It didn’t make Ilisidi happier with him. He could bet on that, too.
* * *
VIII
« ^ »
A noisy night,” Ilisidi said, pouring her own tea—the smell of it drifted with the steam, across the table, and Bren’s stomach went queasy.
“I’m extremely sorry,” he said, “and embarrassed, aiji-mai.”
Ilisidi grinned, positively grinned, and added sugar.
It was little barbs all during breakfast. Ilisidi was in an excellent humor. She wolfed down four fish, a bowl of cereal and two cakes with sweet oil, while he stayed to the cereal and the breakfast rolls, thinking that, considering the pain he was in sitting on a hard chair this morning, he would almost rather drink Ilisidi’s tea than get onto Nokhada’s back again.
But it was downstairs, Ilisidi reveling in the stiff breeze blowing in off the lake, a breeze that tore at coat-skirts and knifed right through sweaters when one passed out of the sunlight and into the stable court.
Nokhada at least was willing to get down for him this morning, and this time, at least, he was ready for the snap of Nokhada’s rising before he was quite astride.
It hurt. God, it hurt. Not exactly the kind of pain a man could admit to, or beg off from. He only hoped for early numbness, and told himself his human ancestors had been riders, and somehow continued the species.
He brought a quick stop to Nokhada’s milling about, determined to have the final word on their course this morning—which lasted until Ilisidi moved Babs out and Nokhada jostled Cenedi’s mecheita for position at Babs’ tail in a sudden dash out onto the road.
Straight out. Ilisidi and Babs vanished over the cliff, a stride or two before Nokhada won out over Cenedi’s mount and took the same downward plunge.
Onto what thank God was trail and not empty air.
He didn’t yell, and didn’t object, though his legs did, and for a moment the pain was acute, in a dozen jolting strides down a dusty slot of a trail that began above the point where Nokhada had thrown the fit yesterday about the rein.
If they had gone off then, they would not have fallen, damn the creature. Gone an embarrassing long distance down to a second terrace above the lake, indeed they would, but there was such a terrace, whether or not, yesterday, at the start of the ride, he might have had the ability to stay on Nokhada’s back.
And he found it equally interesting that, with the plunge over the cliff available for the novice fool, Ilisidi had taken them straight up the mountain yesterday, however rough the course. A second chance missed, then. So maybe the tea was, after all, an accident.
Although, given there had been an intruder on the grounds yesterday, maybe getting them over the ridge or above line-of-sight from the fortress had been a priority.
And given Banichi’s comment about having had them under direct surveillance…
“Why didn’t you tell me yesterday that there was a possibility of someone out there?” he asked Cenedi, with the rest of the dowager’s guard trailing behind. “You knew we were in danger yesterday. Banichi informed you.”
“The outriders,” Cenedi said, “were well alert. And Banichi was never far.”
“Nadi, a risk to the dowager? In all respect, is that reasonable?”
“With Tabini’s man?” Cenedi’s face had things in common with Banichi’s. Just as expressive. “No. It wasn’t a risk.”
Not a risk? A compliment to Banichi, perhaps, but damned well a risk, under any human interpretation of the word, unless, the thought that had jogged his attention last night, there were more security systems about than either Banichi or Cenedi was going to own to. He rode by Cenedi in thinking silence, with the waves lapping the rocks below. The sky was blue. The waters danced. A dragonette soared past Nokhada’s face and made her jump, a single heart-stopping moment, close to the edge.
“Damn!” he said, and he and Nokhada had a silent war for a moment, at which Cenedi maintained complete lack of expression, and complete control of his mecheita.
Ilisidi rode ahead of them, oblivious, seemingly, to all of it. When he tilted his head back and looked up he couldn’t see the fortress walls at all, just the bowed face of the rocks and, behind them, the very edge of the modern wall that divided off the paved court from the trail. Ahead, the trail wound higher on the mountain, until they came to a promontory with a dizzying view, where Ilisidi stopped and let Babs stand, and where, when he arrived, he sat doing the same with Nokhada, telling himself that if Babs didn’t fling himself over the cliff, Nokhada wouldn’t, and he needn’t worry.