by Kate Elliott
“How can you know it is patterned after a demon’s coil?”
She looked down.
“Sarai-ya?” He tugged on her sleeve. “How do you know? Is it something you read …?” A blush deepened the color of her cheeks. “The hells! You’ve seen one, haven’t you?”
He broke out laughing.
“Why do you find that so funny?” Her gaze flashed up to meet his with wary scrutiny.
“I thought I was a reckless troublemaker. I am the least of rule breakers compared with you!”
“My aunt—” She broke off, considered something, then went on. “There is a demon’s coil on one of the hills by the estate. For some years I have been making a study of it. From afar, of course! No person can walk on one although I would like to test that assertion.”
“Sarai!”
“Of course I could never speak to anyone about what I’m doing. Nor have I ever had an opportunity to observe any other demon’s coil to compare one with the other.”
He released her hand and reclined on his back, hands cupped behind his head. “I know where a demon’s coil lies shut away here in Toskala. Not that I’ve ever tried to reach it.”
She lay down alongside him. Her lips teased his ear. “Could we, Gil? There must be a way to just look on it without anyone knowing.”
He hummed, pretending to consider.
She kissed him lightly on the lips.
With immense difficulty he did not move. “You’re not trying to seduce me into defying all custom and law and taking you to a demon’s coil, are you?”
She hitched her body up over his, breasts brushing over his chest, thighs sliding over his hips. Every part of his body became much more alert and responsive.
“I’m not quite sure what would please you. I’ve only had … You don’t mind, do you? That I had sex with a woman before this? You did, too. You told me about Iadit.”
“You’re full of surprises tonight,” he said encouragingly, keeping his hands folded behind his head. “Tell me more.”
She unlaced his vest. “I’ve never touched a man before you, Gilaras. A Ri Amarah woman is only meant to touch the man she marries, no other. But my great-aunt has a trusted hireling named Yava, a local woman, not Ri Amarah. Yava has a daughter named Elit. Elit and I grew up together. We were lovers before Elit was called away to serve Hasibal the Merciful One. I am happy for her calling, but I miss her in so many ways.” She rested more of her weight on him. “Can I touch everything?”
“Please.” He grunted faintly, eyes fluttering. “Touch anything you want.”
She ran her tongue around his nipples with a practiced surety. Despite what everyone believed, it had been months since Gil had had sex with anyone besides his own hand. He did not have coin to pay flower girls and would not have paid for the pleasure regardless, not when his grandmother had raised him on stories of how when she was a girl she and her friends had visited Devouring temples where people went to worship the goddess as a form of holy offering. Coin cheapened a blessed and reverent act, she had said most emphatically, and once coin began changing hands, an act that should be a shared offering merely became a transaction that a rich person could force upon a desperate poor one.
Remembering his grandmother’s words he had to chuckle, hoping his own situation did not cut too close to something she would have disapproved of.
She drew back slightly, brow wrinkling. “Is something wrong?”
“I’m not going to last long,” he said on a broken catch of a breath, reflecting that honesty was the best gift he could give her. “Let me do what you want done to you first because usually the first time a woman has a man in her it is not always the most pleasurable thing for her, not like it will be later.”
“Will it?” she asked, fingers stroking up his erection in a way that made him glad there was cloth between her skin and his skin lest he embarrass himself right this instant. “Be pleasurable later?”
His voice was hoarse. “I like to think it will.”
“The best way to go about it is to try it and see.” She wiggled against him, the silk of her shift slippery against his bare chest. “I’ll show you some of the things Elit did that I liked.”
Since many of these involved his mouth on her breasts or his fingers inside her he was very much in charity with Elit by the time he worked through several interesting variations that Sarai suggested. Was this what it had been like back in days long since, when two people shared each other under the protection of Ushara the Merciless One, the All-Consuming Devourer? Under lamplight he enjoyed her and she enjoyed him.
When it came to the actual penetration he did not last long but she liked it better than he could have hoped, being well oiled. Afterward she cuddled up against him. He traced her scar. He really loved that scar because it seemed the talisman of their trust, the surprise that had cut into their reserve and allowed them to speak frankly and as friends right from the beginning.
She said, “Women don’t have horns.”
“What?” After a moment of confusion he realized what she was talking about. “I’m sorry I ever said anything about it. I wasn’t stroking your hair for that reason!”
“I never thought you were. I would like to try all that again, Gil.”
“Now? Or after we sleep?”
“Maybe after.” She yawned. “I barely slept last night, I was so nervous.”
He found the indoor robes set aside for them. Wrapped in the knee-length silk jackets, they stood on the screened balcony and looked over the palace garden with its lamplit pathways. He draped an arm around her shoulders. She fit perfectly, tucked against him.
The lower palace was wrapped around expansive inner gardens in whose elaborate landscape backstabbing, deal making, kisses, gossip, threats, and slander could be accomplished both in plain sight or behind a vine-draped trellis. He had not spent much time in the lower palace, preferring the freedom of drinking in the city with his friends, and he had never actually stood on one of the apartment balconies at night to look over the whole in a moment of peace.
He hadn’t experienced a moment of peace in years, not like this.
She opened her hand to reveal the brooch. Lamplight glinted along its lines; shadows brewed in its angles. Intensity scored her expression, making it very like the one she had worn in the midst of sex. “Is there really a demon’s coil in Toskala?”
Disquiet stirred in his gut. “It’s walled off and boarded away in the Assizes Tower in the upper palace. No one can get inside.”
“Can’t you get inside, Gil?” Her teasing voice was as provocative as the way her hand slid down his back. “Think of what we could discover if we could examine one up close!”
He chuckled, aroused again. “There’s nothing I can’t do. Let me show you, and we’ll talk about the demon’s coil and how to unlock a forbidden tower … tomorrow.”
26
Dannarah led her wing southwest out of Salya. She found it valuable to learn as much as she could about the home circumstances of each reeve under her command, and so she observed with interest as Reyad guided them to a valley amid the green Suvash Hills. Scattered herds of goats grazed on the hillsides, tended by youths who stared as the eagles swept low. She signaled Tarnit to stay aloft on watch and with the other two came down in open ground near a village. Its steep-roofed houses were set below terraced rice fields and mounded fields of bitter-leaf.
People left their work; children came running. By the time the three reeves had hooded their eagles and Dannarah had checked Slip’s jesses and hood to make sure Lifka had done everything correctly—which she had—several hundred people had gathered at a respectful distance.
“Stay with the eagles, Lifka,” she said. “Use the whistle if you need to get my attention or if Tarnit flags an alert. Don’t let anyone come close.”
A stout woman about her own age sang a greeting, everyone in the crowd gesturing along with the words: Be welcome, guest. Be welcome, child who returns. The greeting was so
old-fashioned that Dannarah did not recognize some of the words. A woman offered rice wine and rice cake to Dannarah. Several older women and men embraced Reyad, and then he was completely surrounded by children all gabbling at once. He bent to whisper in one lad’s ear, and the boy took off running, headed out of the village with a younger girl at his heels.
In procession the villagers led her to the village’s tiny assizes court, nothing more than a thatch-roofed shelter with benches set between two temples, one dedicated to Taru the Witherer, the god of growing things, and the other dedicated to Atiratu the Lady of Beasts. The temples were little more than open-sided sheds. A large, flat rock heaped with flowers lay off to one side, a typical altar to Hasibal the Merciful One who built no temples, not like the other gods. That was why Hasibal’s pilgrims always wandered: All of the Hundred was traditionally said to be their home.
At the thought of Hasibal’s players the memory of a woman’s face tickled at the edge of her mind, but when the archon invited her to sit she let go of the thought. Bowls of wash-water were brought, then trays with a murky soup, pickled radish, and slip-fried sprouts. By this time Dannarah had figured out that Reyad was the grandson of the archon. After asking for permission, his relatives swept him away to the largest house in the village.
“We have two stubbornly unresolved legal cases in our valley, Marshal,” said the archon, who remained behind. “Perhaps you would preside over a hearing.”
“Do no judges come this way once a year, as is mandated under the law?” Dannarah asked.
The woman sat in silence for a while, a custom Dannarah at length realized meant that she had nothing good to say about the local judges and thus would prefer not to criticize them in front of a person who was also an enforcer of the king’s law.
Dannarah coughed politely. “What are the cases?”
The archon nodded. “One is a boundary dispute.”
Dannarah smiled. “Of course. There is always a boundary dispute.”
“It has been a point of contention since my grandmother’s time. Fortunately my family is not involved.”
“The other case?”
The archon glanced toward her clan’s home with a flicker of irritation. Reyad was standing on the porch staring at the hills while his elders gesticulated in the manner of people trying to convince him of what he did not want to hear.
“A divorce case that has dragged on for two years.”
“A dispute over the settlement?”
“No. One of the parties refuses to return his half of the betrothal ribbons. But perhaps you may assist us, Marshal. Reyad is under your command now.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The girl was always unsuitable. Goatherders. Hill people. But he defied the family’s wishes and of course that sort of girl would leap at a respectable and wealthy clan like ours.”
Wealth? Dannarah glanced around the humble village. Compared with the palace, of course, they had nothing to remark on, but the people looked well fed, decently clothed, and the rice wine was good. In her years as a reeve Dannarah had learned that wealth could often be measured as lack of hunger.
“You want him to divorce her, and she is refusing?”
“No, she wants the divorce, and he is refusing. Can you not order him to obey his elders?”
Dannarah smiled wryly. “Verea, this is not a matter in which I can involve myself.”
The archon sighed. “Aui! Then perhaps you will consider the matter of the boundary dispute.”
“Yes, of course. If you will acquaint me with the case I can investigate it now. I have a new reeve who can observe and learn.”
“The young one? When I saw her I thought she must be a foreigner, maybe one of those Tandi merchants we see at Nia Port or a sailor’s daughter from Kost. But she is obviously a Hundred girl for she replied in the correct manner to the greeting. Exactly like my own children. You, however, are clearly outlander-born, Marshal. I mean no offense. It is just an observation.”
“None taken. I am born in the Hundred but don’t consider myself Hundred-born, as you are, verea. I’m of Sirniakan and Qin descent. I was raised in the palace and learned the customs of the Hundred only after I became a reeve.”
She spent a pleasant afternoon teaching Lifka about boundary disputes, pasturage rights, rockfalls on hillsides, streams that gouge new beds over the course of a heavy rainy season, and the stubborn intransigence of people who keep a dispute going mostly because they have little else to make themselves feel important. The two clans accepted her judgment, she suspected, mostly because no reeve marshal had ever before set foot in their village.
They spent the night, feasted by the entire village. Lifka sang and signed a version of the Tale of the Carter and his Barking Dog that no one here had heard before, enlivened by the Runt sulking jealously on a cushion.
Tarnit whispered, “She has good hands. I can’t tell a tale that well.”
Dannarah insisted they sleep under the assizes shelter because it was important for reeves to take nothing but food and necessary repairs in exchange for their services. That was a rule she strictly held. Her father had taught her that the greatest danger to anyone who gains the least scrap of power is the rot of corruption. Lifka took the first watch over the hooded eagles.
For herself, she slept restlessly, an unpleasant habit she had fallen into after her monthly courses had ceased. Thus she woke in the middle of the night with Tarnit asleep beside her and voices murmuring conspiratorially nearby.
She grasped her baton and eased up, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. Moonlight revealed figures pacing inside the Witherer’s Temple. She crept to the edge of the assizes porch and across the shadows to the thin wall. There, she crouched to listen.
It was a lovers’ quarrel.
“I thought you weren’t going to come.”
“I haven’t changed my mind, Reyad. Just give me the divorce and stop being selfish.”
“Please, Hetta. Listen to me.”
“Why should I? You are all cowards.”
“I’m not a coward.”
“All of you just let Auri and his favorites do what they did to women and you did nothing about it because you were all afraid you would be next.”
Dannarah blinked to get the sleep haze out of her eyes.
“I would never have let them hurt you!” Reyad’s indignation sounded genuine, if a bit whiny.
“We like to tell ourselves that story, don’t we? I left and came home because I was a coward, too. I should have stayed and fought. Those women had no chance to leave, not like me.”
“You are just one person, Hetta. Not even a reeve. What could you have done?”
“If everyone had stood against him it would have stopped. But none of you did.”
“I did.”
“You did not! Stop telling yourself that. Do you ever ask yourself how you got your eagle? I hate more than anything the way you lie to yourself.”
“I did nothing wrong! Anyway, the chief marshal is dead. I killed him.”
Dannarah woke straight up with a rush of head-clearing alarm. The hells!
Tarnit snorted in her sleep and turned over, still dreaming.
“What do you mean?” Hetta’s anger broke on the words.
“I sliced his eagle’s jess partway through while no one was looking. Then I loosened the hood. I knew Slip would get agitated because there was a big crowd and lots of angry voices. He’s a good raptor although not as steady like my Surly. Any decent reeve could calm that bird. But I knew Auri would get his harness all a-tangle for fear of looking an ass before so many people, including Marshal Dannarah and a prince! All he ever talks about is how the palace knows who he is, him an ordinary farmer’s son elevated so high because of his loyalty. He would never want to look bad in front of folk like them. I knew he’d rile the bird, and he did.”
“What do you mean, he did?”
“Slip killed him.” A rooster crowing would have sounded less cocky. “I saw
a chance and I took it. Now he can’t do what he did to any more women. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Dannarah put a hand over her mouth to muffle her unsteady breathing.
Hetta said, in a flat tone, “You’re a murderer.”
“You can’t possibly feel sorry for him.”
“Do you expect me to thank you?”
“I did it for you! You’re the one who said you wished he was dead!”
“Hush! What if you wake people up? The hells! How could you …? I want no part of this.”
“But Hetta—!”
“I won’t tell anyone if that’s what you’re worried about. Merciful One protect us! Just leave me alone, Reyad. Leave me alone.”
A figure hurried from the mouth of the temple, fleeing through the silent village. Inside, Reyad paced for long enough that Dannarah’s bad hip began to really hurt. She was too cursed old for surveillance. At last he stumbled like a grieving man from the temple and headed in the direction the young woman had gone.
With a soft groan Dannarah kneaded the worst of the ache out of her flesh, then staggered back to her sleeping mat. But she could not sleep. She turned the conversation around and around, like turning her tea bowl to study every side of its painted decoration.
As soon as the earliest risers began moving about hauling water and grinding grain, she nudged Tarnit awake. They walked to the village latrines.
“Still no sign of the wife, did you notice?” said Tarnit. “I think he’s too cursed proud to admit she doesn’t want him.”
“His grandmother believes he married beneath him, to a goatherder’s daughter.”
Tarnit’s laugh was so bright in the dawn quiet that a man hunting rats along the edge of a rice field paused to give them a warning stare. “After the stories we’ve heard from women who came to us from Argent Hall, I’ve sympathy for the young woman.”
“Auri’s dead now. We’ll change things.” A clever system of pipes brought a stream of water to a roofed washing area with blinds that could be drawn down for privacy. Dannarah rinsed her face and combed through her short hair with her fingers.