“Why would you do that?”
“I’ve seen you before, a long time ago, and I can’t quite place you. Which House are you with?”
“The House of Gardner.”
“That doesn’t sound quite right.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I really must return to my mistress. I’ve tarried here long enough as it is.” I tried to go past him, but he grabbed my arm.
“Not so fast.” Our eyes met briefly before I glanced away. He swore and twisted me around so I couldn’t avoid his gaze. We stared at each other for a long moment before there came the clomp of boot heels on the steps above. He clapped his hand over my mouth and dragged me back under the stairs beside the upturned tray and teapot shards.
“You have beautiful eyes,” he whispered in rough Corcin after the footsteps on the stairs had faded into the bustle of the hall beyond. “I remember them well, Lady Eden.” I tried to elbow him in his gut, and his grip tightened. “Try that again, and I’ll take you straight to Her Majesty.” Finally he lowered his hand from my mouth, likely interested in seeing what I would do.
Not wanting to attract any more attention in this place, I didn’t dare struggle or cry out. Instead I hissed, “What do you want?”
“Ah, the answers to that question . . . where should I start?”
“What do you want with me, first of all?”
“I don’t quite know yet. I wasn’t expecting to catch a Landers today.”
My hand was somewhat free, so I trailed my fingers down his outer thigh. Not very far, but enough perhaps to distract him. He chuckled, a breathless warmth against my ear. “My mother warned me about women like you.” I massaged his muscles, appreciating his strength.
“Men’s thighs excite me,” I purred.
“Nice try. If you’d like a tumble, perhaps we can arrange something later.” I dug my nails into his muscles, and he yelped. “Wench.” He stood, pulling me to my feet. “Let’s get out of here. The last thing I want is for Jazmene or Toscar to see you.”
“Really?”
“I need your help, and you won’t be much use to me locked away.”
I followed him out, his warm hand clasped around mine. I couldn’t bolt from him here, lest the guards notice and perhaps detain me. So I trotted along in his shadow, meek as a wallflower struck dumb with shock at the invitation to dance. Near the south entrance, I tugged on his hand, feeling slightly ridiculous. I wanted to kick the smirking ass and get away, but not yet. There might be some use for him if I could continue playing this little charade.
“What?” he whispered.
“I need my cloak.”
“Oh.” We veered off to a small chamber on the right where servants hung their cloaks and stowed their boots and pattens. He released his grip on my hand long enough for me to drape my cloak over my shoulders and slide my pattens over my shoes. I had bought the pattens after I almost ruined my slippers on the snowy cobbles--whoever had made them had taken great care to polish the pale wood to a high sheen, a pretty pattern of vines and leaves carved into the surface. The iron rings on the bottom even had a serrated edge so that I wouldn’t slip on the ice. All in all, probably too fine for a servant’s wardrobe, but I could always say they were cast-offs from my mistress and leave it at that if someone asked.
As we went through the south entrance, the guards stared at my escort, one of them even grabbing his arm with a gauntleted hand. He paused, his chin high as he looked down on the guard with a haughty glare, his nostrils blowing smoke in the wintry air.
“Falken?” the guard said. That was right--Falken. I remembered faces and bodies, not names. I could hear Mordric’s tart comment that I should at least make an effort to remember both the man and his name if I’d taken the time to remove his clothes. But it had been over six years since Falken’s and my interlude. Much had transpired since then. I couldn’t be expected to remember everything, and what I did remember was at least interesting. For instance, Falken had the Numerian dragon and star tattooed in black ink on his left shoulder, the left side being symbolic of his illegitimate connection to the Numerian royal house.
“How dare you stop me, Kristar?” Falken shook off the guard’s hand. “And it’s Sir Falken to you.”
Kristar averted his gaze downward. “Sorry. It’s just Her Majesty is concerned about you leaving the palace without an escort.”
Falken grinned and lifted my hand in his. “I have an escort. See?”
Kristar spared me an impatient glance. “You know what I mean--an escort of guards.”
“Her Majesty is that concerned for my safety?” Falken’s tone was exaggerated just enough to sound sarcastic. “I’ll have to thank her myself when I see her again. In the meantime, would you like to accompany us?”
“You know I can’t leave my post.”
“Pity.” Falken chuckled. “He’ll miss some fun staying here, won’t he, my poppy?”
I only trusted myself to nod, and Kristar shook his head in response, the guard behind him barely repressing a contemptuous snort. Apparently Falken debauching palace servant girls was nothing new.
“Have a nice quiet evening, gentlemen,” Falken said, and his grin widened to a leer as he stepped down from the doorway, his hand tight around mine so I had no choice but to follow him.
The harsh ringing of my pattens on the street was the only sound I heard for several moments after our little encounter with the guards. I shivered and clutched my cloak against my body. I should be grateful they had only had eyes for Falken and had ignored me for the most part. However, I wasn’t used to being ignored. Navigating through this underworld required a lot of tricky dodging and hiding. I had thought perhaps it would be liberating to play the serving wench for a few weeks but instead I found it annoying. Men shouldn’t ignore me.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
We walked the Serpentine all the way down to the locks before we turned to the right and followed the river, ducking into the maze of cheap boarding houses and dives in this part of the city. The sun had set, the brief winter twilight shifting quickly to nightfall. I had considered pulling my stiletto on Falken several times in the last hour, but each time, curiosity had won out over fear. If I could be useful to him, perhaps he could be useful to me. However, stumbling over the puddles of filthy slush between the intermittent lurid glow of dirty lanterns did little to inspire confidence.
“Where are you taking me?” I demanded finally.
“I’m trying to lose the guards who followed us.”
“We lost them when we ducked into that dive and went through that alley ten minutes ago." I stopped. "Where are you taking me?”
He heaved a deep breath. “I have a message I want you to take to Mordric.”
“Why not take it yourself?”
“Because he has no reason to trust me--yet--and he won’t believe me. You, however--he’ll listen to you without killing you first.”
“He tried to kill you?” I started walking again.
“He might as well have. He left me tied up in the gutters--it took me two hours to get free. I could have been robbed, beaten--jackals roam those gutters.”
I laughed. “Is that why you were down there? To roam?”
His grip tightened on my hand. “I just wanted to meet with him, that’s all. He didn’t have to leave me there like that. Perhaps he wishes now he’d taken me up on my offer to help, now that Merius is locked away again. You know, we could avoided all this if Merius and Mordric had listened to me.”
“Oh, I’m so convinced. What do you want, Falken?”
His tone softened. “Selkie.”
Selkie--he must mean Safire. Men came up with the most ridiculous endearments sometimes. “What do you want with her?”
“The men in your family are fools--they hide her away, while all the time they could be using her--who knows what she could do, if her talents were allowed the chance to grow.”
“It’s a bit tricky using her in Cormalen, as you put it--the whole House could end at the stak
e.”
“That’s my point. Why send her back to Cormalen, where her talents will not only be wasted but could be dangerous to all? How is Merius supposed to advance at his own court, attached to a wife like her? She’ll only stunt his career, whereas she could be my salvation.”
Trustworthy or not, this dead king‘s bastard spoke a lot of good sense. “Did you say all this to Mordric?” I asked.
“Of course--that’s when he tied me up and left me for the jackals.”
Strange--if Falken’s argument made perfect sense to me, why had it not made sense to Mordric? Safire was hardly the wife Mordric had wanted for Merius, and here was a nice way to dispose of her and handle it so that Merius wouldn’t blame Mordric. Unless there was some angle to the situation that Mordric realized and I didn’t, at least at the moment. I could hardly wait to see him, talk to him, even if he was in a nasty temper because I‘d disobeyed him. Especially if he was in a nasty temper.
Falken veered down an alley, a single grimy lantern hanging over a deeply recessed doorway at the end. The doorway was so deep that we could both stand under the lintel while he fumbled with a large, jangling key ring. The door finally squealed open, and he winced. “They need to oil that,” he muttered. “We just woke up half of Midmarch.”
The muffled din of many male voices raised at once greeted our entrance. The language they used, whatever it was, sounded harsh and staccato. “Numerian?” I guessed as I trailed Falken up the spiral staircase made from massive slabs of dull black wood, lit with candles in cobwebbed wall sconces.
“You know it?” Falken glanced back at me.
Even if I did, do you think I’d tell you? “No,” I said aloud. “It just has a very distinctive sound after listening to peasant Sarns in the kitchens all week. Besides, I know you‘re part Numerian. I take it we‘re about to attend a meeting of the infamous Numerian rebels?”
He shot me that bright-eyed, overly familiar grin of his. “I’ll translate as needed.”
“Thanks,” I said. As if I would trust his translations.
On the third landing up, Falken paused before a door which practically trembled from the cacophony of arguing voices on the other side of it. Using one of the keys on the ring, he unlocked the door and pushed it open. The silence was immediate and overwhelming after all the noise that came before. I found myself shaking as he led me into the chamber and was glad I still had on my cloak. I would hate for these men to see me display such obvious weakness.
The chamber walls seemed to be made of eyes, fierce black gleams of eyes that missed little. These eyes tracked Falken’s and my progress to the center of the chamber, so intent that I wondered if they could burn holes through my cloak. I looked around. So many men, all brown-skinned, with black beards and mustaches waxed into spirals and curlicues, the way that men from the southern mountains customarily wore their hair. These shapes cast strange shadows on the plastered walls, especially when the men moved their heads. I wondered suddenly at Falken’s clean-shaven state. But of course, he was the rebels’ spy and liaison to the royal court and could hardly mingle with one and all as he did if he acted like a traditional Numerian lord. He fit in everywhere yet nowhere.
Suddenly, one of the men lunged at me. He grabbed my shoulder and flipped back the hood of my cloak, his eyes burning into mine as he examined my face. His hand bore down on my shoulder so hard that it felt like a sack of rocks was attached to it. I gulped air and tried to break eye contact with him, knowing that he wouldn’t appreciate such female boldness. Were all the Numerian men like this, this violent hunger blazing in their eyes? No wonder the women preferred to stay confined in the seraglio. I knew Numer was poor and landlocked, but such ferocity seemed a bit of overkill. Didn’t they know they could do more damage with the soft-spoken, gentle murder of good diplomacy than highhanded aggression? Highhanded aggression had its place--Mordric had perfected its use to an art--but these men did not seem to possess his hawkish subtlety.
The man gripping my shoulder glanced at Falken, a stream of Numerian invective (of course, it all sounded like invective to me, especially with him frothing spit on to his waxed beard) pouring from his lips. Falken shook his head and answered with a short, sharp explanation that sent the whole place roaring. If my hands and arms had been free, I would have clapped my palms over my ears.
As it was, my assaulted ears rang dully in the sudden silence that followed Falken shouting, “Clept, clept,” and waving his hands in the air. Then he started to speak, his voice quiet. I thought this particularly clever, for it kept the Numerians silent as they struggled to hear him. I tried to pick out individual words from his speech, but it was like trying to pick out individual notes from a lively, staccato chorus.
Finally, he paused, and the man still holding my shoulder said something that sounded like a question, judging from the upward tilt at the end of his statement. His voice at least was softer than before and didn’t seem to be full of swear words. Falken nodded and then glanced at me.
“He wants to know if you can procure Selkie for us?” he asked in Corcin.
“Perhaps,” I answered. “I’ll have to speak to Mordric first. I know what you yourself want her for, but what do these rebels want her for?”
“To bargain with Jazmene. Jazmene wants Selkie badly enough that she’ll finally sign Esme’s official betrothal to me if we promise Selkie in exchange for it.”
Interesting--apparently he didn‘t know Safire had joined Merius in captivity. “I don’t see why Mordric would object,” I said. “He wants his son back, and promising Safire in exchange for Merius will be a sweeter deal for him if he can gain the gratitude of the future king of Numer in the bargain.” It wasn't a lie, not really. It was a statement of what I thought Mordric would do, if he still had Safire to use in a bargain with the queen.
Falken’s teeth flashed against his brown skin as he grinned. “Future king? I like the sound of that. Tell Mordric what you saw tonight.”
"And what was that, exactly?"
"That I'm the leader of these rebels and not to be trifled with." He turned back to his comrades and quickly translated for them. The resulting celebratory roar of voices and boot stamping shook the timbers so hard that a fine mist of plaster dust floated down and settled like ashes in the rebels’ black hair.
Chapter Twenty-Eight - Mordric
The air of my chamber hung thick with it, that heavy, spicy, foreign scent she used to seduce men. I locked the door behind me and pocketed the key before I held up the candle. I searched the chamber with a glance, every nerve suddenly tingling. I hadn’t expected to see her--I figured she had snuck in here to spy or write a note or leave some whiskey and long since left, too wise to face my wrath. But there she sat, chair tipped back, feet propped on the table, her golden eyes glowing like a cat’s in the night. We gazed at each other for what seemed like an hour before I carefully set the candle on the bedside table. I found myself surprised I could move, even more surprised when I began to speak.
“I thought I made myself clear when we parted.”
“I beg your pardon?” She lowered her feet, the chair hitting the floor with a thump. “Clear? When your words contradict your actions at every turn?”
“Eden,” I said through my teeth. “Watch yourself.”
She laughed. “I’d rather watch you.”
My feet carried me around the bed, and my hands, stiff as talons, curled around her shoulders. I started to shake her, her laugh coming in jerky gasps. Damn her for laughing at me. I crushed her mouth under mine, swallowed the dark sweetness of her pipe smoke breath as my lips bruised hers, noting with grim satisfaction that her laughter ceased. Her hands clutched my doublet tight against my back, then slackened when I didn’t release her.
“Mordric,” she whispered hoarsely as she tried to pull away. “Can’t, can’t breathe.”
“Good.” I wrapped my arms around her and smothered her with another long, rough kiss. “This is my chamber. You‘re not invited. So you’re a
n intruder, which means whatever happens to you here is your own damn fault.” Then I kissed her again, relishing the softening of her grip at the nip of my teeth, her body yielding to mine.
“I have news,” she muttered, her eyes half closed and bleary, like she’d just taken poppy seed potion.
"What?"
"Let me breathe, and I'll tell you." I let her go, and she sank down on the bed.
When she didn't speak, I said, "If you don't start talking, I'll tie you up and throw you on the next ship."
"Falken did say you’re quite skilled with knots,” she said, her lips dipping in that mocking smile.
“He should know, the gutter rat. I left him there for the rats to eat. Pray I don’t do the same to you.”
“You wouldn’t leave me tied in the gutter.”
“I wouldn’t?” The whiskey burned a hole in my throat. I set the decanter down with a tooth-cracking clank. “I told you I would never tolerate a false woman, Eden.”
“I haven’t been false, just disobedient.”
“How do you know Falken then, if you haven’t been false?”
“He recognized me from when I was here before as a lady-in-waiting. And he wouldn’t have found me in the palace today if your fool of a son hadn‘t . . .”
“He found you where?” I barked.
Her eyes flared. “You heard me. For the last week, I’ve been in the palace, pretending to be one of Lady Gardner’s maids. I overheard today that Merius has been violent with the guards but--and this is a quote--’an absolute lamb with the women,’ that he’s not allowed anything sharper than a butter knife, that Safire apparently joined him in prison today--”
“What? Damn her.” My hands clenched into fists as I started to pace. “Damn her, I told her . . . damn that insane witch--she’ll be the end of the Landers yet. Why did she do that?”
"I don't know, but maybe I can find out. I’m going back tomorrow,” Eden said evenly, half raising herself from the bed.
“Like hell you are.” I leaned over her and pushed her back down on pillows.
Tapestry Lion (The Landers Saga Book 2) Page 50