Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (19 page)

“Forget I said that,” he apologized quickly, which only made it worse. She looked away and he saw the color rise to the roots of her hair. He knew he should say something, make some other light remark to cover his own confusion and hers, but the air between them teemed with unsaid words, with possibilities unthinkable, like tinder which a spark would set ablaze.

The women he had loved had all been affairs of affection, begun in the knowledge that, as a wizard, he was legally a dead man with no position in the laws of any of the Forty Realms—unable to marry, unable to hold property, unable to enter business or trade or to sign a binding contract. And yet looking at this girl…

She took a deep breath after far too long, set down the cups on the table, and stammered, “Will… I suppose the talisman you gave me
will
keep people from noticing a full-grown horse?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, gladly accepting the offer of a straight line. “It might keep them from noticing half of it but then the rest would be awfully conspicuous.”

She giggled, her painful blush fading; to the relief of both, the moment passed in laughter.

“Where’d you learn to make coffee like this?” she asked a few minutes later, when he poured the inky, bittersweet liquid into the bottoms of the two red-and-black Sligo cups which were much too large for the tiny quantity to be consumed. “If wizardry ever quits paying, you really
will
be welcome in my father’s service.”

“What do you mean, if wizardry ever quits paying?” Rhion demanded in mock indignation. “For one thing, as you may have noticed, wizardry
doesn’t
pay, and for another, making good coffee
is
wizardry. Why do you think I’ve been apprenticed to Jaldis for ten years? Because I like climbing over slippery roofs in the snow? No,” he added, fishing in another lidded pot for yesterday’s bread and putting it and the small jar of honey on the table between them. “It’s just one of those things rich young men are supposed to learn, like dancing.”

“I know.” Tally gravely spooned enough honey onto her bread to satiate a regiment of bees. “My deportment master used to crack me over the elbow with his stick if I didn’t curve my arm properly when I weighed out the sugar or added the cinnamon. My brother Syron has to put up with all that now.” She held the spoon high above the bread for the sheer joy of watching that lucid amber curtain flow to its destiny. “Were you a rich young man?”

“Once upon a time.”
Rhion smiled, remembering the ruby doublet buttons which he’d cut off to buy the opals and gold for Jaldis’ spectacles. Somewhere in the maze of courts, a rooster crowed. The mare nickered outside their door, the sound loud in the thin cool of morning. Other than that, the square was silent. Even Mistress Prymannie had not come out to unshutter her schoolroom. The rich smells of coffee and cinnamon mingled with the faintly prickly velvetiness of dust, the steamy whiff from the laundry in the next street, the odor of privies and stale cheap cooking, a strange, slubbed tapestry of fustian and silk.

“Well,” Rhion went on more briskly, “did you just come to see me because your father’s cook can’t make a decent cup of coffee, or…”

“My father’s cook makes a perfectly good cup of coffee and would demand that you be beheaded for treasonable utterances if he heard you say different. But,” she went on, “I’ve figured out what to do about Damson. And she’s agreed.”

“I’ll have to talk to her about that,” he warned, and Tally nodded.

“You will.” She set down her coffee, cradling the round smoothness of the cup in her hands. Something about her matter-of-factness—or perhaps the gesture of warming her hands in the steam of the cup—reminded Rhion strongly of his sister, and he felt a curious pang when he realized that he still thought of her as a girl of fifteen…
She must be married long ago, with children
…

“There’s a disused pavilion at the end of the kitchen gardens of Father’s palace,” Tally was saying. “You can reach it through a postern in Halberd Alley. Damson will be there tonight, masked and hooded and the whole thing. I’ve told her you don’t know who she is…”

“Thank God she didn’t see us when we rescued her daughter.”

She ducked her head shyly, then looked back at him again with her gray eyes bright. “I thought that, yes. The house is right on the palace wall. If you didn’t know it was actually connected to the palace, you couldn’t tell it by looking. It really could be anywhere. That should lay to rest her fears about being blackmailed or about word of it getting back to Esrex. I told her that I told you that she was a rich merchant’s wife and I was her maid, so remember to treat us that way, all right?”

“Sure thing, lambchop,” he leered in his slangiest street dialect, and she laughed and shoved him playfully. For all her usual gravity there was a sparkle of humor in her eyes, lurking like a wildflower in a bed of well-bred tuberoses, and he suspected she spent a good deal of her time, as he did, explaining
Joke… that was a joke
…

Regretfully, he gave her his hand. “I think you’d better be getting back. They really
will
be wondering where you are…”

“I told them I was going hawking in the marshes,” she said, standing up and shaking out her long green skirt. “And I really am, though it’ll be awfully late by the time I get there. I told Marc—Marc of Erralswan, the Captain of the Palace Guard, who’s supposed to be meeting me and my waiting lady Amalie there—that I had some business to attend to in the kennels and that we’d be late. Amalie will cover for me. She’s getting the hawks and will tell them at the mews…”

“You’re full of tales today, aren’t you?” he teased, as they passed beneath the suspended thickets of drying herbs towards the door. “First you’re posing as your sister’s maid, now you’re playing cross questions with your escort…”

“Well…” When she averted her face that way she looked like a very dignified ten-year-old caught raiding the jam. “Didn’t you do that?”

She put her hand to her cap, a modest little thing his sister would have called paltry. He’d seen the wealthy virgins of Bragenmere sporting cap wings that would have lifted them out of the saddle if they’d ridden at any speed, had some of the wearers not been a solid half-hundredweight heavier than they should have been, that is. But not Tally. She was too thin, if anything, with scarcely more breast than a gawky boy. The light of the open door, strong now that the sun was slanting down over the tiled roofs, cast a gauzy crescent against her cheek and made the amber of her necklaces glow like the honey that still dabbled the plates on the table behind them.

He smiled again. “All the time.”

Catching his eye, Tally laughed again, brightness passing across her face like spring sunlight in the Drowned Lands, breathtaking, fragile, and swiftly dimmed. “I don’t like to,” she sighed. “There’d be a hideous to-do if I was found out.”

“To put it mildly, yes.”

Across the square beyond her shoulder, boys and girls were arriving to school, loitering outside in their clumsy wool and serge clothing or chasing stray chickens in the weeds. Knowing from his own schooldays how easily anything other than lessons will hold a child’s attention, Rhion drew about himself and the girl, and about the mare standing with reins hitched to the cottonwood post, a thin, numinous aura of Look-Over-There.

Tally’s mouth, well-shaped without being either full or soft, tightened, the dimple beside it flexing again into a tired line. “It’s just that… They want so much of you, you know?” Her gesture failed, half-made. “And I want…” She shook her head, scanning his face helplessly, not sure, in fact, what it was that she did want.

“To be alone?”
The incessant grind of his father’s demands seemed to echo along the corridors of his mind—learn this, help me with that, meet all the right men and be sure to be friends with their sons… And his mother’s hands forever straightening the already-perfect set of his sleeves, her fussy disappointment in him pursuing him wherever he went.

“Sometimes.”
Her face softened again. “And sometimes…” She broke off once more, her eyes on his, and he understood, and she knew he understood. It had to do with music, some of it, and some of it with silence, but there was no clear word for what it was that she sought. His hand moved instinctively to touch hers, but he thought twice and closed his fist instead.

She turned quickly from him. “I’ll come for you after dark.”

And Rhion, reaching out with mind and magic, nudged the schoolmistress into a bustling fit of self-importance, so that she fussed the last of her pupils into the building and got them seated, distracting their minds from the sight of Tally mounting her mare and reining away across the court.

As Tally had promised, the pavilion near the kitchen gardens could have been any small house in the Upper
City, with its modestly slanted roof of red tiles and its pale stucco bleached silver by the light of the bright spring stars. After the eternal mists of the Drowned Lands, the dry, hard brightness of the air in the Mountains of the Sun made everything seem slightly unreal, like a child’s drawing; every weed stem growing along the alley walls and every pothole and broken brick in the road were distinct, even in this wan and shadowy light. The air was redolent with the flower and vegetable markets a few streets away, with the smells of the Duke’s extensive stables, and with dust and garbage. Here at the back of the palace complex, the walls lacked the intricate ornamental brickwork, the tiled niches, and the marble statuary that characterized its front, and Rhion guessed as they climbed the tiled steps from the little pavilion’s hall that the place had been built originally to house some married stablemaster or chief cook and his bride.

The light of the single candle in Tally’s hand darted fitfully over painted rafters and bright frescoes on the walls and glinted on the spectacles hidden deep within the shadows of Jaldis’ concealing hood. “Can we get ourselves seated before she comes into the room?” Rhion whispered. “That way, with luck, she won’t see him standing up at all to know he’s crippled.”

Tally nodded. They were all cloaked and hooded like conspirators in a cheap street-corner melodrama—Jaldis had shifted his voice-box up onto his back, so that its smooth roundness, combined with a deliberately assumed crouch, gave the impression that he was hunchbacked; in place of his crutches he leaned on a long staff, and upon Rhion’s arm.

“Good idea… Drat this mask—it won’t stay tied…” She set her candle on a pine hall stand to tangle with the ties of her mask, and Rhion had to stop himself from reaching to help her. Under her cloak he saw she wore the plain, black frock and short petticoat of a serving-maid, her ankles slender as willow switches above sensible shoes. “There. The light’s pretty low in there; I don’t think there’s much danger of her recognizing either of you, once you get your mask on.”

She was right about that, anyway, Rhion thought when he and Jaldis entered the room. A single candle in a crude brass holder provided all the illumination—if such it could be called—available; the candle, moreover, placed not on the oak table in the center of the room but on a sideboard, where its feeble glow would leave everyone’s faces in deepest shadow. “Why do they always have the lights so low they won’t be recognized?” wondered Rhion aloud, helping Jaldis to his chair at one end of the table and moving the candle to the far end of the sideboard so that its light was almost directly behind him, leaving nothing visible of his face but a black shadow within his hood. “Don’t they realize wizards can see in the dark?”

He took his own seat and removed his spectacles, putting on the scarlet mask he’d bought for three dequins with some of the money Tally had advanced them and pulling up his hood again. Carnival had been over a month ago—in the slop shops of the Lower
Town masks were cheap this time of year. His back was to the candle, his face toward the door, which at this distance was only a muzzy line of shadow on the wall.
Good God
, he thought suddenly,
what do I do if I can’t tell Tally and Damson apart at this distance…?

But the concern was set at rest a moment later, as the hall door opened and he saw two nebulous figures framed in the darkness. He’d momentarily forgotten: one form, lithe and freemoving and graceful, was a good seven inches taller than the other.

“Mistress…” Rhion deepened and hoarsened his voice as much as he could and half rose to his feet to bow. Jaldis, to nonmageborn eyes a black form almost invisible in the dark, merely inclined his head.

“My maid has told you what I want?” Damson groped around for the chair back in order to sit—as far as visibility went, her identity, Rhion thought, would be safe from
this
potential blackmailer, anyway. Without his spectacles, at a distance of three feet only the fact that the boiled leather mask covering her face was silvered let him know she was masked at all. He could make out the blurred shape of lips where a cut-out had been made for speech, but couldn’t have taken oath whether they were long and squared, like Tally’s, or round and pouty—only that they were darkened with a considerable quantity of rouge. A dark shawl the size of a bedsheet concealed her hair. She wore a cloak over her dress, and the only way he knew there was any kind of decoration on either covering was when an occasional sequin or gem would catch the candle’s light and flash in the dark like a purple star.

“A philter, she said,” Rhion replied. “To win the love of a man.”

Damson leaned forward. Her scent was patchouli with a heavy dollop of ambergris and touches of lily and spikenard. Any wizard, trained as all were in the identification of herbs by scent, could have picked it out from among hundreds. That was another thing they never thought about. “These are his.” From beneath the all-enveloping cloak she pushed a silken scarf containing a big knot of ivory-fair hair-combings, and a rolled-up linen shirt. The scarf itself was worked with a pattern of red pomegranates, the house badge of the Prinagos.

Nice disguise, Sis.

“I want him to be drawn to me, to love me…”

“You understand,” Rhion said, “that such a philter will only work for a short time? And that afterward, because of being drawn to your bed, he may be angry with you? May even hate you?”