“I offered my help and you spurned it. Now you have been disinherited. You are a homeless refugee.”
Woe! So it was true. Skarash might have been lying, but a sorceress had no need to lie.
“Your help seemed to involve marrying a goblin,” Inos said, keeping her words slow and level.
The sorceress slid around, so the post was behind her. “If you just keep your eyes closed, honey baby, they’re all much the same. Some are heavier than others, some hairier, some hurt more. That’s all.”
“I can hardly keep my eyes closed all the time.”
“You have never had them open! You are a fool.”
Inos felt no anger, only apprehension. “It would seem that my kingdom was disposed of without my presence being necessary. In that case, your help would have been no help. There never was any way you could put me on my throne—the Protocol forbade it.”
The sorceress’s eyes flashed in fury.
Inos did not wait for a comment. “I appreciate that you had good intentions, your Majesty. Now I humbly ask that you return my aunt and myself to Krasnegar, where you found us.”
Rasha laughed hard scorn, like hail. “I may keep the dog as payment for services rendered, though? How about compensation for the votary I have lost because of your stupidity? No, Inosolan, you forfeited any claim on me when you fled from my city.”
Her city? Azak growled wordlessly.
“You organized that whole affair!” Inos shouted, and at last she began to feel anger. “It was all your idea, and—”
“It was your idea, kitten. I did not put it in your head. And had my sorcery not prevented him, that slab of brawn on the floor there would have had you with child by now.”
Fury! How dare this slut speak such lies? Inos took a very deep breath—
“Be silent, or I shall make you silent. He cannot look at you without half choking on his lust.” Rasha chuckled softly, and shivers ran down Inos’s spine. “No, we shall keep you here. We shall teach the royal parasites how to be useful. Your aunt we shall put in the sculleries, scrubbing floors. And you—you I shall assign to one of the guards. I have one picked out already. He has unusual tastes in recreation.” She was watching Azak as she spoke.
Oh, Gods! She had found another way to torture him, by torturing the woman he loved. Inos felt her hands start to shake and clasped them behind her. She would suffer to make Azak suffer. Every humiliation inflicted upon her would be reported to him so that he would be humiliated also. He might even be forced to watch.
Silence. No one spoke.
Then the sorceress jeered at the man on his knees before her. “And you, Wonderstud? Let me give you some disappointing news.”
Azak’s eyes narrowed, but he still did not speak.
Rasha straightened up and laid hands on hips, thrusting her dainty chin forward in a curiously inappropriate gesture. “It is true that Elkarath’s allegiance has been turned, so Olybino broke my spell. Possibly he does have more power at his disposal than I do, for he has votaries to aid him. But I did not put my full power into the spell—sorcerers almost never do, for this very reason. I still have power in reserve, and he can’t know how much. More important, I am in my stronghold.” She waved both hands high, triumphantly. ”Why do you suppose sorcerers build towers? The whole palace is shielded, and it will take enormous power to defeat me here. If he sends in votaries, I may turn them. If they blast their way in, then the entire complex may be razed by the energies released. Think again, Pretty Man.”
Azak studied her for a moment and then said quietly, “And did the warlock of the east spell me, also?”
Rasha hesitated, and Inos sensed that the tension had somehow changed.
“Not that I can see,” the sorceress remarked cautiously. He sighed deeply. That news would be a great relief to him. “Let me up, please.”
Please?
Rasha’s smoldering eyes widened a fraction. “Rise, then.” Azak rose, rubbing a bruised knee. He drew himself up to his full height and crossed his arms. “On your promise to behave yourself, your Majesty . . . I invite you to my wedding, three days hence.”
Inos gasped. Rasha’s face blazed with fury at such defiance. Before she could speak, Azak repeated softly, “Your Majesty.”
It was the royal title she coveted. For a moment the silence seemed to grow unbearably, then Rasha said warily, “And what of the curse? She will char in your arms.”
“I humbly request that you lift it, as your wedding present to us.”
Humbly? Rasha made an effort to recover her disdain. “Lift it for all women, or just for her?”
There was unholy bargaining going on, and Inos groped to catch all the floating threads of it.
“All would be preferable, of course, but just for Inosolan would be acceptable.”
Inos cried, “Azak!” and stopped, stunned. From him, this was an unbelievable declaration of . . . of love?
And surrender.
He could have offered nothing more, not even the whole of his realm.
Rasha’s eyes glinted in a slow smile that chilled Inos’s blood. “Only three days?”
Azak was as taut as a bowstring, his face unreadable. “Seven days might be more seemly,” he said hoarsely.
She stepped close and looked up at him in challenge. “And until then?”
“As you wish.”
Horrors crawled on Inos’s skin as she watched Rasha’s slow smile of triumph. With delicate fingers, the sorceress unhooked her yashmak and let it fall, then raised her face to be kissed. Her appearance might be soft and youthful, but the open lips were too eager for any pretense of maidenly innocence.
But Azak knew all about that. He took her in his arms and kissed her.
She can inflame any man to madness he had said once. When the long embrace ended, he was breathless, and his alwaysruddy djinn complexion burned red as a furnace. He kept his eyes on the seductress’s, and did not look at Inos.
Then Rasha changed. The young beauty shrank and aged, reverting to the hideously battered, squat old woman whom Inos had glimpsed twice before. The jewels and filmy gauzes became a dirty brown wrap, her hair a gray tangle, the silken skin shriveled and wrinkled.
Having to bend farther this time, Azak kissed her again. Inos looked away, until she discovered she was staring at the contorted bodies of obscene sculptures.
Elkarath had known: “If he would only compromise! Bow the knee just once. Say the words she wants to hear.”
And when the second kiss ended, Azak continued to clasp the sorceress in his arms. He lifted his lips from hers just far enough to speak—softly, but without hesitation. “Inosolan, you have seven days. Go and prepare our wedding.”
“Seek to find the Good,” They had said, “and above all . . . remember love! If you do not trust in love, then all will be lost.” Without a word, Inos turned and fled from the chamber. Rasha had won.
Female of the species:
When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant, tooth and nail
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
— Kipling, The Female of the Species
THIRTEEN
Out of the West
1
“Nice little place they’ve got on the hill there,” Gathmor shouted.
Holding tight to the gunwale, Rap leaned sideways and peered under the sail at the great white and green city—rich and beautiful, seeming strangely cool in the blazing sunlight.
“Not bad,” he yelled, knowing that the wind might steal away his words before they reached back to the tiller. “Be a brute to heat in winter.”
The headlands slipped away on either hand as the Queen of Krasnegar raced into the harbor. There could be no doubt where this was, for the blot on the chart now lay directly on the name of Arakkaran. If Inos was living in that incredible palace, that shining wonder of domes and towers and spires, then she must be finding it very comfortable. Rap thought briefly of jungle and galley benches, of jotunn raiders and dragons and the nightmare journey now ending, and he felt an absurd twinge of envy.
Idiot! Where did stableboys live like queens? Nowhere. Never. And he had seen her in a tent, anyway.
Now the voyage was over, the time for action was at hand. He turned to Jalon, who was spread limp on the gratings amidships, covered with a length of salt-caked canvas. That was the only place aboard where anyone could even hope to sleep, where the boat’s unending mad leapings would not shake a man’s teeth out and bounce him until he was black and blue all over. A true storm raised a great swell, but the occult local squall that powered the Queen had lacked enough fetch to change the existing waves much, so the sea had remained relatively calm. Shrouded in flying spume, the boat had skipped and bounded over the crests in a strange unholy motion, all the way from Vislawn. “Belay the wind, pilot!” Rap shouted.