Foolish to come here. What had I thought to find? My skin burned just thinking about what I could possibly say if the princess came to the door: "Have you no abandoned dead man here, my lady? Have you no tortured ghosts who can reach out with immaterial hands to show me across your roof and into your dustbins?"
Hurriedly I put the toppled candlestick and disturbed cushions tonights, When I raised my handlight high to make sure I'd left nothing out of place, a glint of metal caught my eye from the farthest corner of the room. A thick, heavy chain dangled from an iron ring embedded in the high ceiling, the end of it well above my head. Still and somber, the dull, brutish chain looked out of place beside the fine and delicately worked ornaments lying about the room. As I drew closer, it seemed to point like a warning finger at what lay below.
I crouched down and held my light close to the blue-black tiles. Directly below the chain lay a clotted pool the color of ripe blackberries with a pale seepage around it. Smaller spatters had already dried to a deep rust color. A few steps away lay an oddly shaped wire device—a small frame with five protrusions, each having a small sharpened blade on the end. I picked it up to examine it. The blades—fingers on the palm-sized frame—were stained dark. I dropped it on the floor and clamped my hands tight under my arms, screams echoing in my soul, my head like to burst with darkness.
A crumpled paper lay in the corner. I retrieved it gingerly, only to discover it was no paper, but a wadded pair of gloves, a man's fine leather riding gloves, stiff with dried blood. That the gloves belonged to the one who had cried out in my mind, the same voice that had whispered to me from the shadows, insisting I leave the Lady's house, I had no doubt.
Before the lingering glow in the west had faded, I found myself astride my horse again, heading toward Gaelie—only I didn't stop there, but rode all the way to Avonar.
Chapter 20
A thin strip of moonlight was not sufficient to illuminate the dark room where the long-armed man shoved me to the floor. A wool rug burned my cheek as I skidded over it, and tickled my nose when I lay still, fighting to get air into my burning chest before the whole world went dark.
"Aimee, is that you?" a woman called from across the room. She sounded as breathless as I felt, as if she'd been running. "What's going on here?"
Small hard objects clattered onto a hard floor from another direction entirely. "My lady, what's wrong? And who else is here?" This was another woman. Younger. "Someone's come through the garden door, my lady, one or two people, but they've not spoken, so I don't know who they are."
Who else is here … a good question. Whose house was this? Whose knees were digging relentlessly into my back?
I had ridden down from Gaelie as hard as poor Pesca could run and flown to this place as mindlessly as a hummingbird streaks for a scarlet saber-flower. But in my fever to get inside—a fever as terrifying as it was inexplicable—I bumbled over a garden wall and tripped over a step. Long arms had wrapped themselves around me, and no matter how hard I fought and scratched and kicked, they would not let go until we were inside, and they had deposited me on this floor.
The person kneeling on my back snatched away the dry wad of leather I'd clutched for the past six hours and was futilely trying to hide under my breast. I felt a sharp jerking movement, and then a hand grabbed a fistful of my hair and bent my neck backward almost to breaking. "I'll kill you. By the Holy Twins, if you've harmed so much as a hair on him, I'll kill you."
"Paulo, who is this?" asked the first woman, the older of the two.
"It's a god-cursed thieving assassin is my guess." Mercifully, he let my head drop before my scalp tore, and then lifted his weight from my back. When he shoved a boot into my middle and rolled me onto my back, I didn't have enough breath to resist.
"Could we have a light, Aimee?" asked the woman.
"Of course! I'm so sorry."
Yellow light blossomed from someone's fingertips and sprang like a stray bit of lightening to one lamp on the wall and then another. The high ceiling was painted with a scene of a forest glade. I wished I were in that peaceful, uncomplicated place. Paulo , the woman had said. The skinny friend from the Gaelie guesthouse. I should have known. I shifted my gaze to the bony face hovering somewhere between my battered body and the painted forest. His expression was nothing I wanted to see on someone whose heavy boots were a handsbreadth from my face.
Where was I? And what in the name of sense was I doing here? A nasty creeping sensation fluttered deep in my head, like a moth that had been stuck there squirming itself free and flying away.
"I've found this lot—a damnable sneaking woman"— he was surprised at that—"creeping about the garden." Paulo gave my legs a shove with his boot. "She'll be dead if she can't explain herself."
Far across the room a tall, striking woman of middle years pulled off her cloak and threw it aside. The young Lord's mother, no mistaking it. The red glint in her brown hair, the gold cast to her flushed skin, and the dark brown eyes would have told me, even if I hadn't seen her on that long-ago day in Zhev'Na. "We don't have time to worry about thieves," she said. "Gerick is in terrible danger."
"I've figured that out already. See what I found on her." Paulo tossed the wadded gloves across the room to the older woman. Then he looked at me again. "What have you done with him? Where is he?"
"I don't know where he is." Able to take a full breath at last, I attempted to sit up. Paulo shoved me flat again with his boot on my shoulder.
"So it's only by chance you're carrying his gloves with his blood on them?"
"I don't know whose gloves those are, much less whose blood is on them, and"—I jammed my elbow into Paulo's knee so hard he bellowed and stumbled backward—"I'll tell you nothing else until you get your filthy boot off me."
"Heaven and earth!" The young Lord's mother stared at the bloody wad in her hands.
"I'll give you anything, she's the one attacked him in the stable," Paulo fumed. "He wouldn't never say who it was, but this one's been sneaking about the guesthouse for weeks—even asking me about him. Dolt that I am, I never made the connection until now." He looked so fierce for a moment I almost laughed. "If you've harmed him, I'll—"
"I've not touched him—not that he doesn't deserve worse than I could do. My father lives deformed and half blind because of him. My brothers died in the desert after he used them for his sword training. My mother lies murdered these twelve years at the hands of his friends, the Lords."
I clung madly to the things I believed lest the very earth shift out from under me. I was terrified to hear what these people would say of the young Lord. If he owned the gloves, then he was not only the voice who had warned me off, but the one who had been chained in that corner bleeding. I couldn't bear the thought of that.
"I've sworn to protect you, my lady," said Paulo. "Let me find out what she's done."
Lady Seriana—so I'd discovered was her name, not Eda as my father had known her—squeezed the blood-stiffened leather in her hand. She was having to work at staying calm. "You must have a story as to how you come to carry my son's gloves marked with such stains as these." I opened my mouth, but she didn't give me an opening. "Don't try to deny they're his. I gave them to him, and their maker lives a very long way from here."
Paulo, angry as he was, wasn't going to move without her approval. Taking advantage of his restraint, I jumped to my feet and tried to recapture some dignity. I straightened my muddy tunic and brushed away the damp leaves stuck to my cheek. Paulo came near attacking me again when I touched the leather belt that held my knife sheath, but I just looked him straight in the eye and pulled it around straight. But I kept my hands well away from the hilt that protruded from the sheath. I wanted to demonstrate that they didn't intimidate me, but I wasn't stupid.