The Dragon of Despair (44 page)

TORIOVICO SPUN
, balancing less around his physical center than around his loneliness. It was a more perfect center than anything else could be. Weight and muscle might shift and change, but never this.

As the Healed One came to a halt and was about to go into a new move, one that involved reclining in a split on the cool marble floor followed by motions recalling a willow in the wind, he heard a sound from the open archway. He looked up.

Melina stood in the doorway, a heavy book tucked under her arm. Her pale blond hair had been dressed in the New Kelvinese fashion and she had taken to New Kelvinese styles as if they had been designed for her, wearing the long embroidered robes with grace, tripping along in shoes with the longest and curliest of toes.

Although Melina had not resisted cutting her hair—indeed, she had been pleased that New Kelvinese style and dyes hid its silvering—she had been slow to adopt tattooing on her face, not wishing, Toriovico thought, to mar her elegant if rather severe features with the puffing and scabbing that followed the procedure.

However, Melina loved elaborate face paints, especially those that emphasized her startlingly clear blue-grey eyes. In this way, she did not embarrass anyone by exposing her naked face.

Today her eyes were the centers of wispy flowers that also evoked the wide-awake look of owls. Her drawn-in eyebrows were set slightly higher than her natural ones, enhancing the impression of startled alertness and inviting the trained eye to study the contrast.

Toriovico felt his gaze drawn into hers and saw Melina’s smile turn slightly lascivious. Since today’s dance was for practice rather than performance, he wore little more than a loin wrap. Melina, rather than being offended by his lack of formality as many highborn New Kelvinese would at least pretend to be, seemed to enjoy her husband’s undress.

She motioned for him to come closer, and Toriovico rose as if a puppet on strings. No longer did he wonder at the wisdom of his marriage to her. She was the heart and soul of his universe, a warm caress that blunted the pang of his solitary state.

Melina kissed him, warm and lingering.

“After you bathe and cool yourself,” she said, “come and sit with me in the gardens. I’ve hardly seen you today.”

Toriovico obeyed. It never occurred to him to do otherwise.

YET WHEN TORIOVICO CAME TO MELINA IN THE GARDENS
, she hardly seemed to notice his approach. The large book she had been carrying earlier was open across her lap and she looked up from its ornately calligraphied pages only reluctantly. Even after she had turned her face up to accept his kiss and patted the bench beside her as an invitation for Toriovico to come and sit beside her, she still seemed distracted.

Torio, basking in the warm glow he felt only when Melina was near, was only slightly miffed at his wife’s inattention. Idly, he glanced at his rival’s spine, unsurprised to find it a scholarly compendium of folklore and legend. Melina was always reading one of these. She said she’d never understand her adopted people if she didn’t study the type of things they imbibed with their mother’s milk.

“I had a nurse,” Toriovico had replied, a thing that had seemed quite witty at the time. Now, fresh from immersion in the dance, the statement seemed both flat and stupid.

He put the memory from him, not wanting anything to ruin his comfortable mood. Melina, too, made an effort to put aside her distraction, honoring him with a particularly warm smile and slipping her slender hand into his own larger, heavier one.

“You wanted to see me, my dear?” Toriovico asked, not really because he cared about anything but this moment, but because he would not leave undone anything Melina desired.

“Who wouldn’t want to see you?” Melina said playfully, inserting two fingers under the collar of his robe and stroking his skin. “You keep yourself in such wonderful form.”

“I must,” he said matter-of-factly, “for the dance.”

“Did I take you from your practice too soon?” Melina asked with that thoughtful attention to his needs that was mysteriously unlike the flattery of courtiers and servants.

“Never too soon,” he said, “if my lady can spare me her time.”

His words sounded like a rather trite line from a play. Indeed, a few seconds later Toriovico had placed them
as
a line from a play, one of those romantic melodramas his sisters had sighed over when they were girls.

Melina continued to stroke the skin just beneath Torio’s collar with a repetitious, soothing motion that relaxed him completely. Indeed, Toriovico had to struggle not to drift of to sleep.

“I saw Apheros today,” Melina said idly. “The poor man seems quite put out.”

Torio thought it rather odd to hear the formidable Dragon Speaker described in a fashion that would be more appropriate for a small boy.

“Oh,” he said drowsily.

He must not yawn. Melina would be terribly offended. Put out, even.

“Yes,” Melina said, shifting her caress to the base of his neck and massaging the muscles in slow circles. “I asked what was troubling him and he finally admitted that he’d brought a proposal to you some days ago—something to do with Waterland trade—and he felt you’d been less than enthusiastic.”

Toriovico struggled for a moment, then recalled the Waterland trade packet.

“I told you about the meeting at the time,” he reminded her, “that same evening. I rather thought the Waterland business representatives wanted quite a lot for far too little.”

“Magical artifacts are too little?” Melina said, surprised.

“Potential magical artifacts,” he countered, sitting up a bit straighter. “Dearest, you’re going to have to stop rubbing my neck if you want me to think straight.”

Obediently, Melina dropped her hands into her lap. Toriovico took the opportunity to put two fingers under her chin and tilt her face up for a kiss. Then, with an effort—for those lips were powerfully distracting—he returned to business.

“The Sodality of Artificers will send someone into Waterland to make a preliminary inspection when—and if—the Waterlanders agree. They’ve been rather uncooperative to this point—as if they’d expect us to buy a horse without checking its teeth!”

Melina chuckled softly.

“Perhaps I am to blame, beloved,” she said. “After all, didn’t you accept me and those artifacts I brought without prior inspection?”

“True,” Toriovico said.

Or rather Apheros did. I think I might have hesitated. Yet Apheros was right in his judgment. Those artifacts—well, at least the mirror—were magical.

“But those had a provenance,” he said. “These artifacts have been rather conveniently discovered. Prime Dimiria claims to have seen some of them years ago during her residence abroad, but she’s not an Artificer. Indeed, her vision has dimmed over the years—not that she’d appear in public wearing spectacles!—and I doubt she’d be able to detect a substitution.”

Melina snuggled against him and he encircled her slender body with one arm.

“You seem to have thought a great deal about this, Torio.”

“I
am
the Healed One,” he reminded her gently, “and the welfare of my people, especially in regards to magic, is my special duty.”

I wonder what she would say,
he thought,
if she knew that my most sacred duty is to forbid magic rather than to encourage it?

He didn’t need to think hard to find the answer to that question. Melina was the most devoted magical scholar in Thendulla Lypella, for she alone was undistracted by any duty to a sodality. Indeed, some had suggested creating a title and post for her, perhaps giving her a staff to facilitate her research. The matter was being debated in the Primes this session.

However, such thoughts drifted away even as he grasped at them. How long they sat in the shaded nook in the flower-scented bower, he didn’t know. What he was next aware of was Melina pulling away from his loose embrace.

“Where are you going?” he said.

“Inside. It’s getting rather chilly.”

Torio didn’t think so, but perhaps his southern bride felt such things differently. He rose as she did.

“Torio,” Melina said, her tone subtly commanding. “You will think about giving Apheros his way in this Waterland matter.”

“Yes, my dear,” he said obediently.

She smiled then and kissed him lightly. Then, gathering her book, she hurried from the garden.

Toriovico watched her until she was out of sight, mindless of anything but her departing admonition.

“
THEY SEE LADY BLYSSE’S FLIGHT
as an admission of guilt,” Grateful Peace explained to Derian after a harrowing few hours during which the Hawk Havenese had not been certain how much of the anger and fear directed at Firekeeper would rebound upon them.

Peace had done wonders, never abandoning his guise as Jalarios, humble guide and translator, but somehow managing to keep his charges free. It hadn’t hurt that Doc had immediately offered his services to tend the wounded man. Indeed, Doc had insisted. Even now Elise, Wendee, and Doc remained with the patient and the word had just been sent down that he was expected to live.

“I don’t understand,” Derian said stubbornly, though in his heart of hearts he did.

Peace explained patiently. “As the guards see it, if Lady Firekeeper had nothing to fear, why then would she run?”

Derian and Peace were sitting in the inn’s common room at a table by themselves. They weren’t quite under arrest, but the guards had made clear that they would be happier if they didn’t go anywhere out of sight. Citrine had been permitted to go to bed. Edlin was out with some of the guards, helping track down the dogs that had been set on Firekeeper.

“Firekeeper didn’t run,” Derian explained wearily.

He was amazingly fuddleheaded. They’d been on the move since dawn in lousy weather and he’d been just about to retire to his bed—after too much to drink, he had to admit, but the inn’s wine had been very good and there hadn’t been any trouble for so long—when Firekeeper had to stir up a fuss.

Then Edlin’s Moonkissed had kicked him a glancing blow just above the knee. Normally, Doc could have set such right with just a touch of his talent, but he and Elise were desperately trying to save the life of the man Blind Seer had attacked, a man who anyone could see was gutter scum.

“Firekeeper just left,” Derian went on. “They wouldn’t talk with her without taking her knife. She hasn’t let King Tedric—who I think she reveres about as much as she does any human—take that knife away. She didn’t run, she…”

His wine-fogged head couldn’t find the words. Grateful Peace took mercy on him.

“Made a tactical retreat,” he suggested.

“That’s about it,” Derian agreed. “I’d bet my…”

He’d been about to say “right hand” then caught himself. That wouldn’t be the right thing to say, not to Peace, not after he’d seen the expression on the New Kelvinese’s face when they’d brought in the man Blind Seer had mauled. The way Peace had glanced at the bloody ruin of the man’s arm and then at his own empty sleeve had been as eloquent as volumes of some epic. It had all been there: loss, grief, adjustment, the wondering if the man might be better off dead.

Derian wondered just how much they could trust this already chancy ally. Might Peace’s sympathies be with the wounded rather than with Firekeeper and Blind Seer?

“I’d bet anything,” Derian went on, “that she’s somewhere nearby.”

Peace leaned forward and lowered his voice.

“I wouldn’t make statements like that if I were you,” he said. “Right now the guards are convinced that she’s fled to the hills. They’re talking about setting hounds on her trail…”

“Fat lot of good that would do,” Derian murmured.

“No matter,” Peace said. “If they thought she was near enough to learn what was going on here, they might try other forms of persuasion.”

Derian’s eyes narrowed and his head cleared with amazing, unsettling speed.

“Are you saying they might use torture?”

“Let us just say,” Peace replied smoothly, “that they might decide that stronger methods of questioning than those to which they have resorted thus far might be in order, especially if the questioned person was then permitted a turn or two about the stable yard for fresh air.”

Derian shuddered. He didn’t want to, but he did. Peace’s next words didn’t do anything to restore his confidence.

“Lady Archer should be safe from such treatment, as should Lord Kestrel. The guards would not wish to cause an international incident. Sir Jared should also be safe. Not only would they respect his title, but he has shown evidence of being able to do magical healing. That grants him near reverence in their eyes—especially with how freely he uses his gift for others. You and Goody Wendee, however…”

Peace shrugged.

“Which…,” Derian asked, croaking on the first word. “Which would they think a more useful victim?”

Peace gave an eloquent lift of his brows.

“Difficult to say. I suppose it would depend on whether the guards think that Lady Blysse would feel more pity for one of her own gender or for her oldest friend.”

Derian didn’t doubt that the guards could learn about his relationship with Firekeeper. They might know already. The New Kelvinese had a strong spy network. They kept dossiers on interesting foreigners. Like him. Like Firekeeper.