“That’s all I’m doing, Dez—listening to what Loren has to say and seeing if there’s anything that can help you. Will you let Aline know what I told you?”
Dez jerked her head, a nod of assent. They went indoors in silence, and at Dezra’s door Usha bade her good luck, in case she was going out with Qui’thonas.
“Be careful, Usha. All right? Be careful.”
It did not escape Usha that her sister-in-law’s warning had more than one meaning.
Dezra left the Ivy in the small hours, slipping out the bedroom window and dropping down to the grass and away. Her routes were secret, known only to her, and they changed every night. This night, with Usha’s warning still echoing in her mind, she took the quickest, safest way to Rose Hall. She slipped through shadows, crossing alleys and little streamlets. Madoc Diviner might know the pattern of each night’s patrol, and that was handy, but when she must make her own way Dez traveled nighttime Haven simply assuming she’d meet a knight around ever corner. It never failed her and within a very short time of leaving the inn she was jumping the low stone fence two blocks north of the corner where Rose Hall loomed. From there, she’d find very little cover until she came to the part of the street where trees grew thickly, right opposite Aline’s thorny rose garden.
She grinned, her blood warming to the dare, and crossed the distance—a no man’s land where trees didn’t arch and no shadow fell. There was no cover, and nothing for it but to make her way across as best she could. She listened but didn’t hear horses or voices. She waited until she saw Dunbrae come around the corner as he usually did, the knights be damned. The knights weren’t damned, and they’d come to know Dunbrae’s route well enough to consider him within bounds as long as they saw him keep to his regular walk.
The dwarf lifted his head when he came around the corner, like an old hound sniffing the air. He saw her and waved her on. Dez started into the street then stopped when she saw a shadow slipping down the alley between Rose Hall and the stable of the neighboring house. She’d killed a man of Sir Radulf’s there only a month before. This shadow-goer, though, was known to her. To Dunbrae as well, for the dwarf muttered a curse, the end of which Dez heard when she came up beside him. Halfway down the alley, Madoc Diviner saw them and didn’t miss a stride. He sauntered the rest of the way to the street as though it were noon and he was expected.
Dez glanced at Dunbrae. “Someone call him here?”
“Not that I know. Probably doesn’t matter if anyone did. He comes and goes at will—her will.”
Aline’s will.
Dez waited for more, though by the look of him, more might have unleashed a few hours of listening to the dwarf’s grumbling and snarling. She waved Madoc on and said, “I need to talk to you both, and Aline.”
“What about?” Madoc said, looking up the street and down to be sure it was still clear.
“We have to talk about Usha.”
Aline plumped the cushions on the bench against the west wall of the solar, the one that still held the day’s heat. Through the open window the scent of roses drifted. She sat and pulled her bare legs under her night robe, never blushing though it was clear she’d been awake and not awakened, that she had been waiting for Madoc, now sitting in the chair opposite her. Dunbrae’s brow was thunderous; lightning seemed to kindle in his eye. Madoc managed not to smile, and Dez thought it best to maintain the most neutral expression she could.
The lovers long separated, she thought, had become lovers in fact—and by the look of them, some time ago.
“What have you come to tell us about Usha?” Aline asked. “Is she well?”
“She’s fine,” Dez said, thinking of Loren Halgard and looking at the two lovers. “She’s fine, but she has news.”
The three listened closely to the warning Usha had passed on to Dez, and Aline’s face went still and pale.
“We have two teams outside the walls tonight, don’t we, Dunbrae?”
The dwarf nodded. “They’re checking old routes, the ones we used when we first started taking elves out of Qualinesti.”
Aline drew a breath and let it go slowly. “Do you know when these dragons are coming in, Dez?”
“No. Usha didn’t say. I don’t think Halgard knows.”
“Do you think he knows what he’s talking about?”
“I don’t think he’s puffing himself up to impress Usha.”
Eyebrows went up all around, discreetly.
“Well, he’s been underfoot since she did the portrait of his nephews. Anyway, I don’t think he’s the type.”
Madoc’s lips twitched. “Underfoot, is it?”
Dez glared.
Aline changed the subject. “I think you’re right, Dez. Halgard isn’t the kind of man who needs to embroider his stories. If Usha believes him, I do.” She turned to Dunbrae. “How quickly can you get word to the teams that are out?”
“I’ll make sure they hear before noon. They’re not too far away. I’ll either pull them in or send them someplace they can’t be spotted.”
“Do it now,” Aline said. “Come back when it’s safe.”
Dez rose to join him, but stopped when Aline gestured. “Dez, what’s Usha doing?”
At the door, Dunbrae stood to listen. Madoc kept still. His cocked grin vanished, the wicked gleam gone from his eye. Dez wanted to say that she didn’t know what Usha was doing or why she was doing it. She wanted to speak out against Halgard for the sheer satisfaction of making her complaint. Instead she shook her head.
“She’s passed along information she knew we’d need. She says she’ll do it again if she can, and she says she’ll keep up her association with Halgard as long as it looks like it will benefit Qui’thonas. We didn’t talk about this before. We’d said she’d keep clear. But I don’t know how you can pass this up, Aline.”
“I have no intention of passing up Usha’s offer,” Aline said. “I hope she’s careful, though. I hope... she knows what she’s doing.”
Aline thought of the danger, that much was clear. But Dez thought of something else, the look she saw in Usha’s eyes when she spoke of Loren Halgard—the look a woman gets when she’s feeling things she doesn’t dare think about. She glanced at Madoc, sitting quietly beside Aline. As she did, Aline’s hand moved to his, as though she weren’t even thinking about it.
Probably, she wasn’t, Dez thought with a pang, remembering that intimate familiarity, that way of touching a man and knowing he not only welcomed the touch, he’d been waiting for it.
“I hope she knows, too,” Dez said, and. she followed Dunbrae.
In the corridor outside the solar, Dunbrae said, “I hate the bastard.”
“I know,” Dez said, and she also knew he wasn’t talking about Loren Halgard. “But why?”
The stairs were unlighted. They went carefully down. “Because he doesn’t deserve her. He brought her here, turned her over to Lir Wrackham and left, just like he was taking her to market. Then he came back, moping and skulking around until she—” He shook his head. “He’ll leave her again. He’ll break her heart. And I’ll break his head. It’s comin’, Dez. I know it.”
Might be, Dez thought, and it might not be. For her part, she didn’t hate Madoc Diviner. She simply didn’t trust him.
Usha looked around the edge of her easel when Loren put aside the book he’d been reading, a small volume of elven poetry.
“You aren’t going to tell me the poems are dull, are you?”
“No, they aren’t dull.” He chuckled. “Some even make sense to me.”
It had surprised Usha to learn that he could read Qualinesti, until she learned that he could read Dwarvish and something of the language of the nomadic desert people who live outside of Tarsis. “People all over Krynn speak Common,” he’d said, “but they think in their own language. That’s how you want to read their poetry and hear their songs.”