“Unhand me, sir!”
Damin dropped his hand. “I can see why your marriage was never consummated, your Highness.”
Mikel swallowed a horrified gasp. He knew what “consummated” meant.
Adrina laughed. She sounded genuinely amused. “You don’t like me much, do you? Is that why you take so much pleasure from tormenting me?”
“Ah, now there’s the tragedy, your Highness. If you weren’t such a treacherous, conniving little bitch, I’d probably be quite taken with you.”
Adrina turned away from him, to study the red streaked clouds. The sun was almost completely set. “You presume to know an awful lot about me, considering the short time of our acquaintance, Damin Wolfblade. How much is your own opinion, and how much is hearsay, I wonder?”
“I make my own judgments. I’ve no need to listen to hearsay.”
“I beg to differ, my Lord,” she retorted, turning to face him. “You told Captain Tenragan I tried to kill the High Prince. You weren’t there. How could you possibly know what happened, unless you listened to hearsay?”
“He told you that, did he?”
“Yes, and it’s a damned lie! I did no such thing! Your uncle is a perverted monster, and if those boys would rather die than let him touch them, I don’t blame them!”
“So you did give them the knife?”
“Yes!”
Damin was silent for a moment. “Why did you take the collars?”
“I didn’t take them. Lernen gave them to me. I kept them as a remembrance of two children destroyed by a debauched old man. Somebody owed them that much.”
He took a step back from her. “It’s cold, your Highness, and I know how anxious you are to return indoors. Shall we go?”
Adrina planted her hands on her hips angrily. “That’s it? No apology? No admission that you were wrong? How dare you, sir!”
The Warlord shrugged. “For all I know, you’re lying about that, just as you lie about everything else.”
“I am not lying!”
Damin closed the gap between them with frightening speed. “Then prove it, Adrina. Tell me the truth! Why did you leave Karien?” Although he was looming over her, Adrina held her ground. Mikel watched helplessly, wanting to kill Damin Wolfblade almost as much as he wanted to stay hidden and watch this strange scene unfold.
“I’ve told you a thousand times! I left because Cratyn is a miserable, cowardly, little cretin! The day we were married he hit me and called me a Fardohnyan whore and told me all he wanted was a Karien heir to my father’s throne. It went downhill from there.”
Tears misted Mikel’s eyes to hear such words coming from his princess. She is lying to protect herself, he reasoned anxiously.
She walked to the other side of the small tower and leaned against the crumbling merlons, turning her back to the Warlord. The darkness was settling rapidly, making her features hard to distinguish.
“Was it that bad?” Damin asked, in a surprisingly sympathetic voice.
“Worse than you could possibly imagine. The bastards even killed my dog.”
She’s making it up, Mikel told himself, over and over. She’s making it up.
“Does your father know what it was like?”
“Even if he did, he wouldn’t care. Hablet has his own plans.”
“To invade Hythria, no doubt.” Adrina looked around sharply, but Damin smiled. “Don’t worry, Adrina. I won’t overtax your ability to admit the truth any further, this night. Your father’s worst fault is his predicability. His plans are easy enough to fathom. It’s the Kariens who have me worried at the moment.”
“I told you, I don’t know what they have planned.”
“And oddly enough, I believe you. Come on. The sun has set. If we stay up here much longer they’ll be able to decorate their damned Founder’s Day banquet with a couple of ice statues.”
He held out his hand to help her down and, to Mikel’s disgust, she accepted it. But she halted at the top of the steps and leaned toward him in a most unladylike manner. “Tarja showed me the graves, Damin. That was a noble thing to do for an enemy.”
“Careful, your Highness, you might actually get me believing there’s a heart hidden beneath that rather impressive bosom.”
She snatched her hand from his angrily. “You are an intolerable bastard! I was trying to be gracious!”
“Gracious?” he laughed softly. “That wide-eyed look? Those slightly parted lips? That eloquent sigh? What’s next? ‘Oh Damin, won’t you please let me go’? Gods Adrina! I’ve been around court’esa-trained noblewomen all my life. You’ll have to do better than that.”
“You flatter yourself, my Lord,” Adrina said, her voice colder than the rapidly darkening night. “In the unlikely event I ever turn my skills on you, you won’t even know what hit you, until you lay whimpering at my feet, begging for more!”
“Don’t try playing that game with me, Adrina. You might find the rules a little different this far from Fardohnya.”
“Rules?” she laughed softly, savagely. “In this game, my Lord, there are no rules.”
Adrina vanished from Mikel’s sight as she descended the stairs, followed closely by Damin. Mikel’s breath came out in a rush and he discovered he was trembling. He wished he could make sense of even half of what he had seen and heard. The princess must be very upset to lie about Prince Cratyn like that. What were they doing to her?
“Psst!”
Mikel glanced in the direction of the thief who sat squashed in the dark cavern.
“What?”
“You have to steal the eggs!”
Annoyed, Mikel reached in and snatched the fragile speckled eggs from the nest.
“There! Satisfied?”
Dace nodded, grinning broadly. “You have honoured the God of Thieves.”
“If you say so,” he agreed distractedly. It was a measure of his distress that he did not bother to correct the youth. Normally such a statement received a sharp denial of the existence of any other god.
“Your soul belongs to me now, Mikel,” Dace said, sounding enormously satisfied with himself.
“My soul belongs to the Overlord,” he replied mechanically.
“That’s what you think,” the God of Thieves smirked.
Chapter 45
The Medalonians celebrated Founder’s Day with a degree of abandonment that Adrina considered rather inappropriate for men in the middle of a war. Admittedly, there wasn’t much of a war going on at present, so they might as well take this opportunity to enjoy themselves. Even the Hythrun Raiders joined in as if it were a festival of the gods. They didn’t care much for Founder’s Day, she suspected, but they weren’t going to ignore an excuse for a party. There was precious little else to do. One senseless battle and now Cratyn was sitting on the other side of the border with his vast army doing precisely nothing.
The hall was filled with people, as Jenga had declared an open house and many of the officers whose wives and lovers were in the followers’ camp had brought their women to the party. Someone had managed to find a quantity of blue linen and had made a hopeful attempt to decorate the crumbling walls, but there had not been enough to go around. The decorations had a forlorn, unfinished look. The only source of heat was the abundant torches and the huge fireplace near the far end, but the heat of so many bodies pressed together seemed to take the chill off the air.
There were quite a few court’esa present as well, although Adrina thought the term a rather misguided one, when applied to these ill-bred, uneducated whores, whose only feature in common with real court’esa was their willingness to trade sexual favours for coin. A small band of musicians was playing in the corner, enlisted men mostly, whose skill with an instrument had got them invited to the officers’ party. They weren’t bad either, considering their first calling was killing people and musicianship was merely a secondary talent.