"Do not be in too much of a hurry," Olin said kindly. "The married state is a holy one for a woman, but it can be full of woe and danger, too." He looked down. "I lost my first wife in childbirth."
"The gods must have needed her to be with them," Pelaya said, then was irritated with herself for parroting the pious phrase her mother always used. "I'm sorry."
"I sometimes think it has been harder on my children than on me," he said quietly, then did not speak for a long moment. His eyes were roving somewhere beyond Pelaya's shoulder, so that she thought he was watching the gulls again, dreaming of the walls of Hierosol dropping into the distance behind him.
"You were saying, King Olin?"
"What?" He forced himself to look at her. "Ah, I beg your pardon. I was… distracted. Look, please, and tell me-who is that girl?"
Feeling a prickle of something that she would only realize later was jeal¬ousy, Pelaya turned and looked across the garden but saw no one. "Who? My sister and the others have gone in."
"There. There are two of them, carrying linens." He pointed. "One slen¬der, one less so. The thin one-there, see, the one whose hair has come loose from her scarf."
"Do you mean… those washing women?"
"Yes, that is who I mean." For a moment, and for the first time Pelaya could remember, he sounded angry with her. "Do they not exist because they are servants? They are the only girls in the yard beside yourself."
She was hurt, but tried not to show it. "Who is she? How should I know? A washing woman-a girl, as you said, a servant. Why? Do you think she is pretty?" She looked closely at the slender young woman for the first time, saw that the girl was only a little older than herself. Her arms where they emerged from her billowing sleeves were brown, and her hair, which had spilled free from beneath her scarf as Olin had pointed out, was black except for a small, strange streak the color of fire. The girl's features were attractive enough, but Pelaya could see little about the thin young girl that should have attracted the prisoner-king's attention. "She looks like a Xandian to me. From the north, I'd say-they are darker below the desert. Lots of Xandian girls work here in the kitchens and the laundry."
Olin watched the young woman and her stockier companion until they had vanished into the darkness of the covered passage. "She reminds me… she reminded me of someone."
Now Pelaya definitely felt a pang. "You said that /reminded you of your daughter."
He turned, as though seeing her for the first time since the servant girl had appeared. "You do, Mistress. As I said, there is a quality in you that truly reminds me of her, and your curiosity is part of it. No, that servant girl re¬minds me of someone else." He frowned and shook his head. "A member of my family, long dead."
"One of your relatives?" It seemed unlikely. Pelaya thought the captive king was ashamed to have been caught ogling a serving girl.
"Yes. My…" He trailed off, looking again at the place where the ser¬vant had disappeared. "That is very strange-and here, so far away…" He paused again, then said, "Could you bring her to me?"
"What?"
"Bring her to me. Here, in the garden." His laugh was short and harsh. "I certainly cannot go to her. But I need to see her up close." He looked at her and his eyes softened. "Please, good Mistress Akuanis. I swear I ask you a favor for no unworthy reason. Could you do that for me?"
"That makes two favors in one day." She tired to make her voice stern. "I… I suppose I could. Perhaps." She did not understand her own feelings and was not certain that she wanted to understand them. "I will try."
"Thank you." He stood up and bowed, his face suddenly distant, Now I must go. I have much to think about and I have stolen enough of your time today." He walked toward the archway leading back to his tower rooms-comfortable enough, he had told her, if you did not mind a door that had a barred window in it and was locked from the outside-without looking back.
Pelaya sat, feeling oddly as though she wanted to cry. For the first time since they had met each other Olin had left the garden first. The prisoner had gone back to his cell to be alone rather than share her company any longer.
She remained on the bench, trying to understand what had happened to her, until the first drops of rain forced her inside.
"Who could ever live in such a place?" Yazi asked, wide-eyed. "You would tire yourself to fits just walking to the kitchen."
"People who live in such places don't walk to the kitchen," said Qinni¬tan. "They have people like you and me bring their food to them." She frowned, trying to remember which way they had turned on the inbound trip. Monarchs had been adding rooms and corridors and whole wings onto the citadel of Hierosol for so many centuries that the place was like the sea coral from one of her favorite poems by Baz'u Jev. Qinnitan enter¬tained a brief fantasy that one day she would be able to take the boy Pigeon for a walk on the seashore without worrying she might be recognized, to see some of the mysteries that had so charmed the poet, the spiraling shells daintier than jewels, the stones polished smooth as statues. She had work to do, though, and even if she hadn't, she couldn't afford to loiter in the open that way.
"But look at us!" Yazi was from the Ellamish border country so she spoke fairly good Xixian, a good-hearted girl but a little slow and prone to mistakes. "We are lost already. Surely no one can find their way in such a big place. This must be the biggest house on earth!"
Qinnitan was tempted to say that she herself had once lived in the biggest house on earth, just to see Yazi's expression, but even though she had already told Soryaza the laundry-mistress she had been an acolyte of the Hive, there was no sense in telling everyone else, especially someone as innocently loose-lipped as Yazi. The fact that Qinnitan had once lived in
the Royal Seclusion, where she had been one of the fortunate lew who had their food brought to them by hurrying, silent servants, was certainly not going to be mentioned either, although the irony of the present conversa¬tion was not lost on her.
"I know it's back this way," she said instead. "Remember, we came down a long hall full of pictures just after we went through that garden?"
"What garden?"
"You didn't…? Where you could see the ocean and everything?" She sighed. "Never mind."Yazi was like a dog that way-the girl had been talk¬ing about something, a dream she had, or a dream she wanted to have, and hadn't even noticed the garden, the one time today they had been out from under the castle roof. Qinnitan had noticed, of course. She had spent too much time kept like a nightingale in a wicker cage to ignore the glorious moments when she was free beneath the gods' great sky. "Never mind," she said again. "Just follow me."
"Breasts of Surigali, where have you two been?" Soryaza stood with her hands on her hips, looking as though she might pick up one of the massive washing tubs and dump its scalding contents all over the truants. "You were just supposed to take those up to the upstairs ewery and come straight back."
"We did come straight back," Qinnitan said in Xixian. She could under¬stand Hierosoline well enough now-the tongues were similar in many ways-or at least make out the sense of most things said to her, but she still did not feel comfortable with her own clumsy speech. "We got lost."
"It's so big!" Yazi said. "We didn't do anything wrong, Mistress. On the Mother, we didn't'."