She was wearing a clean tunic—man’s clothing, but there was no doubt at all about the gender of the body within it. A garland of white-and-purple flowers crowned the long auburn curls that fell past her shoulders; it was hard to remember her turning the billhook meant for him, bathed in blood . . . And fairly easy, too. All the gods witness, I was terrified. Not half as terrified as he’d been challenging Sawtre, of course.
Adrian cleared his throat, glad of the night dimness. A voice drifted up the stairwell, followed by a tremendous shout of laughter, and then the jaunty notes of a kordax on the lyre. A line of torch-bearing men stamped out into the courtyard of this building, mostly leaning on their companions—women of the town, or boys in a few instances—and began weaving in a chain dance around the fountain and back into the hall. They were singing something, something with his name in it, but between distance, drink and the blur of voices far from used to singing in unison, he couldn’t make it out.
Interesting, Adrian thought with a distant scholar’s part of his mind. He’d never actually seen a victory komos before, although the old epics were full of them. This wasn’t much like the descriptions the poets gave; they left out the bits about men who stopped to throw up, or just fell down paralytically drunk.
I suspect that this is more like what they were really like, even in the War of the Thousand Ships, he mused.
“Ah, um.” Oh, Gellerix, that’s lame, he thought and found his voice. “I’m definitely not going to force myself on you, Freewoman Helga,” he said.
Helga smiled. “That’s extremely gentlemanly of you,” she said, with a polite nod and toss of her head. It wouldn’t have been out of place at a dinner party at Audsley’s house in Vanbert, except that most of his wife’s acquaintances didn’t have that much style. “But I assure you that force isn’t required.”
“Ah, um.” Oh, Gellerix. “Ah, you really don’t have to feel any sense of obligation, Freewoman Helga,” he managed to choke out.
“You do like women, don’t you, Adrian?”
Adrian felt a chuckle rising at her expression of sudden worry. “Well, yes. Don’t believe everything you hear about Emeralds, my—ummmph.”
“You’re exactly the right height,” Helga said as she broke the kiss. “Two and one-half inches taller than me. . . . Look, Adrian, I’m not a virgin, my marital prospects are crap anyway, I’ve been locked up with sixty women for a year and I don’t like girls . . . and I do like you. You’re a fascinating man. You’re also not someone my father picked, either—I like you, I said.” Her smile grew. “Am I making myself clear?”
“Abundantly,” he said, and scooped her up with an arm under the shoulders and another under the knees.
SEVEN
“Preble,” King Casull said.
His pointer tapped down on the map table. The greatbeast hide there showed an island covered in buildings, shaped like a peach pit with a stretch of blue water down the middle. Puff-cheeked wind spirits were drawn to represent the prevailing winds, and a line eastward showed the mainland coast. A few men stood around it: his heir, Tenny; Esmond; Adrian; and the Grand Admiral of the Isles, a half-brother of Casull who’d supported him in his thrust for the crown and had no sons of his own. A cooling evening breeze blew curtains aside to reveal the harbor of Chalice, crammed with shipping, a tarry reek penetrating even this far above the harbor. It was growing dark, but a flicker of red showed on the underside of the clouds that hung in the deep-purple sky—reflection of the lava in the craters above the city.
“We held Preble under my predecessor, Casull III, may his spirit rest with the Sun God,” Casull went on. “Justiciar Marcomann took it away from us, along with the old mainland possessions of the Kings of the Isles. It’s barely half a mile from shore—you can see the old city, Sor, here—but it’s a magnificent naval base and does a heavy trade. According to my spies, who are many there, there’s only a small Confed garrison there, barely a battalion.”