Master of Whitestorm (47 page)

Prince Teadje accepted a chair and after him, the others chose seats. Korendir alone remained standing. As the mountain born reached for a dish, the mercenary saw, and returned a fractional shake of his head. “You’re a guest. Let me.” With a bow to his visiting royalty, he pointedly tasted each platter, then sampled the better of the wines. Candleflame struck sultry highlights in his hair as with enviable grace he sat down.

The mountain born coughed in apology. “Your man implied that a dwarf wife ran your kitchens.”

Korendir raised his eyebrows. “Megga? Poison guests? I’d spit her before she ever dared.”

Aware the quick words masked shock, Haldeth interrupted. “Nix saw tattoos on the Arrax man, and mistook him for a slave master.”

The Lord of Whitestorm relaxed, but only fractionally. His attention flicked back to his company. “Then I ask you to forgive the discourtesy. As a refugee from the mines, the poor dwarf probably had reason.” Gray eyes shifted to the prince. “I regret to disappoint you further, Your Grace, but I don’t any longer take contracts.”

Prince Teadje hooked a slab of meat with his knife. “That is indeed regrettable.” He raised eyes like unmarked brown velvet and sighed. “If we’d paid heed to the gossip of sailors, I could have avoided a tedious voyage.”

Korendir filled the prince’s goblet, unconcerned by the intensity with which the Arrax man studied the scars beneath his cuff. “The best I can offer is to hear your case and recommend a replacement.”

Jade trappings glinted as Teadje inclined his head. “The king my father specified he would hire no other but yourself.”

The Arrax man refused food, no longer on account of dwarf servants. His age was younger than first appeared, under graying hair and tattoos. His acerbity derived from hardship, and the clefts by his mouth reflected no other feeling but grief.

Korendir set aside the wine. His appetite was spare at any time, but the dishes that steamed by his hands also stayed untouched. “However dire your troubles, they cannot follow within these walls.”

“Memories can,” the Arrax man said bluntly.

His comment effectively stifled conversation. High Kelair was an island kingdom, not given to wars or disputes. The dispatch brought by Prince Teadje would not be the usual request to command armies, or assassinate a political enemy, or stand as bodyguard for some fearful nobleman. Firmly as Korendir insisted that his days of adventuring lay behind him, he could not look upon need without pity.

He retrieved the wine flask after a pause, then arose and stepped around the table. Personally he filled the Arrax man’s goblet. “Drink,” he urged firmly. “I would take it very ill if the hospitality of my house did not at least grant refreshment.”

The Arrax man followed with his eyes as Korendir knelt to Prince Teadje, then lifted palms marked from all his past forays and formally asked to see the contract.

Haldeth nearly choked on his salad. Pale, almost sick with alarm, he watched the prince draw out a document crusted with seals and tied in the manner of the eastlands with cords of emerald silk. The knots were an art form, each one ritually significant, but to Haldeth they resembled nothing so much as an obscene coupling of snakes.

Korendir accepted the parchment with steady hands. He arose, selected a knife from the table, and retired to an alcove window.

Only Prince Teadje kept his appetite while the former mercenary broke the seals. Haldeth and the Arrax man watched Korendir’s back as he slit the knots and read. Neither saw anything that might lend a clue to his mood; only something about his stillness caused Haldeth to feel threatened.

“Fetch Ithariel,” the Master of Whitestorm said presently. His tone was inflectionless and short.

Haldeth murmured excuse to the prince and left at once to complete the errand.

The enchantress answered her husband’s summons alone. Warned by Haldeth’s refusal to return, she had left young Callin with a servant. The lady reached the chamber just as Korendir laid aside the parchment. His voice masked the click of the latch as he asked the Arrax man to describe the predator which terrorized the passes through the Hyadons.

“Huge,” came the bitter reply. Though Korendir remained gazing outward through the window, the mountain born continued without pause. “Looks like a great dark bird, but large enough to kill cattle. The horse lords in the valleys lost foals, until they moved their herds. That’s when the monster took to slaughter among the caravans bound for Arrax.”

Ithariel spoke sharply from the doorway. “Is the beast feathered or scaled?”

The guests at the table both started in surprise; neither had noticed her entry. Now, the presence of Korendir’s wife caused noticeable impact. In robes of gold-bordered violet, with her cheeks flushed from her hasty ascent of the stair, the Lady of Whitestorm was stunning. Caught with his mouth full of vegetables, Prince Teadje succumbed to a frankly stupefied stare; the Arrax man simply answered with a directness as dour as his manner throughout.

“The beast has feathers over wings and tail. The breast and neck are scaled with horn something like tortoise shell.”

Ithariel crossed to the table, Looking troubled, she regarded the Arrax man with eyes a mistier gray than her husband’s, and said, “Talons or claws?”

Her beauty at last made an impression; the mountain born reddened behind his tattoos, and his voice became defensively surly. “Talons, Lady. Ones curved as sabers and long enough to pierce a man’s chest.”

Korendir left off his contemplation. He encompassed his wife’s arrival with an uncharacteristically savorless glance, and said, “You know of this creature, Ithariel?”

Whitestorm’s lady set her hands on the back of Haldeth’s vacant chair. She directed her reply to the Arrax man as well as the husband poised too tautly by the windowseat. “The killer our guest has described fits nothing else but the Corrigon of elder legend. Such a beast should not exist. Dethmark’s records claim the last of them died nine centuries ago, as witnessed by Morien’s forbears.”

The Arrax man banged the table, causing silverware to jump. “Would I voyage the breadth of Aerith just to speak lies to strangers?”

Prince Teadje woke from admiration and at last recalled diplomacy. “Peace, man,” he murmured across a glare like swords; but the offense he strove to smooth over seemed not to trouble the mercenary.

“We believe you.” All light-footed edginess, Korendir retrieved the parchment from the windowseat. The ribbons and seals shimmered faintly in the tremor of a hand no longer relaxed. “My Lady, were the records specific? How did the Corrigon replicate, and how came the last one to die?”

Ithariel turned the chair. She sat down with her eyes on her husband and pushed aside Haldeth’s uneaten meal. The chink of plates and cutlery half masked her initial reply. “The females laid eggs in volcanic ash. The time of gestation was not known, but warmth triggers incubation and hatching. Unless they are discovered as chicks, a Corrigon is notoriously difficult to kill. The last one listed in the records was never vanquished. Apparently it perished of old age.”

“After a lifetime of slaughter and destruction?” Korendir sounded incredulous.

Still looking at him, Ithariel shook her head. “The monster hunted the wastes of Ardmark and terrorized nothing but wereleopards.”

“Well, this one makes orphans,” the Arrax man interjected. “It preys upon helpless people, even as we speak. Come the winter, without caravans to bring supplies through the passes, my countrymen in the Hyadons will starve.”

Korendir slipped into his seat. He smoothed the elaborate parchment on the cloth by Teadje’s elbow, then lifted the wine carafe and refilled the Arrax man’s goblet. An expression crossed his face that Ithariel had never seen, as with incisive clarity he said, “You have my sympathy. When the tide ebbs at dawn, I’ll see you off with a letter of recommendation to an adventurer who lives down the coast. He has a fast sword and a knack for the unusual. He might take your contract.”

The Arrax man shoved to his feet. His eyes glittered with fury as he seized his filled goblet, spat on the rim, then deliberately emptied the contents. Wine splashed his plate and reddened fine linen like blood.

Prince Teadje skidded back to safeguard his finery. Unmindful of the spatters which stained his leathers, the mountain man finished acidly, “I have misjudged, and will waste no more words with a coward.” Ignoring Prince Teadje’s shocked outcry, he spun and hurled the goblet into the hearthfire. The crash of crystal masked his step as he stalked in hunched anger through the door.

Beneath the table edge, Ithariel set her hand on her husband’s thigh. The muscles beneath her touch never so much as hardened at the insults. While Teadje floundered to make apology, the Master of Whitestorm said nothing to anyone at all.

* * *

Korendir walked the wilds along the clifftop until sundown. He returned before Megga could notice and complain that his supper stood in jeopardy of getting cold. Following the meal, he spent an absorbed hour entertaining his son. Together he and Ithariel tucked Callin into bed; they read as they always did over tea, but when candles burned low and eyes tired, they did not speak of the day’s events, or of the guests whose needs Haldeth attended in another wing of the keep.

“I have everything in life that I desire,” Korendir said simply, when he caught Ithariel watching him over the edge of her book. “All of my happiness is here.”

Then, exactly as he had on the night she had been his bride, he arose and lifted her in his arms. He carried her down a flight of steps, and up three more to their bedchamber. There he shared without words exactly how deeply she pleased him.

Ithariel roused much later to the chill of a solitary bed. That caused her awareness to sharpen instantly. Since the setting of the wardstone at Whitestorm, Korendir’s nightmares had ceased, as had the nocturnal visits to the clifftops that once had been his way to stave off sleep. Alarmed, Ithariel propped herself on one elbow and shook tangled hair from her eyes.

But her husband had not wandered far. She located his silhouette, framed in the square of the casement. He had donned shirt and hose against the cold. Perfectly still, he stared over starlit ocean toward a horizon not yet gray with dawn. By his stance, she knew he was frowning.

Ithariel repressed a shiver. She curbed her impulse to call him back to bed, and instead chose her words by intuition. “You know already that Stendarr will refuse Prince Teadje’s contract.”

Korendir recoiled, not entirely because she startled him; at times her enchantress’s perception seemed to tap his deepest thoughts. He shifted position in the window. His head turned to reveal his profile, etched in shadow against sky. “Stendarr has courage enough. He’s at his best while managing armies, and good because he loves war. An appeal that concerns a monster is outside his usual experience.”

Ithariel felt a shudder jar through her, the same she had known the past winter in the hour after Callin’s birth. All at once the darkness no longer seemed friendly. She sat up. Her hair tumbled loose on her shoulders as she reached for candle stand and striker.

From the window Korendir added, “This has given me a bad feeling from the first, and not through an Arrax man’s insults.”

Flame bloomed under Ithariel’s fingers. She set the lit candle by the bedside, her face bathed in light like a cameo. She weighed her words carefully before she spoke; in her heart she knew that no others, ever, would suffice. Her voice shook all the same. “Why hide your heart? The man I married would be asking himself why the children of Arrax should suffer and die, while his own daughter should be born in protected safety.”

He moved with a speed that startled and caught her into his embrace. “Ithariel! You, and Callin, and our baby yet to come are the joy upon which my life turns.”

She wept then, from cruellest certainty. “But pleasures and wants do not make the measure of a man.”

He caught her shaking shoulders, slid his hands up the sides of her neck until he cupped her face in his fingers. His eyes, meeting hers, were fearfully deep and steady. “Neth in his mercy, what gives me the right to set you and our child at risk? I might be killed for those other mens’ children and wives, and forfeit the joy of my family.”

Ithariel covered his hands with her own. She could not face the tautness in him, and almost, she could not speak. “Could you live with yourself if you didn’t?”

The answer could be read in his stillness. Ithariel laid her cheek against his chest. Too much a part of his spirit to muddle his anguish with lies, she set herself instead to console. “High Morien before you thought not. You survived him. In the end, the children must inherit.”

Korendir’s arms tightened over her back. He held her fiercely, for long moments incapable of speech. “I’m amazed,” he choked out at last. He caught his breath, changed tack, and tried afresh. “Ithariel, beloved, you are unique among women. You understand a truth that I never grasped until now.”

Something within him let go, then; Ithariel felt his softness against her. He relaxed inside as he never had since before he lost peace to the Mhurgai.

Cut by a sorrow more poignant than tears, Ithariel struggled for mastery of herself. The temptation was cruel, to renounce principle and say the one word that could keep him. At the same time aware how wide were the pitfalls, and how narrow the margin of his happiness, she fought her manner to lightness. “I knew all along that I’d married a maniac.” She untied his points. “It’s not dawn yet. Did you have to get dressed?”

As his hose slithered loose under her fingers, he buried his face in her hair. No word did he say but her name, and that, the way he phrased it, held meanings within meanings, but no regret. Compassion was his master, and his moment of final understanding had set all the universe in her hand.

* * *

In the hour that preceded daybreak, Prince Teadje awakened to a knock at the entrance of the guest suite. The Arrax man was dressed and already pacing the floor in his eagerness to be away from White Rock Head. It was he who minded the sleepy request of his prince, and stepped to unbar the door.