Dockalfar (19 page)

There were living plants in abundance.

Ferns in pots hanging from the ceiling, vines creeping up the wall, trays of flowering plants on ledges and floor. It smelled like the jungle. It reminded her of Aloe. Therefore it must be the girl’s own room.

“It is,” Aloe sat up, smiling at her.

Victoria smiled back, realizing she had forgotten her shields. She did not bother to put them back up. “It is very you. Your own little forest inside of a house.”

“I prefer the real one.” She stretched and stood, waving her arms around her. “I don’t stay here very often, but Ashara insists I keep my room. And I suppose it is nice to have a place to call your own. The baths are through here.” She walked towards a fern camouflaged archway into a small tiled chamber that housed a sunken pool. There were benches around the walls and drying clothes hanging from pegs. Aloe stripped off her tunic and leggings and stepped into the water. It was waist deep. She settled down until it lapped at her chin and waited for Victoria.

A little self consciously Victoria pulled her tattered gown over her head and followed the sidhe. The water was pleasingly warm. She went down to her knees and ducked her head. How nice to be immersed in warm water. A thin film of dirt traced the surface, a tell tale sign of just how dirty they both were. Aloe reached into a glass bowl on the ledge and gathered a handful of sand-like grains. She rubbed them into her hair and created a soapy foam, which she proceeded to rub into the rest of her body. Gleefully Victoria procured a handful of her own and scrubbed into her own skin. Healthy pink showed through under the grime. She washed her hair with luxurious pleasure and finally settled back on her haunches to merely soak in the bath. Aloe situated herself across from her, silver hair fanning out in the water around her. Her eyes were enormous with her hair plastered to skull.

She was less human without the buoyancy of hair. So much more alien and ethereal.

She reminded Victoria of Dusk, with his hair slick and limp from the rain and his elegant bone structure so much more pronounced. Only, she thought, with something akin to guilt, he was more beautiful that Aloe.

“Is he?” Aloe asked with an arched brow, looking honestly curious. “I wish I’d seen him, then.”

Victoria blushed and her shields shot up. Aloe’s lips turned up innocently. They stared at each other from a moment, then gradually Victoria developed a grin of her own. She realized suddenly that it was all right to share with Aloe the utterly embarrassing notion that she found her enemy attractive.

“He’s lovely,” she almost giggled. “I can’t think of a human woman that would not be envious of him.”

“How many sidhe men have you seen?”

“Just the one. God, are they all like that?”

“How am I supposed to know, silly girl. I told you I hadn’t seen yours.”

“He’s not mine,” Victoria informed her primly, then laughed. “I’ve no idea where mine is.”

“Your human. Is he beautiful?”

“Alex? Alex is handsome. There’s a difference, you know. He’s got blue eyes and golden hair. In the summer it turns almost white. He has it very short now, because he just got out of the navy, but when he lets it grow, it has a nice wave to it. I suppose if one were to call one of his features beautiful, it would be his lips.”

“Men have wonderful lips,” Aloe noted.

Victoria smiled sadly. “Will your Ashara help me find him?”

“If she can.”

“I need him, you know. The entire time he was away in the war, I was lost. I wondered about in a daze without him there to orient my life. And then when he came back, I thought every thing was perfect. We were going to get married and start a family.”

“One would almost think,” Aloe surmised slowly, trailing a hand through the mass of her floating hair, “that you are a weak woman, Victoria. To depend so much on a man. But I know better. So I can only guess that you make yourself need this man so much because you know nothing else.”

Victoria stared, momentarily aghast at such a blatant statement. Such a twisting of the truth. “I need him because I love him,” she said tightly. Aloe shrugged. She rose and stepped gracefully from the pool, taking a cloth from a peg and draping it over her streaming head. She disappeared into the other room. Victoria sat for a moment more, grinding her teeth, then less gracefully climbed out of the water and wrapped a towel about her body, then another about her hair.

She walked into the larger chamber and stopped dead in her tracks. Aloe stood unselfconsciousness, rubbing her hair dry, naked as the day she was born and smiling at a man who lounged in the doorway. A very pretty, young seeming man, no taller than Aloe and Victoria, who possessed an odd shade of green hair that fell cloud like down his back. His eyes, also green, shifted from Aloe to Victoria and his smile broadened. He had lovely white teeth, and a mischievous dimple in his cheek.

“My first human. What a lovely experience this is.”

She gaped at him, clutched her towel tighter and contemplated flight back into the bath. His eyes held her. He floated towards her, graceful and sleek as a cat.

“No one ever told me humans looked like you. You’re lovely.”

“She’s wet and tired, Alkar. What do you want?” Aloe quipped from across the room.

He turned his great bright eyes to her. “Just to welcome you home, my love.”

“I’m not your love,” Aloe corrected him. “And not likely to become and neither is she.”

“She’s always testy when she’s out of the wood,” the young man turned back to Victoria with a conspiring wink. “She really does adore me. I am Alkar. Who might you be, little one with the oh so big shield?”

“V-Victoria McFadden.”

“Ah, is that a Celtic name?”

“Celtic?”

“Ah, Irish?”

“My father.” She really wanted to run and hide from his all too piercing eyes. Standing in towels before strange men, even pretty ones with little or nothing to do with humanity, was not a situation she found comfortable.

“You know we used to breed freely with human women way back when, perhaps you’ve a little sidhe blood in your veins?”

“Alkar,” Aloe came up behind him, all naked and graceful. “If I have to throw you out, you’ll not find it a pleasant experience, I assure you.”

He looked back at her, and down at her nudity, then shrugged, bowed with a sweeping arm movement and strolled from the room.

Aloe glared at the closed door for a moment, then her expression softened.

“Noisome,” she muttered, then whirled and flung open the doors of a hidden closet. A cornucopia of colors was revealed within. Silks and crepes, leathers and velvets. Materials Victoria had never seen or felt before. She found a belted green dress of silk that fell loosely about her shoulders and covered her arms down to the wrists. The hem reached the floor and swirled about her ankles with feather light consistency. It was a pleasure to wear. She spun about in it while Aloe dressed herself, delighted to be clean and properly clad once more. She felt like a new woman.

Aloe suggested they stop by the kitchens before finding the lady of the keep and Victoria eagerly assented.

Something, anything other than berries, roots and the occasional small kill Aloe had made during the journey here would be heaven.

The keep’s kitchen was on ground level and located at the rear of the structure. It was large and airy, sporting huge windows that were propped open to vent the heat of fires. Two or three sidhe women and a few that were not quite sidhe, but similar, worked in the kitchen.

Their chatter was cheerful and inconsistent. Several conversations seemed to be running at once, half spoken out loud, half discussed mentally. Victoria caught vague snatches of both without even trying. Neither verbal or mental gossip seemed private. They all took note of the newcomers, gave Victoria a curious once over without breaking stride in their talking, then went back to what they were doing. The smell of fresh baked bread was overpowering. Victoria’s mouth began watering uncontrollably. Aloe headed for a basket of fruits and Victoria looked mournfully at a tray of flaky, aromatic rolls that could only recently have come out of the oven. Aloe tossed her a fruit.

She caught it and a second. Juice already ran down her companion’s chin. She bit into her own more delicately and steeled herself to leaving the kitchen without any of the delicious smelling bread. Someone took pity on her, or perhaps she was broadcasting her desire strongly enough to influence the women in the kitchen.

“That’s not all you’re going to take, child?” One of the sidhe, tall and graceful as they all seemed to be, but somewhat frazzled and disarrayed, put her paring knife down and waved a hand at the two. “There’s no meat at all on your bones. A bakatu ought to have more flesh.”

“I’m not a bakatu,” Victoria corrected her softly, feeling herself the sudden center of unwanted attention. All five of the women stared with more acute interest. They looked past her to Aloe who chewed her fruit impatiently and silently.

“Well,” the first woman said. “Then I don’t imagine I know what’s skin and bones for a human, but you’ve got a starved look to your eyes, girl and I’m thinking it needs sweetbread to sate it.”

She took two fat rolls and placed them on a cloth. She handed it to Victoria with a slight smile. There was warmth in her eyes. She indicated Aloe with a nudge of her chin.

“If this silly chit is satisfied with fruit, then keep all the bread for yourself.” She patted her hand in a motherly fashion.

Victoria nodded, finding herself unexpectedly overwhelmed by the generosity and warmth of a stranger.

There was welcome here. In the lowest level of the keep she had found benediction and support. It seemed somehow more important than finding with the lady of the keep herself.

She swallowed back the lump in her throat and thanked the sidhe woman, then followed Aloe out of the kitchen. She nibbled on the bread as she went. It was wonderful and warm, laced with sweetness.

“She was very nice,” she commented after swallowing a mouthful. “I should have asked her name.”

“Vera,” Aloe supplied. “Mistress of the kitchen and proud of it. She wouldn’t have given me a freshly baked sweet roll if I had begged on my knees. I suppose she has a weakness for poor lost things.”

Victoria lifted a brow. “Oh? And speaking of poor lost things, have you seen my sweet gulun cub?”

Aloe sniffed. “Probably out hunting Ashara’s flock. She’ll have a fit if she actually catches one of them.”

“No one would hurt her, would they?”

“She’ll have half the folk here up trees, sweet. But I’ve let slip that she’s a guest and not to skin her, regardless of what she gets into.”

“A true friend.”

“You realize of course, that in short order, your cub is going to be very, very large?”

“I saw her mother. I’m told guluns are rather dangerous.”

Aloe snorted. “Rather.”

They came to a open garden that might have been in the very center of the keep. Almost an acre of earth open to the sky. Age old trees graced the space, their upper branches level with the tallest spires of the keep. Soft grass covered the ground and wild flowers grew in abandon everywhere. It was a forest inside of a palace, right down the musty moss smell and the chatter of birds and rustle of branches in the wind. The shade was dappled and filtered. The temperature was refreshingly cool. Victoria had the urge to take off her soft shoes and feel the grass between her toes. As if she had not been walking barefoot over every other type of terrain for the last week or so.

There was no such thing as a path here. No suggestion of any popular route, but Aloe seemed to know exactly where she was going. She seemed wonderfully at ease and happy in the miniature forest. She glowed in the arms of the wood. Truly she was not meant for keeps or palaces or civilized structures.

A pool lay at the foot a particularly gnarled and moss-covered grandfather tree. The tree roots thrust up from the earth around it, almost like encircling arms.

Moss and mushrooms covered the gently twining roots. Small patches of flowers nestled between wood and earth. Two women sat within the folds of the great tree’s foundations. One was dressed in flowing white, the other in boyish leggings and tunic. They were both beautiful and delicate and somehow more alien than Aloe in their white skin and great slanted eyes. The one in white was the more fragile of the two, red gold hair bound in a braid that fell over her shoulder. Her ears were tall and pierced many times over with loops of silver and ornaments of gold and gemstone. Her eyes were large and forest green. There was something unutterably old in her expression.

Something that surpassed Victoria’s ability to conceive time. She only knew that some instinct warned her that this creature was as old as time. As old as the forest and the hills. And that her soul, even though Victoria tried not to pry, shone with such a subtle light that all the things around her were infused with her radiance.

“Great grandmother,” Aloe inclined her head respectfully to the woman in white, then smiled at the other. “Lady.”

The woman in gray leather trousers and sleeveless, tight fitting tunic revealed perfect white teeth in a breathtaking smile.

A purple flower was tucked behind her pointed ear, peeking out from a mass of waving golden hair. Blue eyes that sparkled with wit and intelligence observed them both. She was every bit as beautiful as the other, but fresher and more robust. She seemed to live and breathe with the forest, as Aloe did, but she would have fit just an nicely in a setting of cold marble and austere architecture. There was a regalness about her, a sense of refinement.

“Victoria,” she said warmly, holding out a slim hand. Victoria felt no hesitation in reaching out and taking it, squeezing the fingers lightly. “I’m so very glad to meet you.”

Victoria was very certain that the blonde was the Lady Ashara.

“And I you,” she whispered. She should have been nervous. She should have been desperate in this new situation with these strange women. She was not. Comfort radiated from those two. They were benign and old. The trees and the forest and the land itself trusted them. “I think I am very glad to meet you.”