Shadowdance (25 page)

Minarik shrugged as he looked at them one at a time.

When the meal was over and their talk had dwindled to trivialities, Innowen rose, hugged his foster father, and said his goodnights. Razkili followed him back to their quarters. They exchanged no words in the corridors as they walked, and Innowen went straight to the terrace and looked down into the garden.

"All right," Razkili said at last. "What is it?"

Innowen turned a little and leaned against a column. He wore a frown as he folded his arms over his chest and said softly, "We've had two lavish meals since we arrived here, Kyrin's feast last night, and supper with my father just now." He nodded toward the table between the couches. It still held the dried remains of their lunch. "And the servants have kept us well fed on bread and cheese and wine." He looked back at the garden, and suddenly its beauty seemed false and artificial, preserved only by the back-breaking labor of tongueless slaves, who toiled in the sweltering heat of the day. "But I was thinking of the rest of the people in Parendur and Ispor. What did they have to eat tonight? Did they eat at all?"

Razkili leaned against the wall and interlocked his fingers. "Is that why you stopped halfway through the meal?" His voice was little more than a whisper.

"When they brought the meat course," he answered. "It was pork, but the only thing I could think about was the woman caring for Veydon. All she wanted was a stag to feed her family."

Wind chimes whimpered in the trees below. Leaves rustled dryly. Lights flickered dimly in the windows of a few apartments around the garden. Here and there, shadows stirred, causing small eclipses. In the farthest apartment, the lights went out entirely.

Innowen sighed and started back inside, but Razkili caught him and hugged him close. "Thinking of others, my Innocent?" He rumpled Innowen's hair playfully.

He sighed again, but with great drama. "I know, it's not one of my usual habits." He dug his fingers in Razkili's ribs and jumped away. "Be patient. It's a mood that'll pass. Come on, let's light our own lamps."

"Just one or two," Razkili suggested. "Maybe I've been around you too long, but I'm tired of so much light, and you're going to go off to dance anyway."

* * *

Rascal knew him too well, Innowen thought later as he made his way to the lustral chamber and the throne room. The palace was quiet, and he encountered no one along the way. As he stripped and washed himself, he reflected on his first visit to Parendur. The palace had bustled with staff and dignitaries and visitors. Now it seemed deserted by comparison. There weren't even any guards; they had all been assigned to the city walls or to street duty, except for a handful who patrolled the palace grounds. They never ventured inside, though.

He walked to the center of the chamber. It was darker even than the night before. Only four oil lamps suspended from the ceiling provided any illumination, a weak and diffuse light that puddled in the gloom. The banquet table, he noted, was gone, as were the benches for guests. He stared at the empty throne and at the silent gods in their private niches. Again, standing before Tremyrin, Celet, and Shokastis, he made obeisance. To the others, he offered hasty prayers.

If the gods of Ispor heard him, they gave no sign.

He began to dance. The floor was cool against his feet, and he moved mechanically with an unaccustomed detachment. Strangely, there was no music in his head. He neither heard the wind, nor felt it near. Yet he danced. He studied himself, the flow of an arm, the shape of a hand as he drew it slowly through the air, the extension of one leg. It surprised him to feel so little. It was an exercise, he thought, not a dance.

He turned his thoughts inward, away from his limbs, away from the lines and angles he created. Instead, he listened for the beat of his heart, the throb of blood pounding through his body. A warmth spread inexorably through his muscles, a delicious sensation.

There was his dance, deep inside, waiting for him to find it. It wasn't outside; it wasn't his arms and legs, the steps he made or the patterns he weaved upon the floor and through the air. They were only the outward expressions of what lay within.

The choreography of soul.
The thought flashed through his head, and suddenly there were whisperings that echoed in every hidden corner of the chamber, whisperings and mutterings that rose and fell with the flickering of the lamps, words that darted by his ears and faded maddeningly before he clearly heard them.

A single, sharp musical note from out of nowhere cut through the whisperings straight to his heart. He flung back his head, and his muscles stood out like strings drawn too tightly around his bones. He held back, though, completely still, waiting for the riff he somehow knew would follow. When it did, he whirled across the floor from one side of the room to the other. Sweat quickly beaded on his chest, on his arms and brow, and began to trickle down. It streamed along his sides, down his groin. As he spun, he flung off a rain that splashed on the floor and the pillars and the walls. He leaped and, at the apex of it, brought his hands together like a crack of thunder.

Music filled him at last. And the gods! The gods seemed to dance around him as he danced. They made a ring, spinning as crazily and wildly as he, never leaving their niches, but dancing just the same.

Gradually, the music diminished, and the gods became just statues again. The last impossible note quavered and faded, and Innowen ended his dance in a gracefully controlled collapse. Tears burned in the corners of his eyes as he lay there, his chest heaving. Whatever the power was that had moved him, whatever the magic, he had never felt it so strongly.

"That was beautiful!"

Innowen sat bolt-upright. That was no muffled whisper, no ghostly muttering. He peered into the gloom toward the throne. In the poor light, it was hard to see. But some shadow-form crept up on the wall beside the great stone chair. The sweat on his body made him suddenly chill.
"Who's there?"

She rose languidly from the throne. Her shadow stretched up the wall, arched across the ceiling. In the elongated fingers of her silhouette, he saw the pipe and caught his breath.

"Dyan!" he said as she stepped into the light.

"Hello, Innocent!" She put her instrument to her lips and blew a light riff. Smiling, she came toward him.

Innowen scrambled to his feet and backed away quickly. "No, no!" he moaned. "Not you, it can't be you!" He dug his fingers into his closed eyes, then opened them again. It wasn't a dream. Kyrin's daughter came closer, reaching for him. What had he done? What had he awakened in her? He felt the wall at his back and cringed. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"

"For what?" she said reasonably, laying a hand on his shoulder. "Innocent, what's wrong? I thought you'd be happy to see me."

Slowly, he looked at her, afraid of what he might find lurking in her face. But there was only concern there, and confusion. He straightened. Her confusion mirrored his own, and he studied her strangely. "Are you all right?" he whispered. He took her hand from his shoulder, squeezed it. A full head taller, he gazed down into the sparkling dark eyes he remembered so well. "How do you feel? What do you want to do?"

She gave an uncertain little laugh. "So many odd questions! Of course I feel fine. How should I feel? I just wanted to see you!"

"In the middle of the night?" He moved back out of the lampglow into the gloom, hoping to hide the shivering that seized him. No matter what she said, how normal she acted, he feared her. In fact, she terrified him. There was nothing twisted in her face, nothing threatening in her demeanor. Yet she had seen him dance, and he waited for her darkest desire to take form.

"My father doesn't want me to see you," she told him, brushing strands of black hair back from her face as she glanced demurely at the floor. "That's why he sent me to Milas on the other side of the mountains the last time you came to Parendur." She looked up at him again, rolling her pipe nervously between her hands. "I don't know why he didn't this time. But I happened to be on the terrace with my nurse when I saw you and Taelyn arrive with your escort. Of course, she ushered me inside before I could attract your attention. I'm practically her prisoner, you know."

Despite his fears, Innowen smiled. She spoke as crisply as she played her pipe, and her features moved with amusing animation, a lift of an eyebrow to accent one word, a tilt of the head to stress another, a frown, a conspiratorial grin. She had grown taller in five years, and her body had blossomed. The loose layers of her sleeveless linen gown revealed a woman's grace beneath. Her long black hair spilled down her back and draped her form like a natural cloak. And yet, inside that woman he still saw and heard the child he had met five years before.

His trembling had passed, and he stepped back into the light. "I don't understand," he muttered to himself. Then to her, "You shouldn't have followed me down here. You don't know the danger."

"But I wanted to see you," she repeated almost petulantly. "And I had to sneak out as it is. I thought my poor nurse would never fall asleep, and I think she's supposed to keep me in my quarters while you're here. Usually, I can go anywhere in the palace as long as I don't leave the grounds. But I wanted to see you dance again. You're beautiful, you know?"

Innowen's heart skipped a beat. "Again?" He swallowed hard, then caught her arm. "You mean you've seen me dance before? When? Where?"

She looked at his hand where he gripped her. "That hurts, Innocent." She said it sweetly, without any animosity or fear, a statement of fact that made him feel like a bully or a fool, and he let her go. "At Whisperstone that first night we met in the courtyard. I watched you from an upper window in the corridor outside my room."

Innowen felt like he was suffocating slowly; his head swam in confusion. "You didn't feel anything? Nothing strange happened?" It was hard to keep a creeping hysteria out of his voice. What if he'd been wrong all these years? What if his dancing had no effect at all on the people who saw him? Had he borne such a burden for nothing?
Maybe he could dance for Razkili.

"What was supposed to happen?" Dyan answered. "I knew when I saw you that you cared as much for your art as I did for mine." She set her pipe to her lips, blew a stream of air, and her fingers fluttered like birds on a breeze of music. She smiled at him over the reed piece. "I liked you at once, as much as father disliked you." Her smile broadened. "There's balance in that. Dance and music—there's balance there, too. A good dancer needs a good musician."

"You want to play for me?"

She didn't answer in words. She just lifted the pipe and began to make music while she watched him, dared, begged him with those eyes that were darker than the shadows that watched them both.

He tried not to listen.
The danger,
he told himself,
there is still a danger
. He didn't know, didn't understand. Yet she had seen him dance, not once, but twice, and nothing had happened to hurt her. Maybe she was unaffected by whatever terrible power his dancing unleashed. Maybe it was all right. With her, at least.

Her music sang through the chamber, a wondrous music that suddenly filled and nourished him, a food that turned to power and urged him to move, to spin, to fly. Dyan's eyes gleamed at him over her instrument, and the corners of her lips turned upward in a smile of joy even as she played.

He couldn't help himself, didn't want to help himself. It was too powerful. The stones in the walls sang with her melodies, and the echo made an infinite round of every note. It woke the gods in their cold niches, and Innowen's head swirled once more with their muted whisperings.

Dance,
they urged him, or perhaps he only imagined it.
Dance the world away!

So, for the second time that night, Innowen danced.

Chapter 11

Innowen paced through his apartment, a kylix of wine in one hand, a piece of untasted cheese in the other. He tingled all over with unspent energy. His breathing was rapid, his voice high-pitched as he talked incessantly.

"I finally figured it out!" he explained, waving his bit of cheese, crossing out onto the terrace, coming back inside. "The longer we talked, the more I realized it. She doesn't have any dark desires!" He drank deeply from his wine, then wiped a hand over the corners of his lips. "There's no one she hates, nothing she seems to want. And Kyrin has practically isolated her in this palace. She doesn't know about the drought or its effect on the countryside. She doesn't know about any rebel armies. Gods, Rascal, she didn't even know about the siege, and that was right outside the city walls!"

"You danced for her?" Razkili said again from the center of the room. He hadn't moved from the spot since Innowen returned.

From the threshold of his bedchamber Innowen answered, "Yes, it was great! It didn't have any effect on her at all!" He gripped Razkili's arm and squeezed it as he crossed to the terrace threshold, looked out, then turned back inside. "I finally had an audience that could appreciate what I do, Rascal. I finally danced for somebody who could understand, even admire, the dance for the beauty of its movement." He took another drink of wine and swallowed with a gulp. "I
performed!
And I didn't have to worry about hurting anybody."