She said in a quiet neutral voice, “Would you like for me to get Rhoswen for you?”
Carling’s dark gaze snapped up to Niniane’s face, and in an instant the sense of wrongness was erased. “Gods, no,” said the Vampyre with a weary amusement. “Her frantic devotion is so tiring.”
Niniane regarded her. She had a feeling she shouldn’t ask, but she couldn’t help herself. “Are you all right?”
Carling smiled. “I am not doing too badly for an old, diseased woman. We Vampyres are the lepers of the Elder Races, you know, since we were human until we were infected, and of course all of the Elder Races are immune to the disease. I’ve always felt a somewhat irrational connection with the Wyr because of it. As the lepers and the beasts of the Elder society, neither of us are quite as acceptable as the rest of you.”
Niniane quirked an eyebrow. “None of us are that acceptable, Carling.”
The Vampyre chuckled. “Too true. Sit, little Niniane. We did not have a chance to finish our earlier conversation when your Wyr so rudely interrupted us.”
He’s not my Wyr.
A vicious surge of pain came out of nowhere. She took a deep breath and managed to keep the words from tumbling out of her mouth. Then the memory of Carling twisting the head off her own Vampyre and staring at its eyes as it crumbled to dust flashed through her mind, but Niniane stepped forward anyway to sit in the chair Carling indicated.
“I don’t understand you,” Carling said, as she tilted her head and regarded Niniane.
Niniane blinked. “You don’t understand me?”
“Is that so difficult to believe? You don’t maneuver for power around me, and yes, sometimes you are afraid, but underneath it all sometimes it seems that you . . . like me. Even though that isn’t wise or safe. And you are sad at the same time. I find that puzzling.”
Funny, how accurate Carling was at describing Niniane’s reaction to her. Niniane gave the Vampyre a lopsided smile then looked at her hands. She couldn’t possibly tell Carling that she thought the Vampyre was something precious and horrific, an enigmatic tragedy like the ruins of a historic battlefield.
She settled for a small truth. “I do like you, even if maybe I shouldn’t. And sometimes I get sad when I think about all the friends or associates that you must have outlived. I don’t just mean humans. Losing human companions is painful enough. I’m talking about people who have our kind of life expectancy, I guess.”
“You have already lost more than enough people in your own time,” Carling said, her voice gentle.
Was that gentleness an illusion? Did Carling mimic human behavior, to manipulate or to be social, or were there tattered remnants of humanity still left inside that exquisite exterior? Niniane sighed. Whatever the ultimate truth was about Carling, Niniane would not be the one to discover it. “I wanted to ask you something, if you don’t mind.”
Carling gestured with a few fingers.
“Why do you hate Tiago?” The words dropped like stones thrown in a pond, causing a ripple of reaction that moved outward to an unseen shore. Carling never moved, but Niniane’s chest grew tight. She forced herself to breathe evenly as the silence stretched taut between them. She said, “I just want to understand.”
The tension splintered as Carling exhaled an angry laugh. “The reason is so old it hardly holds any meaning, and he doesn’t even remember, which makes me even angrier. I met him once in Memphis.”
“Memphis,” Niniane said, taken aback.
Just as she was going to ask what Carling and Tiago were both doing in Tennessee of all places, Carling said, “Of course it wasn’t called Memphis then. That came much later. Then it was called Ineb Hedj. It was the capital of the entire world, and at dawn the sun would shimmer on the Nile like a sheet of hammered silver overlaid on jade and lapis lazuli.”
Niniane caught her breath. “You met him in Egypt.”
“Yes, a very, very long time ago. Tiago was a god, and I was a commodity. I was young and still human, taken out of poverty and the river mud because of my looks. I was given to a god to entice him to stay with our people. I was entirely desperate, but he did not even look at me. He left and I was punished for it.”
Niniane had gripped her hands together at the small, dry telling of the ancient story. She said, “That’s horrible.”
“It’s ludicrous,” said Carling. “I didn’t want him. I was just a child with a pretty mouth, and he terrified me. I was glad he left.”
Niniane forced her hands to relax. “What happened after that?”
Carling’s lush lips pulled into a smile, as if she were the Mona Lisa of demons and had just swallowed a soul. “I clawed my way to a better life,” the Vampyre said. “I learned poisons and warfare and sorcery, how to rule over others, how to destroy my enemies, and how to hold a grudge with all of my heart. Then I discovered the serpent’s kiss that turned me into a god as well, and no one ever took a lash to me again.”
Serpent’s kiss. Niniane stared at her. “You’re talking about the time when you became a Vampyre.” Carling inclined her head, and Niniane saw in the gracious, imperial gesture how much Rhoswen imitated her mistress. Niniane asked, “And Tiago never realized what happened or who you were?”
“No.” Carling’s expression turned wry. “But when I look at him, I want to strangle him all the same.”
“I’m so sorry,” Niniane said.
“Child,” Carling said. The Vampyre’s dark gaze was quizzical, somewhat bored.
“I don’t care if it did happen eons ago,” Niniane told her on a flash of ferocity. “I don’t care if there’s a more sophisticated way to respond or if it doesn’t matter to you anymore. I am sorry for what that girl went through. I’m sorry for what the girl I was went through. We may not be those girls anymore, but their ghosts live on somewhere inside us, if only in the memory of what happened, and someone ought to say it: those children deserved better.”
Carling’s gaze dropped. The graceful wings of her eyebrows pulled together. She said, “You are right, of course. They did.”
Niniane had slept too long, and none of it had been refreshing. Her eyes felt dry and scratchy. She dug the heels of her hands into them and rubbed. “It happened so long ago, and Tiago didn’t mean to do anything wrong. You do realize that, don’t you?”
Again Carling gestured with a few fingers. She made poetry of the movement through a couple inches of space.
“Do you think you could try to set aside your grudge?” Niniane asked. “I’m asking that you do this as a favor to me, in the interests of building an alliance between us.”
“You care about him.” Carling spoke as if she savored the words, even as she stared at Niniane with intense curiosity.
There wasn’t any point in denying it. She said, “Yes.”
“Even after he withheld the truth from you about the second attack?”
She sighed. “Yes.”
A shadow of a scowl crossed Carling’s face. The youthful, impetuous expression was a startling incongruity amid such disciplined, mature perfection. The Vampyre said grumpily, “Oh fine. I won’t do anything to him as long as he doesn’t try to do anything to me.”
Niniane sagged in her chair. “Thank you,” she said. “That means a lot to me.”
Carling gave her a hard look and said, “Perhaps it means too much to you. You should be careful where you step next, Niniane, and in whom you place your trust. You are in a fragile place right now.”
Niniane’s spine stiffened. “I am well aware of the place I am in.”
The Vampyre’s expression softened. “I know you don’t want to believe that Dragos had anything to do with the assassination attempt. I could feel the struggle in you earlier.”