Authors: Elaine Isaak
Year 1248
City of Lochdale
IN THE
darkest valley beneath the foot of the castle, Prince Wolfram finally cast the demon from his mind. It would not come tonight, not on his way to visit the best lover a man could find. He slapped Dylan on the back, grinning at him in the darkness, and the restlessness receded but did not disperse. Perhaps another drink would banish it completely.
“How about the Copper Kettle, before we go our separate ways?” Wolfram wriggled his eyebrows.
Dylan laughed, tossing back his head to shout his laughter to the night. “Have you not had enough then, Wolf? Aren’t you afraid you’ll not—” Dylan broke off, waving a suggestive hand below his belt.
Wolfram growled back at him, teeth snapping the air.
“Oh, no, not you!” Dylan waved his hands a little more broadly than usual, then paused to steady his swaying steps. “I forget myself, my liege!”
Chin held high, Wolfram struck a regal pose. “You do indeed, my good man. Am I not the finest sower of seed across this great city of mine?” He waved a hand and nearly toppled, but Dylan caught him.
“Aye, Wolf, the greatest. You must be the luckiest man I
know.” He paused to peer at a street name roughly painted on the stone wall.
“I have just been thinking that very thing.” Wolfram leaned closer, throwing an arm around his friend’s shoulders. “You’re not using your wizard-stuff to spy on my thoughts, Dylan?”
“What, me? Would I do that?” Dylan laughed. “I’m just a bloody ’prentice anyhow. What could I do without my master getting on my back? You’re the prince, after all.”
“’Sright! You can’t touch me! Nobody can.” He smirked. “Excepting my lady, of course.”
“And which one would that be?” Dylan started their steps down a brightly lit street where buxom whores leaned out the windows to call to the pair.
Ignoring them, Wolfram cast his friend a warning glance. Uneasiness began to chill him again, but he shook it off.
“This one tonight, I suppose,” Dylan went on, returning the kisses the women threw down to him. “Though I think your mistress touches you more deeply.” He poked the prince lightly in the ribs.
Wolfram glowered. “You’re not to mention that. I only told you because I can trust you to keep a secret.”
“Oh, I’ll keep it, Wolf. But every now and then, I take it out and marvel at it. The prince seducing a woman twice his youthful age, a woman who turned her back on marriage, a woman who—”
“A woman of the Goddess, Dylan.” Wolfram’s cheeks burned, he glanced about wildly, but no one here could listen in, or understand their meaning. “It hasn’t happened yet, Dylan, and if anyone suspects, it could ruin her.”
“I’m sure it happens all the time, Wolfram, but you and her would be something special—”
Wolfram punched Dylan’s side, eliciting a wince and stifling the proclamation.
“Hey, you didn’t need to do that,” Dylan griped, kneading the bruise and eyeing him darkly. “Tell me you’re not getting into one of those moods, Wolf,” he added, voice cajoling.
“I’m not.” Wolfram stalked on, regretting that he had ever
spilled his secret dreams, even to his best friend. Suddenly a rabble of dark faces swarmed down the street, a group of Hemijrani refugees dressed in colorful rags and carrying bundles on their heads. Without their bundles, they would hardly have reached the prince’s chin. For a moment, Dylan was lost from sight.
“Watch your purse, Wolfram!”
“I’m watching,” came the reply as Wolfram pushed his way through the mob. Most of the men looked down, perhaps ashamed of the eye patches so many wore.
Dylan followed more gently, letting his eyes linger on the dark eyes of the foreign girls, who turned to smile back shyly.
Wolfram dusted himself off. “Bury the lot of them.” He checked his dagger, relieved to find it still in place.
“It’s war, Wolfram, or so they tell me. These people have no place to go. Your mother’s compassion—”
“My father’s legend,” Wolfram snorted.
Biting his lip, Dylan gave a half shrug, acknowledging that he trod too near his friend’s sore spot. “Whatever the reason. They do mean cheap labor, and the women—” He sucked in a breath and let it out slow, shaking his head.
“You think so?” The prince looked dubious.
“Oh, I know, you prefer redheads.”
“Watch it, or it’s you your father may be finding in the street in the morning!” He raised a threatening fist.
Dylan backed off, holding up his hands. “It’s not my fault he dragged you in that time!”
“Well you didn’t have to rub it in quite so much.” He scowled.
“I was joking!” Dylan’s face lit with a smile. “Just a joke.”
Wolfram scuffed his boot in the muck of the street. “A joke? ‘He’s the guard captain, not the garbage collector,’ I think you said.”
Biting his lip again, and letting it go, Dylan pointed out, “I also said I was sorry.”
Glancing away, Wolfram raised one shoulder and let it drop.
Dylan sighed. “Anyway, this is where we part company. If I’m late, the astrologer will have my hide.”
“What, you’ll miss seeing the moon with one of those gadgets?”
“It’s important work, Wolfram,” Dylan said, scowling. “We’re plotting the most complete map of the stars ever made, and constructing this clock—Oh, you don’t care, you’re just after the Love Star. When I’m done should I meet you?” He nudged the prince with his elbow, attempting a more cheerful tone.
“No, I might be a while. I’ll walk back alone.” With a halfhearted wave, Wolfram turned away. “Maybe I’ll meet a friendly pickpocket to lighten my way,” he called back over his shoulder.
“Goddess walk with you!” Dylan called after him.
Wolfram waved again without turning. Dylan’s mind was already off in the stars, he knew, following their patterns and charting the moon. As for himself, Wolfram had more earthly pleasures in mind. He longed for the peace and comfort of a woman who neither knew nor cared who he was, a woman who did not know the darkness that pursued him. He rounded a corner and trotted down a series of short stone steps. At the bottom, his lover’s door stood open, as if she knew just when to expect him. She herself stood in the doorway, wearing the linen chemise he had bought for her, her figure outlined through the thin fabric by flickering candles. “My lord, come in out of the dark,” she whispered, holding out a warm hand to him.
Smiling, he obeyed.
SOMETIME LATER,
Wolfram lay on his belly, his chin propped on his crossed arms, staring vaguely at a scrap on the floor. It almost looked like one of Dylan’s star charts. He thought of the Love Star and smiled. His lover slowly drew her long red hair along his spine, eliciting a shiver of pleasure. “I love your hair,” he murmured into the semidarkness.
She laughed, drawing her face near to his to kiss him lightly. This close, he could see the fine lines around her eyes—she was old enough to be his mother, but beautiful, and very good at what she did. She treated him merely as a man, like any other—not blessed with a saintly father, nor cursed by the Lady’s prophet. With her alone he could shed the weight of his own failings. She twirled a lock of his blond hair around her finger. “I’m glad. I do it for you, my love.”
He frowned, tilting his head sideways to look up at her. “Do what?”
“Dye it,” she replied, blinking. “But you knew that.”
“What do you mean?” The frown intensified as he gazed upon her face. A small, cold doubt began to creep along the spine she had so recently caressed.
She laughed again—and the sound did not seem so light to him—shaking her head so that the red hair rippled about her. “You know it’s not natural.”
He sat up abruptly, forcing her to move back on the narrow bed, nearly sliding her off onto the rough wood floor. The cold grew inside him, fastening itself with sharp claws of anger where some soft, forgiving organ should have been. The demon defending his heart unfurled. “No, why would I know that? I can’t believe you’ve been deceiving me!”
She stood up, crossing her arms over her still-lovely breasts. “Because you dye yours, silly, that’s how. I haven’t deceived you, any more than you have deceived me.” In the flickering golden light, she appeared suddenly both young and strange, no longer playful, any trace of softness slipping from her sharp features.
Wolfram narrowed his eyes at her. “I don’t dye my hair—I’m seventeen, why would I dye my hair?” Tension gripped his shoulders, the demon pounding inside his skull, struggling to get out even as he struggled to contain it.
She shrugged. “Dye, bleach—what’s the difference?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied, pressing his palms to his temples, staring at her like the whore that she was.
Her hand flashed out and snatched a lock of his hair, pull
ing it almost taut between them. In the other hand, she offered a lock of her own. “Feel the texture; it’s rough—natural hair doesn’t feel like that.” The flush of anger lit her cheeks. “If you must use me, my lord, that’s fine, but don’t think you can deny what I can see with my own eyes—what anyone could see who looked closely enough!”
He jerked his head away, quaking with fury and confusion—anyone? Anyone could see it, she said—anyone but he himself. The pounding in his head cried for violence, destruction, and Wolfram tried to force it down. She didn’t know what the problem was; no point venting his fury at her. He flung himself from the bed, shoving his fingers through his hair, then sharply pulling back his hand. He laughed, a dry little cackle. “Of course,” he said, “I should have known better than to lie to you.” He pushed past her to the table where he’d heaped his clothes.
Above the table, a small mirror flashed. In the dim light, he stared at his own face, at the blond hair tumbling over his shoulder. His hands clenched the edge of the wood, slivers piercing his uncallused fingers.
Slowly, she came up beside him, her pale face joining his in the polished silver. “You didn’t know,” she whispered.
“How could I not know my own hair was bleached?” he snapped at her. “I’m not stupid.” He grabbed a handful of cloth from the table, shook it until it was revealed as his woolen tunic, and yanked it over his head. “What do you take me for?”
“Nothing, my lord,” she protested, pulling a little back from him.
Jerking on his hose, he flicked a quick glance up at her. The fine cloth tore beneath his hurried fingers. Her arms pulled tighter over her breasts, her thighs pressed together, her head lowered so that she watched him from behind a curtain of that false red hair. She trembled, ever so slightly.
When he had met her, in the depths of a disreputable tavern, he had seen first her beauty, and only then the marks upon her from another man’s hands. From that first night, she had been his alone, he had kept her, paid rent upon this
hovel she lived in, bought her the pretty things she admired. Since that first night, months ago, there had been no marks upon her—yet now, she trembled at the sight of him.
Wolfram let out a pent-up breath between his clenched teeth. “I won’t hit you.”
Defiance and disbelief glittered in her eyes. “You never have, my lord,” she replied coolly, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. “But there’s always a first time.”
With shaking hands, he gathered his belt and slapped it around his narrow waist. Straightening, he caught the flash of his hair again in the mirror and growled at his own reflection.
“Perhaps it’s the soap,” she said lightly, standing still through some force of will he had not seen in her before.
He eyed her in the mirror. She didn’t know who he was; he had been at pains to keep it from her—if he never came back, she wouldn’t know how to find him. It didn’t matter whom she told about her young lover with the bleached-blond hair. Already, he missed the comfort of her arms. He shoved his foot into a boot.
“You aren’t coming back, are you?” she asked. “You’re leaving me because of this?”
Wolfram shrugged stiffly, pulling on the other boot, and turning to face her.
“What are you afraid of, my lord?”
“I’m not afraid! It’s just the soap, remember? Just a little paler than it should be, that’s all.”
“I’ll bet your mother has a locket,” she said quietly, her arms still rigid, gooseflesh beginning to creep along her naked skin.
He glowered. “She may have a dozen, who cares?”
“A locket with your baby hair in it. Many women save the first cutting.”
“Do you have any lockets?” he inquired, brushing past her toward the door.
“My lord,” she called. “Don’t leave without a kiss!”
Wolfram spun on his heel, grasping her face in both hands, and pulling her lips to his. The kiss left her trembling in the doorway as he stormed out into the dark and narrow street.
All the way home, Wolfram turned it over in his head, slapping the treacherous hair out of his face. It didn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter at all, and yet the darkness he carried with him spoke in whispers of dread. His mother would have a locket—she must. What if it were blond? What if the feel of his hair was just the harshness of the soap, or the bleaching of the sun? Of course it was. His wild imagination had again sprung to the wrong conclusion.
Perhaps the dagger hanging against his hip deterred the pickpockets who slipped in and out in the shadows, or perhaps it was that special darkness he carried with him that night, but he arrived at the little door unmolested. He turned a key in the ancient lock, and it slid without a sound. Wolfram pushed back the door and replaced the key in the cleft between two stones. When he shut the door behind him, even the starlight left him at last. No matter, he had come this way too many times to be uneasy in the dark, even up the narrow stairs, choosing the right passage. On the other side of the wall, voices murmured, chairs scraped—the sounds seeping through to him in the musty little corridor. He came to the temple stairs. He hesitated a moment—he could turn down, descend to the chapel and find Mistress Lyssa. She would know what to do, what to say to convince him that his very hair had not turned traitor. Abruptly, he turned upward, toward his mother’s chambers. At this hour, she would still be in the hall, or listening to the complaints of some tedious courtier. He came to the door, pulling it cautiously inward, so that it barely ruffled the tapestry that concealed it. Wolfram stood for a moment without breathing, waiting to hear if anyone moved within. Silence greeted him.