The Wandering Fire (25 page)

She lay in bed, wide awake now, thinking of many things. Eventually, because it was Maidaladan, her thoughts went back to an incident from the day before, and, after weighing it and lying still a while longer, she rose, washed her face, and put on her own long robe with nothing underneath.

She went along the curving hallway and listened at a door where a dim light yet showed. It was Midsummer’s Eve, in Gwen Ystrat. She knocked, and when he opened it, she stepped inside.

“It is not a night to be alone,” she said, looking up at him.

“Are you sure?” he asked, showing the strain.

“I am,” she said. Her mouth crooked. “Unless you’d prefer to go in search of that acolyte?”

He made no reply. Only came forward. She lifted her head for his kiss. Then she felt him unclasp her gown and as it fell she was lifted in Loren Silvercloak’s strong arms and carried to his bed on Midsummer’s Eve.

She was finally beginning to get a sense of what he might do, Sharra thought, of the forms his quest for diversion took. She had been a diversion herself a year ago, but that one had cost him a knife wound and very nearly his life. From her seat at the high table of the banquet hall she watched, a half smile on her lips, as Diarmuid rose and carried the steaming testicles of the boar to the one who had been gored. Miming a servant’s gestures, he presented the platter to Kevin.

She remembered that one: he had taken the same leap as she the year before, from the musicians’ gallery in Paras Derval, though for a very different reason. He too was handsome, fair as Diarmuid was, though his eyes were brown. There was a sadness in them too, Sharra thought. Nor was she the first woman to see this.

Sadness or no, Kevin made some remark that convulsed those around him. Diarmuid was laughing as he returned to his seat between her father and the High Priestess, on the far side of Aileron. Briefly, he glanced at her as he sat down, and expressionlessly she looked away. They had not spoken since the sunlit afternoon he had so effortlessly mastered all of them. Tonight, though, was Maidaladan, and she was sure enough of him to expect an overture.

As the banquet proceeded—boar meat from the morning and eltor brought down from the Plain by the Dalrei contingent—the tone of the evening grew wilder. She was curious, certainly not afraid, and there was an unsettling disquiet within her as well. When the bells rang, she understood, the priestesses would be coming out. She herself, her father had made clear, would be in the Temple well before that. Already, Arthur Pendragon and Ivor, the Aven of the Dalrei, who had talked entertainingly on either side of her all evening, had gone back to the Temple. Or she assumed that was where they had gone.

There were, therefore, empty seats beside her in the increasingly unruly hall. She could see Shalhassan begin to stir restively. This was not a mood for the Supreme Lord of Cathal. She wondered, fleetingly, if her father was feeling the same upwelling of desire that was becoming more and more obvious in all the other men in the room. He must be, she supposed, and suppressed a smile—it was a difficult thing to envisage Shalhassan at the mercy of his passions.

And in that instant, surprising her despite everything, Diarmuid was next to her. He did not sit. There would be a great many glances turned to them. Leaning on the back of the chair Arthur had been sitting in, he said, in a tone of mildest pleasantry, something that completely disconcerted her. A moment later, with a polite nod of his head, he moved away and, passing down the long room with a laugh or a jibe every few strides, out into the night.

She was her father’s daughter, and not even Shalhassan, looking over with an appraising glance, was able to read even a hint of her inner turmoil.

She had expected him to come to her tonight, expected the proposition he would make. For him to murmur as he had just done, “Later,” and no more was very much what she had thought he’d do. It fit his style, the indolent insouciance.

What didn’t fit, what had unnerved her so much, was that he had made it a question, a quiet request, and had looked for a reply from her. She had no idea what her eyes had told him, or what—and this was worse—she had wanted them to tell.

A few moments later her father rose and, halfway down the room, so did Bashrai. An honor guard, creditably disciplined, escorted the Supreme Lord and Princess of Cathal back to the Temple. At the doorway, Shalhassan, with a gracious gesture if not an actual smile, dismissed them for the night.

She had no servants of her own here; Jaelle had assigned one of the priestesses to look after her. As she entered her room, Sharra saw the woman turning down her bed by the light of the moon that slanted through the curtained window. The priestess was robed and hooded already for the winter outside. Sharra could guess why.

“Will they ring the bells soon?” she asked.

“Very soon, my lady,” the woman whispered, and Sharra heard a straining note in her low voice. This, too, unsettled her.

She sat down in the one chair, playing with the single gem she wore about her neck. With quick, almost impatient movements, the priestess finished with the bed.

“Is there more, my lady? Because, if not . . . I’m sorry, but—but it is only tonight . . .” Her voice trembled.

“No,” Sharra said kindly. “I will be fine. Just . . . open the window for me before you go.”

“The window?” The priestess registered dismay. “Oh, my lady, no! Not for you, surely. You must understand, it will be very wild tonight, and the men of the village have been known to . . .”

She fixed the woman with her most repressive stare. It was hard, though, to quell a hooded priestess of Dana in Gwen Ystrat. “I do not think any men of the village will venture here,” she said, “and I am used to sleeping with a window open, even in winter.” Very deliberately, she turned her back and began removing her jewelry. Her hands were steady, but she could feel her heart racing at the implication of what she had done.

If he laughed when he entered, or mocked her, she would scream, she decided. And let him deal with the consequences. She heard the catch of the window spring open and a cold breeze blew into the room.

Then she heard the bells, and the priestess behind her drew a ragged breath.

“Thank you,” said Sharra, laying her necklace on the table. “I suppose that is your sign.”

“The window was, actually,” said Diarmuid.

Her dagger was drawn before she finished turning.

He had tossed back the hood and stood regarding her tranquilly. “Remind me to tell you some day about the other time I did this sort of thing. It’s a good story. Have you noticed,” he added, making conversation, “How tall some of these priestesses are? It was a lucky—”

“Are you trying to earn my hate?” She hurled it at him as if the words were her blade.

He stopped. “Never that,” he said, though easily still. “There is no approach to this room from outside for one man by himself, and I chose not to confide in anyone. I had no other way of coming here alone.”

“What made you assume you could? How much presumption—”

“Sharra. Have done with that tone. I didn’t assume. If you hadn’t had the window opened I would have walked out when the bells rang.”

“I—” She stopped. There was nothing to say.

”Will you do something for me?” He stepped forward. Instinctively she raised her blade, and at that, for the first time, he smiled. “Yes,” he said, “you can cut me. For obvious reasons I offered no blood when I came in. I don’t like being in here on Maidaladan without observing the rites. If Dana can affect me the way she is tonight, she deserves propitiation. There’s a bowl beside you.”

And rolling up the sleeves of his robe and the blue shirt he wore beneath, he extended his wrist to her.

“I am no priestess,” she said.

“Tonight, I think, all women are. Do this for me, Sharra.”

So, for the second time, her dagger cut into him as she took hold of his wrist and drew a line across the underside. The bright blood welled, and she caught it in the bowl. He had a square of Seresh lace in his pocket, and wordlessly he passed it to her. She laid down the bowl and knife and bound the cut she had made.

“Twice now,” he murmured, echoing her own thought. “Will there be a third?”

“You invite it.”

He stepped away at that, toward the window. They were on the east side and there was moonlight. There was also, she realized, a long drop below as the ground fell sharply away from the smooth Temple walls. He had clasped his hands loosely on the window ledge and stood looking out. She sat down on the one chair by her bed. When he spoke it was quietly, still, but no longer lightly. “I must be taken for what I am, Sharra. I will never move to the measured gait.” He looked at her. “Otherwise I would be High King of Brennin now, and Aileron would be dead. You were there.”

She had been. It had been his choice; no one in the Hall that day was likely to forget. She remained silent, her hands in her lap. He said, “When you leaped from the gallery I thought I saw a bird of prey descending for a kill. Later, when you doused me with water as I climbed the walls, I thought I saw a woman with a sense of how to play. I saw both things again in Paras Derval five days ago. Sharra, I did not come here to bed you.”

A disbelieving laugh escaped her.

He had turned to look at her. There was moonlight on his face. “It is true. I realized yesterday that I don’t like the passion of Maidaladan. I prefer my own. And yours. I did not come to bed you, but to say what I have said.”

Her hands were gripping each other very tightly. She mocked him, though, and her voice was cool. “Indeed,” she said. “And I gather you came to Larai Rigal last spring just to see the gardens?”

He hadn’t moved, but his voice seemed to have come very near, somehow, and it was rougher. “One flower only,” said Diarmuid. “I found more than I went to find.”

She should be saying something, dealing back to him one of his own deflating, sardonic jibes, but her mouth had gone dry and she could not speak.

And now he did move forward, a half step only, but it took him out of the light. Straining to see in the shadows, Sharra heard him say, carefully and masking now—at last—a tension of his own, “Princess, these are evil times, for war imposes its own constraints and this war may mean an ending to all that we have known. Notwithstanding this, if you will allow, I would court you as formally as ever a Princess of Cathal has been courted, and I will say to your father tomorrow what I say to you tonight.”

He paused. There seemed to be moonlight all through the room suddenly, and she was trembling in every limb.

“Sharra,” he said, “
the sun rises in your eyes
.”

So many men had proposed to her with these, the formal words of love. So many men, but none had ever made her weep. She wanted to rise but did not trust her legs. He was still a distance away. Formally, he had said. Would speak to her father in the morning. And she had heard the rawness in his voice.

It was still there. He said, “If I have startled you, I am sorry for it. This is one thing I am not versed in doing. I will leave you now. I will not speak to Shalhassan unless and until you give me leave.”

He moved to the doorway. And then it came to her—he could not see her face where she sat in the shadows, and because she had not spoken. . . .

She did rise then and, uttering the words through and over a cresting wave in her heart, said shyly, but not without a thread of laughter, “Could we not pretend it was not Maidaladan? To see where our own inadequate desire carried us?”

A sound escaped him as he spun.

She moved sideways into the light so he could see her face. She said, “Whom else should I ever love?”

Then he was beside her, and above, and his mouth was on her tears, her eyes, her own mouth, and the full moon of midsummer was upon them as a shower of white light, for all the dark around and all the dark to come.

It was cold in the open but not so very bad tonight, and there was a shining light on the snow and the hills. Overhead the brighter stars gleamed frostily down, but the dimmer ones were lost in the moonlight, for the full moon was high.

Kevin rode at a steady pace toward the east, and gradually the horse began to climb. There was no real path, not among the snow, but the ascent was easy enough and the drifts weren’t deep.

The hills ran north and south, and it wasn’t long before he crested a high ridge and paused to look down. In the distance the mountains glittered in the silvery light, remote and enchanting. He wasn’t going so far.

A shadow moved among the snow and ice to his right and Kevin swung over quickly to look, aware that he was weaponless and alone in a wide night.

It wasn’t a wolf.

The grey dog moved slowly, gravely, to stand in front of the horse. It was a beautiful animal for all the brutal scars, and Kevin’s heart went out to it. A moment they were thus, a tableau on the hilltop among the snow and the low sweeping sigh of the wind.

Kevin said, “Will you lead me there?”

A moment longer Cavall looked up, as if questioning or needing reassurance from the lone rider on the lone horse.

Kevin understood. “I
am
afraid,” he said. “I will not lie to you. There is a strong feeling in me, though, the more so now, since you are here. I would go to Dun Maura. Will you show me the way?”