“Always glad to have you with us, boy,” he said gruffly.
Aria’s finger traced a splotch on the side of Dennis’ neck where a drop of slime had splashed the youth soon after Mother Grimes’ door shut behind him. The swelling had gone down, but the skin was still tender.
He turned. She touched a similar blotch on his forehead.
“You’ve been fighting again,” she said. If her touch was cool, then her voice was cold, clinical. “Did you have a good time?”
A disinterested adult talking down to a six-year-old.
“Well, I…” Dennis said, taken aback by this kind of hostility, from—from Aria.
She was concentrating on her plate again, though a certain stiffness in the line of her back suggested that she was no less aware of his presence than she’d been before.
Well, I… Dennis thought; but he couldn’t find a useful way to finish the sentence even in his mind, so he didn’t attempt it aloud.
They’d seen the damage Mother Grimes had done him. It wasn’t their fault, hadn’t anything to do with Rakastava and her people; but it reminded them of those they’d sent to die in the past. King Conall was embarrassed. And Aria—
Dennis blushed. He didn’t understand Aria, but he suspected the fault was in the way he felt about the princess.
“Say, boy,” said the King’s Champion, leaning forward to speak past Conall. “Some more flotsam tossed up in Rakastava. See them?”
He pointed to the next down of the circular arc of tables rising from Rakastava’s floor.
A couple, brightly dressed but obvious from their emaciation, sat gawping at the splendor around them. They looked ancient, though after staring at them, Dennis decided neither was more than thirty. Their faces were smeared with gravy from the food they’d shoveled in—with their bare hands, from the look of them. The time they’d spent in the jungle had left them with no more table manners than the lizards.
If they’d ever had table manners to lose.
“Maybe you’d like to go join them, boy,” Gannon continued. “They’re more your type, aren’t they?”
“Gannon,” Conall murmured to his plate.
“What will you do with them?” Dennis asked. There was no more emotion in his voice than there was on the edge of his sword.
“Well, they’ll stay, I suppose,” Conall said in surprise. “I don’t imagine they’ll want to leave again, now that they’ve found safe—”
He broke off when he realized exactly what Dennis meant. “Oh, good heavens!” the king blurted. “You mustn’t think we did—the things that happened, that is, because we wanted to. Rakastava welcomes strangers. It was only necessity that caused us to…”
Dennis thought of the weapons piled in Malbawn’s hut, clubs and knives and spears of sharpened wood. The sort of weapons simple folk, like the ones at the next table, would carry if some catastrophe sent them wandering through the jungle.
“You’re right,” Dennis said. “It doesn’t matter now.”
He began to eat, uncomfortably aware of the way Conall stared at the cup he held in both hands and Aria turned her torso at such an angle that Dennis had only her back to look at when he glanced to his right side.
The lights dimmed.
Dennis continued eating. He was hungry, even for the bland offerings of the city’s table, and there was still enough light to see the food. He didn’t know why the glow from all the room’s surfaces had shrunk to a fraction of its usual intensity, but there wasn’t very much about Rakastava that he did know.
He was going to have to leave this place. Despite Aria.
Because of Aria.
There was a long, hushed sound, a combination of wailing and sobbing, from the people in the assembly hall.
Dennis set down his fork and dropped his hand to the pommel of his new sword.
All around him, the citizens of Rakastava were covering their eyes or staring fixedly at the empty air in the huge room’s center. The other newcomers to the city, the stragglers at the next table, were as confused as Dennis—though they reacted by clutching one another and hunching down as if they were about to slip under the table.