Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (30 page)

When Rhion finished, the silence was so deep he could hear a slave woman singing in the garden of some big walled house down the street and the endless rattling hum of the cicadas in the trees. He could not meet the Duke’s eyes or look him in the face—even close as they stood he could have distinguished little but a blur in the fidgetting cresset glare. Overhead, the moon stood high, its whiteness shimmering on the curtains of Jaldis’ litter as they stirred in a stray drift of wind.

The Duke folded his heavy arms. His voice was so quiet as to exclude even Marc or Erralswan, holding the two horses four feet away, but calm as if he were hearing the suits of strangers in his own law courts. “And you seduced her by means of a spell?”

Rhion nodded. “She… ” he began, but could not go on. He was shivering, as if with bitterest cold.

“That is not,” the Duke said, “what Jaldis told me.”

Rhion looked up at him, the blood in his veins turning to dust.

“According to Jaldis,” the Duke went on, “my daughter loves you very much. How much you love her I think you have just demonstrated by your willingness to shoulder the blame.” And for all the quietness of his voice, his dark eyes were grim. “But half the scandals in the world are based upon sincere love, and it is scandal with which we now have to deal. Marc…”

At his gesture the young captain came forward with the horses.

“Come. Let’s not keep Esrex waiting any longer than we have done.”

Early summer dawn was just beginning to tint the sky as the cavalcade mounted the rise to the palace gates. The houses of the Upper Town crowded close here, not the villas of the rich—not on a street which bore so much traffic—but tall blocks of expensive flats owned by the wealthier civil servants or their mistresses, built over shops that sold jewelry, spices, and silk. The alley where Jaldis had waited for the Duke’s approach could have been any of a dozen near here, Rhion thought, clinging to the saddlebow of his led horse—the alley where he’d waited, listening for just this clatter of hooves on the cobble, this creaking of leather and armor, this smell of torches made up with incense to keep mosquitoes at bay. Waited and, still blind, still mute, had dragged himself out on his crutches, with the terrible, broken groans of a mute which had not passed his throat in eleven years.

Waited to save him.
To save them.

No servants were about in the great court yet, save the grooms who’d slept half the night in the shelter of the colonnade awaiting the Duke’s arrival from the hills. Awakened an hour earlier by the advent of the Earl of the Purple Forest and the Duke’s servants and baggage horses, they came running briskly as the gates were opened once again. Overhead, the sky was losing its darkness, the late moon huge and white, a solitary lily floating upon a still lake of lilac-gray.

“My lord!”
Esrex came striding rapidly down the shadow-clotted length of the pillared hall as the door guards bowed the Duke in. Rhion noted that the young man had changed into a court suit of ash-colored velvet on which rubies gleamed like splashed blood. “I have been telling the Earl of the shocking crime which has been…” And he stopped, seeing Jaldis at the Duke’s side, leaning on his crutches with his opal spectacles flickering eerily in the long, filthy frame of his white hair. Then his eyes went to Rhion, his torn robe stained with lamp oil and blood, standing at his other hand. Up at the other end of the hall, around the two or three bronze lampstands which remained lit, a handful of courtiers self-consciously tried to pretend that staying up until the bakers were taking the bread from the ovens was their usual practice; but, in the sudden hush, the soft pat of a final card being turned was like the smack of a leather belt, and the clink of glass lace-spindles like the clatter of kitchen pans.

Lazily, the Earl of the Purple
Forest rose from the pearwood couch where he had been flirting with one of Damson’s maids-of-honor. He, too, had changed out of his traveling dress, though his red hair was still braided back from the journey. Opal and sardonyx gleamed on the midnight velvet of his sleeves and breast. “Really, Dinar, I think you owe me some kind of explanation about what Lord Esrex has been saying.”

“Even so,” the Duke said. Neither his voice nor his demeanor gave the smallest of his thoughts away. “Marc—fetch my daughter.”

“She is with my wife, my lord,” Esrex hastened to inform him with a mixture of officiousness and spite. His pale eyes darted uncertainly from Rhion’s face to Jaldis’ and back to the Duke’s. “We thought it better to know where she was. If this man still holds her under his spells…”

“A matter you are most qualified to judge, of course,” the Duke responded, and the young man’s thin skin reddened with sudden anger. Then he turned and looked around him at the hall, and every head bowed quickly over fashionable needlework, lace-making, or cards, and voices rose with exaggerated brightness.

“Oh,
pounds
thinner, darling, but the way she goes on about eating vegetables, you’d think she invented them…”

“…Everything—house, horses, lands, the town investments—on a single cut. The man has more guts than brains, if you ask me…”

“…horse couldn’t run if you lit its tail on fire… ” A weary-looking corps of musicians in the gallery, who had been frantically discussing what part of their repertoire hadn’t already been played four times since the conclusion of supper, struck up a light air on viols and flutes, as incongruous in that tense atmosphere as a fan dancer at an auto-da-fé.

The Duke raised his voice, not much, but enough to carry the length of the hall. “Good people, I bid you good night.”

There was no mistaking the dismissal in his tone. The hall was cleared in five minutes, and Rhion, leaning wearily against the strapwork marble column that supported the gallery, half-smiled to himself.
If I could sell scrying-crystals that worked for anyone
, he thought wryly,
I could retire tonight on the proceeds
.

Then he thought of Tally again, and his heart seemed to die in his chest.

“Really,” the Earl said, when the last reluctant gossip had collected her feather tippet, her snoring lapdogs, and her long yellow silk train and departed. “If the chit’s pregnant, as Esrex claims, I’m afraid our negotiations are going to have to be… renegotiated. Not that I wish to spoil sport, but there is the succession to be thought of.”

“How did you know it was Esrex?” Rhion stepped back to where Jaldis had unobtrusively sunk down on one of the spindle-legged couches set among the pillars which flanked the hall. In the smoky glare of a near-by lamp, the old man looked drained and gray under the coating of grime. Rhion sat down next to him, his legs still feeling weak. Between lamp-oil, blood, and the miscellaneous sewage that covered both their robes, the servants would probably have to burn the cushions, but that was something they could take up with Esrex. “And how did you know what it was about?”

“I remained to listen, of course.” Jaldis raised his head from his hands, making an effort to shake off the exhaustion that all but crushed him. “After getting out through the roof trap I hid for a few minutes near the door that leads out to the midden in the back. They were hunting for me across the roofs and down the alleys, not up next to the house itself.”

Rhion was aghast. “You could have been…!”

“I knew we had been poisoned with
pheelas
root, of course,” that soft, droning voice went on. “But it did not interfere with the senses of a mage. They waited, of course, for it to take effect before coming within the theoretical range of wizard’s marks… As soon as I heard Esrex’ voice, I guessed what it was about. If one is in the habit of storing grease beside the stove, one does not have to look far for a cause when the house catches fire.”

Rhion bowed his head, grief and guilt washing back over him in a sickening wave. His passion for Tally—his yielding to hers for him—had brought ridicule and shame upon the man who had just saved his life, disgrace—almost certainly banishment—on Jaldis and probably Tally as well… He shied from thinking about what he had brought on himself. The Duke was a just man, but he had needed that alliance with the In Islands to guard against the White Bragenmere faction at home. He had saved Rhion from the priests of Agon, but, as he had observed, scandal was scandal.

Intent and terrible, the silence deepened in the room. For the first time, Rhion understood why the very rich, in palaces this size, maintained musicians to fill up the resounding hush. The guards had left, Esrex’ liverymen as well as the Duke’s mailed troopers, and the huge quiet seemed to echo with the breathing of those few who remained. Once Rhion looked up to see the Earl’s dark eyes turned his way, though whether he was studying the man whom Esrex had described as his rival, or merely curious about the two grubby fugitives huddled together on the couch, his eyesight was not good enough to determine.

“What can be keeping them?” Esrex muttered through his teeth. The Duke, his arms folded and his face a careful blank, did not even look at him, but Rhion could almost feel the seethe of conjecture, of anger and disappointment, of possible salvage operations, options, scenarios, and covering lies that went on behind those dark eyes.

At length, Rhion’s quick hearing detected the rustle of skirts in the stairway that led from the vestibule up to the palace’s private suites and the firmer tread of Marc of Erralswan’s gold-stamped military boots. All eyes in the room were on the archway as shadow played suddenly across its lamplit pillars. Then the pillars framed them: the tall Captain with his bronze armor and scarlet cloak, curly dark hair falling to his shoulders; Damson in plum-black velvet that flashed with jewels; and Tally like the flame of a candle, a blurred, slender column of dull gold.

She’s with child
, he thought again, and shivered with wonder and dread and grief.
My child.
Her child.

A wizard’s child.

A child they won’t allow to live.

Without his spectacles, her face was only a blur to him as she crossed the vestibule, to sink to her knees at her father’s feet. Damson remained by the door, rigid and silent—one could only guess what had passed between the sisters in the hours since Esrex had ordered his wife to lock her one-time follower and champion in her room.

“Father, I’m sorry…” Tally whispered, holding out her hands. “So sorry. Please, I beg you…”

The Duke stepped forward and took her hands, raising her, his face suddenly strained. “My child…”

“No.” Shaking her head she stepped back quickly, as if to study his face, and, by the flash of the jewels on her rings, Rhion saw she had squeezed his hands. Though her features were a blur to him, Rhion saw how tense she stood, like a warrior ready to go into a fight—a novice warrior, into her first fight, with no confidence of victory.

“How you can dare…” Esrex began, but a gesture from the Duke stilled him.

“Go ahead, daughter.”

She swallowed. The huge amber beads around her throat gleamed softly in the lamplight as she turned to the Earl of the Purple
Forest.

“My lord, I can only beg your pardon as well. They say you are a man who understands love and lovers…”

If you want to call it that
, Rhion thought cynically, and saw the Earl’s head tilt a little, with detached interest. Esrex drew in his breath, but, at a glance from the Duke, held his peace. Tally, it was clear, was going to be given her say.

“Your pardon also I ask, Rhion the Brown…” She gave him his formal title, setting distance between them “…for this shocking misunderstanding.”

She turned back to the Duke. There was a small bunch of pheasant-plumes on the back of her bodice, the ribbons that hung down from it against her skirt tipped with a crystal set in gold. Rhion could see the facets of it flash with the trembling of her knees.

The hall was utterly silent.

“As usual Esrex was only half-right,” she went on, her voice very clear and steady in the hush. “Father… and my lord…” She inclined her head toward the Earl, who was watching them with folded arms and an ironic gleam in his eye. “To my shame I admit it is true that I am with child. I beg your pardon, beg it abjectly, for having fallen in love with a man other than the one you, Father, would have chosen. But I have fallen in love.”

Half-turning, she stretched out her hand…

…and with only the barest perceptible hesitation, Marc of Erralswan stepped forward, took it, and put a protective arm around her waist.

“My lord,” he said to the Duke, bowing his handsome head. “It is I, too, who must beg your forgiveness.”

Rhion, who had risen to his feet when Tally had briefly addressed him, had just enough sense to keep his mouth shut and his eyes straight ahead. But Esrex was far too stunned to look at him.
Tally
… Rhion thought despairingly, his hand groping for the support of the couch.
Oh, Tally, no
…

Stiffly, as if she spoke with a knife-point in her back, Damson stepped forward and said, “It’s true, Father.” She kept her eyes averted from her husband, whose dropped jaw and twitch of startled outrage were visible even to Rhion. Her high, childlike voice sounded strained but firm. “I learned of this two days ago. I would have spoken to you of it tomorrow. Esrex,” she went on, her gaze fixed determinedly upon the gold ornamentation of her father’s sleeve, “said that you must be told about Tally being with child, and so bade me lock her in her room tonight. But he never told me who he thought her lover was, nor what would be done to… to these innocent men.”

“No wizard is innocent!” Esrex sputtered, completely losing his usual aplomb and looking suddenly many years younger, pale eyes blazing like a furious boy’s. “And as for…”

“Esrex,
be silent
!” Damson’s head snapped around and for a moment their eyes locked. Something in her look, either its urgency or its deadly venom, stopped his words as if with a garrote.

Rhion sank back to the couch, his legs suddenly weak. After the first stunned moment he could see the logic—and, in fact, the brilliance—of the solution. Esrex might or might not choose to believe that the story of the love-philter was a lie. But its corollary—that the tincture to make sure she conceived, the tincture that lay at the heart of this whole hellish night—was something whose existence Damson could never let him even suspect. It was perfectly possible that Esrex, to remain on terms with the cult of Agon, would repudiate a child so conceived; it was almost certain that he would repudiate Damson. But only if the matter became public knowledge.