“See that, Commander? That’s part of the history of Dorthar. Have you heard of the Lowland woman, Ashne’e, the yellow-haired witch who killed Rehdon?”
“I’ve heard of her.”
“The soldiers came to take her, and found her dead. There was a crowd behind them, and they dragged the body out and burned it in Dove Square. The brands they carried made those scorches.”
A sickness came over Raldnor. Kothon did not notice. “This is what he plans for them all, all the people of the Plains, that man I sold my soul to,” Raldnor thought.
Then the cool bowl of the palace appeared among the trees.
And he knew it. Knew the pale color of the stone, the sound the leaves made through windows at certain points of the interior. Inside—what? He searched his mind in a cold frenzy. A mosaic floor—a picture of women dancing—and above, there was a room in a tower. . . . No, what could he know of all that?
Yet when he was inside, he saw the floor before him. He did not search the room in the tower, for the thought of it filled him with a peculiar dread.
“Up there,” Kothon said, applying wine to his grizzled chops, “that’s where she lay, the Lowland woman. They found her dead up there.”
A woman presented herself at the apartments of the princess. She was tall and sour-faced, her hair, the lifeless black of ebony, caught back in a snood of golden wool.
She answered Lyki’s challenge with an arid smile.
“I am Dathnat, the Queen’s chief woman. I am here to assess your mistress’s personal needs.”
She went about her task with few words, and her looks were as barren as her words and as unwanted as her person. When she was gone, Lyki mimicked her, screwing up her face and compressing her breasts with her hands.
Dathnat was a Zakorian, a strange custodian of the Queen’s beauty. Lyki guessed that Val Mala employed her as much for the service of her sharp ears and her bitter disposition as for her talents as handmaiden.
A scented lamp burned softly in the Queen’s bedchamber.
Val Mala had retired early. Two attendants worked, one on either side of the couch, painting and shaping toe and finger nails, and the Zakorian, Dathnat, had begun the kneading movements on her flesh. She was a skilled masseuse; the little creeping lines fled before her iron fingers.
Val Mala sighed.
“Who is this man all my women are chattering of?”
“The Dragon appointed by my lord, your son, madam.”
“What excellent hearing, Dathnat. This is the man from Sar? Amrek’s favorite. And what do they say?”
“They prattle about his body and his face. They say he has pale eyes, and a jealous mistress who guards him, though they’ve got from her that he is—” Dathnat paused distastefully, “remarkable between sheets.”
Val Mala gave a drowsy laugh.
“I’ve seen him, Dathnat. I don’t doubt his lady’s estimation.”
When the women were done with her, she sat for a long while by her mirror. It was her glory that she could still do this unafraid. Yes, she was a match for the Karmian, though twice her age. She pondered upon the new Dragon Lord, the upstart—he had had something in his face which reminded her of Orhn. She regretted the loss of Orhn still. She approached sadness when she thought of him. But the power she had given him had made him many enemies. When the grooms had brought his broken, battered body from the hunt, she had had them flayed and pinched with red-hot tongs, but could discover nothing. How should he fall from his chariot and be dragged by it till he was dead, he who had mastered chariots at the age of ten along with his first woman?
Oddly, she thought of Amnorh, too, on this night, for the first time in years. Amnorh the too-clever, whose body lay on the floor of Ibron. She did not regret him. It had amused her, long ago, when she had been told of his death.
Dathnat crouched at a clothes chest, inserting perfumed sachets among the robes. Val Mala had a sudden, strange hallucination; it seemed another woman’s figure—younger, graceful—was superimposed upon the Zakorian’s. Lomandra. Lomandra, who had fled in revulsion when she had completed the Queen’s task and dispatched the Lowlander’s bastard. Lomandra, the soft Xarabian fool.
“Dathnat, you should get yourself a lover,” Val Mala said. It was her pleasure to taunt the woman thus. The expected blood-burn appeared on the averted bony face. “A man like Kren, of the River Garrison, perhaps. A man with the shoulders of an owar.”
In the dark corridor a woman’s hand snatched his. Raldnor turned uneasily and found Lyki, with a bloodless face, at his elbow.
“Raldnor . . .”
“What is it?”
Her eyes kindled.
“You used not to be so brief with me.”
“There used to be no need. What’s the matter?”
She leaned against the wall.
“There was a message for me—a man waiting by the gate—”
“Did he muss your hair, then, this man? If you wanted a quiet night, you were a fool to go.”
“You!” she flared at him suddenly. “You don’t trouble yourself what happens to me. You put your child into my body and then you’re done with it.”
“By your account, Lyki, the child was as much your doing as mine.”
She would not look at him, or leave him either. She stood immobile, her eyes on the ground. When she raised them, they glittered with sudden spite.
“Am I dismissed, then, Dragon Lord? Would you rather spend your nights alone, dreaming about the little Sarite girl who didn’t want you?”
She had touched him nearer than she knew. Seeing his expression, she fell back a step.
“You delayed me to tell me something, Lyki. Tell it.”
“Very well. The man at the gate caught my arm, and he said: ‘You’re Lyki, Raldnor of Sar’s bitch.’ He had an ugly scarred face, and his right arm ended at the wrist, so I don’t think there’s any need to give you his name. He said: ‘Tell your bedfellow that I’ve something I owe him for my hand. Because of what he did, I’ve nothing better to do in life except watch him, and wait until his gods forsake him. When they do, I will be near. Tell him that.’” Lyki smiled lifelessly. “Then he spat. And let me go.”
She turned and walked away.
She did not come to his bed again, but he found no shortage of lovemaking when he desired it.
11
It was a very social life at Koramvis. Raldnor found that he was fashionable, an asset at the supper tables of rich men and beautiful women. His birth in Sar fascinated them. He became a practiced liar. He knew that for the most part it was taken for granted that he was a bastard of the Imperial line—either Rehdon’s work or that of one of Rehdon’s lesser brothers. They amused Raldnor, these nods and fawnings, but he had made Kothon his bodyguard. He, like all men of rank, considered now he had a need of one.
His fame gave rise to weird anomalies.
At a dinner in the Storm Palace he met an officer of the Queen’s guard, Kloris by name—a handsome boastful fool. He made it clear that he detested Raldnor and his meteoric ascent, and also that he coveted everything that was Raldnor’s, from his post to his woman. The man had been wooing Lyki in trite, unoriginal ways for the whole month that they had been in the city, simply because she was Raldnor’s. Raldnor wondered if she would lose her allure for Kloris now they had parted.
After the dinner the Queen made a brief appearance. She wore pleated white linen and a wig of gold silk. From a distance she was white-skinned and golden-haired. He had heard of the enmity between Val Mala and her son—was this some secret jibe at him, something she would not dare in his presence, yet which would be repeated to him in Thaddra?