Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic (16 page)

“Are you all right, child?”

Starhawk managed to nod, cursing herself for showing weakness. “Fine,” she whispered, wanting more than anything to lie down and not certain that she could negotiate the marble corridors as far as her room. If she were attacked now, she thought giddily, she wouldn’t stand a chance. She could barely remember where she’d put her hideout knives.

The crystal tone of the Lady’s bell was like another spear going through her brain. “I just need rest,” Starhawk said haltingly, and forced herself to rise. The room doubled, reeled, then stabilized again; embarrassed and feeling ridiculously shy, she started for the door. Another pain struck her, buckling her knees, and Renaeka, who had been walking close beside her, waiting for that, caught her in arms surprisingly strong, and lowered her to the floor.

In the dead, waiting calm of the night Sun Wolf watched, listening to the darkness.

All day and evening the wind had been still. He had dozed for an hour after Renaeka Strata had left, and had shared the guards’ rations, but always, it seemed, with one ear cocked toward the east. When he slept, his uneasy dreams had been a confusion of cloud and storm. Later, sitting in the pooled-ink shadow of a siege tower, facing out into the night, he had cautiously conjured winds.

Though unable to summon them against a natural inclination without sinking into the moving trance of deep magic—something he feared to do, now—he was able to herd and coax a kind of gentle push of land breezes eastward, to thrust against the cold masses over the sea. It was the most he could do, though his hands, his spirit, ached with holding back from more, and he cursed his ignorance again—his ignorance of weather; his ignorance of the healing that he was coming more and more to sense that Starhawk needed; his fatal ignorance of the magic of ill.

He knew he shouldn’t have to track down the ill-wisher like an assassin and kill him with his hands. There had to be other ways to finesse around a lack of power. His methods of healing were inefficient, he only bulled his way through on strength when he should have used skill. As a warrior and a teacher of warriors he knew that only worked until you met someone stronger.

Worry clawed him like a rat chewing in a wall. In thirty years’ experience with physical mayhem, he had seen thousands of head wounds, and he hadn’t liked Starhawk’s pallor that morning, or the lines of strain around her eyes. Glad as he’d been to see her out of bed, there was a part of him that had wanted to order her down again. She shouldn’t have been up, shouldn’t have been sitting with him . . . 

But, by his ancestors, it had been good to talk to her again!

The warm land breeze stirred his tawny hair, and he watched its footprint pass him in the nodding weeds. Far down the dark line of the coast he could see the lights of the City Troops, camped in the ruins of Vorsal’s little port. By this time next year, those ruins would be replaced by warehouses, ropewalks, and the barracoons of slaves; the wharves would bristle with mastheads bearing the red-and-blue banners of the Pierced Heart.

On the way out to the engineering park to meet Purcell, he had ridden past the decaying walls of the ancient Royal
Palace. Through unguarded gates rusted open, the Wolf had glimpsed unswept courtyards and a weed-choked portico, empty of life save for one laundress taking a shortcut with a basket of washing on her arm. The contrast with the city’s markets, with the lively chaos of money and fine clothes around any of the great merchant houses—the Stratii, the Cronesmae, the Balkii—was glaring. No wonder the King wanted a tame wizard, to win him back power in this land.

Feet soughed the long grass in the windless silence, too light and furtive for the measured swish of the patrolling guard. Catlike the Wolf rose and slid into the shelter of one of the tower’s wheel housings. Not Moggin already, he thought, following the dry breath with his ears. In any case he refused to believe that the master wizard’s coming would be detected so easily. A confederate after all?

Then the breeze that flowed along the side of the hill threw wide the corner of a cloak, and brought, above the stinks of raw wood and hides and smoke, a strand of dark perfume. Edging the hood as blown snow edges a drift crest, he glimpsed the unraveling tangle of hair. The dim phosphor of reflected torchlight from within the circle of the engines picked from the dense shadows a thread of golden chain.

Or a distraction ?

He said, “Opium?” softly, and she spun, catching her breath at finding him so near.

He stepped from the shadow.

“They said you were here.” Black hair spilled forth as she put back her hood; again he had to remind himself not to touch. “Do you mind if I walk with you for a while?”

“We’ve got to be fifteen miles from the camp,” he pointed out, starting to move widdershins along the outer edge of the park, his one eye scanning the formless land where the blocky shadows of the towers and rams blurred into the darkness. “Don’t walk on my right,” he added, and wondered, for a brief splinter of a moment, how much he could trust this woman to walk in the darkness on his blind side. He ought, he supposed, to send her away.

“Not if you come straight overland,” Opium’s voice replied, husky and a little high above the continuous soft rustle of her skirts on the grass. In Ari’s company last night, he’d seen her wear her company face, bright and saucy and quick. Now, as he’d seen her first among the ruined siege engines of the camp, she was more subdued, with a kind of shy thoughtfulness behind her soft chatter. “I can go back that way. I was in the city this evening.” She nodded toward the fairy-tale glitter of Kwest Mralwe’s domes and turrets, spilling down the shape of its invisible hillside to throw a broken carpet of reflections on the lamp-sewn river below. “Sorry—I look a mess, I know—I barely had a moment to comb my hair . . . ”

The thick braids hanging at her temples smelled of sweetgrass and herbs; kohl deepened the subtle colors of her eyes. “You look fine,” he murmured.

“I just didn’t want to go back just yet.”

“You can leave, you know,” the Wolf said quietly after a time. “Leave the troop, I mean, if Zane’s really giving you hardship.”

“And do what? Dance in taverns where I’d have to sleep with the customers and pay the innkeeper for the privilege? I’ve got money in Wrynde, all Geldark’s—my man’s—savings, and a little I saved, dancing at Bron’s tavern during the winter. If I can get back there and get it, I can come south again in the spring.” With a quick, wild gesture, she scooped aside the dark cloud of her hair where it snagged her cloak collar, shook it out, and with practiced fingers adjusted its delicate tendrils around her face. Sun Wolf found himself wanting very much to see her dance. “But for a woman by herself, it takes a lot of money to stay free, you know? I’ve seen them. Even the highest-paid women in town have keepers.”

She moved closer to him as they walked, and he forced himself to be ready for an attack from that direction, though he didn’t seriously think she was Moggin’s confederate—if there was such a thing—inside the camp. And that, he added to himself, was probably fortunate. It was difficult enough to watch, not only the empty lands on three sides of the engineering park but the park itself, with only one eye, without having her soft, inconsequential chatter covering possible sounds and soothing his mind with the warm pleasure of her presence. But he was loath to send her away. And he could manage, he told himself.

At one point in their circuit of the park he said, “Look, Opium, if I tell you to run, you RUN—run screaming back to the middle of the park where the fires are and get the guards. Even if it looks like I need help, you don’t help, you get help, as much of it as you can and as fast as you can. All right?”

“But if that—that thing that attacked you last night—comes back, by the time I get guards you could be dead.” She moved anxiously, to get into the line of his sight, but his face was turned away from her, watching the dark. On guard duty it was fatal to have anything block his view.

“And so could you.”

“I’d throw my cloak over it . . . ”

Her eyes were dark and wide and anxious, and she was young and very beautiful and genuinely concerned about him, so he didn’t make the remark that he wasn’t about to trust both their lives to her ability to hurl ten pounds of velvet accurately in an emergency. Instead he said, quite truthfully, “Opium, if that thing shows up, it isn’t going to be the way you think. It isn’t what anybody thinks. Our best chance is if you do what I say, all right?”

She nodded willingly. “All right. It’s just that I’d feel treacherous, running away. I don’t run when my friends are in danger.” And she bent her head to readjust the jewel-tipped points of her bodice.

“You run when I tell you to,” he said gruffly, “and run damn fast.”

They moved on through the shadows, slipping cautiously through the spaces between them, where the light of the torches and fires inside the ring shone through, the Wolf showing Opium how to do this most quickly, most efficiently, without arousing the suspicion of someone watching the camp. Sometimes she walked quietly on his blind side, the musk of her perfume faint to his nostrils; other times she talked in her soft, drawling voice—camp gossip, the events of the siege, all the horrendous details of Ari’s earlier efforts to sap and mine the walls, and of the last battle in which the mine tunnels had collapsed, the siege tower had burned, and the man who had bought her last summer from a brothel keeper in Kedwyr had been killed.

“He was good to me,” she said, folding her cloak close around her for warmth, her breath a luminous haze as they passed close to the lights of the park. “I’d been sold there when I was fourteen, when Father couldn’t pay his debts; Geldark looted some rich pook’s house when they sacked Melplith, else he couldn’t have bought me. It was the first time—I don’t know. It wasn’t that I could say no, but it was better, you know? I was still his slave, but . . . ” Her hand strayed to the thin gold chain around her throat.

The Wolf stopped in the shadows of the siege tower where they had begun their circuit, and put his hands to her throat in the velvet shadows of the cloak. “This is all there is to being a slave.” Twisting both hands in the delicate chain, he snapped it. It was a lot stronger than it looked, but he was damned if, after those words, he’d give up and exerted all his strength. The metal cut into his flesh, drawing blood as it parted. He cursed, and started to draw his hands out of the warmed shadows of her hair. She caught his wrists and drew his mouth down to hers.

A shudder passed through his body; pulling a barbed war arrow from his flesh would have been easier than thinking about drawing back. “I can’t,” he whispered, even as his arms shut closer around her, her hand tangling in his long hair, digging into the curly fur at the back of his neck. The scent of her, the warmth and strength of her embrace, clouded his senses and blurred his thoughts; dark, uncaring madness loomed suddenly in his mind, uncaring of what happened now or later . . . 

He pulled up his head against the unexpected strength of her arms. “I have a lady of my own.” His voice was thickened, his mouth so dry he could barely speak, and it was hard to remember that he wanted to.

“Does she need to know?”

No, he thought, as his head was drawn down again to meet those moist silken lips, she didn’t. And if she did she’d understand. He hadn’t had a woman in weeks, and the soft urgency of Opium’s body against his kindled devastating heat in his flesh. It was, pure and simple, a case of eating to satisfy ravenous hunger . . . if she ever found out, Starhawk would know that . . . 

But that knowledge wouldn’t change what it would do to her.

As surely as he knew his name, knew the flesh and bone and magic within his own hide, he knew he would lose something which could never be replaced, and the loss would taint the days that had been and demolish all those long, bright future joys. To take this woman, as he had casually taken so many in his life, would mean, literally, absolutely nothing to him, except for the momentary release of his aching flesh. But to Starhawk it would be betrayal.

She would understand, of course. She probably wouldn’t even be surprised.

That was the worst—that she wouldn’t be surprised if he betrayed her.

That she wouldn’t be surprised if anyone betrayed her.

His hands shaking—for while his mind raced, his body had thought for itself—he pushed Opium from him, first gently and then, when she clung, more forcefully.

She breathed, “No. I want you . . . ” and the touch of her hands was torment.

“No.” He was panting, every atom of his flesh needing her, trying not to be aware of his hands on her waist where he held her away from him.

Her smooth brow, curtained with the veils of her hair that his clutching fingers had loosed, puckered as she read the desperate sincerity in his hoarse voice.

“I won’t.”

She lowered her hands from his shoulders to his arms, the warmth of them still maddening through the leather and lawn of his sleeves. Her eyes were pools of desire—everything he was and had always been screamed to him To hell with Starhawk . . . this only comes once . . . 

But even as he thought it, he knew that what he had with the Hawk only came once—to many men, not at all—and was fragile as glass in his clumsy hands. I can’t let that go, he told himself blindly. I can’t . . .  But he no more knew the words to say it than he’d known how to explain to Purcell that he couldn’t make a whore of his magic.

He could only push her away from him and turn aside, folding his arms now as if for protection across his chest, still shuddering all over with passion. Having never broken off such an encounter before in his life, he had no idea how to do it with any kind of grace.

“You afraid she’ll find out?” Beneath the vicious spite her voice trembled, but through the blinding smoke of his own need he didn’t hear.

The men would laugh themselves sick if this got back to them—it suddenly occurred to him to wonder how discreet this woman was. Trying to think of that, of his men, and of his own conflict between manhood and magic and his love for Starhawk, of Starhawk’s own feelings, confused and stalled him. He managed to stammer, “I won’t do it to her,” but he wasn’t sure Opium heard. She drew breath to say something, but at that instant another sound came, the soft brush of a foot in the weeds nearby, far too near . . .