Alenor wanted to cry. She wanted to roll back time. She wanted things back the way they were, when she loved Kirsh and thought that he loved her. She wanted to make it better but knew that she never could. Things had deteriorated too far for it ever to be truly right between them. They were barely even friends now.
“I must know where you’re going,” she insisted. “When your father finds out about this—and you can be certain that he will—I must be able to convince him that I knew about and approved your departure. He’ll get suspicious otherwise.”
Kirsh was silent for a moment, considering her words, and then he nodded slowly. “You’re right. It would look better for both of us that way.”
“Where are you going, Kirsh?”
“Omaxin,” he told her, the news slicing through her like a sword dipped in acid. “The High Priestess and I are going to Omaxin.”
Alenor managed to keep her composure for the next few hours. She even rode down to the wharf to see Kirsh off with Dorra and Jacinta, maintaining the fiction that the young Queen of Dhevyn and her prince consort were happily married and deeply in love. Kirsh climbed down from the open carriage and turned to kiss her good-bye, mostly for the benefit of the onlookers who had gathered to watch. She turned her face at the last minute so his kiss landed on her cheek. As she looked up, she saw Marqel standing on the deck of the High Priestess’s ship watching them. She was too far away to see the expression on the Shadowdancer’s face, but she could feel the other girl’s eyes boring into her.
“Be careful, Kirsh,” Alenor said.
He looked surprised. “I will.”
“Have a good journey.”
He nodded and turned away, heading for the ship. Alenor watched him climb the gangway, watched him greet the High Priestess and then walk over to stand next to Marqel as the sailors began to get the ship under way. He said something to Marqel that made her laugh, and then he turned and walked aft to speak to the captain.
“We shouldn’t sit here baking in this sun,” Dorra warned. “It will ruin your complexion.”
“Nobody wants a freckled queen,” Jacinta added wryly, with a wink at Alenor. There had been no time to explain to Jacinta what had gone on, but her cousin could sense something was wrong.
Alenor tore her gaze from the ship and looked at her companions. “You’re right. We should get going. Take us to the barracks, Hugo!”
The coachman turned the open carriage around and headed back toward the palace through the city. Alenor smiled and waved to the people lining the streets as they went.
“The barracks, your majesty?” Dorra asked with a raised brow.
“One of the mares foaled yesterday, Dorra,” she explained. “She had a splendid colt, I hear. Alexin promised to show him to me.”
Dorra sighed heavily. “Your majesty, I really think it’s time you outgrew this childish fascination you have with horses.”
“But he’s only a day old! He’ll be so cute!” she declared, hoping she sounded like the child Dorra obviously thought she was. “Don’t you want to see him, too?”
“Not at all, your majesty. I can’t think of anything worse than standing around a smelly stable getting all misty-eyed about a beast of burden.”
“We can return to the palace in the carriage, then,” Jacinta suggested. “Alenor can have them saddle Circael and she can ride back to the palace after she’s seen the new baby.”
“That’s a splendid idea! Is that all right with you, Dorra?”
The Senetian woman let out another long-suffering sigh, but she did not object to Jacinta’s arrangements. With relief, Alenor settled back into the soft leather upholstery, her eyes fixed on the road ahead, deliberately not even glancing in the direction of the Queen’s Guard who flanked the carriage.
Only a little while now, she told herself. You can hold it in a little while longer.
Alexin had not been part of the guard to escort Kirshov and the queen to the docks, but he came out to greet her as soon as he learned that the queen had arrived at the barracks. She allowed Dargin Otmar, the guard’s master-at-arms, to hand her down from the carriage, issued orders to take Dorra and Jacinta back to the palace and then turned to look at Alexin. He must have seen the desperation in her eyes, but he gave no outward sign of it.
“This is a singular honor, your majesty,” the master-at-arms told her as the carriage turned through the gates back toward the palace. “To what do we owe this unexpected visit?”
“Alexin informs me you have a new recruit, my lord.”
Dargin turned to Alexin in confusion. “New recruit?”
“I promised to show her majesty Sunchaser’s new colt,” he explained.
“Ah!” the big man laughed, sounding a little relieved. “You should have sent word on ahead, your majesty. But if you’d like to wait for a moment, I will have the stables readied ...”
“Please, there’s really no need,” she assured him. “I’m not so squeamish that I can’t handle the smell of a bit of manure. Will you show me, Alexin?”
“Of course, your majesty.”
Alexin led the way to the stables as Alenor forced herself to smile in acknowledgment of the numerous salutes she received as they passed the other Guardsmen. Alexin offered her his arm and led her past the lunging yard to the small stables reserved for the mounts that required isolation from the rest of the herd. As they stepped into the cool dimness of the stalls, Alexin glanced around to ensure they were alone, and then turned to her with concern.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Alenor suddenly discovered she was crying. “We’ve got trouble, Alexin. Big trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“Belagren and Kirsh are going to Omaxin.”
Alexin was silent for a moment. “Do you know why?”
She sniffed as she shook her head. “Kirsh just said he had something important to do. It’s a coincidence, isn’t it? There’s no way they could know ...”
“Shh!” Alexin warned, glancing around nervously. “I’ll get a message to Reithan,” he promised in a low voice. “But I’m afraid there’s no way to warn ... anyone else.”
“But if they find him there ...”
“Dirk’s a smart boy, Alenor. I’m sure he’ll be able to manage something.”
“I’m so scared, Alexin,” she admitted with a sob. “I nearly died when Kirsh told me where he was going. It was all I could do not to burst into tears right then. I’m no good at this. I can’t even lie convincingly.”
Alexin smiled at her, and then—somewhat hesitantly—he put his arm around her, as if sensing her need for comfort. “You’re doing just fine, Alenor,” he assured her softly.
She let him hold her for a moment, just relishing the feel of his embrace. Then she suddenly realized what would happen if anybody chanced upon them in such a compromising position.
“I’m sorry,” she said, stepping away from him. “I shouldn’t risk your life just because I’m a coward.” She wiped her eyes, sniffed back the rest of her tears and squared her shoulders with determination. “You’d better show me this colt, Captain, or people will start to think we’re doing something improper. Do I look like I’ve been crying?”
“Yes,” he told her with a small smile. “But your love of horses is becoming quite legendary around here. Nobody will think it odd that you cried with happiness of the birth of a foal.”
“And you’ll get a message to ... our friends?”
“The first chance I get.”
“What would I do without you?” she asked, with a wan smile.
“Let’s go look at this colt before someone sees us like this and you get to find out,” he suggested.
Chapter 55
Dirk!” Tia’s voice echoed eerily off the smooth curved walls of the Labyrinth. There was a quiver in her voice that he only ever heard when she entered the darkness.
“I’m down here by the gate!” he called back, resisting the temptation to add: “Where else would I be?”
; The flare of light from her torch appeared a few moments before Tia did.
“You’re spending far too much time in this damn tunnel,” Tia complained as she stepped into view. “Are you any closer to figuring it out?”
Dirk shuffled the notes he had made around, and then shrugged. “I’m guessing that I have to hit each of the six numbers in sequence.”
“We figured that out the day we found it,” she reminded him. “What’s taking so long?”
“Well, there are six different numbers I can choose to hit first. After I’ve chosen the first one, I’ve then got five different numbers to choose from and so on until I have only one choice for the last number. Fortunately, there are only six numbers and they’re all different, so assuming I only have to hit each number once, there are only seven hundred and twenty possible combinations. All I have to do now is work out which one of those seven hundred and twenty possible combinations isn’t going to kill me.”
“You can’t ever give a simple answer to anything, can you?” she sighed. “How long is it going to take?”
“Forever, unless I can figure out what Neris meant by that stupid verse.”
“Well then, you need a break,” she declared. “Maybe if you forget about it for a while, the solution will come to you.”
He shook his head doubtfully. “Numbers are logical, Tia. I know there’s a sequence here somewhere and it makes perfectly good sense. The trouble is Neris would have realized that any mathematician with half a brain could eventually work it out, too, no matter how obtuse. Whatever he chose it’ll be something different. Something unique. Something that only he knew about.”
“Maybe you’ll think better on a full stomach.”
He glanced up from his notes. “That hint was about as subtle as a lava flow.”
“I found these!” she announced proudly, producing two speckled eggs from behind her back. “We can have blincakes.”
“What you really mean is we can have blincakes if I cook them.”
“Naturally. I’d just ruin them if I made them.”
“Do we have everything we need?”
She smiled. “The previous tenants were very thoughtful. They left enough to feed us for months, if need be.”
“Goddess! I hope it doesn’t come to that!”
“So you will cook them?”
He nodded. She was in a remarkably good mood, no doubt because she had spent the day scouring the lake shore for eggs, rather than looking over his shoulder in the darkness of the Labyrinth. Every time Tia came in here, she grew more and more apprehensive. It was odd to discover Tia was afraid of the dark. Until she had entered the Labyrinth that first time, Dirk had been quite convinced Tia Veran was not afraid of anything.
“You’re not as obsessed about blincakes as Neris, are you?”
She laughed. “No. You can make them any way you want. I can’t taste the difference.”
“Neris can,” he told her with a shake of his head. “I made them for him once and didn’t mix the ingredients in the right order. He threw the whole batch out and made me do it all over again until I’d memorized the recipe and gotten it all in the right order. And then he spent the rest of the day telling me how stupid I was.”
“I think he’s done that to everybody who’s tried to cook for him.”
Dirk stood up and stretched his arms above his head. He had been crouching over his notes, trying to puzzle out the sequence for the best part of three weeks now. His muscles were protesting their forced idleness, and his mind was starting to feel like scrambled eggs. He was glad Tia had come to drag him out of the tunnel. And he was looking forward to the blincakes, even if he did have to cook them himself.
“I’ll go chase up Nellie,” she offered. “You’re going to need milk.”
Nellie was the name Tia had given to the she-goat the Shadowdancers had left behind. Tia had adopted the abandoned creature as a pet, and it followed her everywhere—until she tried to milk it. If Tia even thought about tying Nellie up, with some indefinable animal sixth sense, the goat would vanish into the ruins, and it sometimes took hours to find her again.
“Good luck.”
With a legitimate excuse to escape the darkness, she headed off to find the recalcitrant goat. Dirk picked up his torch and made his way back through the Labyrinth, squinting as he stepped outside into the light, surprised to see a smudge of red on the eastern horizon. He had not realized how late it was.
Dirk tossed the torch into the sand near the entrance, and then headed to the tent where the supplies left behind by the Shadowdancers were stored. He was glad he had thought of demanding that sufficient food and shelter was left for him and Tia, and it was a good sign that Belagren had done as he asked—or rather, demanded. He had not left much doubt about his intentions if she did not do exactly as he wanted.
As he gathered up the ingredients he needed, he tried to calculate how long they had been here in Omaxin or, more specifically, how long it was since they had left Bollow. He had lost track of the days, so engrossed was he in the problem of the gate. He wondered how much time they had left.
Dirk realized he should probably warn Tia about what he had done. He should have told her about the letter to Belagren while they were still in Bollow. Instead, he let her think he was joking. Of course, she would never believe the truth, he was certain of that, and his silence would do nothing but make him look even more guilty when the time came ...
Maybe she was better off not knowing. Too many people had died because of him already. He would not allow the toll to climb any higher. He certainly wasn’t going to endanger Tia if he could avoid it.
And that was the problem. He truly did not want to hurt her, but he needed her to be upset. The more outraged Tia was when she learned the truth, the more credibility he would gain in the eyes of the High Priestess.
Several months of living in close proximity with Tia Veran had changed his opinion of her somewhat. She was still annoying, temperamental and stubborn, but she was also intelligent (which was hardly surprising, given who her father was), resourceful and extremely independent ... and when she kissed him ...
Dirk pushed that thought away, hastily. It was going to be bad enough when Tia discovered he had betrayed her.
I’ve been down in the tunnel on my own way too long ...
“Have you seen Nellie?” Tia asked, poking her head through the tent flap.
Dirk jumped with fright at her unexpected appearance. “What? No, I haven’t.”
“Damn that goat! I swear she can read my mind.”
“Try down near the lake,” he suggested.
She looked at him quizzically. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Why do you ask?”
“Because you were just sitting in here, staring off into space. I had to call you three times before you answered me.”
“I was thinking about the gate,” he told her with a shrug. It was a perfectly acceptable excuse.
“Well, get your mind off the gate and onto the blincakes, boyo,” she ordered. “It took me all day to find those damn eggs, and if you botch them up, I’ll probably have to disembowel you or something.”
He frowned. “You really do have an unhealthy obsession with causing me grievous bodily harm, don’t you?”
She grinned at him. “I thought it was one of my more endearing traits.”
“Not from where I’m sitting.”
“Don’t be such a baby. How long will they take?”
“The blincakes? That depends on how long it takes you to milk that goat.”
“Do you remember the recipe?”
Dirk rolled his eyes. “Two cups of flour, a teaspoon of salt, three quarters of a cup of milk, an egg, an eighth of a cup of lard and a quarter of a cup of treacle. In that order. I remember it very well. Neris made sure of it. He even made me measure out the cups of flour in teaspoons.”
Tia smiled, remembering Neris doing the same thing to her. “Fifty teaspoons to a cup. I learned to count measu
ring out the ingredients for Neris’s damn blincakes.”
“I’m not surprised,” Dirk agreed. “He called it the beautiful simplicity of numbers. Do you think he did anything without breaking it down to a mathematical equation?”
Before she could answer him, the baleful bleating of a goat clearly echoed through the ruins. Tia cocked her head to one side, trying to determine the direction of the sound. “I swear that beast is taunting me,” she muttered.
The bleating came again, even closer this time.
“Sounds like it’s coming from over near the corral,” Dirk suggested. “Do you want a hand catching her?”
“And let that slot-eyed little bitch think she has me beaten? Not a chance. You just take care of the cooking, Dirk, and I’ll take care of that damn goat.”
Chapter 56
The blincakes were delicious, and there were enough so that they were able to have the leftovers for breakfast the following morning. By the time the second sun had risen fully they had eaten their fill, and Dirk was drinking the last of his tea before disappearing back into the gloom of the Labyrinth again to puzzle out Neris’s gate.
“You know, you’re going to make someone a very good wife someday,” Tia told him, as she licked her fingers appreciatively. Dirk really was quite handy to have around at times, when it came down to it. “Reithan’s always trying to convince me I should learn to cook properly. He says I’ll never catch a husband otherwise.”
Dirk smiled. “I rather imagine if you ever decide to catch a husband, Tia, you’ll run the poor sod down, club him over the head and drag him back to your cave by the ankles.”
Her eyes flashed angrily for a moment, then she laughed as she realized he was joking. It had taken a long time, but she had finally reached the point where he could make such a comment and not get throttled for it.
“I’ll have you know there are any number of young men in Mil who would gladly allow me to ‘drag them back to my cave by their ankles,’ as you so poetically put it.”
“A few months at sea will do that to a man, I hear,” he remarked with a grin.
“I’m in too good a mood to let you irritate me today, Dirk Provin.” She sighed contentedly and settled back into a more comfortable position. “Since you did such a good job of making the blincakes, I’ve decided to be nice to you all day and ignore your infantile and pathetic attempts at humor.”
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