Authors: Michael A. Stackpole
"M'lady has lovely large eyes." Noreen carefully painted a black line around them, letting the curved lines from the lower lids arc up toward Gena's temples. She then applied a light blue powder to the lower half of Gena's cheekbones and brushed it back up to blend with her hairline. More blue dusted the hollow of her throat and her eyelids, then Noreen rouged her lips.
As the woman produced a brush from the bottom of the case and began to work on her hair, Gena smiled at her own reflection in the mirror. The cosmetics had sharpened her features, accentuating a natural difference between Men and Elves, and enough of her skin tone made it through the white to prevent her being taken for a walking corpse. She secretly wondered if the women of Aurdon chose to make themselves look Elven out of some hidden desire to be more than they were, or if changing styles had simply come around to the point where vulpine decoration just happened to be appropriate when she came to visit.
Noreen pulled Gena's hair back into a thick braid, then folded that up onto itself and secured it with two silver needles. "There you are, m'lady. I do not think my ministrations have dulled your beauty."
Gena smiled. "They have enhanced it."
"You are most kind." Noreen replaced her brush and the trays and shut the case. She carefully pulled the sheet free, then looked up behind Gena. "Evening, m'lord."
Gena turned, half expecting to see Count Berengar, and saw Durriken entering the room on the other side of the bed. He wore a long gray woolen tunic, edged with silver, that came down to his knees. Beneath that he wore a navy-blue hose and dark-grey slippers that had elaborately curled toes and a small bell set at each heel. On his head perched a blue beret with a silver feather in it that matched the silver belt tied around his waist.
She started to smile, then covered her mouth with her hand to stifle a laugh as Durriken glared at her. He looked miserable, and she knew he would have jumped at the suggestion of riding away from Aurdon or at least slipping out of their clothes and avoiding the festival entirely.
Noreen nodded. "My lord won't mind my saying he wears those clothes better than Count Nilus ever did. Quite handsome a figure you are, sir."
Rik smiled momentarily. "You are most kind, ma'am."
Noreen curtsied. "Evening, m'lady, m'lord."
When the door closed behind her, Rik scowled heavily. "Bells on the shoes?"
"I believe they are meant to remind people of the happy time when the winter will be no more." Gena shook her head. The bells on the shoes had to be especially galling to Rik, because his profession so relied on stealth for its successful practice. Given Waldo's animosity toward him, Rik had to be feeling persecuted by circumstance.
His scowl dissolved into a feral expression of forbidden delight. "If Waldo had these bells put on my shoes on purpose, what he owns, I will own."
"I do not think that is a very good idea, my Lord Orvir."
His head came up at the use of the title. "True, I would have to do something more befitting my station. Of course, that could be almost anything." He pulled off his ring and crossed the room to where she stood. "I don't know if Berengar knows about this, but it is an interesting trick. This is a genuine slapdeath ring."
"What is that?"
"Watch." Holding the ring between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, he twisted the thin cylinder of scrollwork around the base of the sapphire to the left. Smiling, he flicked the gem up, exposing a small compartment in the ring. "Barely large enough to hold a pinch of gold dust, yes?"
Gena nodded. "Hardly useful for a hiding place, as a highway man would likely take the ring as well as a purse."
"Agreed. Now watch." He flipped the gem back into place and turned the cylinder back to the right. He continued twisting it after it had locked the gemstone down, and stopped when he apparently met resistance. "There."
"I don't see anything."
Rik winked. "You're not supposed to see anything—slapdeath." He rotated the ring so she could see the section that would lie hidden toward the palm of his hand. Extending upward at a shallow angle toward his thumb was the tip of a hollow needle barely an eighth of an inch long.
"That ring, if it held poison . . ."
"A pat on the back, a gentle caress, a slap across the face, and someone dies." Rik retracted the needle with a twist on the scrollwork. "It looks as if Nilus had a reason to expect trouble. As this is a weapon well suited for use on one's familiars, he expected that trouble from someone close to him."
Gena nodded as she fastened a silver-leaf pendant around her neck. "I wonder if Berengar knows the secret of his brother's ring."
"And I wonder if Nilus had other secrets." Rik smiled wryly. "I think that is something I may try to find out."
"But not tonight."
"No?"
"No." Gena shook her head as she slipped her hand into the hollow of Rik's left elbow. "Tonight they are having a celebration in our honor. We will go and act as befits our station. And after that, provided you are willing to remove that ring, I will see if Lord Orvir is a better lover than a certain thief whose company I greatly enjoy."
Though she stepped light as a cat bent on mischief, the faint crackle of straw being crushed underfoot betrayed Yelena's approach. Though I do not often wake quickly, I did so this time, with the faint tendrils of unease that had wracked my slumber evaporating slowly. Her steps lacked the furtive urgency of someone on a mission of mayhem, so I let my fists unknot beneath the woolen blanket, and I opened my eyes.
A warm smile brightened her heart-shaped face, and her black hair all but glowed from careful brushing. "I trust, my Lord, you slept well?"
"I have greatly enjoyed the hospitality of the Riveravens here, Lady Yelena."
"So I assumed when you slept away the day without snoring."
"I did?" I rubbed a hand over my face. I recalled having trouble getting to sleep because of all the dogs barking outside, but once they stopped, the weariness of the journey hammered me into unconsciousness.
I returned Yelena's smile politely, so as not to offend her, and to make amends for any offense I might have given the night before. She had been appointed by Festus to take me back to the Riveraven longhouse and provide me suitable accommodations for the night, while Aarundel was made the Fishers' guest. Though fifteen years my junior by the most generous tally of her age, she had seemed willing to share the pallet to which I had been directed. My refusal, which I based on my being road weary, battle sore, and a notorious snorer, had been accepted even though I was thinking she had seen it as a lie.
"You did indeed, my lord Neal." She half turned back toward the center of the longhouse and, with a sharp, snapped twist of her hand, started two servants wrestling a heavy oaken cask over toward where I lay. "Your Steel Pack arrived two hours ago and is encamped down by the river. The Elf has seen to their care and ordered no one to disturb you. I only disobeyed because the sun is but an hour from slumber, and the festival that you ordered will then begin."
I worked my left arm around, bringing my elbow to my breastbone, and heard my shoulder pop. Yelena's eyebrows betrayed her surprise at the sound, but I had become well used to hearing it. The new twinge in my ribs reminded me of the Haladin ambush, but the pain was not as sharp as I would have expected. Though I would have preferred to have been awakened when the Steel Pack made Aurium, I was thinking that Aarundel had not been wrong in letting me sleep. Though I did not heal as swiftly as I had in my youth, I still did heal, and the sleep had helped a great deal.
Yelena smiled, her brown eyes lit with a devilish fire. "I thought my lord would wish to bathe before the festival. The Elf had things sent around from your personal train, in order that you be suitably attired for this evening." As the servants hauled buckets of steaming water from a cauldron near the central fire, Yelena drew the curtains that isolated the small area in which we stood from the rest of the building.
The longhouse itself looked to be four times as long as it was wide, and two sets of pillars running the length of it split the width into thirds. On either side, up against the exterior wall, rough planking framed small stalls barely over nine yards square. The planking rose to six feet or so, which cut off most sight and filtered some sounds from one stall to the next, but hardly made an attempt at privacy. From the grunts and giggles, gawfaws and moans I could hear around me, the Riveraven Clan did not feel the lack, and to be honest, after months in the field, I felt closed in.
Yelena's closeness accentuated that feeling. In the dark of the night, when she had been my hostess, her invitation to enjoy the hospitality of the Ravens had been at her uncle Festus's behest. He had seen value in having me bed a woman of his clan and like as not thought it might win him some advantage or concession or a chance to renegotiate his son's position in the bargain struck the night before. Yelena had taken the rejection easily, likely pleased that her uncle's strategy had failed.
Her presence here now bespoke her coming on her own behalf, and it did not greatly surprise me. She did not seem the sort of woman who would pursue me to prove herself desirable—the intelligence in her eyes had me thinking she knew her beauty made her a prize. Even had her vanity been pinked by my refusal to let her share the straw-strewn pallet and thin woolen blanket, she would not have returned to salve her wound. Doing that would have conceded a battle to me, and in Yelena I sensed no concession and damned little compromise.
If she had come for herself, she had come to get what I represented. It wasn't the pleasure of bedding, I felt fair certain, because aside from one rather bawdy ballad about me and the nuns in the convent in Esquihir, I had no reputation for being a bold or romantic lover. While not above being flattered by a woman's appreciation for my meagre abilities at loveplay, I'm not a ram that wants to mount every available ewe in hopes she will sing my praises afterward.
To Yelena I represented what visitors to my father's court in the Roclaws had been for me: a window onto the rest of the world. I was what existed, what lived and breathed outside Aurium. I had defied the city's clan leaders, bearding them in their own den, and if I could do that, then I could certainly take her with me when I left. I did not think she saw me as a lover with whom she would remain for all time, but just someone with whom she could stay until she won her release from the city of her birth.
All the while I thought this out, Yelena busied herself with supervising the servants filling the wooden tub. She diligently tested the water for warmth and directed the servants to bring water in sufficient quantities of specific temperatures in accord with some arcane formula that at last produced a satisfactory smile on her face. Accepting a small unguent jar and a thick towel from the last servant, she drew the curtain completely shut. Ignoring the mild laughter from the people in the center of the longhouse, she smiled and waved me toward the bath. Her husky whisper conveyed a multitude of messages. "Your bath awaits, my lord. As none of our servanrs would be satisfactory to you, I offer myself as your attendant."
Raising myself up on my elbows, I narrowed my eyes. "Do you know what you are offering, lass?"
She broadened her smile and nodded.
"And do you know why?" My question caught her unawares for a moment. Before she could reply, I pressed further. "Do you want to know why I'll be refusing you?"
Yelena hesitated, then her smile slackened. "It should have been obvious to me."
I shook my head and threw back the blanket. "There's no reason you could have known, so don't be thinking what you're thinking now." I stood, naked, with my joints popping and cracking like Dreel gnawbones. I saw her eyes widen, and looking down, I knew the purple bruise on the left side of my chest had been what caught her initial attention. As her focus opened up and she took a good look at me, one hand rose to cover her mouth.
"My lord, you . . . you . . ."
Aside from being a bit more furry than most flatlanders, as well as taller and more thickly muscled, the difference between me and the other males she'd likely seen in a similar state of nudity came in terms of my scars. Witch women and shamans, hedge-wizards and physickers, are all well able to close cuts and smooth gashes so as to leave no trace of a scar. Unlike me, the only thing most men took away from a fight was a tall tale.
I smiled to ease her distress and crossed to the tub. I sank myself into it, having to scrunch down a bit and bring my knees up out of the water, but it covered me to midchest and felt warm and inviting. "My compliments, Lady Yelena." I took a small cake of soap from a shelf near my toes and began to work it over my left arm.
"How is it, my lord, that the Dun Wolf is so worried and marked?"
I shrugged. "Well, now, this slice here, on my shoulder, I got from Tashayul when he meant to be killing me twenty years ago. And this one, the cross there above my left knee, that was a Haladin arrow I won near seven years past in the first battle I fought under the Red Tiger's banner." Lifting my left arm and leaning to the right, I exposed my hip. "See that tear there? That was from the Dreel."
"You have so many scars, my Lord, yet there are ways ..."
"I've collected a tale with each one, my Lady, and in another thirty years I'll be delivering an accounting to one of the Consilliarii." I smiled. " 'Tis not much as ambition goes, but it is a goal worth striving for."
She kept the horror in her eyes out of her whispered question. "And these scars—they have left you . . . unable . . . which is why you refuse me?"
"No, lass, I am able, which is why I must refuse you." I rinsed my left hand, then gently cupped her jaw in it. The truth, I was thinking, would only pique her interest, not dispel it. That was good, because I'd never been inclined to share the truth with anyone. No one would have believed it of me, and I knew all the protests concerning its veracity would only cause folks to doubt it all the more. So, for her, a bit of a lie.