The Dragon Revenant (15 page)

“Indeed? How much do you want for it?”

“Two zotars only, for one as lovely as you.”

“Bandit! I’ll give you ten silvers.”

The haggling was on in earnest. At the end, Alaena had the pin for twenty silvers, about a sixth of the asking price. Rather than having the man wrap it, she turned and pinned it onto Rhodry’s tunic, near the collar.

“A barbarian trinket for a barbarian,” she said, smiling. “I rather like the effect.”

“Thank you, mistress.” Rhodry had learned that gifts like this were his to keep, even if he chose to turn them into cash some day. “I’m flattered you’d think so well of me.”

“Do you know what kind of metal that is?”

“Well, yes. I had a knife made out of it once. In the Deverry mountains are little people called dwarves, who live in tunnels and make precious things out of strange metals like this kind of silver. Some of their trinkets have magic spells on them. Maybe this one does, too, but we won’t find out unless it chooses to show us.”

“How charming you are when you want to be.” She laughed and reached up to pat his cheek. “What a darling story! Now let’s find something for Disna.”

Eventually she found a pair of long gold earrings, shaped like tiny oars, that she pronounced suitable. Rhodry took the parcel and started to follow her out of the marketplace, but again she had him walk beside her.

“That was fun, but now everything wearies me again.” She sighed gently. “Do you think I should marry Pommaeo?”

The question took him too much by surprise for him to think of a properly phrased answer. He gawked at her while she laughed.

“Well, I think he’d be mean to you—and far too interested in Disna,” she said at last. “So perhaps I won’t. Besides, he can be the most wearisome thing of all when he wants to.”

At that she moved ahead and let him walk behind until they reached the fitter.

When they returned to the house, Alaena closeted herself in her bedchamber with Disna while Rhodry went on to the kitchen to haul in firewood for the evening meal. In some half an hour Disna rushed in, the earrings glittering as they framed her face in a most appealing way.

“Guess what? The mistress won’t marry that awful Pommaeo after all. She’s going to ask Mistress Malina to find her other possible suitors instead.”

The staff raised a small, dignified cheer.

“My thanks to holy Zaeos, to all the Goddesses of the Many-Starred Sky, and to the Wave-father,” Vinsima said. “Any member of Mistress Malina’s family is bound to be a fair-minded and generous man.”

“I think,” Porto said, “that we may have some extra wine with the evening meal. To toast the gods for smiling upon us if nothing else. Girl, does the mistress require anything?”

“Yes.” Disna glanced at Rhodry, her smile disappearing in an oddly abrupt way. “She wants you to run an errand. She’s in her bedchamber at the moment.”

Rhodry assumed that he was to take a note over to Malina’s, but when he came into the chamber, he found Alaena sitting, as carelessly as a girl, on the floor in front of her jewel chest. When he hovered uncertainly in front of her, she motioned for him to sit down, too, with a flick and a point of one slender hand. Beside her on a cushion lay a tangle of emerald necklaces and two heavy gold arm bracelets.

“Pommaeo gave me these. I want you to take them over to the temple of Selenta as a gift to the priestesses. They run an orphanage, and they can sell these off a bit at a time when they need coin.”

“Very well, mistress. Are you going to give me away, too?”

Alaena laughed in a peal of musical amusement.

“No, I don’t think so, really.” She reached up and put her hands on either side of her face. “Well, come along. Kiss me.”

More in shock than pleasure, Rhodry kissed her on the mouth.

“You do that much better than Pommaeo ever did. Yes, I think I definitely like the slave better than the stupid master.” She glanced at the jewelry beside her. “Oh, that can wait.”

The meaning was unmistakable, but Rhodry hesitated, half-panicked. All his intuitions were screaming that it would be very unsafe for both parties if a slave had an affair with his mistress, no matter how common it was for men to take their female slaves. No doubt it’s worse for the slave, too, he thought; I’ve no desire to end up getting flogged in the public square or suchlike.

“How can you look so shy?” She was grinning at him in her wicked way. “What about all those other women I saw in your tiles?”

“They weren’t as far above me as you are. You own me body and soul.”

“Then you’d best do what I want, hadn’t you?”

This time she reached up and kissed him. The hungry feel of her mouth, the soft warmth of her body, the way she pressed herself against him, all conspired to made him forget that he’d ever thought this a dangerous idea.

From that time on, Alaena would often summon him to her bedchamber on one excuse or another or even tell him to slip out of bed at night and join her. Yet most of the time, she treated him exactly as she had before, as an exotic servant who often needed a good slap to teach him a lesson. Although he was glad enough of the sexual comfort she was giving him, Rhodry honestly wished that the affair had never begun. On the one hand he felt that his lovemaking was just another of the well-trained footman’s dudes; on the other, he knew that it threatened his secure niche in the household. What if she tired of him and decided to sell him off to remove an embarrassment? Although Alaena realized his reluctance, it amused rather than annoyed her. She liked ordering him into her bed, and once he was there, he could never refuse her.

Since at night he was creeping out of the room they shared, he had no doubt that Porto knew what was happening in the mistress’s bedchamber, just as Disna did, though neither of them betrayed a thing, not by one word or gesture or giggle. Once or twice, though, Rhodry overheard Porto making a sharp remark to one of the other slaves that was obviously designed to keep the scandal within strict limits. Finally Rhodry was sick enough of feeling shamed to bring the matter out into the open. He was restacking the woodshed one afternoon when Porto came out to tell him that there would be guests for dinner that night.

“You’ve done a good job on the shed, boy, and I’m afraid it really needed it. I’m getting too old for that kind of thing. You do all your work well.”

“Thanks. Yes, I’m sure I do. All of it.”

Porto stiffened, his eyelids flickering.

“Oh by Zaeos and all your gods!” Rhodry burst out. “Do you think I like these goings-on? I’m scared sick.”

“You’re sensible, boy. More so than our poor little mistress.”

“Tell me something, will you? How much trouble is there going to be over this? I don’t want to be beaten to death in the marketplace just to set a good example for every slave on the cursed island.”

“Now, now, I doubt it’ll come to that. Alaena’s so rich that no one’s going to interfere, not even that brother-in-law of hers. Without the commission she pays him he wouldn’t live very comfortably. But there’s going to be nasty talk if this gets spread around, and somehow or other, things always do get out, don’t they? No matter how careful we all try to be.” He sighed, shaking his head. “You’d best pray to all the Holy Stars that Pommaeo never hears of this. A clever man, of course, can help the goddesses answer his prayers.”

“By keeping his mouth shut and watching every step he makes?”

“Just that. And by making himself well-liked. If any of the mistress’s friends tip you, you might consider spending part of it on Vinsima.”

“Very well. And Disna’s never going to carry a heavy load upstairs again, not while I’m within reach of it.”

On a day sticky with a cool drizzle Jill and Salamander arrived at the harbor town of Daradion. Since it was too late in the day to question the harbormaster about the
Gray Kestrel
, they found a room in an inn, then went down to the evening market as soon as the rain stopped. Jill found the wet weather such a pleasant change that she was shocked to hear the citizens complaining bitterly about the cold and damp. The market was nearly deserted, with over half the stalls empty and only a handful of customers hurrying along on brisk business.

“Well, there won’t be much use in putting on a show tonight, will there?” Salamander remarked with a certain gloom. “I’d forgotten how the Bardek folk carry on about the weather.”

“You’d think we were in for howling snows, truly.” She paused to grab her gnome, who was splashing through a filthy gutter puddle. “How are we doing for coin?”

“We’ve got enough to pay our passage over to Surtinna, but we can’t go first class.”

“That hardly matters.”

“It does. Cursed if I’ll spend days and days crammed into the common hold with merchants and other riffraff.”

“Then you’d best think up a show you can do in daylight, hadn’t you?”

“Now that, oh beauteous handmaiden, is an excellent idea. Hum. Colored smokes might work. And I could have some sylphs carry a scarf through the air—it’d look like it was flying of its own accord. People would think I was doing that with black wires, no doubt. And how about mysterious music from unseen sources? Possibilities—truly, I see possibilities.”

For the rest of that evening, Salamander brooded over his new show. Every now and then he would make some alarming noise, or fill their inn chamber with vast illusions of red and green smoke, but mostly he left Jill to her work. By then, she was gaining a remarkable degree of control over images, enough so that she was forced to admit her natural aptitude for the craft. Once she snapped a remembered object into her mind, she could turn the image this way and that, looking at it from all sides and moving it so that it seemed she was seeing it first from above, then below. That night she stumbled across a particularly interesting trick. She was visualizing the small leather sack in which Salamander carried their coin, and in her mind she laid the open sack on a table so that she could peer inside it. All at once she felt that she was only a few inches tall, standing on the table and looking into the yawning mouth like a cave. Startled, she lost the image immediately, but it seemed important enough for her to disturb Salamander, who was producing an effect of sunset clouds on the ceiling. He let the illusion dissipate and listened carefully.

“This is real progress indeed, turtledove. You’re beginning to get to the important part of the work, so don’t lose heart now.”

“Oh, don’t trouble yourself about that. This is the most interesting thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

He let his jaw drop in honest surprise.

“You think it’s interesting? Ye gods, you
are
marked for the dweomer sure enough!”

“Well, not the exercises themselves. I can see how they must have driven you absolutely mad with boredom. It’s the whole thing, truly, everything that’s happened to me this summer. I’m beginning to see where … where what? It’s so cursed hard to put into words! But where doing things with my mind like this might lead, and it’s … well, it’s like the day my Da came and took me from our village. There was a whole world just down the road, and here I never even knew.”

By the morrow morning, the rain and the clouds were gone when Jill and Salamander went down to the harbor, a semicircular bite out of cliffs that dropped straight down to a narrow stretch of white beach. Along the cliff-tops, radiating out from an enormous wooden longhouse with statues at either end, was a crowded scatter of booths and stalls.

“Is that a temple?” Jill pointed at the longhouse.

“It is, to Dalae-oh-contremo, god of the sea. Actually, he’s the god of all sorts of other things, too, including for some odd reason unjustly treated slaves.”

“There’s some provision in the laws for that, then?”

“Of course. Don’t Deverry bondsmen have rights that their lord can’t cross?”

“Well, but bondsmen aren’t slaves.”

“Oh come now!” Salamander snorted profoundly. “They can’t be sold away from their land or their families, true, but free? You jest, my turtledove. Of course, there aren’t many bondsmen left in Deverry anymore, so no doubt you’ve never thought much about them.”

“Well, I haven’t, truly. Here, were there once a lot of them?”

“On every lord’s manor, or so I’ve been told. Now it’s pretty much only the King who holds bound-land. I don’t know why things changed, but I’m blasted glad they did. Do you know why slavery is such a bad thing, my turtledove?”

“Well, it’s cursed unfair.”

“More than that. It makes men grow used to being cruel and to justifying their reasons for being cruel. That way lie the paths of evil.”

He spoke so quietly, with none of his usual jests or affectations, that Jill was forced to remember the real power underlying his jokes and foppery.

Since the departures and arrivals of all ships were publicly posted outside the harbormaster’s office, they found out easily enough that a ship called the
Gray Kestrel
, owned by a certain Galaetrano, had just returned from a run over to Ronaton on Surtinna. After some searching they found Galaetrano himself, an enormous bronze man with a shock of straight black hair, sitting with some of his crew in a wine shop at the edge of the marketplace. He was returning to Ronaton on the morrow, with plenty of room for two more passengers and a couple of horses, especially if the passengers wanted to pay for a first-class passage. Salamander bought wine all round, told a couple of his less-than-delicate stories, and got everyone talking at great length about life in general and the shipping trade in particular. Almost at random, or so it seemed, the captain himself began telling them about someone named Pommaeo, a regular passenger who had made his last trip over with a rare barbarian slave.

“He paid twice what the man was worth, too, he told me, just to get him for a courting gift. As far as I can tell, this woman he’s after inherited a fortune.”

“Oh, so that’s why he’d go all that way just to find a wife,” Salamander said, carelessly. “She must live right down in Ronaton, huh?”

“Well, no.” The captain suddenly laughed. “You know something? He never did tell us where she lives. Just realized that myself. A sly dog, that one. If you know a rich widow, you keep her to yourself.”