Shakily she descended the last couple of steps, fighting back tears, trying to scrape some last trace of strength from the bottom of her personal barrel. Her knees trembled with exhaustion. Her head told her that the sultana’s palace was rocking gently, like a ship, and that was not very likely. Soon she would simply fall over. Oh, Rap! Rasha must be a very powerful sorceress, but she might be crazy, also. Was her hatred of men genuine? Had she endured the sort of experience she had hinted at?
Could anyone ever believe anything said around here?
Azak stepped past Inos and moved toward the door—head high, back rigid. Kade came to Inos’s side and took her hand in a gesture that held only caution and sympathy. Those were not much use.
Rap! He was only a stableboy, yet he had been the only one to stay faithful. Even when Inos had spurned him in the forest, he had not wavered in his allegiance. He had endured the ordeal of the taiga for her sake, not once but twice. Her only loyal subject! Monarchs dreamed of loyalty like that. For Rap, Inos would brave even the fury of a sorceress.
She had just one arrow left in her quiver, and it might make things immeasurably worse, because despite what Rasha said, men as well as women could meet ordeals more terrible than a quick death.
“He knows a word of power!”
Rasha spun around, matronly dignity replacing nymph seduction instantly. ”Who does?”
“Doctor Sagorn!” Inos watched the sorceress stalking back toward her like a hungry cat. “And Rap has one, too.”
“So!” Rasha came very close, smiling dangerously. “So that was why you were holding hands with a stableboy? I wondered why the smell didn’t bother the royal nose.”
Queen Rasha herself reeked sickeningly of gardenia. Rap, Inos suddenly realized, had smelled of laundry soap, not of horses as he usually did. Which was irrelevant . . .
“His talent doesn’t work on people! Just on animals. He’s a faun.”
Kade said, “Inos, dear!” in a warning tone.
Still somehow catlike, the sorceress smiled. “But words of power have side effects. Even one word would naturally make a man more successful at lechery; he would automatically collect any stray princesses around.”
“That wasn’t what—I’ve known Rap all my life! I’d trust him with—”
“More fool you!” Rasha sneered. “Don’t ever trust a man, any man. Muscles, you stay! I’m not done with you.” Her eyes had not wandered from Inos’s face; she had spoken to Azak without looking at him. “Men keep their brains between their legs. Don’t you know that yet, child?”
“Not Rap!”
“Yes, Rap.” She considered Inos slyly for a moment. “Maybe I will fetch him for you! I could show you his real colors.”
“Don’t believe her!” Azak shouted from the door. “She can inflame any man to madness!”
Rasha raised her eyes to glare at him. She did not seem to do anything more, but the young giant screamed, clutched his belly, and fell writhing on the floor.
“Brute!” Rasha muttered, then went back to studying Inos. Azak was thrashing and whimpering. Inos had heard tales of animals caught in traps trying to chew off their own paws . . . why was she thinking of such stories at a time like this? Appalled as much by the sorceress’s casual indifference as by the barbarity itself, she fought in vain for words.
“No,” the sultana said. “They’re all after the same thing, and nothing else.”
“Not Rap!”
Rasha seemed to grow taller, and her eyes redder. “You think so? What do you know of life, Little Palace Flower?”
“Enough!” Inos shouted. “I was about to be married to a man I loved and I saw him transformed into a monster!”
“Inos!” Kade said sharply.
“At twelve I was sold to a monster. He was old. He oozed.”
“I watched my father die!”
“When I was younger than you I watched my babies die!”
“I crossed the taiga in winter!”
“I was cook on a fishing boat for five men. Can you guess what that was like, Butterfly?”
Kade was clucking like a panicky hen at Inos’s side. To yell at a sorceress was certainly rash, but Inos ignored the warnings. Yet she didn’t think she was going to win this crazy shouting match. Rasha sounded like one of the fishwives on the docks at Krasnegar, an expert.
“I can’t help what happened to you!” Inos bellowed, louder still. ”But you could help me now!”
Azak was still sobbing and squirming in agony on the floor, disregarded by everyone.
“Help you?” The sorceress glared. “Help your stableboy lover, you mean?”
Inos dropped her eyes. It was hopeless! Oh, Rap!
“On the other hand . . .” Rasha said more softly. “Which one was Sagorn?”
“The old man.”
“One of the sequential set? But they must share memories, so they all know it?”
Inos nodded, looking up with sudden hope.
“Interesting!” Rasha had reverted to her matronly, queenly guise, which was encouraging. “A matched set with a word of power! That could be amusing. And two words would be worth salvaging. Come, then, dearie, and let’s see.”
She started back up the stairs. Hope leaping wildly within her, Inos brushed past Kade, ignoring her attempts to signal warnings, following the sorceress. As she rounded the curve, she saw the basalt panther watching her with eyes of yellow onyx, gleaming bright. They seemed to follow her as she approached, but it remained a statue, and she ignored it, staying at Rasha’s side.
Before they had quite reached the top, the sorceress stopped, holding out a hand to stay Inos, also. Then she advanced cautiously, one step at a time. When her head was level with the floor, she paused a long time, seeming to be listening, as she had before.
“What—” Inos said.
“Sh! All clear. . .” Apparently reassured, Rasha strode upward again. Once past the panther she did not turn north, toward the magic casement, but headed instead to the southeast, weaving between bijou divans and tables and grotesque carvings, until she came to a large mirror hung on the wall. It was oval, bound in an intricate silver frame depicting leaves and hands and numerous other shapes, all vaguely sinister. Even the reflections seemed oddly distorted.
Inos stared in horror at the two images she saw there, shadowed and dim. She was a fright-face livid, eyes staring, honey hair awry, looking for all the world like flotsam washed up on a rock. Rasha, meanwhile, seemed as fair and regal as everyone’s ideal of motherhood. She was observing Inos’s reaction with cool disdain.
Then she frowned, as if in concentration. The twin reflections faded and the glass darkened. Shapes moved within it. Inos gasped at this new sorcery, seeing the mists coalesce into the forms of imp legionaries. Soon she recognized the chamber at the top of Inisso’s Tower, dimly lighted, with snow swirling beyond the panes and settling on the leading. She could make out the shattered door, and the throng of soldiers milling around in the thin gray light. There was no sound, only the vision in the glass.
“See?” the sorceress muttered. “No sign of your lover.”
“He was not that! Merely a loyal subject!”
“Hah! He’d have been slobbering all over you as soon as he got the chance. They all do. But I don’t see the goblin, either; nor one of the set. ”
Inos blinked tears from her eyes.
“And look here!” Rasha said. The scene lurched sideways and steadied again. Several of the legionaries were leaning out the great south casement, staring down. “Either they had the sense to jump,” Rasha said, “or they just got thrown. Thrown, I expect.”
The scene blurred as the tears won over the blinking.
Rap and Aunt Kade—only two of her father’s subjects had stayed loyal to Inos. And now there was only Kade.
3
Eastward, a faint glow rising from the sea was washing the stars from the sky, playing on waves that rolled in monotonously from the dark to lap a beach already shining like hammered silver. Westward, behind Rap, the jungle was wakening into carillons of birdsong. He had never heard melody like that.
He had never breathed such air—warn and affectionate on the skin, sweet with scents of sea and vegetation. The humidity stole his breath away. It made his head spin, seducing him like a hot bed. It felt decadent. He distrusted such air, and the soft warm sand, also.
Morning was coming, and he had not slept at all. His eyelids kept drooping, no matter how fiercely he told them to behave themselves. Not that he needed his eyes, for his farsight told him that no danger lurked nearby. Nothing larger than a raven stirred within that dense foliage, and whatever those jeweled birds might be, they were not ravens. He had already scanned carefully as far as he could reach, satisfying himself that the forest was not merely deserted, it was impenetrable, a tangle of lush vines, succulent leaves, and nasty fleshy flowers. It teemed with bugs and snakes. He had never known trees so huddled, nor so varied.