by Anne Leonard
She thought about it, then raised her eyes to his. She said firmly, “Show me the interesting places, and tell me all the sordid stories. I should change my shoes. Where will you wait for me?”
He admired her resolve. “The fountain hall,” he said, “but I’ll have to hide in a corner so no one traps me.”
He was intercepted by a messenger who told him Mari was not far out of town and her husband only two days behind her. It was the first decent news in days and made him almost cheerful. At the fountain hall he made sure a large plant was between himself and the sight line of anyone casually walking through, and he talked to one of the guards for good measure.
It seemed hours before Tam came. “I’m sorry,” she said before he could remark on it, “it’s impossible to get away from them. Just when you’ve said something to one person another comes along and you have to repeat it.”
“I probably deserve to have to wait,” he said. He kissed her hand. “Are you ready?”
She nodded. “Lead on, Your Highness.”
That meant she was happy. They made their way quickly and correctly, not touching, through the wide corridors, which seemed to be extraordinarily full of people. Tam maintained a formal dignity he had not suspected in her, coolly ignoring everything but him. There was so much of her he still did not know. She was full of contradictions and complexity.
The men who saw her were not. They stared, no matter their rank. Eyes were quickly averted when they saw him. Briefly, it amused him; he was not used to being second place. Then he realized he was going to have to find a way to make it clear she was to be respected, not coveted. He had to step carefully with it. If he gave her something it could not be allowed to seem return for being in his bed. That meant he had to make sure she did not come into it. It took work to not show frustration.
He remembered walking to the Terrace Room that first night with her, hoping desperately no one would come out of a room and see them. It could have happened at any moment, but he had got them into the antechamber and shut the door to the hallway before it did. Bron, who had far better things to do than stand guard outside a room while Corin cultivated a woman’s affections, had only poorly concealed his irritation when being told to do so. Then he had seen her and straightened more than he did for Corin, his own display feathers going up before he recalled himself. Corin still did not understand how she had been free of other attachments.
He showed her the council chamber, the king’s private library, the map room, his mother’s receiving room, the ceremonial armory. But they were both soon bored, and it was not long before, despite his better sense, they went out one of the garden doors. They stepped onto a broad flagstoned area with a few trees inset and a flower bed bordering the other side. A path ran parallel to the building in either direction. Early white stars shone in the clear sky. Bats darted everywhere, feasting on insects. In the garden, frogs and crickets competed loudly with one another. He heard voices but did not see anyone.
“My God,” said Tam, “you didn’t say anything about the noise. How big are those frogs?”
“Tiny. Half the length of my thumb. Sometimes they get inside and can be heard for yards and yards down a hallway. When you get close to them they get quiet, they’re hell to catch. I speak from experience.”
“You brought them in, didn’t you.”
“A few of them,” he admitted. “But really, they are quite adventurous on their own. Which way?”
“You decide. I don’t know where to go.”
Resolutely he turned away from the enticing darkness of the garden. He spent an hour leading her about between the buildings, into small grassy courtyards, under covered walkways, in and out of narrow doors, past the kitchens with their smells of meat and spice and woodsmoke, through the kitchen garden with rosemary strong in the air, across the sundial court where he had been tutored endlessly in geometry. He made certain not to take her any place a lady should not go. They were seen now and then by servants and guards but by few courtiers. Some places were very dark and quiet, causing them to tiptoe into the shadows and take much too long to come out, while others were splashed with light and full of sounds from inside: voices, music, clashing metal, crockery, water. There was no area he did not know, but watching her discover them was almost as stimulating as exploring had been when he was very young. He had been given free range then, and he took it. It was years since he had gone places where his duties did not take him; the boy who had wanted to know what everything was and how everything worked was long grown.
The night cooled, and Tam grew chilled. Corin put his arm around her and walked her back in through one of the garden doors. It happened to be the one that led to the more formal areas of the palace; it was the door through which a foreign dignitary would be taken to view the gardens or to walk for a careful, term-setting conversation with the king. The rooms nearby were mostly used for state affairs and were dark and empty tonight. There were several guards along the hall but no other people. The hallway lights were low.
Tam shivered. He felt her body trembling under his arm. It was highly improper to touch her so, but he was the prince, damn it, custom could go to hell. “What is it?” he asked, keeping his voice low.
“It’s a little spooky,” she said. “All this emptiness.”
He understood what she meant. Many times he had walked back to his own rooms after some business kept him in his study for hours, and even those familiar and well-traveled hallways felt cold and slightly eerie in that midnight quiet. Here, where everything was designed to impress rather than to be useful, it seemed even more inhuman.
They walked by the high golden doors that were one of the four public entrances to the throne room. He thought absently of the bare splendor within, the elaborate roof beams and gorgeous wall hangings and all the space for standing with not a place to hide. There had been a dragon seal on the floor once, but the Myceneans had destroyed it. It was an old room, restored and enlarged several times over the centuries, first built when war was far more present, when power meant naked force and domination. He knew that his family ruled because his forebears had been stronger and luckier and more cunning than their rivals. Strength and luck and cunning were nothing to shrug at, and he did not underestimate what they had done. But kings no longer had to be warlords, they had to be gamesters. Even more so since Mycene took the dragons.
“Do you want to see?” he asked, since they were there.
“Can we?”
At first he thought it was a naïve question, as though she had forgotten who he was. Then he realized that she knew he was rule-bound too and did not know what the rules were. Even with all the things he had told her, she did not know the customs of this place. She was not a courtier.
He stopped to touch her face. “Yes,” he said softly. When Mari came he would put them together.
She considered it, then shook her head. “No. Not now, in the dark.”
He was not about to force her. “A cat got in once,” he said as they walked on, “and took a nap on the throne.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“What could happen? It was a cat. It got out before anyone could catch it and the rober spent half an hour picking cat hairs off the cushions.”
She laughed. They were passing an unlit hallway that he knew was never used, and he gave in to temptation. He turned into it. She followed him to the end, down the stairwell to the landing. It was dark.
“Where does this go?” she whispered.
“Nowhere. The storeroom below was rebuilt years ago and the door is blocked off. No one is coming.” He stroked her neck and slipped a finger under her collar. Her skin was amazingly soft and smooth.
She made a noise that was neither a word nor a sigh. He took it as permission to go ahead and pushed both sleeves off her shoulders. The dress was snug and would not go down
without being unhooked, so he gave up on that. She stroked his arms and left her hands lightly on his wrists. He kissed her bare skin feverishly.
Then they heard voices and both froze. There was just enough light from the main corridor for him to see a glint in her eyes. He touched a finger to her lips for silence. She licked it, arousing him more. Her hands came down to his thighs. After a few seconds he realized they weren’t stopping. He swallowed and firmly lifted her hands back to his shoulders.
The voices moved on. She said in his ear, “Don’t you want to?”
“Are you mad? Of course I do. But not here,” he said, although his resistance was almost gone.
“Then continue the tour,” she murmured, her tone suggesting it was rather a different tour that she had in mind.
“You are a witch.”
“Maybe.”
“If you keep teasing me like this I’m going to have to go find some other woman to keep myself sane,” he said. It was not entirely a jest.
“Who says I’m teasing?”
He took her up to the roof. It was a long ascent, and she was sweating and winded by the time they reached the top. That should slow her down some. The stone still radiated heat from the day. There were no seats up here, nothing but the flat stone and the guardhouse at one end and the coop for the message birds at the other. The moon was overhead, not at the full yet but bright enough to see by. He led her to the western wall so they could look out, over the blackness of the garden, the lights of the city, the river curving through the hills and fields beyond. They were high up, a good fifty feet or more above the other levels of the palace; if it had been a clear day they could have seen for miles. At night the kingdom had no edge.
The air that had felt too cold while they walked the grounds was welcome after the exertion of their climb. The rushing of the fountains and waterfalls everywhere made a pleasant noise. He had heard that sound all his life. When he was a boy, he had come up here on the nights that were too hot to sleep and sat, back against the wall, legs extended, listening to the water, watching the fireflies. Sometimes there would be a storm coming, far to the west, a pile of clouds and orange flickers of lightning while the wind picked up. Now no one came up except the sentries and the birdkeepers.
And dragons. Dragons with their gleaming claws and iridescent wings. Dragons with their enthralling eyes. Dragons who were the Emperor’s captives. Dragons whose silky scales would have been blue and shining in the moonlight.
“Corin?”
He brought himself back to the present. She never shortened his name, he liked that. “Yes?”
“I’ve been thinking,” she said.
“About what?”
“Dragons.”
It had caught up to her. He wondered if she would understand how beautiful they were. “What about them?” he asked, holding back other questions with an effort. He was prepared for her to decide to leave him. It was difficult enough to be the companion of a prince, let alone one who had been given a mission. Why had they chosen him instead of some peasant or poet?
“What holds them?”
That, however, he had not expected. He had underestimated her again. He shook his head slightly, scolding himself, and said, “I have no idea.” It made him realize how little he had to go on. Kelvan might know, but Kelvan was a thousand miles away.
“The dragons—what do you want?”
It was an impossible question. It tugged him. “I want to ride,” he answered softly, remembering wind and shining scales and a river far below. Remembering the dragon’s eyes and the images whose meaning he had almost known. “It was bliss.”
Her face was ageless, wise. “And the rest of it? They gave you a task—a command. They gave you power. Are you afraid?”
He could not remember if anyone had ever asked him such a thing. In another woman it would have been charmingly innocent, in her it was a challenge. Not to be brave, but to be truthful.
“I was,” he said. He thought about it some more. “Now, I don’t know. I’m not trembling in my boots. I don’t fear the dragons. I will do this thing, Tam, whatever it takes. But it will make everything different. I can’t know how until it happens.”
“Must you do it?”
Must. “I’m not being compelled,” he said, and knew it for the truth. “I could turn my back, refuse. I don’t know that I could live with myself afterward, though.”
“How will you start? With a war on, doesn’t your father need you here?”
“I had this very conversation with him this morning,” he said. It came out more harshly than he had expected. “No wonder he likes you, you’re more like him than I am.”
“Corin!”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He could not admit, even to her, how helpless he felt.
There was an awkward silence, the first between them. Before he could break it she shifted and said, eyes averted, “Corin, I lied to you.”
For a moment the world went still. “When?” he asked over the coldness in his gut. He knew about the little fibs where she held back what she was feeling, everyone did that. But this must be something important.
“At the fair, the fortune-teller’s stall. I couldn’t burden you. I think I already knew something was going to happen. Your eyes had changed. They were dragon eyes. My hand—it did go through that tray. You didn’t imagine it. It was cold, very very cold.” She paused. He reached out and briefly rubbed her shoulder, comforting them both. He was glad it had been no greater lie. “It was an opening. I don’t know how I did it, or even if I did it, or if it was done to me.”
She stopped. He had the sense that she wanted to say something else. He waited. He hoped she did not fear his anger. When she did not speak, he said softly, “You did right not to tell me. I would not have known what to do with it then. I had to remember things first.”
They were silent again, but this time it was comfortable. He saw the dark swoop of a hunting owl over the garden. He reached for her hand and held it warm against his. He thought he could feel the blood moving.
After a while she spoke. “There’s more, love.”
Love. She could not mean it, not yet, not so soon. He could not help hoping. “What?”
“The thing on the steps, the dark thing, I felt it too when I made the opening. It was waiting. What is it?”
He remembered that sweetly rotten smell of death. “I don’t know,” he said. The poor people in the north would know. Liko would know. It had been watching him for years. God, he could not let it get at Tam. He had no idea how to stop it. He wanted to clutch her to him and hold her safe.
Instead he spoke. “Tam, whatever’s happening to me, call it my doom if you will, I’m sucking you in too. You’re not going to be able to get out. I don’t know if I can protect you.” He could not bear to tell her she should go.
“You’re not doing it. I saw the moths. I think maybe it’s like looking at water under a lens, it’s full of living things, moving, in their own world, and they’re there even when we can’t see them, they’ve been there all along and only in the last two centuries have we learned to see.”
The rightness of what she said was like a force. A difference in seeing. The world itself was unchanged. He did not have to change to meet it, only had to shift his gaze. Hope blossomed in him. “You are a marvel,” he said. He kissed her.
She returned it fully, eagerly. “Another?” He gave it to her, slowly, tasting everything. Her hand was on his hip. He pressed closer. Now her fingers were under his waistband sliding toward the center, telling him to yield.
He drew back. “I can’t let you,” he said. He wanted her so much it hurt, but he could not allow this. “You have to be free to marry someone worthy of you. If we go on you can’t go back.”
“Then what do you want from me, Corin? What else is there? You said last night we would.” He could not tell if she w
as more hurt or angered.
“I never should have started this,” he said. Every word was a blow. “I’ve put you in an impossible place.” He bit the inside of his lip.
“I have my own will,” she said. “Do you think I haven’t thought about this? There’s going to be a war. This may be all the time we have.”
“Tam,” he said, aching. “Don’t you see?”
“Of course I do. I don’t care. You haven’t with other women, why do you now?”
“Because I love you,” he said. He had thought the words a hundred times already, but it felt strange to finally have said them. “I didn’t love them.”
“So the one woman you love is the one you won’t make love to?”
“Don’t,” he said harshly. “Don’t.”
She did not rise to the anger. Instead she took his hands, gripping them hard, and stared at him. He could not see the blueness of her eyes, but he felt the force of the gaze. “No one ever gives you anything,” she said.
“What do you mean?” he asked, startled.
“It’s all due to you. Earned or owed or traded for. You don’t know what to do with something without ties. Let me give you this, my love, please.”
It hit him in a place he had not even known was tender. She was the only person who had ever found it. And he had to put her aside. He did not have the strength—or cruelty—to do so. He returned the grip on her hands and bent his head toward hers. “Tam,” he whispered. “Are you truly sure?”
“Completely.” She gave him a kiss that left no room for doubt.
He ripped his mouth away and said, “Come with me?”
She said nothing but gave him that sly smile. They made their way down the steps and through miraculously empty hallways and stairwells. If he had seen a single other person he would have sent her back to her rooms. He could do nothing about the guards outside his door, but they knew better than to breathe a word.