Wolf's Head, Wolf's Heart (42 page)

"I have all I need in these,". Waln told to the shadowy face beneath the hood. "You'll find the ladies' overnight bag at the back of the wagon."

"We'll bring it in," a male voice replied, "once the mounts are under cover."

Transfer of horses and wagon was accomplished in so little time that Waln had no doubt this routine—or some form of it—was a familiar drill. He did not delay his own steps, but walked through the front door into the seeming farmhouse.

"We've brought the girl," he said once the door was firmly closed behind him, "and plan to leave in the early morning."

Citrine, thinking that this was where she was to winter, burst into sudden panicked tears. Waln felt the purest hypocrite as he patted her head.

Poor little thing
, he thought.
I wonder how she'll feel when she sees Smuggler's Light
?

The man Waln had addressed had shoved his hood back as soon as they were inside. He was a tall, lank figure whose clothing hung loosely from his bony frame. His features were simply but efficiently concealed behind a kerchief tied over the bridge of his nose and hanging over his lower face.

Catching sight of him, Citrine's tears turned to howls of terror.

The wind howled in return, shaking the wooden farmhouse and banging at the fastened shutters as if trying to get inside.

"How nice," Lady Melina said politely to their host, "to be inside out of the rain."

B
y the night of the twenty-sixth of boar moon, Baron Endbrook and Lady Melina were a half-day's ride from Plum Orchard, the town on the White Water River from which they planned to cross over into New Kelvin.

Their route had been fairly direct once they left the rendezvous with the smugglers. They had joined up with a road that led between Plum Orchard and the royal post-road. Since Plum Orchard was the major crossing point between the nations—the others, farther west, were less convenient to Port Haven—the road was well maintained, and despite the wagon's slower pace they made reasonable time.

The weather was flowing in that mysterious and subtle transition which carries autumn into winter. Most of the trees were leafless and those that still bore foliage sported rags of greyish brown rather than the flamboyant scarlets, yellows, and oranges that represent the vegetable world's last desperate declaration of life. The days that were not overcast hosted a sharp, biting wind beneath a clear blue sky that made Waln wish for the dull grey days—even with their threat of rain.

Now that their party was reduced to three, Baron Endbrook became more intimately acquainted with Lady Melina. Although she maintained all of her ladylike airs with Fox, she softened toward Warn. Several times a day she mounted the serviceable dapple grey Waln had purchased for her and rode alongside him. At these times she would chat lightly and pleasantly, telling tales of her childhood or the court. Despite the subject matter, Waln felt she was talking with him as equal to equal. A time or two he even thought she might be flirting with him.

When she did not ride, Lady Melina retired to the back of the wagon, where, seated on a heap of bedding that did something to absorb the jolts of the road, she buried her attention in several books she had packed along from Eagle's Nest.

When she took up these studies she was so absorbed in her own world that she noticed nothing else. Several times Fox Driver had needed to warn her to get into cover when rain began to fall—a thing he never failed to do after she had viciously scolded him when a few raindrops plopped onto the printed pages.

Before too many days had passed, Waln learned that Lady Melina's books—which at first he had superstitiously shied away from as potential treatises on magic—were nothing so exotic. They were merely writings on New Kelvinese language and culture.

New Kelvin had not been colonized by the same Old Country that had founded Gildcrest—the original colony of which Bright Bay and Hawk Haven were halves and the Isles a sprig. Waln supposed, given their destination's name, that the founding nation must have been named Kelvin.

Whatever the truth of that matter, the language spoken by the New Kelvinese was quite peculiar. Waln had learned enough to respond to common greetings, to offer thanks, and to ask very simple directions, but even this sparse knowledge had been enough to convince him that he did not care to invest more of his time in that direction.

New Kelvinese was full of round sounds ending in "a" or "o," of drippingly liquid polysyllables, and sharply accented phrases. It was—so he had been told—a language that turned even the simplest request into poetry, a language filled with idiom and allusion, not a language that was inviting to a plain-spoken merchant sailor like himself.

Lady Melina, however, seemed obsessed with it. When she wasn't poring over her texts, memorizing rules of grammar and form, she was laboring over volumes of poetry or drama. Even on horseback she did not abandon her studies. Several times when Waln had ridden up alongside her, he had heard her chanting rhythmic phrases. When questioned, Lady Melina had explained that these were parts of poems.

A few she had recited for him in all their musical fullness, but when he had asked her to translate she had refused with a giggle that was definitely coquettish.

Apparently, Lady Melina told him, a common entertainment among the better classes of New Kelvinese was poetry recitation. Another was a game that involved one person reciting a line from a poem or play—and not necessarily from the opening—and then challenging the rest of the group to continue the piece from that point.

For Baron Endbrook, whose idea of a pleasant social occasion involved dancing or perhaps drinking and telling sea stories, this sounded impossibly dull. Lady Melina, however, seemed to be looking forward to joining in on at least some of these socials.

He wondered—after a particularly long recitation after which she colored and glanced up at him through her lashes—if she was contemplating other entertainments as well. He found himself restlessly anticipating the day when they would have some privacy from Fox. He had married Oralia after he had given up a sailor's life, and his mother's profession had made him feel nothing but revulsion for those women who sold themselves.

Lady Melina was different from these. She was a born noblewoman—not one newly promoted to title, like his wife. Though he despised himself as a snob, Waln realized that Lady Melina's rank drew him almost as much as her personal charms. And he realized with a mixture of guilt and almost painful desire that she could tempt him into infidelity where no other woman could.

Occasionally, Lady Melina put her grammars aside and studied instead a book illustrated with colored woodblock prints of some of the designs the author/artist—a silk merchant from Eagle's Nest—had observed in his travels. The author also offered his conjectures as to the significance of the designs and of the manner (painted or tattooed) that they were applied.

Discovering her fascination with these, Baron Endbrook spent an evening or two looking at the paintings with Lady Melina while she peppered him with questions regarding which designs he himself had seen. Since his hosts had seemed one chaotic swirl of color, Waln was less helpful than she had hoped, but under her persistent questioning he was able to remember enough to satisfy her.

"If the author is correct in his conjectures," Lady Melina said, almost reverently shutting the book after one of these sessions, "and you are correct in your remembering," she added with what he took for affectionate severity, "then it is likely that those who interviewed you were representatives of the same group, but whether that group corresponds more closely to one of our Great Houses or to a Society is uncertain. The author has failed to ascertain even such a basic point."

"How," asked Waln, "do you figure that they are all members of the same group?"

"Several times you have mentioned the use of a tight spiral design," she said, sketching the representative pattern on the back of his hand with the tip of one finger. "This seems to be one of the signature designs. Significant, too, is the predominance of the color orange in the paint near the eyes."

Waln nodded, only partly convinced and very distracted.

"There's an awful lot of color all of them seem to wear," he cautioned.

"And doubtless it seems applied without rhyme or reason to the untutored eye," she replied severely, "but my sources indicate that to the knowledgeable they are as distinct as, say, types of ships would be to a sailor."

Waln didn't care to argue, that not being his job. Nor did he wish to alienate Lady Melina, not when they were growing so comfortable together, not when they were nearing a town where they might stay at an inn with the luxury of private rooms.

No. Most certainly he did not wish to alienate her now.

H
is parents had named him Grateful Peace—perhaps their wistful ensorcellment that he might be a quiet child. Their previous three, he learned when he grew older, had all been loud, screaming infants who refused to sleep through the night.

Whether or not the ensorcellment had taken, Peace, as he had been more usually called—though his eldest sister tormented him with the name Grey Pee—had indeed been a quiet child. Bookish and solemn, he had roamed through his earliest childhood in a nearsighted haze.

When Peace was five, his father had been promoted to full scribe at the Scriptorium. This new prosperity had meant that he could at last afford a pair of spectacles for his youngest son. These precious ground-glass lenses had revealed miracles to the boy. For the first time he saw mountaintops and the intricate lacework of tree branches. He reveled in the majesty of cloud formations and the mystery of the distant horizon, but even after they had become memory those early years left their mark.

Grateful Peace could never forget what it had been like to dwell within the private island of his myopia. Indeed, each day when he put the spectacles aside for sleep he was reminded afresh. Raindrops or the sudden cold that misted his lenses reduced his sight once more. From an early age he resolved to become wealthy, for to slide back into the near poverty of his childhood would mean that he might also slip again into near blindness.

Ironically, it was his myopia that opened the way to wealth and influence for him. The same weakness in Peace's eyes that made the distance a blur made it possible for him to focus closely without difficulty, nor did he suffer the headaches that plagued others when they worked up close for overlong.

Peace's father was a scribe, his mother an illustrator—perhaps one reason they both believed so strongly in the magic of written things such as words.

Before Peace was seven they trusted him with their brushes and inks. By the time he was ten, his mother let him do his own makeup. By the time he was twelve, she was requesting he touch up his siblings' work—earning their resentment.

At the age when most children of his class were being apprenticed, Peace was already acknowledged a master in the basic crafts of writing and painting. Rumor of his skills came to the ears of the Illuminators—those revered mystics who were trusted with transcribing the treasured records of the past. His apprenticeship into their class promoted him forever beyond his family and guaranteed that he would never want for any basic need.

Grateful Peace missed his parents when he moved from their home into the many-windowed palace of the Illuminators. He did not, however, miss his siblings. They had resented how their parents favored him and had made his life such a misery of small torments that the punishments promised for the afterlife—even the fabled torture of living pictures—seemed less terrible.

When he was twenty-five, Grateful Peace was tattooed as full Illuminator. He was given apprentices of his own, servants, and a suite in the palace. At thirty, he married a pretty young woman who had been his apprentice.

Chutia was not as talented as her husband. Indeed, she had never risen above the ranks of a junior Illuminator. However, she possessed a capacity for joy and a wealth of compassion that made her company a never-ending delight.

She died when Peace was thirty-five, taking their unborn twins with her into the Enchanted Paradise. He vowed never to marry again and tattooed his vow across the bridge of his nose so that none could doubt his resolve.

As with his myopia, that tragedy proved to hold a hidden blessing. Realizing that Grateful Peace sincerely meant never to marry again, noting that while he honored his parents he barely spoke to his siblings, the Dragon Speaker—the first among the thaumaturges of New Kelvin—initiated Peace into his intimate circle, elevating him at last to one of the Dragon's Three.

Fifteen years had passed since the day Grateful Peace had added a dragon's claw to the feather and bar already permanently adorning his features. His hair, like that of his father, had politely receded, making the tedious work of shaving his front head unnecessary. What hair remained showed streaks of grey, so Peace had it bleached bone-white. His features had settled into grooves and lines but had not yet begun to sag.

Apheros, the Dragon Speaker who had appointed Peace, remained in power—they were much of an age—and showed promise of retaining his influence over his peers. In fifteen years he had given Grateful Peace many peculiar and often distasteful tasks, but none quite equaled the one before him in its potential to transform their world.

Grateful Peace had left Dragon's Breath as Dead Leaf Moon was waning and New Snow Moon not yet a sliver on the horizon. He took with him a small entourage: a groom, his body servant, a scribe, several guards. He also carried with him a resolve to connive at murder.

Had there been any chance that Queen Valora would insist on seeing the body of her ambassador, then more elaborate theatrics would have been necessary. Queen Valora, however, was far across the seas. The prevailing winds were from the north this time of year, meaning that to visit New Kelvin she would need to risk sailing against them and the greater danger of landing in countries where she was not welcome—and this assuming that she would dare leave her new domain before her rulership was firmly established.