Fires of the Desert (Children of the Desert Book 4) (5 page)

The Palace took up as much room outdoors as in. There were the royal food gardens, flower gardens, and herb gardens, all interspersed with fruit and nut trees; the royal leisure-area; the lesser lounging spots, where benches and pavilions afforded shelter from sun and rain for courtiers and palace staff; even a small outdoor meditation spot, which for some reason had not been entirely destroyed during the Purge.

Apparently even priests of the Northern Church had liked a quiet area in which to pray from time to time. All they had done was to remove all traces of the `pagan’ southern religion from the area. Even Alyea had to admit that the difference, in the end, was minimal.

On sunny days, Alyea had often visited the meditation area herself; as it afforded no shelter from poor weather, she bypassed it today. She considered pausing to brood in one of the pavilions, but the grey of the day seemed to be creeping into her bones. She wanted to get out of the rain, out of the chill, into somewhere warm and comforting.

Her thoughts turned to Deiq, waiting for her in what had once been the Northern Church tower. Ironic, that the place she had hated the most out of the entire city of Bright Bay was turning into her refuge.

Oruen had been
almost
right, she mused: Deiq had a habit of bringing
changes
to any situation he became involved with. And those changes could be complicated.

She passed through the outer palace gates with an absent-minded nod to the guards, barely noticing that they’d opened the gates for her and bowed. Normally she would have smiled at them, perhaps even paused to say hello if she knew one by name, but today such small courtesies seemed unimportant against the problem of what she was going to do about her mother.

Pausing a few steps past and to one side of the gates, she admitted to herself that Oruen had been entirely right on one point: bringing Deiq to see her mother at the moment would be a bad idea. She’d have to handle the discussion alone, and she might as well do it now, while she stood within the Seventeen Gates.

She turned left, deciding to pick up a bottle of Stecatr blue wine first. It was her mother’s favorite—and, of course, one of the most expensive wines sold in Bright Bay. Perhaps that would sweeten the discussion.

Peysimun Mansion’s grounds boasted a tall fence and wide, sturdy gates that hadn’t been closed since the Purge; and even then, the gates hadn’t been guarded. But now they stood not only firmly shut, but attended by four burly guards in House livery of blue and green. Their expressions, under their rain hoods, ranged from surly to nervous.

Alyea didn’t have to ask questions to understand the situation: her mother, in the face of the king’s refusal to help, had decided to set her own restraints and refuse her daughter entry altogether. As she’d never seen the men before, her mother must have gone to the unprecedented extent of hiring mercenaries.

Idiot.
She shouldn’t have allowed Deiq to distract her. This could have been avoided—probably.

Two of the guards, older men with bristly, jowly faces and flat stares, moved two steps forward and a step closer together as Alyea stopped in front of the gates. The other two, both considerably younger, darted nervous glances at each other and actually backed up a step, provoking a snort of disgust from one of the older men.

“Sorry, lady,” one of the older guards said, tone indifferent. “Peysimun Mansion is closed to visitors today.” His cold blue eyes watched her as though sizing up her desirability as a bed partner.

“I’m not a visitor,” Alyea said cooly, crossing her arms, the neck of the wine bottle gripped firmly in her right hand.

Rainwater collected in a miniature pool around the hollow formed by her fist and spilled over her knuckles; she kept her grip steady, afraid she’d drop the bottle if she tried to adjust her hold. She couldn’t afford to look clumsy or awkward right now.

“I’m Lord Alyea Peysimun, and this is my home. Open the gates and let me pass.”

“Sorry, lady,” he shrugged. “We don’t open the gates for nobody, is our orders. Not even you.”

“Lord
Peysimun,” she corrected sharply.

He glanced over her from head to toe with a deliberate, slow insolence. “You don’t look much like a man to me, lady.” A smirk crossed his white-stubbled face.

“Good gods, my mother’s hired a pack of idiots to guard the gates,” Alyea said with as much stinging contempt as she could muster. “What a waste of money.” She caught his eye and snapped,
“Open the damn gates right now!”

He twitched, blinked; eyes hazing, he turned, reaching for the handle. His companion knocked his hand aside sharply, barking, “Stop that, Kei! What d’ya think you’re doing?”

The newly-identified Kei’s eyes focused. He swung back around to regard Alyea with a very different expression than he’d had a moment ago.

“How did you just—you’re a
witch?
Nobody told us you were a witch!” There was no condescension left in his tone, and his stare was a mixture of outrage and wariness.

“I’m not a witch,” Alyea said frostily. “I’m a desert lord.”

“Balls to this,” one of the younger guards said, already edging away. “We ain’t gettin’ paid enough to tangle with one of
them.”

“Stand!” the guard who’d stopped Kei from opening the gates barked. “You walk away, you’re
done
as a freewarrior, boy! The Hall won’t take you on another contract.” He eyed Alyea, scowling. “She ain’t gonna hurt any of us.
Are
you,
Lord
Alyea?”

“Not unless you make me,” Alyea said, not moving.

“Don’t plan to,” he returned, crossing his own arms. “Like the boy said, we ain’t gettin’ paid enough to tangle with a real desert lord. An’ the Hall is going to have
something
to say about that little detail getting left out, let me tell you.”

Alyea hesitated; but any fines levied would come against her Family, and part of her new job was smoothing over ruffled feathers.

“I’d prefer not to bother the Hall over a simple misunderstanding,” she said. “No harm done, after all—as long as you let me through those gates without any more argument.” She smiled. The older guards exchanged calculating glances. Before any of them could speak, Alyea added, “And you’ve certainly shown commendable integrity in following orders, and a quick reaction to a changed situation.”

The faint hint that a bonus would be involved—one that would go straight into their pockets, not the Hall’s—tipped it. All four guards bowed, more or less together, and stepped aside ostentatiously.

“We were told not to open the gates for nobody,” Kei said, looking steadfastly just past her right ear. “Reckon
we
won’t open the gates for nobody, right?”

Alyea smiled without humor. As she went by, she handed the bottle of Stecatr blue to a startled but visibly delighted Kei.

“Looks like I won’t be needing this after all,” she said, and pushed through the gates.

Peysimun Mansion fronted on a wide courtyard of grey and brown brick arranged in large, interconnecting circles. In the center of every second circle stood a giant clay pot spilling over with brightly colored plants, the centerpiece of each taller than Alyea. A rain-slick scattering of dead leaves made footing treacherous; Alyea slowed her pace, frowning a little. Her mother had always been insistent on keeping the courtyard pristine, and the weather didn’t seem so bad as to prevent the gardeners from cleaning up.

An uneasy chill working down her spine, she cut swiftly to the left, aiming for the servant’s entrance. A heartbeat later, primal instinct dropped her to the ground.

A sharp
thurrrr
cut through the air where she’d just been standing.

Something clattered to the ground well past her.

Still working on reflex alone, Alyea rolled, fetching up behind one of the giant planters, and drew into a tight crouch, palms flat on the ground. Three more arrows clattered on the courtyard brick.

An eerie silence descended.

Alyea stared at the scattered arrows in disbelief; then her thoughts snapped into sharp, unemotional focus. Her mother, for all her faults, would never try to kill her own daughter: which meant someone else was in the Mansion.

The gates seemed very far away, and across too much open ground. With a new, paranoid suspicion, Alyea wondered if the guards hadn’t given way and let her in a shade
too
easily. If so, getting out wouldn’t be nearly so simple.

She couldn’t hide behind the planter forever. As though to punctuate that thought, one of the gate guards peered through the gate at her, a drawn dagger in his hand. Without waiting to find out his intentions, she took a deep breath and leapt, rolling across the wet cobbles, to the dubious shelter of a planter closer to the house.

More arrows clattered around her. She crouched behind her new protection, panting a little and not at all sure that she was going in the right direction. If she’d tried, she could probably have made it to the fence and been up and over relatively fast. Rubbing her hands against her leggings, she thought about gripping wet, rusty metal and reconsidered that idea.

And even if she had succeeded in running away, what then? Involve the king in the matter, have guards called out to attack her own home, probably half destroying it in the process? No. This was Family business, not something for Bright Bay authority to meddle in.

She’d handle it herself.

A definite advantage of her new position was that a large planter stood between her and the gate now, blocking any straight-line shot that might come from that direction. But the more time she took to think about her next move, the more time her opponents would have to prepare for it. She launched herself from shelter again, tumbling across hard ground that ripped her clothes and scraped the exposed skin on her hands, elbows, and knees.

She ignored the stinging, gritty pain as trivial and made it to the side of the main building before the arrows had finished splattering across the courtyard. Three men rose from concealment as she arrived, long daggers in their hands; no doubt as to their intent.

With no leisure time in which to capture their wills, Alyea had no option but to fight.

As three more men came in behind her, she began to wish she’d opted for retreat after all.

Deiq read the letter three times, carefully sorting through for anything left unsaid; but Idisio had been brutally direct, even explicit, in a way that sent a shiver up Deiq’s arms. The young ha’ra’ha made no defense of his actions in his explanation: he’d killed a human by feeding—not a particularly troublesome issue to Deiq’s way of thinking, as the younger hadn’t been caught, but Idisio clearly loathed himself for it.

I hated myself for the same thing, a matter of days ago,
Deiq thought ruefully. But Idisio’s situation wasn’t at all the same as it had been with Meer; Idisio had been misled into the action by his mother and had no real blame to attach to himself over the killing. And after all, Idisio was ha’ra’ha; this would have happened sooner or later, like it or not.

Ha’ra’hain
liked
killing, when all the surface gloss was stripped away. Feeding from a desert lord was...adequate. A feeding that took an entire life...was considerably more than that. Youngers had to learn to restrain themselves, just as desert lords needed to rein in their passions and tempers after the change.

Deiq sighed.
I should have had that long talk with him before his mother got hold of him.

Too late now. Much too late, considering that the next paragraph outlined a bare-bones account of Idisio killing a ha’ra’ha: that had been his own mother—and worse than even that was the way he’d done it.

He fed on his own
mother.
Good gods...Talk about breaking every major Law!

Deiq drew a deep breath, shut his eyes, and allowed himself a heartfelt shudder. The Jungles would have Idisio under a death hunt when they heard of his actions, and the boy clearly suspected as much. He was continuing north to Arason, he wrote, to his mother’s cottage by the shores of Ghost Lake. He would continue writing reports on the northern kingdom under the name Gerau Sa’adenit, and had no plans to ever travel below the line of the Great Forest again.