‘You could make a fortune peddling that one as an emetic, you
know. I felt the urge to vomit before you’d finished reciting the
first stanza. ‘
He howled in absolute rage and made a clumsy thrust with
his rapier.
Ehlana had watched Stragen training Sarabian often enough
to know that the thrust was well off the mark. The intrepid
Baroness, however, coolly deflected the blade with the wrist of
the hand she seemed to be raising in a futilely defensive gesture,
and Elron’s blade passed smoothly through her shoulder.
Melidere gasped, clutching at the blade to conceal the exact
location of the wound. Then she lurched back to pull herself
free of the blade and clawed at the wound to spread the
blood spurting from it over the bodice of her nightdress. Then
she fell.
‘You murderer!’ Ehlana shrieked, rushing to her fallen friend.
She hurled herself across Melidere’s inert body, weeping and
crying out in apparent anguish. ‘Are you all right?’ she muttered
under her breath between sobs.
“It’s only a scratch,’ Melidere lied, also in a whisper.
‘Tell Sparhawk that I’m all right,’ the queen instructed, tugging
off her ring and concealing it in Melidere’s bodice, ‘and tell
him that I forbid him to give up Bhelliom, no matter what they
threaten to do to me.’ She rose to her feet, her face tear-streaked.
‘You’ll hang for this, Elron,’ she said in a deadly voice, ‘or maybe
I’ll have you burned at the stake instead – with a slow fire.’ She
pulled a blanket from the bed and quickly covered Melidere with
it to prevent too close an examination.
‘We will leave now,’ Scarpa said coldly. ‘That other one is also
your friend, I believe.’ He pointed at the ashen-faced Alcan.
‘We’ll take her along and if you make any outcry at all, I’ll
personally slit her throat.’
‘You’re forgetting the message, Scarpa,’ Krager said pulling
a folded piece of paper from the inside of his leather Peloi jacket.
‘We have to leave a friendly little note for Sparhawk – just to let
him know that we stopped by to call.’ Then he drew a small
knife. ‘Your pardon, Queen Ehlana,’ he smirked, exhaling the
sharp, acrid reek of his wine-sodden breath into her face, ‘but
I need a bit of authentication to prove to Sparhawk that we’re
really holding you captive.’ He took hold of a lock of Ehlana’s
hair and roughly sawed it off with his knife. ‘We’ll just leave
this with our note so that he can compare it with later ones to
verify that it’s really yours.’ His grin grew even more vicious
‘if you should feel a sudden urge to cry out, Ehlana, just remember
that all we really need is your head. We can harvest hair
from that, so we won’t need to bring the rest of you along if
you start being too much bother. ‘