Moving Water (36 page)

“Why,” she said, “not?”

“Because I love you,” he said.

She was so stunned she almost whispered.

“What?”

“Because I love you.” It came now without plea or passion or stress. “I don't care if you chained me or gave me fever or burnt my hand or drowned two hundred phalanxmen or murdered innocent people or tore your country apart to blackmail me. I don't care if you're queening it up here or running like a pi-dog with every Assharran out for your blood and nothing to your name, not even skirts. I love you. You're what I want.”

Her eyes dilated, flared and narrowed, a sequence of passions flew across her face. Shock, hate, fury, triumph, a torment of conflicting spites. If he had the Well she had, now, the ultimate weapon. To wound beyond remedy this foe who had just delivered himself into her hands.

The tumult passed. A vicious glee succeeded it.

“That will make me truly happy,” every word a stab, “when I go.”

He gave her the pleasure of pleading. “Moriana, please—”

She laughed in his face. “Just what is left for me? Deposed, thrown out—lynched! Or crawling round some hovel, turning to a hag, in debt to your—mercy—for what's left of my life!”

“Moriana—”

“I'd sooner die and be done!”

She whipped about and he shouted, “No!”

It was panic. More than panic. I felt it as she must, she whirled back, teeth bared, fists clenched in her skirts till the black ripped under her fingernails.

“You hypocrite! Preach about love and use your filthy arts on me? To be sure, you'll ask!”

The laughter had gone. Under the dirt and travel-dust he was completely white. He lifted his hand, one gesture that tried to say it all: I would never enforce it, I never meant it to happen. I would never compel anyone like that. Least of all you.

Her eyes burned like the lava behind her, her head came forward as if to spit. I wanted to cover my own eyes. To cry, No, don't let me see.

His face said it all. Final destruction, defeat. Loss of the one thing that might have balanced the wreckage. His own dreams. His wildest hopes.

But he stood there and watched her, and then he made the slightest shift of his good hand. So brief, so simple, a child could read it, yet an aedr's gesture: If it was a command, I revoke it. You are free. If you choose it, go.

She understood that. Her lips drew back in that vampire smile. The lava pulsed below her, a red flare in the smoke, she tossed her head up in response. “Changed your mind?”

Just audibly, he said, “No.”

“Had wiser thoughts?”

For a moment his face took me back to the clammy dark of the vault. Then he turned his hand out in that little, assenting motion and I knew that once again he was committing everything to a gamble. To the chance that she would remember his own beliefs and tenets. What he had said about Math.

“The choice,” he said, so quietly, “is yours.”

The choice of death or life, and more. The surety that, whatever he felt for her, he would not interfere. Not even for this.

She froze on the parapet, poised like a fallen leaf. For an instant I knew that, to her bones' marrow, she had understood.

Then those black depths slitted. The gold meteors stilled.

“So. . . .”

It was barely breathed.

He must have stopped breathing too. I wondered the lava itself did not stop.

“If I. . . .” The hand-wave finished it: did not go down there. “If. . . .”

Go on, his eyes said. Torture me if you choose.

“If I stayed. . . .”

It must have been easier to fight the Well than to let her finish. To stand, the length of that hesitation, and simply wait.

“If I stayed . . . you'd . . . protect me?”

In the flesh I would have shut my eyes. Would have yelled, Don't believe her!—Listen to me! It's not wariness, it's calculation, nothing else!

But he had already replied. Clenching his fist, his shoulders, to keep the words steady. Pledging himself with his eternal lunacy that would deny truth and caution and common sense for the sake of impossible hope.

“Yes.”

“You'd stop my—loving subjects'—revenge?”

No, I could not bawl! Not even for Math! I did shut my eyes, or at least the faculty of sight. Through whatever passed for ears the word came. Steadier than before.

“Yes.”

I looked again. She was staring, those black gulfs of eyes starred with golden darts. The mouth was set, no softening there. The face of a gambler. A predator.

“You'd save me from my—just deserts?”

He answered as evenly, a little faster.

“Yes.”

“Save my life?”

It went up a little at the end. Perhaps even she could not master that disbelief.

Like his eyes, his voice never faltered.

“Yes.”

Her hand turned in the sendal's black. She drew a visible breath.

“You'd—marry me?”

Perhaps she had expected him to balk there. He answered as if she had asked him how the weather looked.

“Yes.”

Smoke whirled in a breath of wind, the dead leaves hissed. I felt my own lungs choke on the brimstone fumes, could feel the sweat trickling on her temples, her jaw, into the pure white curve between her breasts. I could not read her face at all. Not triumph now, not fury, not mockery either. But the blackness of her eyes had hardened. The shift was in her voice.

“After I've whored with ‘ten lives' favorites'?”

He answered as if nothing had changed.

“Yes.”

“If I lost Assharral? If I was a beggar, a pauper?”

“Yes.”

“If I was old and ugly and—and sick to death?”

“Yes.”

“And you'd forgive everything I've done to you?”

“Yes.”

“All my—Ammath?”

“Yes.”

“Not because it's right? To ‘forgive me'?” Now the sneer was molten. “Because you have to do it or betray your ‘Math'?”

“No.”

“And if it came to a choice between me and Math, you'd put me first?”

His face moved. Clear, open anguish. But even then his voice kept control.

“I would hope it never . . . came to that.”

“But if it did?”

He did shut his eyes. It came in the barest whisper.

“If I had to . . . if it was the only . . . yes.”

The air, the Morhyrne trembled under me. Burn you in the everlasting pits, I swore at her. Do you know what you've just heard?

Something she must have felt. I actually saw her own lips tremble, so quickly he could not have seen before he re-opened his eyes. But the look that met him was harder than obsidian. As black, as pitiless.

“Because you're ‘in love' with me? You couldn't live without me? I mean more to you than anything else?”

She made it flaying satire. His answer turned it back to honest truth.

“Yes.”

The meteors blazed then, flaming into white-hot scorn. “You love me so much you'd pervert justice for me, deny your ‘beliefs'—such as they are!—for me, betray your friends for me, you'd marry me on those terms—and afterwards I could tread all over you and you'd go on suffering and forgiving and refusing to hit back and doing all those bloody-minded forbearing lily-livered things, and bleat that you had to do it for the sake of”—she fairly bawled it—“ ‘Math'!”

 His shoulders sprang upright. His eyes shot one green streak of mirth.

“Oh, no,” he said with the utmost affability. “If I ever do lay hands on you, madam, I shan't suffer anything. I shall tie you to the bedpost and beat you black and blue. Every . . . single . . . night.”

She all but fell off the parapet. Her hand clapped to her heart. The color fluxed wildly in her cheeks. Her eyes were enormous, there was some strange convulsion in their depths. She hiccupped for breath.

The spasm passed. For a moment she was wholly, perfectly still.

Then her lips shook, her eyes went impossibly wider, the gold flamed and crescendoed and died. And the obsidian melted. Blackness shivered and shifted, transformed to sheets of coal-black mist.

“Oh,” she whispered. She was laughing, crying, both together, unable to help herself. “Oh, you are such a
fool!
”

The sun came out in his face. Looking back at her he laughed in pure delight.

“An outright imbecile! An absolute idiot!”

“I am, I am! Else I couldn't have made such an almighty bungle out of this.”

“B-bungle?” She was crying, and trying to blink rather than wipe away the tears.

“What else could you call it? When I tried to propose I ended making fun of you, and you threw me in chains. When you came down to bait me I had to preach at your courtiers and you all but broke my head. And when your Wardrobe Mistress blazoned your very private affairs all over Zyphryr Coryan I didn't even have the sense to shut her up.”

“Klyra! That . . . ! How would you have felt if someone—”

“Believe me, I knew just how you felt! Who made a laughing stock of my very private feelings to the whole confounded court?”

Her lips twitched. She tried to stop a sound and choked. Then, for the first time, I heard the Lady Moriana laugh without menace or malice or spite.

Their mirth died away together. She looked at him, he looked at her.

“And what,” she demanded with feigned belligerence, “am I supposed to do now?”

He was still smiling. I had never seen such joy, such tenderness, such candid happiness in his face.

“You could,” he suggested softly, “come down—if you liked.”

She looked at the pavement. He came over, holding out his hand. For another long moment she held back. Then hers came to meet it, and he helped her down into the bower.

She stood looking up at him, uncertain, and trying to mask it in truculence. A new light, not of laughter, woke in his eyes.

“I shouldn't,” he said rather thickly, “do this. But—”

He still had hold of her hand. He gave it such a jerk she literally tumbled into him, caught her with his right elbow while he transferred his left hand from wrist to waist, said, “Blast you, look up here,” and began kissing her in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with Math.

I was back in my body, looking across a battered vestibule into Fengthira's face. “Ah,” she said in pure satisfaction. “At last.”

Then she saw me and that smile came, fey and chilling even in mirth.

“What, didst think he'd kiss her forehead and ‘forgive her'—send her off to do better like one of tha mewling priests? Tcha! May be soft, but he's flesh and blood.”

“But—but—”

Her eyes narrowed. “Hast paid
no
heed at all? To aught he looked? Aught he said? When even her jimping popinjay of a maid could say, T'is a case with her?”

“With her, yes! But he—” I tried to rally. “I thought he—admired her, yes, I thought—”

She gave a veritable horse's snort. “And when he said, I've plans for her, hast never wondered, What?”

“I—uh. . . .”

She snapped her fingers under my nose. “Then soften tha granite head and wonder now! For I tell thee plain, it's been in his mind since the day he clapped eyes on her. And if tha or thine tries to botch it for him, after all this. . . .”

I gulped and tried not to hold my head on. And then tried in earnest cowardice to think no further. Not to say, He has what he wanted. But at what cost to us?

And is it a prize that can be kept?

I opened my mouth. Fengthira gave me one quelling glower. “Come tha. We've eavesdropped enough.”

* * * * *

We sat on the fern-walk's lowest step. The earth rumbled, the lava hissed, withered ferns above us rustled in the gloom. I tried to think, then tried not to think. Fengthira sat quiet, whistling softly through her teeth. But at last she glanced upward, and a small frown rucked her brows.

“I doubt,” she remarked, “he's as little care for time now as if he'd twisted Los Velandryxe himself. But. . . .” Then she rose quickly as scraps of conversation floated down.

 “. . . use your arts, then. Act without hands. Perfect if you have no hands to act.”

“If you think, you coal-eyed femaere, that I'll totter down there with you under my arm and Los Velandryxe Thira bobbing like a kite in front of me, you're a bigger fool than you think I am.”

“Impossible . . . ?” A splutter. A scuffle. “Oh, mind the step!”