“Madam, how have I offended you?”
“You have the eyes of a Lowlander,” she hissed.
His blood turned to ice. He found himself trapped, confronted unaccountably by a terrified old woman, and beyond them both, a waiting gold and silver bed of love.
“What did you want from me?” she shrilled. “What? You’ve no hope of anything—anything, do you hear? Reveal yourself and he’ll kill you.”
He felt himself back involuntarily away.
“Yes—go—go! Get out of my sight!”
He turned, he almost ran from her, driven by forces of hate and fear he did not understand.
Val Mala fled inside the door and pushed it shut. The room was full of shadows.
“Lomandra?” she asked them. Nothing stirred. No, it was not ghosts she had to fear. It was the living.
The living.
Strange, she had never doubted, never allowed the intrusion of doubt. She had thought the Xarabian had fulfilled her promise and smothered Ashne’e’s baby. She had not dreamed the finger she had flung into the brazier had come from the hand of a living child. When Lomandra vanished, she had been unsurprised. The woman had been sickened and had run back to Xarabiss. It did not matter, for her work was done.
And yet now, never having doubted, she knew without hesitation, knew that the child had survived and grown into a man. A man with the face, the body, the very stance of a king.
She had thought herself rid of Rehdon.
But it was Rehdon she had found suddenly beside her—Rehdon in his youth, at the peak of his beauty and magnificence, as she had known him in Kuma when he had seemed to blind her like a sun. She had always believed the child was her husband’s seed, despite her accusations; the gods had seen fit to prove it to her. And simultaneously he had given her the key to what he was.
Had Lomandra died before she could tell him his history, or had she lived and spoken? It seemed not. Would he be so stupid as to intimate to her in such a forthright way, if he had known? Unless, of course, he had meant to frighten her.
He must be killed. But how? They said Amrek loved him. Raldnor’s curious, swift ascent seemed to uphold this. She would not dare have him assassinated out of hand. Inform Amrek, then, that his favorite was a Lowlander—but that would reveal her part in it, what she had tried to do. She hated her son, yet she feared him. Who could tell which way he would jump? Perhaps she would suffer as much as the bastard.
Sheer terror clutched her heart. What was his purpose here? A yawning gulf seemed to open at her feet. She glimpsed her face in a black mirror beyond the bed, a face for this moment stripped of beauty, and old—old as the mummy dust of tombs.
Zastis was in the sky, a red wound at the moon’s back. There was a joke abroad in the lower quarters of the city. It concerned Astaris and the star and the color that her hair must be, surely, between her thighs.
There were rumors about Amrek also. He would be home shortly, Thaddra’s barbaric insolence settled. There had been a skirmish or two. A few women would weep for their lost men, but that was nothing besides the prestige of Dorthar. And the worst was past. Kathaos was already in the city, attending to various council duties that must precede the Imperial wedding. The rites would be held at their traditional time—the peak of Zastis.
There was also Kathaos’s personal honor to the bride. He had been ever mindful of this, though not vulgar: two or three expensive, unique gifts, as was fitting. Now he arranged a royal hunt in the hilly forest land—the acres of cibba, oak and thorn to the northwest above Koramvis. Kathaos entertained certain thoughts concerning Astaris. He appreciated the beautiful and the rare. His childhood at the court in Saardos had taught him to admire and value things, and, at the same time, systematically deprived him of them. Now he would pay handsomely for an exceptional piece of enamel work from Elyr, and be prepared to wait anywhere up to a year for a silversmith to achieve the required perfection in some lamp stand or set of plate. He had had to wait a lot of his life—be patient and be slow to get anything he wanted. It had become an acquired skill. So, in the same way that he saw the Karmian as an art object, he was prepared to maneuver, most of all to wait to have her. He had attained several high beds—Val Mala’s not the least. And he had enjoyed the preliminaries as much as the prize—in some cases, more.
The royal hunt today was all part of the exercise. He did not think Astaris would enjoy it, if she noticed it at all. But there would be intervals when he could discreetly engage her attention.
Amrek was too demanding for her. It was subtlety that breached her remoteness, or so it seemed to him. It would be a game he liked to play, and which he was good at.
She looked like some exquisite pastoral goddess for the ride. He wondered who dressed her so well; she herself he could imagine taking no personal interest in such things. Lyki, perhaps, the Sarite’s discarded mistress, chose her wardrobe.
And the Sarite was there also. Kothon absent from his chariot, he was handling his team himself.
The man was still a thorn in Kathaos’s side. He had had an intermittent watch set on him, but Raldnor was probably aware that such a thing was possible and accordingly careful. It seemed he had done no specific damage. As often before, Kathaos pondered his origins and his purposes, achieving no solid answers. There was the story, too, of Raldnor and the Queen. Certainly it had been a brief enough liaison. And now Val Mala had shut her doors to all comers, the lord Councilor included. He had heard she was ill. Kathaos sensed many threads leading down into some furiously productive yet hidden loom.
He saw that Raldnor had raised his hand to him in formal salute. On impulse, Kathaos trotted his team level with the Sarite’s vehicle.
“I trust that you’ll enjoy the hunting, Dragon Lord.”
“I’m here to escort the princess, lord Councilor, not to enjoy myself.”
“It’s praiseworthy that you take your duties so seriously. But I assure you the princess will be quite safe in this company.” The light eyes, so reminiscent of past royalty, were full of ironical disdain in the impassive face. “Your rank becomes you very well,” Kathaos said. “Perhaps I did you a service, indirectly. And how is the Queen these days?”
The look in the eyes altered, and for a fleeting second Kathaos saw he had touched a nerve. With the polite friendly nod reserved for useful underlings or merchants, Kathaos turned his chariot.
Noon had brought unexpected heat to the still, windless day. Cloud masses were already building for a storm.
Grooms flushed orynx from their shallow lair with burning pitch; the kalinx pack was unleashed and the chariots rumbled after.
The hunting was not to Raldnor’s taste. It was the old Lowland ways which troubled him again. A man hunted only for food or clothing or in self-defense. It was another mark of the effete and the sadistic to take life as a sport. He had detailed three of his captains to trail Astaris’s chariot. It was privacy he wanted in these woods. Once he had been too much alone. Now he felt crowded. Always a man at his door, Kothon at his back, the bickering court, the soldiers’ gossip. Even the women in his bed with their post-coital questionings.
Like all men forced consistently to lie, he felt now the pressure of being absorbed by his false self.
Heat beat and blazed through the forest roof. He thought of Val Mala and what she had cheated him of. The pang of his sex strove in him to make itself a strange component of his fear. For he feared her, feared her words to him. A hundred times each day he reasoned them away—over wine, at drill, lying snared in the satisfaction and arms of some woman after love. And she had done nothing, the white-faced Dortharian woman. Was she mad, then? At worst, even if she spoke, Amrek hated and distrusted her. When he thought of Amrek, he was filled now with abrupt uncertainties. He felt that absence had estranged what he had known. Amrek was once more stranger; and legends, ghost stories had come between. He recalled his moment of burning loyalty in the tent between Hah and Migsha with discomfort, almost with shame.