Remembering his melted blade and the scent of burning silk then, he grimly bent to examine Kako’s trouser leg in spite of her physical and verbal protests. There where her blood had smeared across the silk were burnt patches; tight, crumpled little sections that had blackened, hardened, and in some cases burnt right through.
“Happy?” said Kako when he straightened. “When I melted your stupid dagger it ruined the only set of clothes I have access to.”
Rafiq looked down into those clever, wary, almond eyes and said in quiet certainty: “You have fire in your blood.”
Kako startled so badly that she almost fell off his lap and into the intermittent spikes that surrounded them. She caught herself with one clutching hand at Rafiq’s collar and said: “Excuse me?”
Her voice was very carefully calculated between anger and annoyance, but Rafiq could see reddening in her faint aura. She was very frightened indeed. If he hadn’t been sure of it before, he was now.
“Sorry,” he said, and tore away the whispy loops of Kako’s scarf from her neck.
She made a stifled sound, snatching the scarf back to her neck, but it was too late. Rafiq had already seen the new, pink scar that ran below her left ear and across her throat to the opposite shoulder. It was a very familiar slash: he had used the exact slice on the Dragon of the Keep.
Kako was the Dragon of the Keep.
“Don’t assault the serving maid!” called the prince irritably. “I informed you of neck scarfs earlier, Rafiq. I won’t be held responsible if she wants to marry you.”
“We’ll talk later,” said Rafiq softly, as Kako rewound her scarf.
Kako, with her fingers trembling slightly, said to the prince in a careless voice: “Oh no! My mother expects me to marry much higher. At least a steward, I should think.”
The prince, who didn’t care about the matrimonial aspirations of a serving girl, said: “Is the path found, or must we begin again?”
“It’s found,” said Kako, slipping from Rafiq’s lap. She favoured her left foot slightly but didn’t seem to have too much trouble standing. “I just had to stop for a bit to fix my foot. Follow me, Rafiq. Three steps to the left, then blue, then yellow. One step back, repeat. Follow me exactly. And make sure your whole foot is inside the tile. The spikes are rather painful.”
Kako and Rafiq made their way slowly across the floor, followed closely and then overtaken by the evening shadows. By and large their path bore them left, and it wasn’t long before Prince Akish was cautiously able to lower himself to the floor behind them. Kako was entirely silent, and though Rafiq had found her chatter both bothersome and cheeky, he now found that he felt very badly about her muteness. It seemed, he thought uncomfortably, that he’d behaved more like Prince Akish than a dragon, and he didn’t like the feeling. He didn’t miss the occasional look that Kako flicked his way, her sloe eyes shuttered and watchful.
Akish, while not so self-absorbed as to be oblivious to the tension, was fortunately too busy counting tiles under his breath to notice, and it wasn’t until they found themselves between a wardrobe and the grand bed they’d seen from the other Circle that he seemed to notice how little light remained of the day.
He muttered something beneath his breath, producing a flare of sorcerous light, and at once the tiles beneath their feet blanched to white, all hope of identification gone.
“That’s torn it,” said Kako, gazing around. They were the first words she’d spoken in quite some time, and it was something of a relief to hear her voice again. Rafiq realised that he’d been waiting for her to disappear through the Door Out and leave himself and Akish to their own machinations.
Prince Akish said something rather rude and banished the light, but it was too late. In the last of the fleeting sun the tiles remained white, useless as a guide.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“I think your magic reacted with the Keep’s magical mechanics. It thinks you’re trying to cheat with magic, so it’s taken away your privileges.”
The prince looked annoyed with himself. “I didn’t consider the possibility. Will the patterns come back, wench?”
“I’d imagine so,” Kako said. “Probably not until morning, though. We may as well stop for the night.”
“What a plaguey nuisance! Very well, we’ll stop for the night. Find somewhere to sleep and we’ll start again in the morning.”
Prince Akish of course took the bed. It was a massive, canopied thing that could have held the three of them with ease and very little embarrassment, but in spite of that Kako made herself a nest in the wardrobe with some conveniently hanging furs and Rafiq threw himself onto a nearby chaise lounge that was much less comfortable than it looked. From there he could see the diminishing flame of the sunset as it flickered and died, while listening to Kako’s tiny rustles as she settled in her wardrobe and Prince Akish’s various rasps, rattles and thumps as he divested himself of the more cumbersome pieces of his armour.
After the fidgets and rustles came the quiet, and it was slowly borne in on Rafiq that Kako was working small, quiet magic. He rolled over to watch her work, the soft, fiery heat of her magic overshadowing the peaceful iridescence of lavender that fluctuated in her aura. It looked as though the working was calming her.
When Prince Akish’ irregular in and out of breath had settled down to a rhythmic snore, Kako’s voice, low and muted, said: “Are you going to tell him?”
“No,” said Rafiq. “But if he asks me–”
“You’ll have to tell him. All right. I can work with that.”
Rafiq, struggling to find a way to put his regret into words, rolled over onto his back once again and said to the ceiling: “I didn’t mean to tear your scarf. I’ll get you a new one.”
Kako’s dragon aura had almost faded now, but he saw the faint edging of forgiving gold from the depths of the wardrobe and relaxed.
“That’s all right,” said Kako. “I have others. Good night, Rafiq.”
Kako was gone again. Rafiq, waking late in the night to the solitary snoring of Prince Akish, saw the empty, shadowed inside of the wardrobe in which she’d been sleeping. He was conscious of a feeling of relief mingled with disappointment: it was safer if she stayed away from Akish, but he’d really thought she meant it when she said she’d stay.
He found himself regretful that he wouldn’t have the chance to ask Kako about her dragon form. He would have liked to know more about the construct– not to mention the small matter of why she wasn’t dead. He’d never heard of a human with fire in the blood surviving when they died in dragon form.
Rafiq was still pondering the question when he heard slight scuffling sounds from across the room. It was Kako; carefully clambering across furniture piece by piece to make her way back to the wardrobe, and she appeared to be carrying a small bundle. It seemed good to Rafiq to close his eyes once again and feign sleep. He was surprised to discover himself smiling.
He felt Kako hovering over him a little later. What was she about? Then there was a slight fumbling somewhere in the region of his right arm, and Rafiq heard the slight creak of the wardrobe as Kako climbed back in and made herself comfortable.
He sat up and saw in the grey light of early morning that she had tucked a carefully folded handkerchief of food into the crook of his arm, along with a small flask of water. The food was simple fare—bread and some species of preserves that were tangy and a little bit sweet—but there was quite a lot of it. It was the sort of thing he would have expected of a hungry youth raiding the larder late at night. It was immensely satisfying; filling and delightfully piquant.
When he had finished eating Rafiq folded the handkerchief neatly, took a long, refreshing draught of water, and lay back to gaze up at the silvery ceiling with his hands laced behind his head. It was very pretty, of course, but the silver did throw some strange reflections. The blue in the floor, for example, was nothing like the blue that the silver reflected back at him. It was more of a robin’s egg blue. And come to
think of it, the yellow tiles reflected in the ceiling looked closer to robin’s egg blue than yellow, too.
Rafiq blinked. Ah. They’d been looking for patterns in the wrong place. His eyes followed the pattern of blue across the ceiling and found that it led very precisely and easily to a window across the ballroom. Rafiq briefly considered pointing it out to Akish, but after the food and drink Kako had brought he wasn’t distractingly hungry or thirsty– or particularly inclined to assist the prince, if it came to that.
Rafiq threw a look over at Kako and saw that she was watching him, her eyes glittering in the shadows. She had realised the same thing that he had; and like himself, was declining to tell the prince. Interesting. He closed his eyes and drifted back into a pleasant sleep.
The day was one of annoyance and frustration. Prince Akish was frustrated, which meant that everyone around him was annoyed. It didn’t help, thought Rafiq tiredly, that by the time Kako had led them another few feet across the tiled floor, the pattern suddenly and explicably changed. The first indication they had of any such thing was the tiles heating painfully beneath their feet. By the time they’d scrambled for somewhere safe, Prince Akish’s boots were smoking gently and the soles of Kako’s feet were burnt into red, angry blisters.
Kako looked more resigned than tearful, though her face had a carefully blank look that suggested she wasn’t giving in to her pain. Akish, on the other hand, was loud and vituperative in his distress both of burnt shoe-leather and lost path, and spent the next few hours eating his rations in an angry sort of way before climbing over some of the closer furniture to get a better look at the room. When Rafiq asked somewhat sarcastically for Commands, Akish only said: “Be silent, lizard. I am attempting to find the pattern again.”
True to his word, he did find the pattern again. By that time Kako had managed to heal the burns on her feet, and though the scar was still on the bottom of her foot, the rest of the skin looked smooth and new.
“How did you find it?” she asked Akish, accepting Rafiq’s hand to rise from the footstool upon which she had taken refuge.
“The pattern was clear from above,” said Akish grandly, and led the way.
Rafiq exchanged a look with Kako, brows raised. Akish was obviously in one of his more childish moods today. Rafiq had known him to go into terrifyingly infantile rages at the least pretext when he was in such a state, the prince’s vaunted prowess and battle cunning notwithstanding. Kako looked distinctly wary and Rafiq got the impression that she was used to dealing with such anger. He wondered if her princess often went into the same kind of paroxysms.
Before long it was obvious to Rafiq that the pattern was not taking them in the direction he had discovered last night. That was unfortunate, given Akish’s current mood, but he saw no reason to enlighten the prince. He was beginning to think that Kako was by no means eager for them to get through the Circles of challenge, and since it was no part of Rafiq’s design to make things easy for Prince Akish, he continued to follow behind silently.
The pattern ended at a small side-door at the other end of the ballroom from whence they had entered. Prince Akish, with a grunt of triumph, wrenched the door open, and an incongruous flood of late afternoon sunlight streamed into the room.
“Oh well done,” said Kako. “You’ve found the Door Out.”
Rafiq craned his neck to see around the seething Prince Akish, and found himself looking at the wide stairs and open courtyard by which he and Akish had entered the Keep.
“This,” said Akish through his teeth, “Is insupportable! Wench, what is the meaning of this?”
“It’s the Door Out,” Kako repeated. “I told you: there’s one for every Circle. We’ve been following the wrong pattern.”
Much to Rafiq’s surprise, the prince didn’t immediately explode. Instead, he said: “You did inform me. This challenge is more irritating than I’d supposed. Can we go back to the entrance of this Circle?”
“We can go back to the point at which we entered, but the door is closed to us. We can only go forward or out.”
“You know a great deal, wench,” said Akish, closing the door again. He turned his back to it and looked very narrowly at Kako. “I’m beginning to believe I went too lightly on you in the last Circle.”
“Oh, is Rafiq going to hold a knife to my throat again?”
Prince Akish put one hand around her throat almost casually. “You’re remarkably forward for a maid.”
“Yes,” said Kako. Her voice was strained, but she was otherwise unaffected. “The princess finds it very useful.”
Rafiq made a restless move, powerless by Thrall to do anything to help; and Prince Akish, jerking Kako closer, shot him a smouldering look.
“Keep back, lizard! I don’t need your help. How do we proceed to the next circle, wench?”
“I’m sure we have to find the right pattern to follow,” said Kako chokingly. Her face was suffused with crimson, but when Rafiq opened his mouth to tell the Prince he’d found the way himself he saw Kako’s hand rise, the index finger slightly uplifted. “I don’t know anything else.”
“I don’t believe you. You know entirely too much of this accursed place.”
Kako rasped: “Live here. Know how it thinks.”
“You’ll kill her,” Rafiq said shortly. Kako’s finger was still raised, but she was beginning to droop. He opened his mouth to tell the prince the way out in spite of her wishes but Kako lost consciousness as he did so, dragging the prince forward with the unexpectedness of her weight.
Akish gave vent to a series of unpleasant remarks regarding her parentage and said to Rafiq: “Plague take the wench, she knows nothing after all! Pick her up and carry her back with us. It’s possible she may yet prove useful.”
They spent the afternoon back at the bed, where Kako took far longer than she should have to regain consciousness and the prince did a piece of magic that made a fat slab of architect’s paper appear, along with a winding fountain pen. It also made the colours in the floor disappear once again, which irritated the prince greatly.
Rafiq deposited Kako on the chaise-lounge and removed himself to a nearby chair, worried by the amount of time that she spent unconscious until he saw her eyes open a slit to watch Prince Akish’s busily moving pen as it scrawled characters and numbers on the paper slab.
He found himself grinning. How much of her faint had been real? None of it, he was inclined to think. He was also inclined to think that she’d deliberately needled the prince. There was no excuse for the prince’s behaviour, of course, but Kako had seen his mood and deliberately provoked him, Rafiq was certain. What did she have to gain from being physically attacked?
When Kako finally deigned to wake from her self-imposed ‘faint’, the prince was still at his scribblings and Rafiq was amusedly watching her. She caught his eye and winked, then produced an entirely convincing, throbbing cough.
“Not dead, then, I see,” said the prince, without looking up. “If I were you, I would begin to think of ways in which to be very useful. Your unhelpfulness is starting to pall.”
“Oh,” said Kako, her voice slightly raspy. “How awful. Did you know that the colours in the floor have disappeared again?”
“Yes,” the prince said sourly. “I worked some magic again and the Keep took exception to it.”
“I see. Just trying to be helpful.”
Akish violently scribbled out a section of his figures and barked at Rafiq: “Instead of smirking, lizard, why don’t you clamber over the furniture to see how far you can get?”
“Of course,” said Rafiq, his grin just a little wider.
“The Floor Is Quicksand!” sang Kako at him, and leapt from the chaise lounge to a nearby desk with surprising lightness of foot.
Rafiq followed her, enjoying the feel of his muscles coiling and uncoiling. There was less exercise to be had as a human, and the fact that his arms were more useable as a human never quite made up for the fact that he was always flexing his shoulders in expect
ation of being able to use his wings.
They enjoyed an afternoon of childish fun while the prince worked at his figures. Rafiq, chasing Kako over couch-back and under chandelier, saw Akish frequently flopping on his back on the bed and wondered that the prince didn’t see the same patterns on the ceiling that he had seen.
Kako, noticing the direction of his gaze, stopped for a brief moment atop a dressing table and said: “It’s the canopy. It’s not just a curtained bed, it’s a fully canopied one. All he can see is drapes.”
Rafiq gave a hiss of laughter. “Akish was never one for sleeping with his troops.”
“Exactly,” said Kako. “Serves him right for taking the most comfortable bed.”
“So you do know the way through this Circle!”
“Oh yes,” Kako said, dropping lightly to the next piece of furniture by way of the chandelier. “I told you: I know the way this place thinks. I didn’t think you’d figure it out, actually.”
“He will, too,” Rafiq warned her. “Eventually.”
“Yes, but will he do it before he runs out of food?”
It was a good question, Rafiq thought. The prince was clever, but he was used to commanding battles and planning raids, not solving puzzles that seemed ridiculously complicated while being actually quite simple. The Keep’s puzzles so far had been children’s games– right down to the dragon that guarded it; a child’s story if ever there was one. What chiefly interested him now, though, was whether Kako was a part of the Keep’s magic, or whether she was an actual person.
That night when Kako carefully sneaked away, Rafiq was awake to follow her. She took a perilous route across a spaced-out series of armchairs that made a wandering line around furniture and finally came to a halt beside a knight that was guarding a shallow, curtained alcove. Rafiq, following her, discovered that the alcove became somewhat less shallow the closer one grew. By the time he was leaping from the second-last armchair to the last he could see down the alcove’s gloomy length as if it was a hall. A flutter of pink silk was just disappearing around a corner at the end of it.
Fire In The Blood (Shards Of A Broken Sword Book 2) Page 4