«You're asking a lot if you expect people to admit how ignorant they are,» she answered. She had adapted to captivity better than he had. She worked on embroidery with thread borrowed from the servants and seemed to take so much pleasure from it that Abivard was more than once tempted to get her to teach him the stitches.
«I admit how ignorant I am here,» he said. «Otherwise I wouldn't ask so many questions.»
Roshnani loosened the hoop that held a circle of linen taut while she worked on it. She shook her head. «You don't understand. The only reason you're ignorant is that you're shut up here. You can't know what you want to find out. Too many people don't want to find out anything and just repeat what they happen to hear without thinking about it.»
He thought about that, then slowly nodded. «You're probably right,» he admitted. «It doesn't make this easier to bear, though.» In the end he did learn to embroider and concentrated his fury in producing the most hideous dragon he could imagine. He was glad he had only the rudiments of the craft, for if he could have matched Roshnani's skill, he would have given the dragon Sharbaraz' face.
Some of his imaginings along those lines disturbed him. In his mind he formed a picture of his army swarming out of Vaspurakan to rescue him that felt so real, he was shocked and disappointed when no one came battering down the door. As it had a way of doing, hope outran reality.
Among themselves, the servants began to talk of rain rather than snow. Abivard noted that he wasn't feeding the braziers as much charcoal as he had been or sleeping under such great piles of rugs and furs and blankets. Spring was coming. He, on the other hand, had nowhere to go, nothing to do.
«Ask Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his years be many and his realm increase, if he will free my family and let them go back to Vek Rud domain,» he told a guard-and whoever might be listening. «If he wants to punish me, that is his privilege, but they have done nothing to deserve his anger.»
Sharbaraz' privilege, though, was whatever he chose to make it. If the message got to him, he took no notice of it.
As one dreary day dragged into the next, Abivard began to understand Tzikas better. Unlike the Videssian renegade, he had done nothing to make his sovereign nervous about his loyalty-so he still believed, at any rate. But Sharbaraz had gotten nervous anyhow, and the results-
«How am I supposed to command another Makuraner army after this?» he whispered to Roshnani in the darkness after their children-and, with luck, any lurking listeners-had gone to bed.
«What would you do, husband of mind, if you got another command?» she asked, even more softly than he had spoken. «Would you go over to the Videssians to pay back the King of Kings for what he's done?»
She had been thinking about Tzikas, too, then. Abivard shook his head. «No. I am loyal to Makuran. I would be loyal to Sharbaraz, if he would let me. But even if I had no grievance against him before, I do now. How could he let me lead troops without being afraid that I would try to take the vengeance I deserve?»
«He has to trust you,» Roshnani said. «In the end I think he will. Did not your wizard see you fighting in the land of the Thousand Cities?»
«Bogorz? Yes, he did. But was he looking into the past or the future? I didn't know then, and I don't know now.»
Bogorz had seen another image, too: Videssians and ships, soldiers disembarking at an unknown place at an equally unknown time. How much that had to do with the rest of his vision, Abivard could not begin to guess. If the wizard had shown him a piece of the future, it was a useless one.
Roshnani sighed. «Not knowing is hard,» she agreed. «The way we're treated here, for instance: by itself, it wouldn't be bad. But since we don't know what will come at the end of it, how can we help but worry?»
«How indeed?» Abivard said. He hadn't told her that Sharbaraz had wanted to take his head-and worse. What point to that? he'd asked himself. Had the King of Kings chosen to do it, Roshnani could not have stopped him, and if he hadn't, Abivard would have made her fret without need. He seldom held things back from her but kept that one to himself without the slightest trace of guilt.
She snuggled against him. Though the night was not so chilly as the nights had been, he was glad of her warmth. He wondered if they would still be in this chamber when nights, no less than days, were sweaty torments and skin did nothing but stick to skin. If they were meant to be, they would, he decided. He could do nothing about it one way or the other. Presently he gave up and fell asleep.
The door to the chamber opened. Abivard's children stared. It wasn't the usual time. Abivard stared, too. He'd been shut up so long, he found a change of routine dangerous in and of itself.
Into the room came the beautiful eunuch who had conducted him to Denak. «Come with me,» he said in his beautiful, sexless voice.
«Are you taking me to see my sister again?» Abivard asked, climbing to his feet. «Come with me,» the eunuch repeated, as if it were none of Abivard's business where he was going till he got there, and perhaps not then, either.
Having no choice, Abivard went with him. As he walked out the door, he reflected that things could hardly be worse. He'd thought that before, too, every now and then. Sometimes he'd been wrong, which was something he would rather not have remembered.
He quickly realized that the eunuch was not leading him down the same halls he had traveled to visit Denak. He asked again where they were going, but only stony silence answered him. Though the eunuch said not a word, hatred bubbled up from him like steam from a boiling pot. Abivard wondered if that was hatred for him in particular or for any man lucky enough to have a beard and all parts complete and in good working order.
Several times they passed other people in the halclass="underline" some servants, some nobles. Abivard was tempted to ask them if they knew where he was going and what would happen to him when he got there. The only thing holding him back was a certainty that one way or another the eunuch would pay him back for his temerity.
He hadn't been in the palace for years before the summons had come that had led him to become much more intimately acquainted with one small part of it than he'd ever wanted to be. All the same, the corridors through which he was traveling began to look familiar.
«Are we going to-?» he asked, and then stopped with the question incomplete. The way the eunuch's back stiffened told him plainer than words that he'd get no answer. This once, though, it mattered less than it might have under other circumstances. Sooner or later, regardless of what the eunuch told him, he would know.
Without warning, the hallway turned and opened out into a huge chamber whose roof was supported by rows of columns. Those columns and the long expanse of carpet running straight ahead from the entrance guided the eye to the great throne at the far end of the room. «Advance and be recognized,» the eunuch told Abivard. «I presume you still recall the observances.»
By his tone, he presumed no such thing. Abivard confined himself to one tight nod. «I remember,» he said, and advanced down the carpet toward the throne where Sharbaraz King of Kings sat waiting.
Nobles standing in the shadows stared at him as he strode forward. The walls of the throne room looked different from the way he remembered them. He could not turn his head-not without violating court ritual-but flicked his eyes to the right and the left. Yes, those wall hangings were definitely new. They showed Makuraner triumphs over the armies of Videssos, triumphs where he had commanded the armies of the King of Kings. The irony smote him like a club.
The eunuch stepped aside when the carpet ended. Abivard strode out onto the polished stone beyond the woven wool and prostrated himself before Sharbaraz. He wondered how many thousands of men and women had gone down on their bellies before the King of Kings in the long years since the palace had been built. Enough, certainly, to give a special polish to the patch of stone where their foreheads touched.