Beneath the Thirteen Moons (20 page)

“Your Highness?”

She stopped, stunned to see the lined face of the Master Seer, as if she’d conjured him up from thin air.

“May I be of assistance?”

“Aya. I came to see you.”

It was his turn to look stunned. “Me?”

“Aya. Korl said you’d answer my questions, help me to learn about the palace… and other things.” Mahri just
hoped her lifemate hadn’t had a chance to talk with R’in yet. Although he had suggested she see the Seer, she didn’t know how much Korl would allow the old man to tell a water-rat. This might be her only chance to learn as much as she could.

He stroked his beard thoughtfully. “Makes sense. A bit dangerous to have a Wilding, er, an untrained Seer, running around the palace.”

Mahri smiled and nodded. She needn’t tell him Korl didn’t allow her near any zabba and had hidden that stash in the bathing room in another place. He didn’t want her using it to escape, for without it he knew she’d barely make it to the base of the Palace Tree, much less through the guarded channels. She’d been counting on his pride to keep the knowledge that his bride was a prisoner only to his own personal guard.

Master R’in’s eyes sparkled with more than just the Power of root. “Perhaps you’ll even teach me a few things.”

Mahri shrugged. All she knew were the swamps. Could he really be interested in her home?

The old man waved her toward an open door and when Mahri crossed the threshold she stopped in stunned amazement. Shiny boxes of silver lay everywhere, piles of round discs—of some pearly substance that rivaled the inside of Caria’s most beautiful seashells—littered the spaces in between. Walls of wooden shells held stacks of Leviathan bones, and Mahri threaded her way through the chaos to finger the flat pieces.

As she’d thought, words were inscribed on each surface, the same way Caria had scratched her notes about Mahri’s adventures. But whereas, by necessity, her sister-in-life had worked with soft bone, Leviathan had
been used for these tablets, and only Power could shape that substance. They’d last forever.

Mahri eagerly picked up several and began to read, mentally thanking Caria for teaching her that skill.

The old man had his own private library… and some of the tablets had the yellowish-brown tinge that spoke of great age! This was surely the greatest treasure to be found in the Palace Tree.

“You’re welcome,” said R’in, “to come here anytime and read the records, although not much might be of interest to you.” He sighed. “Only an old man seems to have interest in the First Records. Like most, you’ll probably find the main library more appealing.”

Mahri looked up from what appeared to be a personal account of someone called the First Commander. “You mean there’s more?”

Master R’in nodded, fought a rather condescending smile unsuccessfully. “My collection contains only those records no one else had any use for.”

Mahri laid a hand over her heart. More bone books! To imagine such a thing, why, Caria would have fits.

Some water-rats were literate, those that kept track of goods for trade, but they usually had no need of records of any permanence, and to be in possession of anything other than private accounts would be cause for arrest by the Royals. Even Caria’s scratches, if discovered, could get her family into more trouble than they were worth.

“You’d get arrested for allowing a water-rat to read books of knowledge.”

He threw back his head and laughed, a throaty chuckle that Mahri immediately liked. “You still think of yourself as that, do you? My dear child, you’re a
Royal now, and may read whatever you wish. Besides, I would not deny anything from the woman that had saved my prince.”

Mahri frowned. She’d asked Korl and he’d refused to answer… perhaps the old man would tell her what had happened to his sister. “How is S’raya anyway? And that blackrobe.”

R’in’s beard wiggled. “You don’t know? You should have been warned!”

“Warned about what?”

The Seer frowned. “I can’t imagine why my prince… well, perhaps he thought to protect you. No matter, you should be told. S’raya went quite mad and killed herself. But the blackrobe has disappeared, and taken with him several of the palace monk-fish.”

“For what purpose?”

The old man shrugged. “We only recently discovered that he’d been performing experiments on them. We assume that’s how he learned to See into the mind of our prince—something I’m still having difficulty believing. And since you thwarted his plans I think you should be wary of him, at least until he’s been found.”

Mahri nodded. Knowing Korl’s arrogance, he probably felt that they’d catch the blackrobe, and in the meantime he’d keep her safely imprisoned in the palace. Why bother telling her anything when he’d take care of her anyway?

She sighed. Would he ever consider her his equal?

Mahri turned back to the shelves and feather-touched the stacks of bone. “But Caria can’t learn,” she whispered.

“Eh? What’s that?”

“Why can I learn, but none of my family or friends
can? I’m still the same person I was before I took Korl as lifemate.”

Master R’in shook his head. “Customs, dear. Traditions that started with the first taste of zabba. And they die hard.”

“So, no matter how hard I study, I’ll never be Korl’s equal. Water-rats are considered inferior beings by law and nothing I do can change that.”

“I’d hoped that you’d wish to study for its own sake.” He hobbled over to one of those shiny boxes and rapped the top of it. A boom-rattle noise followed. “Curiosity, perhaps. If you wish to know the beginnings of the law, you’ve come to the right place.”

Mahri sighed. So he wouldn’t discuss the stupidity of Royal Law. She’d have to approach him within the boundaries he expected. “All right, I give. What is that thing?”

He smiled at her, as if to say he’d judged her rightly. “It’s a compu’tor, and these shiny round things are books that it can read.” A dawning excitement showed on his face. “They’re artifacts left over from the original Landing, but the crash destroyed much of the equipment, and age the rest.” His face fell for a moment. “They don’t work anymore so all the knowledge contained here cannot be read and only a small portion was recorded on Leviathan tablets.”

“So it’s true,” breathed Mahri as her fingers flitted from tablets to discs. “Our ancestors did come from the stars, in a boat of fire?”

Master R’in’s eyebrows rose, the beaked nose twitched. “I didn’t think you’d understand what I was even talking about. Where’d you learn such things?”

A product of his time, his voice shook with
indignation, that a non-Royal would know of such things. Mahri tried to forgive him his ignorance, as she hoped he would hers. “In dreams.”

“Then they were dreams of Power. My prince was right in sending you to me. We have much to teach each other, you and I.”

“Aya. You teach me the beginning of our history…”

The old Seer smiled. “And you teach me how you fought a battle of the mind.”

And so it began.

Mahri stood on the balcony of her apartments, let the breeze lift her hair and bring the smell of the open sea, salty fish, and spicy plant life to her. A hugull cried it’s mournful “rraaa-kay-raa” and her stomach twisted with longing for the swamps. Only birds ventured this close to the city. The sound of humans replaced the roar of swamp animals and she didn’t like it.

It had been many turnings of the moons since she’d been imprisoned here and she’d learned a great deal from Master R’in. That her ancestors had come from another planet, one where there was something called land, which R’in thought could be what lay at the bottom of the sea, but unattainable to those of Sea Forest so of little use for study. They had, however, metal from this land, something that equaled Leviathan bone in strength, yet could be shaped with a different sort of power. They called it teknologee.

This power had allowed them to study the affects the zabbaroot had on mankind. How the chemical in the root reacted with the DNA (the smaller components of what
made each human unique, explained Master R’in) of certain humans to open pathways into untapped areas of the brain. Allowing eyes to See on the molecular level. And for those with enough immunity to the root’s poison, an increase in the brain’s electrical output to the point where the resulting electro-magnetic waves could actually manipulate those molecules. At least, those were the words he used to explain her question. Half of which she understood.

Much of what R’in taught her of her ancestors she didn’t understand, wasn’t sure that even he did. But the knowledge from them—of the shape and structure of things, of the inside workings of the human body, of the sea and plant life and animals—she grasped quickly.

Mahri smiled. Master R’in seemed to take her brightness personally, as if he were responsible for the intelligence of her mind.

She wanted to concentrate on Healing, but he’d hear none of it. Although most Seers specialized in one area he felt she could encompass them all and therefore become a Master herself.

Jaja hopped on her shoulder and chirruped. “You scamp,” she whispered, and scratched the scales beneath his chin. The monk-fish cooed, looked mournfully out over the canopy of trees. “You too? No matter how much I learn, how hard I try, I still don’t feel at home here. We belong in the swamps, Ja.”

Mahri sighed. She knew the beginnings of the hereditary laws of learning, how the First Commander, who showed the most tolerance of the root, had set up his little kingdom on this new planet, ensuring that his sons would continue to rule by controlling knowledge
and zabba. Power made some men cruel, and hungry for more.

But it didn’t change the way of things now and to this house of people she’d always be the “savage.” The prisoner.

Jaja nodded his head and patted her cheek.

Master R’in, in return, had indeed learned from her. She shared her knowledge of mind-connecting and how the overdose had allowed her this ability. They speculated on whether or not the same had happened to S’raya’s boyfriend, or if he’d discovered another way to reach the mind through the monk-fish. For only with one of those small pets could the Bonding ceremony be performed, although no one was quite sure how it worked. Even a Bonded.

But Mahri didn’t share her knowledge of the natives with him, she didn’t trust R’in that much, and although he knew they had a purpose other than the serving of humankind, he’d only guessed at what it could be.

They’d become close, she and the old man, but not that close. And besides Korl, and the ever-present guard (who’d given up trying to keep her penned and now just watched over her), he was her only companion. Mahri sighed and longed for Caria’s laughter and no-nonsense advice. And the company of her swamps.

“You’re miserable here, aren’t you?”

Korl’s deep voice startled her, made Jaja hop from her shoulder to look about with a lolling tongue, to see if the man had been accompanied by a servant with their dinner tray. Mahri had been so lost in thought she hadn’t heard anyone come in. “Do you care?”

“How can you ask me such a thing?”

He spun her around, captured her with his gaze, and she felt her knees go weak. He never failed to mesmerize her. Nor could she lie to him while he looked into her soul.

“I’m happy when I’m in your arms,” she snapped, as if it were a curse. For although her words to him were often devoid of warmth, her body never was. All he had to do was touch her and all thoughts flew away, only the heat of his skin and the hardness of his own body existed for her.

And their bodies had become very familiar to each other over the past moon-turnings, so that now when he smiled, causing one cheek to dimple and the other to pull at his scars, her hand reached up unerringly to finger that line of damaged skin, to wrap itself within the pale silkiness of his hair.

He tried to pull his head away. “But I can’t be with you all the time.”

“Aya.” She pulled his mouth to hers, always hungry for the taste of him, and he kissed her most thoroughly, always responding in kind. Their groans mingled in their mouths while Mahri ran her hands across the broad expanse of his chest, around to the lower curve of his back.

“I’m trying,” he panted, “to talk to you.”

“Why bother? You know what’s in my mind.”

He frowned, pulling down the curls at the edges of his mouth. “But I really don’t, now, do I?”

Mahri forced her hands down and fisted them at her sides, because she couldn’t pull the rest of her body away from the welcoming warmth of him.

He always pushed for more. No matter the physical ecstasy of their joining, he always pleaded for her to let their minds meld as well, to become one. And she
couldn’t do it, remembering how she’d lost herself within him whenever she’d allowed that kind of closeness, and too fearful to risk such a thing. For she knew that in truth he searched for the possession of her heart and she wouldn’t surrender it to him.

Even now.

K
ORL GRABBED HER ARM AND BEGAN TO DRAG HER
from the room.

“Where are we going?” said Mahri.

“I want to show you something.” He flung open the doors with one hand, the other keeping a firm grip on her.

“Jaja!” Mahri didn’t know why, but she wanted her pet with her. The monk-fish looked up from a turtle-shell bowl filled with some sugary concoction, a glob of the stuff atop one small finger, poised before that little brown mouth. A long, pink tongue flicked out and licked his finger clean, the small body trembled with delight, and he looked beseechingly from her to the bowl. His shining brown eyes told her that this was some new treat never before experienced.

I don’t care,
she thought-spoke. The pooch of Jaja’s stomach extended beyond his webbed toes and he’d become awkwardly heavy on her shoulder. Nothing had threatened his loyalty to her like the culinary delights from the palace kitchen, and she’d had enough.
It’s me or the food, Jaja. Choose now.

He rolled his eyes to the turtle bowl with regret, let out a dramatic sigh, and managed to waddle after them as Korl yanked her past the door.

They made their way down corridors she hadn’t seen before, her hand clasped within Korl’s, Jaja and
the prince’s personal guard trailing behind. Mahri had managed to escape those guards a few times, but the one that had captured her at Vissa’s was a wily fellow with a healthy tolerance for the root, which meant that she usually had an escort to Master R’in’s rooms that discouraged any exploring.

They piled into the elevator, crowding the Seer who Pushed it, the fall of it raising her stomach to about the area of her throat, and got out when they reached water-level. Mahri glanced out a passing window, felt her heart do a joyful flip at the sound of a channel so near—that a quick hop over the sill would land her in its warm depths. She twisted her hand within his, struggling for a moment to get free.

“I knew if you were this close the water would call to you,” grumbled Korl.

He threw open a double door and she gasped at the garden that lay before them. Enclosed within walls formed from a weave of living tree branches, the garden sparkled with the fall of water from numerous fountains, gave off a heady aroma from the combination of thousands of blooming flowers, and sounded with the squeals and growls of hundreds of small animals.

Korl slammed the doors on the frowning faces of his guard, allowing Jaja to barely squeeze through—but near smashing his fin-tail. Then the prince crossed his arms over that broad chest, a frown marring his face.

He’s lost his tan, thought Mahri. And for some reason he’s angry—very, very, angry. She’d felt it building in him on their way to this place, could see it now in the rigid set of his shoulders, the hardness of his pale face. And yet she should be the angry one, that a place such
as this existed, and instead he had kept her up in the heights of the tree.

“It’s akin to the swamps,” she breathed.

He only raised his eyebrows and watched her. She felt so many conflicting emotions from him underneath that fury, and knew he sensed her own in kind. For although she’d refused to mind-join, the results of the Bond, or perhaps from the times that they had touched each other in that way, had made them both sensitive to the others’ emotions.

Had he felt her misery so clearly then, that it prompted this excursion to forbidden ground? Why else take her here now, and for what purpose?

Mahri opened her mouth, then shut it again. Best go slowly, for the most prominent feeling she sensed beneath his anger was fear. She took two steps, turned, and raised a brow at him. He said nothing and she continued on, taking his silence as consent to explore. Jaja puffed alarmingly in trying to keep up with her, the little glutton, so she scooped him up into her arms.

It wasn’t like the swamps, this enclosed garden. It was a prison also! The animals she’d heard were all caged, in cunning twists of branches yes, but caged nonetheless, pacing against the confines of their prisons, lounging with dull eyes or scraping, digging at the walls with bloodied paws. Jaja climbed to her shoulder and cooed mournfully at them while Mahri caressed the handle of her bone staff, aching to snap those confining branches.

She felt the heat of his body behind her.

“This is what you wanted to show me?” she asked, her throat tight with horror. “The way you Royals keep your wild things around you?”

“No.”

The deep throb of his voice pulled her toward him and she fought it. Mahri’s traitorous body responded to him even in his fury, wanting his hands in her hair, his breath in her mouth. He’d taught her something new, her prince. That as long as he was near her, nothing, nothing, could stop her desire for him. Even if he hated her, she would still want him.

Mahri fed on his anger to fuel her own. “What then, did you want to show me, in this… place?” And she gave that word all the disgust she could.

“Something Master R’in pointed out to me.”

Mahri frowned. What had that old Seer to do with this?

She followed Korl through a twisting pathway, dodging the leaves of a stingvine until she realized that all the thorns had been somehow plucked from it, making it look a pathetic, naked thing. Was there no end to the control of the Royals? How she wished for the Power to set this garden aright!

When she unconsciously drew Power from Korl he held up his hand. “Not yet,” he commanded, and stopped the flow.

Yet? Did that mean he would allow her zabba? She sensed a change in him and met his look with a searching stare of her own. He shuttered them against her and this act shook Mahri enough to follow him without another word, for she’d always been the one to look away from his soul-reaching gaze.

The sculpted archway of vines opened onto a small clearing that rivaled that corridor of white flowers they’d traveled through in the swamps. But it also recalled her
bird-cove, for the flowers wore the same sheer variety of colors that graced the plumage of that noisy flock. In the middle of this velvet color stood a spindle bush, the skeletal branches shaped by Power to form an oval of a cage atop the thin trunk.

Mahri felt the maker’s design of this flower-enclosure as a place to display the contents of this cage, as if the setting must honor what lay within. She walked forward with a mix of curiosity and horror, trampling fallen petals of purple-red-yellow that released even more ambrosial perfume into the already sweetened air.

Jaja hopped from her shoulder and waddled over to a cradleplant, crawled into one of the welcoming blossoms and curled up for a nap. Mahri ignored him—except to acknowledge that he again sought to sleep off another eating binge—and pushed her face against the branch-bars of the cage.

She spun, her hair slapping into her face. “It’s empty,” she accused Korl.

He stepped forward, the spicy scent of his skin overwhelmed for a moment with the fresh release of perfume. His hand shook as he smoothed the red strands away from her face, then he moaned and buried his fingers in the mass of it behind her head, thereby trapping her within the circle of his arms.

“Master R’in brought me here last night,” he began, the anger in his face masked for a moment by something else as he studied her, tracing a path from the heart-shape of her brow, down her freckled nose to the fullness of her lips, along the curl of her chin to the ridges of her cheeks. As if he wished to memorize every detail of her.

“I didn’t even know this place existed… too many gardens are created by bored courtiers to keep track of them all. But it seems that this particular courtier had a taste for the swamps and the creatures rare and wild.” His frown told her that he considered her one of those creatures as well, as they traveled from the hollow of her neck to the swell of her breast.

Mahri blinked, aware that her hands lay on his waist—that even now they plucked the laces from the holes of his shirt, to remove that barrier to the warmth of his skin beneath—yet she was so intent on unraveling his words that her body moved without thought from her mind. “What creature does this cage hold?”

“A bird,” he growled, for her questing hands had reached the small peaks on his chest, had rubbed them to hardened sensitivity. “Rare indeed, said to have come from the Unknown treelands, beyond even the swamps of your people.”

Mahri’s hands eased the shirt off his broad shoulders. Caria would be more interested in a new species than she would. But she’d been to the Unknown a few times, and pride prompted her to ask the name and kind of bird, for perhaps she’d seen it herself.

Korl shook his head in response to her questions, the pale strands of his hair slipping across his naked shoulders, tickling the backs of Mahri’s hands. “The courtier named it a qa’za, for it’s rarity made it precious beyond price. I doubt if even your far wanderings brought you close to where it’s said to nest.”

She shrugged, knowing full well the many surprises her swamps had still yet to reveal to her. Every journey she made brought her new and amazing discoveries, so
it didn’t surprise her that others had found their own as well. But why had he brought her to see an empty cage? “Why isn’t the qa’za in the cage?”

“It died.”

Mahri felt the muscles in his back tighten and she kneaded them with the pads of her fingers. He’d brought her to see an empty cage. But more mysterious was that Master R’in had brought him here first. She held on to her patience and waited for Korl to explain, waited for the fury that still boiled deep within him to be released.

Korl’s eyes had widened to huge, mournful proportions, and the mask of arrogance he wore like a second skin had slipped. Mahri stared at him in fascination, her hands stilled, for he didn’t let her see his true self very often. She’d have to link minds with him for that.

“R’in told me,” he half-whispered, “the story of the qa’za. And I understood his meaning, as I’m sure you will also.” And he took a step back, those long legs making it a wide space between them, and her hands fell to her sides, fingers spread as if his skin still lay beneath them.

Korl’s voice took on the singsong quality of a traveling bard. “A gypsea tribe brought the bird to the palace, for the pleasure, and bribery, of the king. He gave it into the keeping of Lista, a courtier who had a fondness for rare things, and with her Power she made this garden for the bird; all paths leading to this flower-place, to its cage. She cared for it well, fed it the choicest of seeds, water purified and sweetened with Power. And for a time, it lived.”

Mahri blinked. She knew why Master R’in had brought him here, and until now hadn’t realized how well the old man had come to know her.

The anger had started to seep back into Korl’s voice. “No matter how much she cared for it, how often she talked and petted those silky feathers, no matter how much she loved…” and his voice broke on his rage and he had to swallow it before he could continue. “Every morning more of its feathers would be missing, for it beat at the bars of the cage all night long, until even the small downy scales were sloughed off. And though its beauty was gone, Lista kept the qa’za, for to her it was still a rare and precious thing.”

Korl paused, his breathing harsh as if he’d poled all night long, and removed the circlet of crystal he wore, studying it as if he’d never seen it before. “They told her it wouldn’t live in captivity, that some creatures had to be free to survive, but she wouldn’t listen. Instead she tried to Heal it with the Power, to grow it new feathers, to calm its mind so it wouldn’t beat senselessly against the walls of the cage.”

He threw the circlet into the petals at Mahri’s feet. “She gave it everything… everything!” Korl raked his hands through his hair and he looked at her, anguished rage twisting his face. “But you know what happened, don’t you?”

Mahri couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. She hoped that Lista had set it free, that the tale had a happy ending, but knew from the expression on his face that it didn’t. It was only a bird, she thought, yet she knew they spoke of more than the qa’za.

“It beat,” and he ground the words out, one by one, “at the bars of the cage until it lay bloody and dead.”

Mahri lifted out a hand to him, slowly, carefully. Did he understand, then? Could she hope that the story of
a captured qa’za had somehow made him realize how useless it was to keep her imprisoned here?

She managed to speak. “At least it was free.”

His face turned red. “It was an exceptionally stupid bird!” he bellowed.

“Aya.”

“Come here.”

She walked forward, stepping over the circlet, unable to disobey. To get anywhere near him seemed the most foolish of things to do, for his body radiated his fury, his eyes sparked with more than the zabba in his system. For the first time Mahri felt weak when compared with his strength.

But she couldn’t quench that flare of hope that he might, just possibly, let her go.

Korl read something in her face that enraged him even more and his muscles tensed and he reached for her clothing and with a violence that took Mahri’s breath away he ripped the silk from her body. Strong arms enclosed her in a grip that pulled her from her feet and slammed her against his rigid torso.

“You will love me,” he commanded, crushing his mouth to her own, plunging his tongue inside to possess her, and she couldn’t fight him off. Wouldn’t even if her body had let her. For this one moment in time he wouldn’t be denied and she knew it, and although startled at first, something inside of her responded to him so that, like the first time they’d made love, Mahri was more than ready for him.

She must be the savage the Royals accused her of being, because his need to dominate excited her beyond reason. When he pulled back from her to tear his own
leggings from him, and kept one hand fisted in her hair so that she couldn’t escape, she whimpered not from pain but from the sheer animal desire that swept through her. Mahri reveled in the knowledge that he wanted her with a mindless passion, that he’d fight an army and win if it got in his way between them.

Had any woman a man that wanted her this much?