Prince of the Blood (10 page)

Gods, how I hate waking up tired, he thought. Then he lay back as comfortably as possible to meditate upon his troubles. The soothing heat seemed to creep into his bones, and minutes later his mind floated. He ran down a street, and a hand grabbed him by the arm. He closed his eyes in remembrance. His first memory. He could have been no more than three. It was his mother, pulling him inside her whore’s crib, out of the sight of slavers who were prowling the night. He remembered being held tightly while she clamped her hand over his mouth. Later she would be gone. When he was older, he knew she was dead, but all he could remember of that night was the man with the loud voice shouting at her and hitting her and the red everywhere. Jimmy put the ugly memory aside as he fell into the warmth of the water. Soon he dozed.

He awoke without moving. From the angle of the sun, he couldn’t have dozed for more than minutes, perhaps a
half hour at best. The morning was quiet, but something had disturbed him. He had somewhat outgrown his childhood habit of coming to his feet with a dagger in his hand—it had proven quite disturbing to the servants in the palace—but he still kept a dagger close by.

Opening his eyes, he moved them first, and saw nothing in his field of vision. He turned his head and again could see nothing above the rim of the pond. He slowly elbowed himself up, feeling foolish as full wakefulness returned. Who would be a threat here upon the island of Stardock?

James peeked up above the rim of the pool and found nothing. Suddenly there was a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach and he couldn’t find a name for it. It was as if he had entered a room a moment after someone had left through another door; without knowing why, he knew someone had just passed beyond his view.

Instincts born of city dangers set off a primitive alarm in his head, an alarm that had saved him from harm too many times before to be ignored. Yet this alarm didn’t have the echoing ring of threat to it, rather it was excitement. Years before, James had learned the discipline of the night: remaining motionless, keeping one’s mind distant from the concerns of the moment so sudden movement wouldn’t trigger a response. He relaxed his breathing and kept still. He glanced over the rim again, and the echo of another’s passing was gone. The small inlet looked as it had before.

He lay back again and sought to recapture the warm calm that had finally overtaken him, but he couldn’t relax his mind. An anticipation began to build in James, as if something glorious was approaching, but there was a sadness, too, as if something miraculous had just passed within touching distance and left him behind. Odd feelings of giddy delight and childish tears clashed inside him. He took a long breath to calm himself. James had
discovered he was a man of deep passions since coming to Arutha’s service, but they were rarely shown to others—another legacy of a dangerous youth spent with those for whom displays of emotions other than anger were considered admissions of weakness. But what was triggering these sudden feelings?

Lacking a satisfying answer, he heaved himself out of the pool and raced headlong for the lake, yelling a boy’s shout of frustration released. He dived under and came up spitting water. A sound of relief escaped him as the cold lake seemed to shock him to full wakefulness.

He was an indifferent swimmer but enjoyed the occasion from time to time. Like most children of Krondor’s Poor Quarter, when the hot winds of summer blew, he had sought relief at the harbor side, diving from the piers into the salt water and refuse. The sensation of clean water upon his body was something he had remained ignorant of until well into his thirteenth year.

James found himself swimming lazily toward the far side of the inlet. The trees and reeds cut into the water, providing a series of narrow passages to whatever lay on the other side of the inlet. He picked his way through, half-swimming, half-paddling, until he came to a thick stand of reeds and grasses. He saw the grasses and reeds were wide-spaced, allowing ample vision of the shoreline. He turned upon his back and kicked lazily. Above him, the morning sky turned brilliant, as the sun was now full upon the day. The clouds were white and beautiful as they sped their course across the heavens. Then he was in the grasses, seeing stalks rise high above his head as he felt their ticklish caress while he swam. After a few minutes of swimming this way, he righted himself and glanced about.

Things appeared different and the way back not apparent. Calm by nature, he found the notion of swimming in circles within the reeds an unappealing but not a fearful
one. He remembered Pug’s words and saw the grasses all bending to his left. He would simply swim to where he felt ground underfoot and walk out.

Within a minute, he felt the shore under his toes. He walked through thick reeds and tall grasses, toward a line of trees at the water’s edge. The hanging branches and thick greenery plunged him into shadows while he was still up to his chest in the water. He could only see a few feet in any direction, and the morning light made everything a pattern of murk and blinding blue-white sky above. James followed the rising bottom until he was in water below his waist. He felt foolish to be striding around naked, but as there was no one about, he would only need a short scamper back to the pool where he had left his clothing.

James took a step and suddenly found himself falling into deep water. A current had eroded a small channel to a depth more than his six feet and he came up sputtering and blind. He paddled to the far side and again felt land under him.

A birdcall above him made him wonder if the creature was laughing at his clumsy progress. Sighing, he continued toward the shore, which was but a few yards away, judging by the glimpses of land he got between the trees. With the water at his knees, he was confronted with an impassable barrier of trees and reeds, a rocky overhang rising up to shoulder height. He moved to his right, toward what seemed a closer exit from the foliage that conspired to trap him, and again felt a drop beneath his feet. He settled down to chest-high water and pushed through a very thick curtain of reeds. His progress was slow and he could only move a few feet at a time. His overwhelming feeling was one of unalloyed stupidity for finding himself so distant from where he wanted to be. Pleasant swim before breakfast, indeed.

As his knees brushed a ridge of lake bottom, signaling
an end to the channel he was wading through, he parted the reeds before him. Abruptly, James found himself confronted by a sight totally unexpected. Fair skin, white as a newborn’s, was revealed merely a yard before him. And by circumstance of his depressed perspective, he was staring directly at the naked backside of a young woman. Her nearly white-blond hair hung wet from her head as she squeezed water from it, a pose which conspired to display her hips and buttocks in a slightly exaggerated and flattering pose.

James’s breath caught in his chest. The same mixed feeling of alarm and excitement struck him like a hammerblow. He felt as embarrassed at his intrusion into her privacy as he would have felt had she found him at his own pool. Conflicting signals to hold motionless, move back, say something, not be discovered, all clashed together and paralyzed him.

Again his boyhood training overrode conscious thought and he froze in place. Then another thought intruded, and he felt his stomach tighten as a hot rush of excitement gathered in his stomach and groin. Almost aloud he said: It’s about the most beautiful bottom I’ve ever seen.

Instantly the young woman turned about, her hands flying up to her mouth, as if startled by a noise. In that instant, James discovered that the rest of her was equal to what he had already seen. Her figure was slender, like a dancer’s, and her arms and neck were long and elegant, her stomach flat, her breasts not large, but full and lovely. As her hand dropped away from her face, he saw a high forehead, fine cheekbones, and pale, slightly pink lips. Her eyes, wide in astonishment, were the blue of midwinter’s ice. All these details were etched in his mind in an instant. A thousand instants of recognition flooded through James, and in each he knew the young woman before him was at once the most wonderful and terrifying sight he
had ever beheld. Then those beautiful pale blue eyes narrowed and suddenly pain exploded in James’s head.

He fell back as if struck by a weapon, and his voice cried out hollow in his ears as he went beneath the water’s surface. Sharp knives of hot agony filled his mind as water filled his mouth. James sank into the murk of the water as he lost consciousness.

In a place that was not a place James swam, drowning in memories: his playing upon the street cobbles and never a moment passing without the fear. Strangers were a danger, yet every day brought strangers into his mother’s house. Men who were loud and frightening passed the boy each day, some ignoring him, others attempting to amuse him for a brief moment with a pat upon the head or an odd word.

Then the night when she died and no one came: the man with the crooked smile had heard him cry and fled. Jimmy had found his way out of the house, his child’s feet padding through the sticky blood on the floor.

Then the fights with the other boy for the bone and the bread crust left out behind the inns and taverns, eating the raw wheat and corn that spilled from under the grain wagons at the dockside. And the drops of bitter wine in the almost empty bottle. The occasional coin from a generous passerby to buy a hot pie. Hunger was always there.

A voice in the dark, no face to remember, asked him if he was clever. He had been clever. Very clever. His beginning with the Mockers.

Danger around, at all times. No friends, no allies, only the rules of the guild to protect Jimmy the Hand. But he was gifted; the Upright Man forgave small trespasses from one who brought in so much wealth at such an early age.

Then the man with the crooked smile reappeared. Jimmy had been twelve. It had been nothing of proud
honor and hot revenge. A boy thief had crept in and dosed the drunk’s wine with a poison purchased from a man dealing in such things. The man with the crooked smile died without knowing his murderer’s reasons, his face blackening as his tongue protruded through swollen lips and his eyes bulging, while the son of a murdered whore watched through a crack in the ceiling of the flophouse where he lay. Jimmy had felt no triumph, but somehow he hoped his mother rested better. He never knew his mother’s name. He felt as if he wanted to cry but didn’t know how. He had cried twice … no, three times in honesty. When Anita lay stricken and when he thought Arutha dead. That had been grief, and it was not a sign of weakness or shame. But he had cried in the darkness when trapped in the cave with the rock serpent, before Duke Martin had saved him. He could never admit to his fear.

Other images: his incredible, almost inhuman skills in the calling. His discovery that his fate was linked to great things when he helped to hide the Prince and Princess of Krondor from their captors during the reign of Mad King Rodric. His freeing the captives in Del Garza’s prison and fleeing the city and the Upright Man’s wrath afterward, then his adventure in Land’s End. His death duel with a Nighthawk upon the rooftops of the city, and saving Arutha’s life, though he had not known it at the time. His travels twice to the Northlands and the great battles of Armengar and Sethanon, and the peace that followed after the battle to stem the return of the Dragon Host.

Now he was James.

His service to Arutha and his reward by being elevated to a place in his court, his title, and, later, another title, and his being named Chancellor of Krondor, first in rank after Duke Gardan in the Prince’s court, all became a haze of pleasant thoughts—the only pleasant thoughts in his life.
Faces passed, some named, others nameless. Thieves, assassins, nobles, peasants. Women. He remembered many, for early on he had developed a taste for the attentions of women and, as a rising young nobleman, had his choice of many companions. He never treated any poorly, and genuinely cared for those he bedded, but there was always something lacking. Something important. The moments were pleasant, but pleasure was fleeting and he felt empty afterward. Then a nude figure wading in the lake as she squeezed water from her hair. The most stunning vision he had beheld.

A face with pale blue eyes, and lips like pink roses. A concerned face, which peered into James’s, saw past the mask and deep into his very being. Something magical and beautiful burst within James, and again he wanted to cry. A sadness filled him with awful joy and he cringed before those clear eyes. They looked inside and saw things, and he had no secrets. He had no secrets! I am lost! he cried out and a child whimpered at the death of his mother, and a boy cried as a young woman lay dying from an assassin’s bolt, and a youth cried as the only man he had come to trust lay dead before him in his chambers, and a man cried for all the old pain and torment, the fear and loneliness that had lived within his breast since the day of his birth.

James awoke upon the shore, a cry of pain and fear upon his lips. He sat bolt upright, his arm over his head, a child avoiding a blow from above. He was still damp, and naked. A voice said, “The pain will pass.”

James turned, and as he did so the terrible aching inside slipped away. He turned to find the young woman sitting upon the shore a few feet away from him. She sat with her legs pulled up before her, arms around her knees, still without her clothing.

James had never so much wished to flee in his life. No experience filled him with such nameless dread as seeing
this beautiful young woman sitting near. Tears rose unbidden to his eyes. “Who are you?” he whispered. Yet as he wished to flee, so much more so did he long to be close to this woman.

Slowly she rose, unself-conscious in her nudity, and came to stand before him. She knelt until her face was before his. A voice sounded inside his mind:
I am Gamina, James
.

Fear again visited James, and he found himself unable to move. He said, “You spoke inside my head.”

“Yes,” she answered aloud. “You must understand that I can see your thoughts, hear them”—she seemed to grope for a concept—“no, those words are not right. But I know what you think unless you try to keep your thoughts from me.”