by Anne Leonard
“Hmm?”
“He’s arrogant to everyone.”
“Then perhaps he was so to someone he should not have been,” she said. “I haven’t done anything.” How easy it was to lie.
She took the other paper out of her pocket and held it carefully so Jenet could not see. It was indeed an official seal, beside a formal signature. It gave her all rights and privileges reserved to those of ducal rank. A full pass. She stared at it. He did not need to do this for her. It was a very very precious thing.
“Tam? Is something wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, clutching the pass. “Excuse me.” She hurried into her room and shut the door.
First the wine and now this. From another man it might have been meant to urge her into bed, but she was sure that was not Corin’s intent. She would not have needed any urging last night, and he knew it. No, this was a gift, pure and simple.
It was nearly dark when she put on her plainest skirt, blouse, and walking boots. The cloth was good, she would hate to ruin it, but she had nothing else. It was drab in the palace and would be too fine for the fair. She managed to leave the wing without being noticed. At the fountain hall, a soldier was waiting to escort her to “the private entrance,” the same man who had brought her back the night before. He called her “my lady.”
A cat trotted along behind them some of the way, tail straight, and followed when they went through a guarded arch with a velvet rope in front of it. Symbolic, of course, but she had no doubt the guards there meant business. It chilled her to realize she was in a part of the palace to which few people were admitted. The cat stopped at a narrow flight of ascending stairs and began to bathe itself, the licks loud in the stone hallway. There was nothing ornamental about the corridor this side of the rope. It was old and purely functional and had looked the same three hundred years ago. They passed several doors secured with heavy chains and a small, lonely looking guarded antechamber with a sculpted dragon on the lintel. Part of its tail was missing. It gave her a strange feeling of being in stasis, locked in place while the world went on by.
Corin was not there when they arrived at the entrance, but she did not wait long for him. He wore faded brown trousers and a coarse white shirt. His boots were worn and scuffed. No one would ever mistake him for a laborer, though; his hands were too clean, his back too straight. At a signal from him, one of several guards began to unlock the wooden door.
“Thank you, Bron,” he said, extending his hand to Tam. “Ready, Tam?”
“Yes,” she said, a bit nervously. It seemed very public, more public in a way than the fountain hall had been. She liked how he looked in the white shirt. Rakish, not entirely respectable.
He clasped his hand around hers and led her through the door, down a short flight of steps, and out another door into a small walled garden. A gravel path led to the main drive through a tall iron gate. On the drive was a very plain coach drawn by two very plain horses, with two very plain footmen in the back. They were broad-shouldered, and she thought they were actually soldiers, as was the driver. The inside of the coach was much more elegant and even had two glowlamps.
“First things first,” he said when they were moving, sliding back and forth in the coach. It was better made than it looked from the outside, and it was not as bumpy a ride as Tam had expected. The leather seat was wide and well cushioned, and the floor was carpeted, softening the sounds of creaks and jolts. He put his mouth on her lips.
When they finally separated, they both realized his hand was on her bodice, the fabric between his palm and her breast suddenly feeling very thin indeed. It had happened briefly in the garden, but he had drawn back at once. She put one hand over his, pressing it closer. With his other hand he undid the top buttons of her shirt. She did not try to stop him. They looked at each other for a long time. She was hot and tense with wanting.
Slowly, wordlessly, he slid his hand inside her blouse and placed it on her breast. Her nipple hardened against his palm. He caressed her with thumb and forefinger. It was unbearably exquisite. He kissed her again while he tightened his grip. She shuddered in anticipation.
“I want you,” she whispered. There. It was said.
“You have me,” he said. Then, unbelievably, he began to do up her buttons.
“Corin!” she protested. It was completely backward, she was supposed to have complained when he started, not when he stopped. Her mother would be furious.
“Not here,” he said. “Not in a coach.”
She whispered his name. He put his arm around her and pulled her close.
Suddenly afraid, she said, “You won’t hate me afterward, will you?”
“Hate you!” he said incredulously. “Why do you think I would hate you?”
“Because sometimes after men have a woman, they blame her for not staying chaste.” She had heard them crying in her father’s surgery too many times to think it unusual. “Seduce her, then call her a trollop.”
“Tam, Tam, Tam,” he said. After a pause in which she could almost hear him thinking, he said, “I know you are honorable. I know you are not the kind of woman who takes a man to bed an hour after she’s met him. And if you make me wait five years for you I will.”
She thought he would say more. When he didn’t, she looked at him. He was watching her, not staring, and it wasn’t lust on his face. He kissed her forehead.
“It’s complicated,” she said. It was so complicated she couldn’t even figure out how to say it. She would have felt the same if he had been a brick mason, but neither of them could pretend he was not the prince. If he had been a brick mason she would and could have waited for marriage. She wondered if he understood that.
“I know,” he said. It assured her.
“I won’t make you wait five years,” she said.
He laughed.
“You’re far too perfect,” she said.
“You haven’t known me very long. But I hope you don’t really think I would do that to anyone, let alone you.”
“I don’t,” she said. Was he really worried? “I’m sorry, I panicked a little.”
He stroked her hair. It made her feel safe. “Of course you did, you have a lot to lose. That’s why we’re not going to make love now. We have to do it properly.”
“Properly!” That was absurd. Going to his bed was improper in so many ways.
She didn’t have to look at him to know that he knew what she was thinking and it amused him. “Oh, stop it,” she said. “I concede. Acquiesce. Bow to your greatness.” She would have gone on, but he kissed her.
A particularly large pothole jolted them apart. Drawing the curtain aside briefly, Tam saw that they were still in the heart of the city. The coffee shops and alehouses were wide-open, the streetlamps lit; it was much brighter than she had expected. In Dalrinia any respectable shop closed by dusk. The sidewalks and streets were crowded with all sorts of people. The rain had gone, the air was warm, no one wanted to be inside.
She let the curtain drop and looked back at Corin. “Tell me about the fair,” she said.
“Ah.” There was an ordinary burlap bag beside him. She watched curiously as he opened it. He removed two silk cloaks, one colored peacock blue shifting to emerald green and one flame red shifting to black, and two masks.
“Not masks?” she said, feeling ridiculous. He held one up; his nostrils, mouth, and chin were exposed, but the rest of his face was covered with glistening black feathers fanning out from silver-trimmed eyeholes. Hers was a vivid yellow. “I thought you didn’t want to be noticed.”
“No one will, like this,” he said. “These are unremarkable.” He tossed her the blue cloak. “Stay close to me, things are apt to get wild as the night wears on. It’s not entirely safe, you know. That’s for daytime. There will be men behind us, but if we get separated you could wind up on your own.”
“What if we do?”
The thought made her a bit anxious.
“There’s a guard tent near the center, make for there. Here.” He reached into his pocket and removed something. It was like a coin, but thicker and made of a reddish bronze. It had an embossed eagle on one side and a crown on the other.
“Don’t lose it,” he said. “It’s a courier token, it will make the soldiers take you seriously. It would give you credit with any merchant, too, but I count on you not to deplete the treasury.”
The coach hit a large bump, and she dropped the token. He caught it quickly, without even looking, put it on her palm, and pressed her fingers closed around it.
“Aren’t you being a bit too trusting giving this to me this soon?” she asked. “Even if I manage to hang on to it?”
“Never.” He traced her lips with his finger. “If you couldn’t be trusted with it you wouldn’t take it. You might be sly and saucy but you’re too proud to be a thief.”
Once at the fair, Tam saw immediately why Corin had called the costumes unremarkable. Many other people were in harlequin garb or spangled head to toe; there were hats a foot high and ribbons and bells dangling from collars and cuffs and belts; about half the crowd was masked, most of them fantastic or grotesque faces, half human, or animals, birds and cats and unicorns. The first row of stalls upon entering was crowded with costumes for sale for those who had not worn one excessive enough. A wolf’s head mask in one stall caught her eye. It was strikingly real-looking, with up-pricked ears and a long toothy muzzle. Its glass eyes gleamed knowingly at her, not quite frightening but disturbing enough that she involuntarily looked back over her shoulder several times to see if it was watching.
Corin bought her little cups of wine, and she drank them without hesitation. There were fire-swallowers and fire-jugglers, acrobats and puppeteers, conjurers pulling swords out of bags, musicians of all sorts, fortune-tellers, vendors. They sold everything from cheap and gaudy jewelry to hot spiced meat to rare perfumes to trained mice and two-headed snakes. Music boxes played familiar folk tunes and popped open to reveal enameled mechanical monkeys hammering the strings. A man had set up a table for a chess-playing automaton and took wagers on the games. Many of the sellers were frauds and charlatans; at one stall a bird purported to be a phoenix was obviously a chicken with suncock feathers stuck to it, and at another the “magic stones” were plainly glass. It didn’t matter. This was the fair, a world of lights and colors and frenetic movement. One came to exchange truth for illusion, to relinquish thought to fantasy.
Tam kept a tight hold on Corin’s hand. There were so many people it was hard to walk quickly, and sometimes currents or knots of movement threatened to part them. She couldn’t see any soldiers following them, though she had no difficulty picking out the ones among the crowd. Women wearing paint and jewels but very little else beckoned from corners or danced atop large wooden blocks, masked men naked to the waist wrestled each other or fenced behind ropes, pigs and goats roamed loose. Large brown bears competed for audiences with lifelike wax figures that bowed or danced. Children darted in and out through the crowd, their hands full of spun sugar candy or streamers or tinkling cymbals. It was very noisy, and the smoke from all the fires and torches obscured the clear and starry sky. The air was full of smells: food and fire and sweaty people, cinnamon and musky perfumes, damp mud, the sweetness of flower garlands and the yeasty scent of beer. Once someone jostled Tam, almost knocking her into a stall, and she lost her grip on Corin. Before she could even react he had hold of her again. She thought such a mass of people and sensations might disturb him, he who spent his life among people staying at a respectful distance, but he seemed to be reveling in it, urgent, almost frenzied. His hand was warm and his movement eager.
Some of the stalls were places to play games of skill or chance. Try your luck Try your skill See what you can win Play darts and win a prize for the young lady Can you guess where it is Today’s your lucky day Try Try Try Win Win Win. At one the contest was of throwing knives at a moving bronze pendulum, and Tam said recklessly, “Try that one!”
She could not see his eyes well with the mask and the flaring light, but his lips curved mischievously and he put down his coin. The knives were small, and he shifted the handle carefully between his fingers until he apparently found the right balance. He watched the pendulum for a few passes, then threw. It was faster than Tam could see, and unerringly accurate. The gamester said, “Once is luck, you have two more throws.” Corin hit twice more, just as easily, and, laughing, left the prize.
“You have a sharp eye,” she said.
“My sister Tai is better. She hits anything she aims at, she could have done that from fifteen feet away.” He stopped abruptly, as though thinking of something else. Then he took her hand and led her on.
They passed a stall with hundreds of glittering disks hanging on strings above hundreds of tiny candles lining the walls. Rainbows of light reflected everywhere. A heavy smell of incense drifted from the stall. A woman sitting on a stool was watching them. The woman said, “Tell your fortune, young mistress, young sir, come see come learn come try.” It drew her irresistibly.
Tam looked at him. “Can I?”
“If you want.” His mouth was serious; if he thought she was bowing to foolery he didn’t show it. It would have no truth, she knew that, but she had never done it before.
The lights and the scents and the wine she had drunk made her float. She stumbled forward and let the woman take her hand and bring her down to sit cross-legged on a wool rug. Corin gave the woman a coin, then squeezed Tam’s shoulder and stepped back.
She expected a glass ball or cards or palm-reading, maybe a throwing of the fortune-sticks or dice. Instead the woman took out four stoppered bottles of colored sand and opened them. She was a very old woman, shrunken, face wrinkled and hair white, but her black eyes were bright and sharp as a bird’s and she moved quickly. She put a tarnished silver tray between herself and Tam and said, “Choose.”
Tam pointed at the bottle of black sand, and the woman poured it into her hand and scattered it across the tray. Then the yellow and the red and the vivid blue. She said to Tam, “Now draw the lines.”
Tam touched the sand and moved a finger through it in a circle. The sand separated into colors and followed her as though her finger were a magnet pulling iron filings. She felt too dreamy to be astonished. A spiral. Three short straight lines. Her hands moved on their own, knowing, and she breathed the incense and let them do it. A triangle of red, a half circle of black, a blue maze of squares. Mist floated across her eyes. She smelled stone and ice. Some place old, some place very distant. She had smelled it before. Cold air passed over her. She shivered and pulled her hand back from the tray.
The woman bent over it and stared, then swept her hands across a few inches above the surface. She began to chant. It was not in any language Tam knew. Heat burned between her shoulder blades, spreading down and outward, tingling her arms and legs. Little whirlwinds of sand scudded back and forth across the tray. The words hung, detached, meaningless. Images came to her. A moon bright over a black plain, curls of steam in a cave. A wolf howled from a high rock. Lightning flashed in a brassy sky over jagged black mountains. Wind blew across coals and sent sparks flying into the air. A roof beam with strings of braided garlic hanging from it. A mountain, jutting and crenellated like a fortress. A man whose eyes flashed silver, then turned to black stone.
The sand separated into its four colors. It flowed back into the bottles as the woman held them to it, one after the other. Time running backward. The tray gleamed. Watching herself from a great distance, Tam leaned forward and looked into the silver, suddenly bright. Her reflection rippled. It kept spreading. It was not her reflection at all, it was some color within the tray, iridescent. That too shifted and she was looking into a well of darkness. Here was a narrowing, a point where the emptiness cut through her world, but on the other side was an endless open space t
hat swallowed light. A hole. A tunnel. Icy air stung her face. She heard a scratching on metal that set her teeth on edge. There was something old, old, old rousing itself, its hour come round.
She turned to look at Corin and saw that his eyes were a full flickering gold. Recoiling, she lost her balance and pitched forward. Her right hand hit the surface of the tray and went through as though breaking the surface of water. Corin clapped his hands over his ears as she pulled back in horror, a sharp scream coming from her mouth. Her hand was frozen and unfeeling.
The woman scuttled away. Corin grabbed Tam and pulled her up and out of the stall. The world sharpened and became crisper again. Her hand tingled with returning blood. She staggered a little and he caught her. There was a knife in his other hand. His mask was up. His eyes were ordinary, his face almost desperate.
“Corin?” She could call him that here, there were probably a hundred Corins in the crowd. Her fear was gone entirely, swept away by his need. It was not time to think about what had just happened to her.
“She hurt you,” he said harshly.
“No.” She could not tell him about his eyes.
“Your hand went through.”
She shook her head. It felt like one burden too many to put on him. “I fell and bent my wrist. It may be sprained. That’s all.”
“Don’t lie to me, Tam. I heard the noise of it. It cracked like ice. You told me about the moths.”
She cradled her wrist. It hurt. The burning of her hand was almost unbearable, but she could not let him see it, she could not. There was a pressure in her chest. She had to draw a line, for his sake. “This was nothing, my lord.”
It struck him. He sheathed the knife. “I’m sorry,” he said unhappily.
She pressed into him, wondering if anyone else had ever seen him like that. “So am I,” she said. “Can we forget about it? Please?”
“Of course.” He kissed her. She no longer felt as though she were suffocating. His mood flashed into something else. “Come play.” He twirled her cloak, then let it go.