After a glorious start, the day had clouded over, so I was glad to get out of the wind. Most of the hut was taken up by a rickety table covered in plans of the castle. Dillan proudly showed me his newest idea, a contraption for pouring liquid pitch on any attackers foolhardy enough to besiege his masterpiece. Not even my lukewarm praise put him off.
“How amazingly strong your elephant is,” he enthused. “Do you think he could shift those boulders out there?”
“I don’t see why not,” I answered, for I had wondered the same thing, “but he would need a proper harness for that.”
At his obvious interest, I described the kind of gear we had used when dragging logs, heavily padded so it wouldn’t cut into Hami’s sensitive skin, and at once Dillan shoved a pile of papers aside and began to sketch a design for an elephant harness, already wondering how to improve it. I had to smile at his enthusiasm, but as I explained some of the finer points, I suddenly wondered what had happened to my plans of escape. My earlier misgivings welled back up. I acted as if I was going to stay! It was all that man’s fault, I decided, though in all honesty I couldn’t have said how.
That moment the bit of sackcloth serving as a door was pushed aside, and as if summoned by my thoughts Rhys entered. He straightened up, and somehow the hut suddenly seemed a lot more crowded. It had started to rain outside, so he shook out his cloak before hanging it up near the fireplace. The smell of wet man hung in the air. After a guarded nod of acknowledgement my way, Rhys greeted the master builder with a warm smile.
“I came to check on your progress on the dais, but I see you’re finished already,” he said. “That was quick.”
“Yes, thanks to Lady Arisha’s elephant,” Dillan explained. “We were just discussing how to harness him, so he could pull those annoying boulders away.”
Rhys flashed me a surprised look. “That’s kind of you. Shifting them is heavy work.”
Though secretly warmed by his praise, I shrugged. “Hami doesn’t mind.” Besides, it would show him that my elephant was useful for other things than lording it over the common people, as he had once put it.
Dillan handed him a fresh mug of tea, and the two pored over the design for a harness. When the master builder showed him his idea for pouring pitch on any unlucky attackers, he finally got a properly appreciative audience. The two unrolled plans of the castle, discussing further improvements, and Rhys’s face lost its habitual sternness, making him seem younger. I cradled my warm mug of tea and watched them idly, as they completely forgot my presence in their shared enthusiasm.
Finally Rhys straightened up. “I have to go and play host now,” he sighed. “Are you coming too, Arisha?”
Had he only come to check on the dais? It surprised me, for surely he could have delegated such a routine task to his squire. But by now the rain was drumming hard on the roof, and with sudden unease I thought of the steep path down to the village. “I’ll stay here a little bit longer and wait for the rain to stop, if Dillan doesn’t mind.”
Rhys frowned. “It looks as if the rain has set in for the rest of the day. You’d better come with me.” He picked up his cloak and handed it to me. “Here, that will keep you dry.”
“But what about you?”
“I’ll be fine.”
I didn’t want to make a fuss, not after he’d found me crying on his grandmother’s lap the night before, so I agreed reluctantly. Hami had never minded the rain anyway, but then he didn’t have my memories. The elephant ambled over and I suddenly wondered if Rhys intended to ride down with me, for he seemed to be on foot. The idea of having him sit behind me, his arms round me, somehow unsettled me – for some reason it had been easier when he had just been the enemy.
So I clicked my tongue to make Hami follow behind me and started walking down the path. Rhys fell into step beside me, but seemed in a pensive mood and didn’t try to keep up a conversation, which suited me fine. As I had suspected, water flowed by in brown rivulets, making me tense. Not just a fine drizzle, but the kind of rain that drenched the earth. My elephant, tuned to my mood as always, extended his trunk and rested it on my shoulder in reassurance. I took a deep breath. Such little rain was harmless, hardly enough to properly soak the soil. It was all in my mind.
“Arisha, is there something the matter?” Rhys asked suddenly.
How had he known? I drew the cloak closer about me. “Nothing. I just don’t particularly like rain.”
“Are you cold?”
I shook my head and stepped across a puddle of water. “No.”
We walked on in silence, but though Rhys asked nothing more, he kept watching me with a frown on his face.
“I…my mother was killed in a landslide,” I finally explained grudgingly. For some reason I felt that I owed him an explanation.
“A landslide! How?”
“She helped clear the road to some remote villages in the mountains, and a whole hillside came down and buried her and her elephant.” Hami’s mother, her favourite. I still remembered how it had rained for days and days, turning all the tracks to a muddy brown.
“You were there?” he asked, sounding appalled.
“No, I was too small.” But I heard all about it, and dreamed of it for months afterwards.
“Why didn’t you say!” he exclaimed. “Do you want to go back up?”
“I’m fine,” I insisted. “Just bad memories.” From behind Hami rumbled in reassurance.
Rhys took my arm and drew it through his. “Arisha, did I ever tell you how I earned the name of Eagle?”
I looked up, surprised at this sudden change of subject. “No, I don’t think so.” Why did he ask?
“If I do, will you promise me not to tell Wynn?”
“Why not?”
He grinned. “You’ll see. So do I have your word?”
“Fine,” I agreed, but still wondered why. Surely it was a properly heroic tale.
“When I was a boy of about Wynn’s age, Taren and I found a book in my father’s library by some mage from Sarbatinia,” Rhys began. He flashed me a smile. “The drawings were wonderful, so lifelike! I’ve still got it in my study, I’ll show you sometime. The book had a mix of portraits, sketches of animals and drawings of buildings. But what really caught our interest were a few pages at the back filled with ideas for wonderful contraptions we’d never seen before.”
He paused, deep in thought, and I had to nudge him to carry on. “So?”
“Oh, one in particular caught our fancy, a kind of frame with two wings attached. The idea was that you sat in it and worked the wings to fly like a bird. We decided we had to build one.”
“What! Were you mad?”
He chuckled. “No, just young and foolish. We spent the whole summer putting the thing together in secret in one of Father’s hunting huts. You see, we had the suspicion that the grownups might not let us try it out. I wanted to launch it from the Eyrie.”
I gasped and he squeezed my arm in reassurance. “Luckily Taren dissuaded me. We went to a small, hidden glade in the hills instead.”
“What happened?”
Rhys gave me a rueful grin. “You can probably guess: I crashed the thing and broke my arm in the process.” He smiled triumphantly. “However, I manged to fly the distance of ten yards! Anyway, that’s when Taren came up with the name.”
I chuckled. “Now I understand why you don’t want the tale repeated to Wynn. Climbing trees for feathers seems downright reasonable compared to that.”
He grinned and launched into another outrageous story from his boyhood, after which I absolutely had to tell him about the time that an elephant with a passion for swimming ran away with Roshni’s governor still in his howdah, and they both ended up in the local water reservoir. Rhys followed up with another story, and before I knew it, we had reached the bottom of the hill.
For the first time I noticed that he was drenched with rain, his blond hair plastered to his skull and drops of water lying like small pearls on the eagle feather. Yet he did not
seem to mind and cast me another grin. From one moment to the next, I became aware of his body heat seeping through the thick woollen cloak where he still held my arm, almost as if a new sense had blossomed, tuned only to him: his steady strength beside me, a swordsman’s firm muscles, the magnetic force of his personality that drew you in. His arm brushed against my waist and I jumped.
“Arisha, what is it?”
He had a special way of speaking my name, unexpectedly soft and low. I shook my head to clear the confusion from it. “I…nothing.” What was the matter with me all of a sudden? But he had been kind to take my mind off my dark thoughts. “Thank you,” I said.
“What for?”
“For distracting me.”
He shrugged. “We all have our bad memories.”
I thought of the life he had led and wondered what sights he would rather forget. He had chosen the warrior’s path, I reminded myself, completely opposite to my own calling in life. Though we might find a brief moment of accord, like two people dancing to the same music, it could not last, we were far too different.
Unaware of the troubled thoughts tumbling through my mind, he frowned down at me. “With your mother and father dead, do you have any other family to look after you?”
I shrugged. “A grandfather in Sikhand.”
“That abbot of Mohsen monastery you mentioned? What kind of man is he?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never met him.” I hesitated briefly, but why shouldn’t he know the truth. “Mother’s family is Fourth Circle and quite influential, but they disowned her on her marriage to my father. I have no idea if my grandfather will even acknowledge me.”
His frown deepened. “And what were you going to do there?”
My flight from Sattar had been so precipitous, I had never really thought beyond reaching my grandfather. “I don’t know,” I answered slowly. “I suppose I could always join the monastery.”
“What! You want to shut yourself away in there?”
“People do that quite voluntarily,” I pointed out, “to honour the Elements or simply in order to hone their magic.”
He made a cutting motion with his hand. “Well, forget about that idea.”
Really, the man acted as if it was up to him to decide! “That’s my choice alone,” I answered.
“No. I won’t let you.” His voice held the tone of finality.
“I don’t see how it concerns you!” I exclaimed. The cheek of the man!
“You’re staying here, Arisha, and that’s my final word on it,” Rhys bit out, a dark look on his face. Then he suddenly snapped his mouth shut.
A reminder that despite all the nice talk of being his guest, he still held me completely in his power? Was his offer of having me escorted to the border worth so little? But perhaps he’d only made it because he knew that I would never leave Hami behind. I dropped his arm and drew the cloak closer around me, suddenly feeling chilly and alone. And to think that I had almost started to like him.
Almost.
SIXTEEN
When we reached the courtyard, Hami went willingly into captivity and let them shackle his leg while he started to make inroads into the big pile of fodder waiting for him. Feeling faintly depressed, I left him in the shelter of the big beech tree and went to change.
But once in Cerwen’s room, I settled down on the truckle bed, pulled my legs up to my chest and rested my forehead on my knees. I needed a chance to think. Rhys’s cloak fell around me in soft folds, smelling of wet wool, but also of him: that compound of horse, the oil used on his chain mail and a musky scent uniquely his own. How was it that I should recognise it so clearly?
He had been kind, that was the problem, and I had let my guard down. Dealing with the Eagle had been so much easier, the lines of engagement clear cut and my loyalty unquestioned. That had been compromised the moment I relinquished my chance of escape in order to save Wynn from the river. And ever since we’d arrived at the Eyrie, I had let myself be caught up in the lives of these people, worse, had started to care for them. That had to stop. I would have to steel myself to stay aloof from them in the future.
Especially from that overbearing, arrogant, pig-headed…Fresh anger surged up within me. How dare he try to dictate my life to me! I should have ordered Hami to crush him or left him to drown in the river, or better still, pushed him off the ledge at the Eyrie. I smiled as I pictured all sorts of gruesome deaths for Rhys that still somehow resulted in him coming crawling back to beg my forgiveness. He had to be the most annoying man I had ever encountered.
That moment the door opened and Cerwen entered, followed by two servants carrying a chest. “Ah, here you are,” she said. “This is for you, Grandmother sends it.” She waved to the servants to set down the chest at the foot of my bed.
“For me?” I asked in surprise. The chest was beautiful, carved from walnut wood with intricate scrollwork decorations.
Cerwen threw it open. “Yes, one of Grandmother’s dower chests.” With a flourish she handed me a key. “And the best thing about it: it’s got a sturdy lock.”
Why did they all have to be so nice to me? Wasn’t there a dark, stinking prison cell somewhere that they could throw me into and have done with it? I wouldn’t even have minded rats, though they weren’t exactly my favourite animals.
“Do you want me to help you put your things away?” Cerwen asked when the servants had left the room. When I didn’t answer, she peered at me. “Arisha, are you all right?” She touched my forehead. “You’re chilled to the bone! Where have you been?”
“Up to the Eyrie.”
“In this rain?” she exclaimed. “Don’t tell me Rhys dragged you up there. Why, the man has less sense than a drunken donkey! Just you wait, I’ll give him a piece of my mind.”
“It was my own idea,” I interrupted her tirade. “In fact he lent me his cloak to keep me dry.” I tugged at it disconsolately.
She cast me a sharp look. “Well, never mind. Let’s get you out of these damp clothes before you catch a chill.”
With her help I wriggled out of my tunic and trousers and then just accepted whatever she handed me, feeling too dispirited to take an interest in what I wore. While I slipped on dry clothes, Cerwen put away my few belongings in the chest, took the key from my unresisting fingers and locked it. “There!”
I slumped down on the bed again. “Thank you.”
“Arisha, have you quarrelled with Rhys?” Cerwen asked suddenly.
I started. “What makes you think so?”
“Sometimes he says things without meaning them. You must remember there’s enormous pressure on him.” She sat down on the bed next to me. “Rhys doesn’t always watch his tongue with his friends.”
His friends? Ha! I frowned. “What kind of pressure? Do you mean this war?”
Cerwen twisted one of her sleeves. “There are those who would not mind seeing him fail.”
One person sprang to mind. “Lord Pellyn?”
Cerwen nodded. “First and foremost, yes, but there are others.”
“But he lost family at Glynhir, too! Surely he wants them avenged?”
She pulled a face. “Yes, but he would like to be the one to get the credit for the victory.”
It did not make me like Lord Pellyn any better. Cerwen patted my hand. “Don’t worry. Once Rhys wins, all the doubters will be silenced.” She smiled at me, apparently forgetting the bloody price my countrymen would have to pay for Rhys’s victory. And what of her own people? A cornered opponent was all the more dangerous. How many Aneiry would not survive to see their lands freed? Even Rhys himself… I could not finish the thought. He would be in the thick of the fighting, of that I was sure.
Cerwen got up and pulled me to my feet. “So for the time being we have to keep our Lammergeyers sweet.”
I had to laugh despite myself. “What do you propose? Throw them bones?”
Cerwen grimaced. “If only it were that easy!” She took my arm and pulled me to the door. “But first let’s get someth
ing hot into you. That will make you feel more cheerful.”
Despite my protests, she dragged me to the great hall, which was full of men talking and laughing while the rain drummed a counterpoint on the roof. There she set me down at the high table and sent a servant to fetch a bowl of hot soup. Perhaps she had a point, for I felt better once I’d gobbled down some lovely leek soup accompanied by freshly baked bread. As Rastam tal Nasar had written: the wise general will look to his soldiers’ stomachs.
Midday meals were informal at the Eyrie; people just grabbed something to eat whenever it was convenient. It being late, most of the others had finished already, but they gathered in small groups talking. Some of them worked on their equipment, sewing iron rings onto leather tunics or polishing swords, others played at dice and other games.
Taren joined us at our table with his hair still damp from the rain and swept Cerwen an extravagant bow. “I’ve battled through pouring waters and bottomless bogs just to reach your side, my fair lady.”
Unimpressed, Cerwen lifted an eyebrow. “Are you sure it’s not the hot food that drew you?”
Taren put his hand to his heart. “How you wrong me!” He cast me a beseeching look, asking for support. “Do you treat your admirers so cruelly too?”
Remembering Sattar, I grinned. “Hami takes care of them for me. The last one ended up unconscious in the water.”
Taren sighed deeply. “I see I cannot hope for succour from you.” He turned to Cerwen, his manner back to normal. “You mentioned hot food?”
She laughed and sent off a servant for more soup, while Taren drew up a stool and sat down opposite us. “If only dragons still roamed the land,” he said, “I could rescue my lady and earn her eternal gratitude. Surely that would make her treat me better.”
“Yes, dragons are in rather short supply,” Cerwen commented, amused.
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