She felt as if she were falling down a chasm; she could hardly move for the shock, and she could not think at all.
"What-what do you want of me?" she asked faintly.
He leaned back against the door of her office, crossed his arms over his chest, and surveyed her from half-closed eyes. "At the moment-your potential," he said lazily. "What you may become, in time. I have peculiar tastes among my kind. Or rather, let us say that I have particular tastes. My brothers and sisters are a little less discriminating in their choice of partners than I am. I do not much care for women who are thick-headed, broad-backed and broad-shouldered-who look and act more like draft-horses than I care to contemplate. My tastes run to females who are intelligent, graceful, lithe, as attractive physically in their way as I am in mine-women who are out of the ordinary. You are more than that, Xylina. You are extraordinary. Quite lovely, in fact, and the closest thing to a match for me that I have seen in centuries. Exactly the kind of woman I would choose to be my lover."
With every word, Xylina's shock deepened, but at his final sentence, her outrage overcame her shock. She leapt to her feet, so enraged she could hardly see.
How dared he! How dared he come to her with such a perverted proposition!
If he had been something other than a demon, she would have attacked him then and there, or challenged him for his slight to her honor. But caution forced her rage to cool a little-he was a demon, after all; his powers of magic were just as strong as hers, and they were utterly unknown. Demons were incredibly dangerous; that was all she knew. He could probably defend himself against her perfectly well.
In fact, from the way he was acting, he could probably not only defend himself, but do it with ridiculous ease.
She contented herself with glaring at him instead, putting every iota of her detestation into her gaze. "Give me a moon," she said, forcing the words out between clenched teeth. "You tricked me-you owe me at least that much,incubus . If you know anything of honor, you will give me a moon to make up for that."
Ware shrugged. "A week, a moon, what does it matter?" he said with indifference. "You still will not have the coronets. The proposition will be the same."
"A moon," she insisted. "I swear it." She shifted her stance, and unconsciously raised one hand, invoking the gods to witness her oath as she spoke in the formal words of binding. "If I pay thee not in gold, I will pay thee in silver!" Unspoken was the real import: she would never pay him in sex.
He blinked a little, as if taken aback by her vehemence; the formal words which made her pledge into a solemn oath, and the force of will with which she swore the oath. Then he smiled, lazily. "Very well, then," he agreed. "One moon. It will make your surrender all the more piquant for the wait. I have waited years to find a woman like you; I can wait a moon."
Before she could order him out, he winked, slowly, and vanished before her eyes. He was a demon, without doubt; both his magic and his arrogance attested to that.
Ware returned to his villa in the tiny section of the city that housed mostly demons and those few wealthy women who found the incubi and succubi to be quiet and agreeable neighbors. He was very pleased with himself, and well satisfied with his encounter with Xylina. It had been altogether successful as far as he was concerned. He had been generous-more than generous. In recompense for his tiny deception, he had given Xylina more time to raise the gold she needed to pay her debt. That was just; that was honorable. A tiny concession to make up for a tiny deception. Now she knew what her options were and that she had an enemy-and that, too, was honorable. The Queen had forced him to swear that he would not tell Xylina the identity of her enemy, or else he would have done just that. But now that she knew that she had a powerful enemy, he could skirt around the outside of the oath to give her more information. If Xylina guessed her foe was Adria, then Ware had not violated his oath. He was fairly certain she was bright enough to do just that, if not now, then in a moon, when he brought her more such information.
In human parlance, "all the cards were upon the table." There were no deceptions, there was only his ability and hers. A challenge of sorts, though a bit one-sided. She could not win, not with the Queen against her.
She was, he thought, a most incredible creature. Every day seemed to add to her beauty-the more she grew in wisdom and maturity, the more she ripened, rather than souring. Her courage in defying him was quite amazing. No few Mazonites in Adria's service had quailed and cowered when confronted with a demon-but not Xylina! She stood up to him, her magnificent eyes flashing, and demanded that extra time of him, demanded honorable recompense, as was her right. She was a far cry from the child in the arena, a child whose bleak eyes had told him that she was ready for death. Xylina would not consider death to be an option now; she would fight to the last breath in her body before admitting defeat.
This was good; he did not want a poor, shattered creature who longed for death. He wanted a spirited woman quite prepared to meet him on his own grounds. She was, he thought with a touch of longing, a fair match for Thesius. Now if only...
He let himself into the villa with a touch upon the gate, but instead of entering the building, he followed one of the paths leading off deep into the wilderness garden, to one of the many half-hidden alcoves the garden boasted. He had not lied to her about this; one of the sources of his ordinary income came from his own training school, which supplied skilled gardener-slaves to most of Mazonia, and the ones who tended his own grounds were second to none.
Here, deep in the cool shadows beneath his trees, there was a quaint little half-cave beside a tiny, artificial waterfall. Although some suspected that his magic had a hand in creating this spot, it had been constructed entirely by his gardeners. The water fell down a graceful cascade of rocks into a pool containing three red-gold fish, who flashed among the smooth water-worn stones of their pool like shadowy living treasures hidden there by an eccentric miser. He flung himself down on the thick, deep emerald green moss carpeting the cave and the rocks surrounding the pool, staring at the waterfall without really seeing it, listening to its music without truly hearing it.
How beautiful she had been! And how graceful! With her golden hair flying like a battle-banner as she tossed her head and defied him, and her deep blue eyes flashing like precious sapphires, she had been incomparable. Indeed, she was everything he desired in a woman. Not like that black cow of a Queen, nor the dun cattle that were her subjects. No, it was no great sacrifice to give her the time she asked for; it would only increase his desire to wait a little longer.
In fact, the longer he waited, the more chance he had to work subtly upon the mind of the Queen, to try to make her see reason regarding this girl. Once he won her, he would have to keep the Queen from destroying her, and that could be difficult, given his oaths. And he could not chance the Queen discovering their relationship-for the foolish Mazonites considered demon-loving to be the height (or rather, depth) of perversion, and it would mean Xylina's exile. No, he must soften the Queen's resolve, make her realize that the girl truly had no ambitions for the throne, make her see that wasting her time in trying to destroy Xylina was only taking energy and resources that could be much more profitably spent elsewhere.
So this moon could be spent defusing the Queen's malice; that would be a good thing. On reflection, this extra time would be no hardship, and might turn out to have been a wise choice. The Queen was a woman of reason; she was a decent ruler of her people-perhaps not as good as some had been in the past, but by no means the worst. She exceeded her legal powers when she felt threatened, but then, what creature did not strike back in such circumstance? Ware and the others of his kind prospered under her tolerance, and she had not made undue demands upon them. There were some who said that the Queen had gotten above herself, that she acted as if she had forgotten her own humble origins, but there would always be those who would say that of someone who had succeeded where they had not.