Silk Dreams - Songs of the North 3 (24 page)

Until he discovered his horn-handled dagger was missing.

He retraced his steps through the courtyard, hoping it had slipped from its sheath after his climb down. He nearly ran headlong into the watchman and brazened it out by bullying the man and deriding him for being so late on his rounds.

Of the dagger, he saw no trace. He concluded that he had left the incriminating object in Valdis’s bedchamber. In his frenzy to rid himself of his clothes, it must have come out of the sheath unnoticed and was now lying on her floor or, please gods, had been kicked under her sleeping couch.

Perhaps the goddess Freya wasn't so approving of his night of stolen joy, after all.

“Pray don't wait on me, friend,” Damian said as Publius opened the door for him. “My business with Valdis shouldn't keep you from breaking your fast.”

“Quite right,” Publius said with a harrumphing cough. He turned away without bothering to enter the chamber to check on his most recent charge. “See yourself out then.”

Damian was surprised to find Valdis still abed. The air in the room seemed different, muskier than usual. He set the herbal potion on the bedside table.

“Rise and shine,” he said. “Publius tells me you supped privately with your new master last night. He was unusually closemouthed about it. I would hear the whole tale and don't stint the details.”

Valdis struggled to sit up, her hair a tangled mess and her lips swollen with spent passion. Her mismatched eyes were decidedly bleary. Had she been crying?

Damian noted a small bloodstain on her linens as she swung her long legs over the side of the bed. She slept in the nude, which was unlike her. He allowed himself a quick look at her full breasts before averting his gaze. Obviously, she'd lacked the will to dress properly for bed after leaving her new master's side.

“So, Mahomet was unable to restrain himself,” he said crisply, as if commenting on the weather. He knew women frequently were devastated over the loss of purity and he wished he could've spared Valdis this. Privately, he'd given her claim that she must remain a virgin to retain her prescient abilities only half a chance at success. If only she'd been less striking ...

Damian noticed that her night shift lay in a crumpled heap on the floor. Before she left his home, Damian had made sure she was supplied with plenty of dried lavender to scatter amid her clothing. If she wasn't wearing the garment, it should have been neatly folded in the chest at the foot of her sleeping couch. Valdis scooped up the night shift and quickly slipped it over her head. She accepted the mint-scented chalice from his hand without meeting his eyes.

“It's a pity, but don't trouble yourself overmuch. We both knew this was likely to happen,” Damian continued. If he made light of it, perhaps she'd view it that way as well. “If you become a favorite, Mahomet will confide in you readily enough. You won't be able to feed him erroneous information as easily, but if you have his ear, you'll still be useful.”

Valdis put a hand to her forehead. “What are you talking about?”

“Coyness does not become you. At least, not with me. Let us speak plainly then. If you were still bleeding when he sent you away, enough for you to leave a stain on these linens as well, Mahomet was probably brutal with you. I regret that it happened thus, but there's little to be gained by dwelling on it. Do you require a physician?”

She bit her lip.

“I’ll take that as a ‘no,’” Damian said, determined to keep matters businesslike. He was nearly overcome with the desire to take her into his arms to offer her comfort. “Tell me what you discussed with Mahomet. Now that your master has deflowered you, how do you intend to proceed?”

“Mahomet did not—” she started, then stopped, her eyes frozen on a spot on the polished floor.

Damian followed her gaze. A horn-handled knife lay near the open window. Damian recognized the weapon immediately.

The Varangian.

He crossed the room and all but pounced on the knife. Valdis was on his heels.

“Damian, please, you don't understand.”

“Oh, I understand a good deal more than you think,” he said with vehemence. “How could you be so undisciplined? So gullible? Do you realize what you've done?”

Fury rose in him that he suspected had nothing to do with the risk to the mission.

“I'll do what I can to save you, though it may not be possible,” Damian said. “Mahomet will eviscerate the man.”

Valdis blanched pale as a corpse. “No, please. It's not his fault.”

Damian tossed a murderous look at her.

“This is all my doing. I asked Erik to come to me. I had an evil dream and I had to warn him,” she said. “Then things just happened.”

“Don't tell me you believe your own lie about having the Sight? How could you do this? After all my instruction, after meeting Chloe and seeing what will happen to a woman who's found to be impure, how?”

“I love him,” she said simply. “I couldn't bear not to let him love me.”

“Love? What kind of love consigns another to the torture Mahomet will surely order?”

Her face crumpled in misery. “I don't know. I didn't think.”

“If you survive this night's work, you'll have time to think. For the rest of your life, you'll be able to think about the fact that your own actions brought about the very unpleasant death that awaits your Northman.”

Damian turned to go. If he told Mahomet what

“No, wait.” Valdis threw herself to the floor and hugged his knees, impeding his progress. “Please, Damian. No one else knows of this. Why must you destroy everything?”

“I am not the destroyer,” he said, resisting looking down into her pleading eyes. “You brought this on yourself.”

“Damian, please don't,” she cried. “I've done everything you asked. Mahomet trusts me and believes in my powers. We can turn him whichever way you wish. If only you guard this secret, I'll... I'll do anything.”

Since his gelding, Damian experienced random erections. He never trusted them to last long enough for him to give a woman pleasure and he feared trying, even with a well-paid whore. It was the only thing that kept him from going back to his wife Calysta and his son. For a blinding moment, Damian had a vision of Valdis, naked and willing, spreading her legs for him so he could test the limits castration put on his sexual abilities. If there were a chance he could return to Calysta as something resembling a whole man, he'd leave the Imperial service in a heartbeat and disappear back into the Macedonian mountains to watch his son grow to manhood and redeem the lost years with the woman who'd become a memory.

“Please,” the woman at his feet repeated. “I’ve learned where Mahomet's allegiance lies.”

He looked down into her strained face, her eyes brimming with unshed tears, her full lips trembling. Valdis feared him. Perhaps that turn of events was no bad thing. It might protect her from future folly.

“And where does
your
allegiance lie?”

“With you, Damian,” she said quickly. “Absolutely with you.”

He knew her declaration for a lie, and an artless one, at that. If the big Northman so much as waggled his finger in her direction, Valdis would go running, no matter the cost. Well, there were ways to deal with the Varangian that Valdis never need know about.

“Very well.” He hid the damning knife in the folds of his garment. “I will keep your dirty little secret, but should your master learn of your unchaste behavior in another way, I cannot help you. And you must promise me there will be no repeat performances.”

“I promise.”

“Now, tell me what you have learned of the worthy merchant's politics?”

While Valdis related the events of the previous evening, in the back of his mind, Damian was already formulating a plan to remove the Varangian from Mahomet's household.

Permanently.

Two mornings later, Erik lay on his sagging straw-filled mattress, his fingers laced behind his head. As he listened to the muttered curses of the boy tasked with mucking out the stables next to his tiny cell, Erik congratulated himself on not making a repeat visit to Valdis's chamber.

When he first came to Miklagard, a Greek
tagmata
with whom he served told him the stories of their heroes. Erik's favorite was a man named Odysseus, a great wanderer who lashed himself to the mast in order to hear the seductive song of the Sirens, but not be able to run his ship aground in a disastrous attempt to answer them. Odysseus knew the danger posed by the Sirens, but he tormented himself with their alluring voices anyway. Odysseus took a foolish but calculated risk.

Erik decided he was even more a fool than the Greek hero. He had no mast. All that kept Erik from the siren song of Valdis's nearness was his own will. Though he'd always prided himself on possessing resolve as hard as iron, he felt it melt each time a shadow passed behind her curtain.

That stolen night was the worst kind of folly. Far from slaking his thirst for her, their tryst only sharpened his desire. Now, instead of imagined delights, he had fresh memories, myriad tiny images, sounds and smells to torment him—the unbearable softness of the skin of her inner thigh, the small groan she tried so hard to suppress as he pleasured her, the scent of her arousal...

He was lost and he knew it.

She'd sent him another runic message: "Knife found." He wondered if Valdis were trying to warn him that they had been discovered and he should flee to save himself. If that was her aim, she'd be sorely disappointed. He wouldn't leave of his own volition, even if they intended to flay him alive.

Then when another day and night passed without incident, and without catching so much as a glimpse of her, Erik decided Valdis had found the knife herself and was safekeeping it.

The chief eunuch came and went with irritating frequency. Damian Aristarchus came bearing his herbs as if he were a physician instead of a secret puppet master. Erik had watched through narrowed eyes as the eunuch ascended the curving stairs to the upper story of the house.

He longed to change places with Aristarchus for those few moments.

No, whatever it cost him, he would not endanger Valdis again. As long as they bided in the silk merchants sprawling household, he wouldn't go to her. He set all his energies toward discovering Mahomet's political bent, so he could help Valdis satisfy Aristarchus and gain her freedom faster.

Since he'd given up her ownership, Erik wasn't sure how the chief eunuch would secure her manumission, but however he might dislike Damian, he sensed the eunuch was a man of his word. No one could rise so high in the emperor's service without some redeeming qualities.

A discreet scratch on his door brought Erik upright in a heartbeat. He forced himself to walk instead of bound to the portal. Living in Habib Ibn Mahomet's house made him jumpy. The frowning outer walls enclosed the space like a miser brooding over his hoard of coin. Far from giving him a sense of safety, the walls seemed to contract on him.

Erik's enemies were already within the gates.

The scritching noise came again, this time accompanied by a cough. If it was someone intent on mayhem, he reasoned, they'd have battered down the door instead of scratching for admittance. Still, he wished for the familiar worn hilt of his horn knife in his hand.

A eunuch clad in white linen waited for him. “The master commands your presence,” the servant said tersely.

Erik dressed carefully, making sure his beard was freshly trimmed and his breastplate gleaming before mounting the stairs to Habib Ibn Mahomet's receiving room. A rat of panic gnawed at his belly. He recognized the annoyingly Christian emotion known as guilt. He'd cuckolded the man he'd come to nominally protect. Erik must be careful not to let Mahomet see his discomfort, lest he endanger Valdis.

It might be nothing,
he told himself.
Mahomet may just want a report on my changes in the household security.

If that was the case, Erik had no cause for concern. He'd beefed up the guard at the house's tall gate and set a strict schedule for patrolling the roof garden. He even pointed out the kitchen charcoal chute as a possible point of entry and ordered a lock put on it. If someone had observed him wiggling in and out of it the night he killed Barak's would-be assassin, he could always claim he was testing the perimeter of the great house for unlikely methods of entry.

He was totally unprepared to see his friend, Haukon, standing at ease, conversing in his stilted Greek with Habib Ibn Mahomet.

“Erik, you sandbagger,” Hauk's voice boomed in his more comfortable mother tongue. “Is this the duty that kept you from joining us in Antioch? You should have been there. We filled the corbeys' trencher with fresh meat and made the desert run red. The Saracens will think twice before testing that Imperial outpost again.”

Erik clasped forearms with Hauk. “We must raise a horn and you can tell me all about it. What are you doing here?” The words spilled out of his mouth before he felt the shrewd dark eyes of Mahomet on them. He switched to Greek. “Haukon is my countryman and friend.”

“It is clear you know each other very well,” Habib Ibn Mahomet said. “Perhaps it comes as no surprise to you that your worthy companion has been sent to replace you, though I myself confess to puzzlement over it. I have no complaints with your service, centurion.”

“What's this?” Erik was sure Mahomet's words were genuine. The silk merchant had more inventive ways of ridding himself of people who'd displeased him. If the Arab knew of his tryst with Valdis, Erik had no doubt he'd die horribly.

Being ordered from her made him feel as if a horse had just kicked him in the gut. He knew he should be relieved. At least he'd not endanger Valdis again. This was safer than Odysseus's mast.

“Why am I being replaced?”

“I'm only obeying orders,” Hauk said with a slight lift of one eyebrow. He knew more than he was admitting. “You're to report to the general at once for reassignment.”