And she wanted one; she was hot, sweaty and dusty, and the shaded pool in the center of the courtyard she shared with the others was appearing more inviting by the moment.
Only Sit-aken-te was there, and the lanky young woman waved languidly at Peri from where she was immersed up to her neck in cool water. Her body was invisible under the water-lily pads that covered the surface of the pool. For once, careless of the extra work for the servants, Peri stripped off her tunic and dropped it to the pavement, then sank into the cool water herself.
“A pity Lord Kiron is gone,” Sit-aken-te said lazily.
“How so?” Peri asked, with a faint feeling of guilt. Had the others noticed all the time she had spent with Kiron? Did they guess at the game she was playing? It was a delicate balancing act. Because Letis, along with the other demands she was making on her son, had wanted to present him with his wife-to-be as a fait accompli, and press him to wed her.
Peri was absolutely certain in her own mind that this would do her no good at all. She managed to persuade Letis to concentrate on what was, in Letis’ mind, the more important issue anyway: getting the family home back.
It had been a long and tiring “discussion”—it was an argument, but that was not what Letis called it. Patiently, Peri had pointed out that Jousters seldom married, to which Letis replied that Kiron wouldn’t be a Jouster once he had the farm back. That was when Peri had nodded and said, “So the important thing is for him to concentrate on that, then, and not get diverted.”
She hated being so duplicitous, but she knew that having Letis present her now would only mean that Kiron would lump her in with all of the other pressures his mother was putting on him, and that would spell the end to any thoughts of love.
No young man really cares to have his mother pick out his wife, after all. Perhaps the noble-born and wealthy were used to that sort of thing, but they could afford concubines and mistresses and more than one wife. A young farmer needed to be sure that the wife he was getting was one he wanted. And though Kiron was no longer a farmer, and probably never would be one again, he thought like one of the young men in her village.
Meanwhile Peri had continued her quiet campaign. But if the other women had noticed . . .
“How so?” the other woman laughed. “He is easy on the eyes, that one. And much more amusing than our sober trainer or our quarrelsome wingleader.”
So they hadn’t noticed. She smiled with relief. “Now that is a true thing.”
Her campaign was going well. Kiron sought out her company when he had time. He called her “restful.” She spoke always of things he cared about—dragons, mostly, telling him of Sutema’s antics, asking his advice. A man liked having a restful wife. Peace in the house; that was what they liked. A man liked to be deferred to.
It would be a strange sort of life. She could not imagine giving up Sutema, so they would be Jousters together, of course. What would that be like?
Hmm. Probably much like life now. Well, that was hardly a bad thing. Life now was very good, and she really could not see a way to improve on it.
“Hesh-ret is flapping his wings hard now,” Sit-aken-te said into the hot silence. “I was glad when he tired, because he had long since worn me out. I think I will persuade him to use those perches tomorrow.”
“You should use some other command than ‘fly’ when you want him to exercise his wings,” Peri warned. “You’ll want to use the word ‘fly’ later when he is really flying. I use ‘wings.’ But it really doesn’t matter what word you use as long as the dragon understands what you mean.”
Sit-aken-te laughed quietly. “Now that is a very true thing. Are you cool now? We could go study one of those scrolls Huras brought with him.”
Peri flushed. “I cannot read,” she said reluctantly.
Surely Sit-aken-te would stare at her in uncomprehending astonishment.
“I did not think you could, which is why I said we should study it together,” the young woman replied. “You are sensible and practical, and we can, I think, do a commendable job of sifting grain from chaff together. Unless you had rather go to placate that friend of yours.”
“Placate?” It hadn’t occurred before to Peri that this was what she was doing with Letis. But it was, of course. That was exactly what she was doing.
The lily pads moved a little as Sit-aken-te shrugged. “One doesn’t choose one’s friends’ friends. But I would not spend nearly the time with her that you do, if it were me. She does not approve of us, nor of your being one of us, and will not accept that you wish to be here. I would have reached the limit of my patience long ago. But then, she is not my friend. She may have many worthwhile qualities that I cannot see.” The other woman chuckled a little. “And I must admit, her voice grates on me. I never could bear people whose words say one thing, while their spirit says another.”
Peri blinked. “I must be missing something,” she said carefully. “Whatever do you mean?” Was this a priestess attribute again?
“Hmm. It is a matter of paying a little less attention to what she says and more to the tone of her voice and the look in her eyes, the way she moves,” Sit-aken-te explained. “She says that she is proud of her son, and yet I can tell that she is angry that he has risen to so high a place. She defers to us, and yet I can tell that she despises us because we are nobly born. Her words are soft and mild, yet her heart is full of bitterness and anger. I can understand why she would be so, of course, and in her place I should probably be just as bitter and angry. But this does not make her a comfortable person to be around. And if she would simply admit to you and to herself that this is how she feels, perhaps she could rid herself of some of it.”
“She lost much,” Peri replied, feeling as if she had to defend Letis now.
“So have others, on both sides,” Sit-aken-te pointed out with justification. “But—there, you see, it is not my place to judge. I merely say I do not find her a pleasant person, and I would spend less time in her company than you do. If you would rather—”
The other woman rose from the water, and reached for a cloth to dry herself, though it was so hot that the faint breeze dried her before she even picked the oblong of linen up.
“No, no, if you will be so kind as to read the scroll to me, I had much rather do that while the little ones nap,” Peri said hastily, also standing. “You do me a great favor.”
“Well, and I do owe you for far too much time you spent watching over my dragon,” the young woman replied, with a smile over her shoulder, as she shook back her hair and wrapped the linen around herself.
Peri did the same, feeling touched and a little surprised at the same time.
“Huras is right; we have been . . . hmm . . . taking advantage of your good nature,” Sit-aken-te said. “It is time to change that.”
Them-noh-thet, the Priest of Haras who had gone with Kiron the first time, had spent hours setting up elaborate ritual equipment to work his magic.
Rakaten-te, the Chosen of Seft, set up nothing but himself.
Kiron had more than expected the Chosen to ask him to find some other venue than the Temple of Haras and had resigned himself to moving all of the provisions that they had found to a new location.
Instead, Rakaten-te had dismounted—a bit stiffly, which was hardly a surprise, given his age—and followed Kiron into the temple by the simple expedient of keeping one hand on Kiron’s shoulder. He had stood in the middle of the sanctuary floor for some time, with his head cocked a little to one side as if he was listening to something.
“Properly cleansed and purged,” he had said at long last, with an approving nod. “I shall have to tender Them-noh-thet a compliment when we return.”
Then he had sat down where he stood, without any preparations, elaborate or otherwise, and apparently went off into meditation.
That left Kiron and Aket-ten to set up the living space, fetch water, prepare food, and hunt, all in blistering heat. From time to time Aket-ten would glance at the Chosen with resentmen
t.
“I don’t know why he wanted me,” she finally said, crossly, as she kneaded dough. “All I’m doing is acting as a servant.”
“So am I,” Kiron reminded her, thinking as he did so that being made a wingleader, the one thing she had wanted above all others, had not improved her temper any.
“Yes, but I’m having to cook,” she continued, looking down at the dough resentfully.
“So am I,” Kiron reminded her, as he banked coals around the pot of lentils they would be having for dinner.
“Yes, but anyone could have done this,” she responded. “Probably better than I could.”
At this point, it was clear to Kiron that Aket-ten didn’t want to hear anything logical, she only wanted to vent her frustrations. On the one hand, he could agree with her. After all, he was certain that, eventually, Rakaten-te would have magical need of Aket-ten’s training and skills. All he had served as was a kind of cart driver on a very superior cart indeed. And now his only purpose here was to attend to whatever need the Chosen had.
Aket-ten fretted and fidgeted, wondered aloud what she was doing here, and became more irritated and irritating as the chores they were doing to make things livable clearly made her feel as if she was nothing more than a servant.
And how would she feel in Aerie? he wondered. Perhaps that was the real reason why she had not wanted to stay there with him. There was too much drudge work for her. Now he began to be irritated with her, and some of his mother’s comments about the noble-born who had never known what it was to work hard began to ring truer . . . .
Perhaps he didn’t fit so well with her. Perhaps this was the true Aket-ten, nobly born, she who had never had to do without servants, who had never known what it was to take care of herself. Life at Aerie, life as the new sort of Jouster, was going to be hard for a very long time. Perhaps the feelings they had for each other could not stand up under that hardship.
Despite the bright sun, a shadow seemed to fall over them both, and his spirits sank further and further. He had been deceived, or he had deceived himself. Why should someone like Aket-ten waste any time on someone like him? He was nothing more than a novelty to someone like her. Exciting for a while, certainly, but after that, after the novelty wore off . . .
And what had he seen in her anyway? Oh, she was pretty, and he supposed she must be a good lover, though he certainly didn’t have anyone else to compare her to. But to listen to her whine about how terrible it was to have to make the bread that she was going to eat, to have to sweep out the spot where she was going to sleep—oh, it was maddening! He’d have spanked her like a petulant child if he hadn’t felt so leaden. It was just too much effort.
No, what he really wanted to do was just leave. Leave this place, this whining girl, this old blind cripple. Leave them to their own devices and let them take care of themselves without him. He didn’t have to be their servant. Why should he be, after all? Who had appointed them as his master? He wasn’t a serf anymore, to be loaded down with common labor.
He should go back to Alta. He would go back to Alta. He would do that right now, this instant! In fact, there was nothing in this world he wanted to do more than to go home, back to the farm, where someone else would take care of him.
He left the loaves he had been shaping, and turned to march out of the kitchen-court of the temple, into the east, heading home with a determination that nothing and no one would stop him. It barely registered with him that Aket-ten had done the same. And for a brief moment there was uncertainty—a flutter of a thought—Alta is not in the east, and the farm—but the thought was gone in the next moment, and the need to go east rose up and crested over him like a flood wave—
He saw the old priest stepping into his path and thought only with annoyance that he was going to have to shove the old man aside—
And then the Chosen of Seft lashed out with his staff and shouted a guttural phrase, and lightning exploded in his skull.
“I am very sorry about that,” Rakaten-te said, as Kiron sipped at a cup of some herbal stuff that was as thick as silt-laden flood-waters and tasted green. Whatever it was, Kiron hoped it would go to work soon, because his skull felt as if it was going to crack in half at any moment.
Aket-ten didn’t look as if she felt any better. There were black rings around both her eyes, as if someone had punched her, and her face was pasty. She sipped at a clay cup of the same herbal muck.
“Couldn’t you have shielded against that?” she asked the Chosen of Seft.
He shook his head. “Regrettably, I am finding that Them-noh-thet was correct. Something around here drains magic. Fortunately, mine is of the sort less susceptible to such things, but if I had set some sort of shields upon you, they would still have been reduced to nothing, and the result would have been the same.”
“Shouldn’t we go out there?” he asked. “Go to the spot where the townspeople were taken? We could catch whoever set this—”
Again, the priest shook his head. “We would catch only the slavemasters who had been told where to go,” he corrected. “And perhaps—not even then. I do not think that anyone is aware that we are here. I think it was simply set up in the full knowledge that sooner or later, someone would come to investigate, and when they did, the trap would close and they would walk out into the desert and die.”
Kiron shuddered, remembering his conviction that he had to go home, and that home lay in the east. He knew what would have happened had the Chosen not stopped them. He would have gone out and kept walking. . . .
“An insidious trap, too,” Rakaten-te continued, in a musing sort of voice. “The magic caught you both in moments of doubt, amplified those doubts out of all proportion, then offered you a way out of the bitter unhappiness it had created in your minds. You actually supplied what would have been the instrument of your demise. If you had felt a simple compulsion to walk into the east, you likely would have fought it. But instead, you had reasons to walk into the east. Reasons that were vitally important to you at the time.” His lips twisted wryly. “A master-work of magic.”
“Please tell me you broke it,” said Aket-ten.
His mouth quirked in a sour smile. “Oh, yes. I broke it. Which is a pity, because now I cannot study it. I can only tell you that there was more than one hand involved in the making of it. And more than one kind of magician.”
“The Magi?” Kiron asked, mouth going dry.
Rakaten-te sighed. “Now that—I do not know.”
FIFTEEN
“THE first thing is to find the source of whatever is consuming magic.”
There had been silence for a long time as Kiron and Aket-ten finished the last of the green muck and waited for their respective headaches to fade. Though “headache” was far too mild a word for something that made him want to crack his own skull open to let the pain out. Neither he nor Aket-ten had wanted anything to eat, and the Chosen had seemed happy enough with bread and some cold meat. Well, that would just leave the pot of cooked lentil stew for the morning; it would certainly stay warm enough in the ashes, and if the bottom was burned to the pot, no matter; there were a hundred pots where that one had come from.
They sat in silence for a very long time, as the oblong of sun coming in through the ventilation slit crept up the wall.
When the silence was finally broken, it was with those words from Rakaten-te.
“That seems logical,” Kiron said slowly, trying to be very careful not to set his head off again. He worked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, trying to get the taste off. “And there must be a way in which we can be useful in that hunt, or you never would have said anything about it right now. Correct?”
“Correct.” The Chosen’s face was unusually hard to read because of the bandage across his eyes, so Kiron had not a clue as to what he was actually thinking. “In a moment, you will begin to feel sleepy. You should go to rest as soon as you do. You will need all your senses alert in the morning.”
Right on cue, Aket-ten yawn
ed, and he found himself yawning in return. “Go,” said the Chosen, then a very faint suggestion of a smile crossed his lips. “You feared I had selected you as little more than my servants. I assure you, I pondered all my choices with extreme care. I need the two of you, specifically. You will find yourselves using skills you did not even know you possessed.”
Ah, Kiron thought. Grand. So now he was going to be mucking about with magic, which was perhaps the very last thing he wanted to do. He didn’t much like it, he didn’t much trust it, and truth to be told, if it weren’t for the useful things it could do like heating the sands of the dragon pens and making the cold rooms, he could well do without it.
He got up carefully and offered Aket-ten a hand when she didn’t move. She looked up at him, sighed, and took it. The only lamps were here, in the sanctuary, and they only lit the center of the room where the Chosen was, and where, since he had directed them to place his pallet there, he would presumably sleep. But there was enough of the fading twilight for them to find their way into the chamber they had taken to sleep in—not one of the inner chambers, but one that had probably once housed servants, at the back of the temple. It opened onto the kitchen-court, which suited Kiron fine. The wind off the desert that carried away the kitchen smells also served to cool their room.
Their room. Without thinking about it, they had placed their pallets together, in the same room. But after this afternoon . . . she had surely had similar thoughts to his, unflattering at best, downright hostile at worst. It seemed almost impossible to span the gulf the things he had been thinking had cut between him and her. She didn’t know what he had been thinking, of course, but she could surely guess. And the worst part, perhaps, was that there was a grain of truth in all of it.
He dreaded what she was going to say.
But, in fact, she said nothing. She only shoved their pallets together with her foot and collapsed on one. And when he gingerly laid himself down on the other, she turned to him and put her arms around him, slowly, as if they were weighted with stones and she could hardly move them.
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