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 d
ry 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...
His head snapped up. Opium stepped swiftly away as Purcell appeared around the side of the siege tower with a horn cup of wine in his hand. Startled, the little Councillor dropped the cup, the wine dumping down his front, his hands fumbling nervously. “I—er—I...” He gulped, and then his eyes went to Opium and his narrow, delicate mouth pinched.
“Well...!” Even in the darkness, Sun Wolf was aware of what the reflected torchlight would show Purcell—the Wolf’s shirt and doublet parted by those probing fingers, the tender disarray of the girl’s hair and dress. A white square of handkerchief billowed into view as Purcell began dabbing ineffectually at the spilled wine on his gown. “Really, Captain, I do apologize...” He stiffly turned to go, and the Wolf reached him in two strides, blocking his way, massive and dark against the torchlight.
But what, he wondered, embarrassed, flustered, and furious even as he extended his arm like a barrier to the tower’s wooden corner, could he say without making himself look even worse? Don’t tell anyone would sound absolutely ridiculous. Other phrases flashed through his mind, the stock-in-trade of bawdy theater... It isn’t the way it looks... Nothing really happened... SHE was the one who tried to rape ME...
He was aware that he was blushing furiously.
He settled for the simplest. “You say one word of this to anyone and I’ll break your neck.”
Cringe and whimper as he might around Renaeka Strata, Purcell drew himself up to his fullest height—his dark cap reached just above Sun Wolf’s shoulder—and said with dignity, “What you do when you are off duty, Captain, is no concern of mine. Or even,” he added frostily, “when you are on duty—as you are tonight. But as Treasurer of the Council I feel obliged to dock your pay.”
“You can stuff my pay up your... Aah, get a guard or somebody with a horse and take this girl back to the camp.” He turned to gesture to Opium, but she had vanished like a shadow in the night.
He stood for a moment feeling overwhelmingly stupid, anger and frustrated lust eating at his soul, while Purcell gave him a coldly formal bow and walked back toward the lights of the inner ring where the slaves’ voices could be heard quarreling wearily over a supper of corn bread and gruel. The cup Purcell had dropped lay half in the bar of light that streamed from around the corner of the siege tower, an ordinary horn cup from the engineer’s cookshack. The reek of cheap wine lay heavy on the air.
Now why...? thought the Wolf, and after a moment’s thought strode after that prim, retreating form.
Purcell was climbing into his litter, assisted by one of his half-dozen personal guards while another one, resplendent in the daffodil tabard of the House of Cronesme, held an armload of furs to be tucked about his lap.
The Wolf strode through the group of them, peripherally aware that two were watching him, hands ready on their swords. “Why were you coming to see me?” he demanded. “Did you have information of some kind?”
Purcell’s cold gray eye traveled over him, taking in with slow distaste every untied lace and shirt point, the bared tangle of chest hair and the stains of grease and powders that still blotched his clothes. “No. Good night... Captain.” He settled back into the litter, pulled the lap robes up to his narrow chin, and jerked the yellow curtains shut. One of the guards mounted the fore horse, and reined it toward the hard-beaten track that led back to the city.
“And I hope your privy collapses,” growled the Wolf after the retreating cavalcade.
Later, alone once again and walking patrol in the dark, he reflected dourly that neither love nor magic was turning out to be something easily dealt with, no matter how desperately he might want them. He was beginning to have the mortifying suspicion that he was not particularly good at either.
“I should have stuck to breaking heads,” he muttered, shoving his hands behind the buckle of his sword belt and scanning the queer stillness of the dark hills beneath the hanging black of the clouds. “At least I was good at that.”
It was not until the following afternoon that news reached him that Starhawk was dying.
He left the engineering park shortly after sunup, and took the shorter way through the brown morning hills to Vorsal and the siege camps that surrounded it. The air was clear, but felt ominous and strange. Ground-mist hugged the stream-beds with their shrunken gurgles of water, but on the hilltops the wind brought him alien smells of sea and wind and sky. He hoped the storm fronts wouldn’t turn today, but it was odds on they would. Moggin had had twenty-four hours in which to rest and regather his forces. He would know about the mobilization, and guess the attack would be soon. Sun Wolf shivered at the thought of trying to work the weather again, exposing his soul once more to the strength of that shadow hand. The books might contain some clue of how to strengthen his defenses,
but, when he reached the siege camp, his eyes felt gummed and his head heavy from two nights with almost no sleep. He ordered the Little Thurg, who was the first person he met, to wake him at once if the weather looked to be changing, and fell into Dogbreath’s cot in all his clothes, rolled up, and slept.
And dreamed of Opium.
“Chief?” The voice was blurred with dreams. “Chief?” But he recognized the touch of something cold and hard on his arm.
His reaction, slamming up out of sleep, was hard and instinctive—grab, twist, slash with the dagger under his pillow. It whipped through nothingness, and as his eyes cleared he saw that Dogbreath, very wisely, had poked him with the butt end of a spear from a distance of six feet.
He slapped the heavy oak shaft aside in disgust. He’d had four hours’ sleep, and felt infinitely worse than he had when he’d stumbled into bed. “What the pox-festering eyeless hell do you want?”
“Message from Renaeka Strata.” The squad-leader’s thin face was more serious than he’d seen it, at odds with his coat of rags and scrap and the gaudy ribbons in his hair. “It’s Starhawk.”
He had ridden like a man driven by demons, scoured by guilt and fear. She can’t be dying, he though desperately. Not now. Not like this.
It was only last night that he had fully realized how desperately he needed her—what he was willing to do, or not do, to keep what they had for the rest of their lives. The thought of living without her was more than he could bear. With manlike illogic, he cursed Opium for a lascivious slut to ease the guilt he felt, as the thudding rhythm of the horse’s muscles worked its way through his thighs and trunk, and the white road dust stung his nose.
Not Starhawk. Not her.
But years as an expert in death would not permit him to think anything else when he saw the gray, sunken face against the exquisite linen of Renaeka Strata’s pillows and felt the cold, weak flutter of her pulse.
“Curse him,” he whispered blindly, sinking to his knees on the honey-colored tiles of the floor. “Curse him, curse him, curse him...”
The Dark Hand of Magic Page 13