Moth and Spark (24 page)

She looked uncomfortable. “I shouldn’t have said it, I couldn’t help myself. I was too worried. He asked what happened to you and I told him you had seen the dragon in the mirror. He asked if I had and I said yes. That was all. Why?”

Not much, but enough. She probably did not even realize how fearless she had been to say those things. Aram would have, though.

“I think you softened him up,” he said.

“I did?” Her tone was truly surprised.

“He was much kinder than I deserved, which has to have been for your sake, not mine.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You kept your head, Tam, instead of falling to pieces. He respects that.”

She fidgeted with a decorative button on her skirt. He realized she wasn’t going to say anything else about it. “Should you have told me everything you did?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I need your thoughts.”

“You want me to feel useful.”

“Trusted.”

“I know you trust me, Corin,” she said. She walked to the window. The light of the sun made her dress shine and showed the soft hairs escaping from the braid. “You have shown that abundantly. This is different. It’s not my place to advise you.”

It struck him in the heart. He went to her. “Tam,” he said. “Tam Warin. Look at me.”

Slowly, reluctantly, she turned. He put his hand on her cheek. “Your place is with me as long as you want it. Entirely.”

“How can I tell you what to do? You can’t make me privy to state secrets.”

“I can.”

“Your father . . .”

If he gave her the bald truth, exactly what Aram had said, it would be too much for her. She was confident and strong and not fooled by pomp, but she respected power. Carefully, gently, he kissed her. “He said I could tell you whatever I wished, Tam. I’m not spilling things I should not be spilling. I’m not asking you to do anything you shouldn’t.”

“He trusts you not to be fooled by my wiles?”

It was jokingly said, but he heard the worry behind it. “Tam,” he said. “It’s not that he trusts me not to be fooled, but that he trusts you not to be fooling me. Don’t doubt you have his favor. He told me not to lose you, do you understand?”

She stepped back, her hand over her mouth. “I can’t—Corin, what does that mean?”

“It means what we want it to mean,” he said softly. Except for the one unalterable condition.

Tears sprang to her eyes. They glistened. He wanted to touch her but she had to come through this herself. She swallowed. Then, as he had seen her do before, she drew herself together.

“In that case I want the better wine,” she said.

“You little devil,” he said, relieved. If she had to make a jest of it to keep her footing, he didn’t mind. It was better than running. How hard it must be for her to push her way through the thickets of the court only to find herself in the center of them with him.

He took her hand. “Will you walk with me?”

“Where?” she asked.

To my bedroom, he thought. “About.”

“The garden?”

She sounded anxious. It would be the most public he had been with her. He knew he was challenging her.

“No,” he said. “I’m not that much of a fool. The only woman here I could walk alone with in the garden after dark is my mother. And the insects can be bad this time of year. But I can show you the palace. Bring you to the places no visitor is allowed. I warn you though that most of them are dull and look like one another. Say no if you don’t want to, Tam, we can stay here. But I haven’t the time to take you anywhere in town.”

She thought about it, then raised her eyes to his. She said firmly, “Show me the interesting places, and tell me all the sordid stories. I should change my shoes. Where will you wait for me?”

He admired her resolve. “The fountain hall,” he said, “but I’ll have to hide in a corner so no one traps me.”

He was intercepted by a messenger who told him Mari was not far out of town and her husband only two days behind her. It was the first decent news in days and made him almost cheerful. At the fountain hall he made sure a large plant was between himself and the sight line of anyone casually walking through, and he talked to one of the guards for good measure.

It seemed hours before Tam came. “I’m sorry,” she said before he could remark on it, “it’s impossible to get away from them. Just when you’ve said something to one person another comes along and you have to repeat it.”

“I probably deserve to have to wait,” he said. He kissed her hand. “Are you ready?”

She nodded. “Lead on, Your Highness.”

That meant she was happy. They made their way quickly and correctly, not touching, through the wide corridors, which seemed to be extraordinarily full of people. Tam maintained a formal dignity he had not suspected in her, coolly ignoring everything but him. There was so much of her he still did not know. She was full of contradictions and complexity.

The men who saw her were not. They stared, no matter their rank. Eyes were quickly averted when they saw him. Briefly, it amused him; he was not used to being second place. Then he realized he was going to have to find a way to make it clear she was to be respected, not coveted. He had to step carefully with it. If he gave her something it could not be allowed to seem return for being in his bed. That meant he had to make sure she did not come into it. It took work to not show frustration.

He remembered walking to the Terrace Room that first night with her, hoping desperately no one would come out of a room and see them. It could have happened at any moment, but he had got them into the antechamber and shut the door to the hallway before it did. Bron, who had far better things to do than stand guard outside a room while Corin cultivated a woman’s affections, had only poorly concealed his irritation when being told to do so. Then he had seen her and straightened more than he did for Corin, his own display feathers going up before he recalled himself. Corin still did not understand how she had been free of other attachments.

He showed her the council chamber, the king’s private library, the map room, his mother’s receiving room, the ceremonial armory. But they were both soon bored, and it was not long before, despite his better sense, they went out one of the garden doors. They stepped onto a broad flagstoned area with a few trees inset and a flower bed bordering the other side. A path ran parallel to the building in either direction. Early white stars shone in the clear sky. Bats darted everywhere, feasting on insects. In the garden, frogs and crickets competed loudly with one another. He heard voices but did not see anyone.

“My God,” said Tam, “you didn’t say anything about the noise. How big are those frogs?”

“Tiny. Half the length of my thumb. Sometimes they get inside and
can be heard for yards and yards down a hallway. When you get close to them they get quiet, they’re hell to catch. I speak from experience.”

“You brought them in, didn’t you.”

“A few of them,” he admitted. “But really, they are quite adventurous on their own. Which way?”

“You decide. I don’t know where to go.”

Resolutely he turned away from the enticing darkness of the garden. He spent an hour leading her about between the buildings, into small grassy courtyards, under covered walkways, in and out of narrow doors, past the kitchens with their smells of meat and spice and woodsmoke, through the kitchen garden with rosemary strong in the air, across the sundial court where he had been tutored endlessly in geometry. He made certain not to take her any place a lady should not go. They were seen now and then by servants and guards but by few courtiers. Some places were very dark and quiet, causing them to tiptoe into the shadows and take much too long to come out, while others were splashed with light and full of sounds from inside: voices, music, clashing metal, crockery, water. There was no area he did not know, but watching her discover them was almost as stimulating as exploring had been when he was very young. He had been given free range then, and he took it. It was years since he had gone places where his duties did not take him; the boy who had wanted to know what everything was and how everything worked was long grown.

The night cooled, and Tam grew chilled. Corin put his arm around her and walked her back in through one of the garden doors. It happened to be the one that led to the more formal areas of the palace; it was the door through which a foreign dignitary would be taken to view the gardens or to walk for a careful, term-setting conversation with the king. The rooms nearby were mostly used for state affairs and were dark and empty tonight. There were several guards along the hall but no other people. The hallway lights were low.

Tam shivered. He felt her body trembling under his arm. It was highly improper to touch her so, but he was the prince, damn it, custom could go to hell. “What is it?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

“It’s a little spooky,” she said. “All this emptiness.”

He understood what she meant. Many times he had walked back to his own rooms after some business kept him in his study for hours, and even those familiar and well-traveled hallways felt cold and slightly eerie
in that midnight quiet. Here, where everything was designed to impress rather than to be useful, it seemed even more inhuman.

They walked by the high golden doors that were one of the four public entrances to the throne room. He thought absently of the bare splendor within, the elaborate roof beams and gorgeous wall hangings and all the space for standing with not a place to hide. There had been a dragon seal on the floor once, but the Myceneans had destroyed it. It was an old room, restored and enlarged several times over the centuries, first built when war was far more present, when power meant naked force and domination. He knew that his family ruled because his forebears had been stronger and luckier and more cunning than their rivals. Strength and luck and cunning were nothing to shrug at, and he did not underestimate what they had done. But kings no longer had to be warlords, they had to be gamesters. Even more so since Mycene took the dragons.

“Do you want to see?” he asked, since they were there.

“Can we?”

At first he thought it was a naïve question, as though she had forgotten who he was. Then he realized that she knew he was rule-bound too and did not know what the rules were. Even with all the things he had told her, she did not know the customs of this place. She was not a courtier.

He stopped to touch her face. “Yes,” he said softly. When Mari came he would put them together.

She considered it, then shook her head. “No. Not now, in the dark.”

He was not about to force her. “A cat got in once,” he said as they walked on, “and took a nap on the throne.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“What could happen? It was a cat. It got out before anyone could catch it and the rober spent half an hour picking cat hairs off the cushions.”

She laughed. They were passing an unlit hallway that he knew was never used, and he gave in to temptation. He turned into it. She followed him to the end, down the stairwell to the landing. It was dark.

“Where does this go?” she whispered.

“Nowhere. The storeroom below was rebuilt years ago and the door
is blocked off. No one is coming.” He stroked her neck and slipped a finger under her collar. Her skin was amazingly soft and smooth.

She made a noise that was neither a word nor a sigh. He took it as permission to go ahead and pushed both sleeves off her shoulders. The dress was snug and would not go down without being unhooked, so he gave up on that. She stroked his arms and left her hands lightly on his wrists. He kissed her bare skin feverishly.

Then they heard voices and both froze. There was just enough light from the main corridor for him to see a glint in her eyes. He touched a finger to her lips for silence. She licked it, arousing him more. Her hands came down to his thighs. After a few seconds he realized they weren’t stopping. He swallowed and firmly lifted her hands back to his shoulders.

The voices moved on. She said in his ear, “Don’t you want to?”

“Are you mad? Of course I do. But not here,” he said, although his resistance was almost gone.

“Then continue the tour,” she murmured, her tone suggesting it was rather a different tour that she had in mind.

“You are a witch.”

“Maybe.”

“If you keep teasing me like this I’m going to have to go find some other woman to keep myself sane,” he said. It was not entirely a jest.

“Who says I’m teasing?”

He took her up to the roof. It was a long ascent, and she was sweating and winded by the time they reached the top. That should slow her down some. The stone still radiated heat from the day. There were no seats up here, nothing but the flat stone and the guardhouse at one end and the coop for the message birds at the other. The moon was overhead, not at the full yet but bright enough to see by. He led her to the western wall so they could look out, over the blackness of the garden, the lights of the city, the river curving through the hills and fields beyond. They were high up, a good fifty feet or more above the other levels of the palace; if it had been a clear day they could have seen for miles. At night the kingdom had no edge.