It was beautiful. Rialla searched for the inner knowledge that allowed her to know that the tree was cedar and that rivers held magic—but it wasn’t there.
I’d never seen one before, said Tris unobtrusively. I’d been out walking when I felt the disturbance in the forest.
That’s not a wyvern, stated Rialla, staring at the creature, not wanting to say anything further for fear of being wrong.
What do you think it is? replied Tris, with a touch of amusement. I didn’t think that my carving was so far from the real animal. An image formed of the intricately carved game piece that resembled the sleeping lizard.
Even as Rialla questioned Tris, a jeweled green eye opened warily and the graceful head and neck uncurled and lifted, until the creature had as good a view of Rialla as she had of it. As it moved, the pattern of color on its scales shifted to match the white and blue of the rushing waterfall, then continued through a range of colors.
“Ah,” said the dragon, in a voice rich with music and rustling scales, “I had thought that all of the children of the forest were gone.”
Tris waited until he was certain she was asleep. He shifted her clothes aside and picked up the book she’d taken. If it were discovered with her, he was sure Winterseine would find an appropriate punishment.
It was harder leaving through the stone than it was coming in, when gravity aided his descent. He emerged outside the keep on his hands and knees in the dirt.
Rising, he shook the dirt off his clothes as best he could. He used his magic to summon the darkness and muffle the sounds of his movements. So concealed, it was a simple matter of stealth for him to arrive unseen at his small hut, nestled in the outer court like one of so many beehives. He’d been offered accommodations in the servants’ hall, but he’d chosen a domicile that offered more privacy—even if it was less than impervious to the weather.
Rape in any form had always enraged him. It was a violation of the male’s protective role—even among the humans—but this anger went deeper. Rialla was his, whether she knew it or not.
Guilt struck him at that thought. Rialla was his because she hadn’t understood what the bond between them meant.
Despite the appearance of stolidity that his size and usual manner lent him, Tris had always been impulsive, even rash. He acted on the moment, without thought for the consequences—and he very seldom rued his actions. Even when he had been banished from the enclave, he hadn’t regretted helping the girl. But this… this was different. This time he wouldn’t be the only one to suffer for his impetuousness.
He’d done it on impulse: initiating the link between the fire-haired dancer and himself. He could have figured out a better way to keep in contact if he’d wanted to—but he wanted her… a human. He hadn’t intended to bind himself to a human at all, though he had more tolerance for them than most of his kind. Even when he realized that she was the one Trenna had meant in her vision, he had no intention of bonding to her; Tris was not one who believed in fate. But he had known she was his. He would have recognized it even without Trenna’s vision.
Rialla had intrigued him from the first, and not just because of her appearance, spectacular as it was. He relished her humor, her reluctant courage and her ability to play Dragon and win by fair means or foul. He hadn’t known her long before he realized that the only way she was going to trust him enough to let him close to her was if he refused to allow any barriers between them.
There were not many among his people who were so joined anymore. Most had fallen into the simple marriage ceremony the humans used. Too often a perfect mate could not be found and the link waned rather than strengthened with time. But he had known it wouldn’t be that way with Rialla, known it before he established the bond between them.
The connection was strong enough now that he couldn’t break it. It had been too late once she inadvertently used his magic to find the water when Winterseine had “disciplined” her.
She could still block him out if she tried hard enough, but he didn’t think that she could do that indefinitely—then she would find out what he’d done. He wondered if she would prefer slavery. He wondered if she’d see any difference between him and Winterseine. With a sigh, he closed his eyes.
It was the sound of the guard’s key in the lock that woke Rialla the next morning. Tris was gone, of course, but it would have been nice if he’d told her what he planned to do before he’d left. She glanced casually at yesterday’s clothes, but the journal she’d taken was gone too. She hoped Tris had been the one to take it. With a slight shrug, she followed the guard out to the practice floor.
The raised platform that served as a dance floor could also serve as a battleground. Even as Rialla worked to rid herself of the night’s stiffness, she could feel the hostility of the other slaves.
Of course they blamed her for the injury Winterseine had inflicted on the other dancer. The slave who had been hurt had been a comrade; Rialla was an outsider. She couldn’t expect them to blame Winterseine: they were too well trained to object to their master’s actions. Rialla had shirked her duty, something that a good slave never does, and it had hurt of one of their own.
The other dancers’ hostility didn’t upset Rialla, but it served as an unpleasant reminder that once she would have reacted the same way.
As the first moves of the dance began, the girl next to Rialla waited until the dancemaster was looking away before she extended a foot too far. Rialla took a short step and avoided falling, having read the girl’s intention an instant earlier. After that, Rialla used her empathy to avoid most of the mischief, and simply ignored the rest of it.
The dancemaster was good; he saw what was happening and moved Rialla away from the others: too much contention would disturb the training. She smiled grimly and concentrated on her dancing.
At break Tamas was waiting for her. He grabbed her arm with bruising force as she wiped her forehead with a rough piece of cotton towel. Rialla stiffened in surprise, not at Tamas, but at the snarl she felt from Tris; she hadn’t noticed how near he was. Turning her head slightly, she saw him sitting in the shade near the keep, rubbing oil onto a smooth piece of wood.
To regain her attention, Tamas shook her lightly. “It seems you caught the young master’s attention. He wants you to come with me.”
She looked at him for a second in blank horror before she dropped her eyes, letting him drag her across the bailey and into the darkness of the keep.
Rialla trailed Tamas meekly enough through the twists and turns of the halls and up two flights of stairs into the more private area of the keep. When they reached a place that was quiet enough for her purposes, she struck.
Her elbow hit Tamas hard in the center of his chest. While he struggled for breath, she pushed his head violently into the wall.
“Nice,” commented Tris from just behind her. He made no move to help as she lowered Tamas carefully to the floor.
“Did you find out where the study is?” Rialla asked from her position on the ground.
“Yes,” Tris nodded, “one of the servants told me. Though I thought that we’d be looking for it in the dead of night. Traveling through the keep unseen in the middle of the day is going to be difficult.”
Rialla turned her attention to the unconscious servant and reached reluctantly to touch his face with her hands, wishing that physical contact didn’t make mental touch so much easier.
The initial contact with his surface mind wasn’t too bad, but when she probed more deeply, she felt as if she were being immersed in filth. Carefully, she ensured that he would sleep for a while longer, and then backed out of his mind. She was sweating when she stood up and tugged him into the shadows underneath the nearby stairs. She shook with the effort that it had taken to keep herself in contact with Tamas’s distorted frame of reference. Tris’s warm hands on her shoulders brought a measure of peace with them.