And stopped dead as a terrifying cry of outrage exploded from Tegid’s throat. Still screaming, he dropped the Prince like a discarded toy on the sandy floor.
There came a smell of burning flesh. Leaping spectacularly, Tegid upended another table, rescued a brimming pitcher of ale, and proceeded to pour its contents over his posterior.
The movement revealed, somewhat like the drawing of a curtain, Paul Schafer behind him, holding rather apologetically, a poker from the cooking fire.
There was a brief silence, an awe-stricken homage to the operatic force of Tegid’s scream, then Diarmuid, still on the floor, began to laugh in high, short, hysterical gasps, signaling a resumption of universal pandemonium. Crying with laughter, barely able to stand, Kevin made his way, with Erron staggering beside him, to embrace the crookedly grinning Schafer.
It was some time before order was restored, largely because no one was particularly intent on restoring it. The red-doubleted man appeared to have a number of friends, and so, too, it seemed, did the soup-pourer. Kevin, who knew neither, threw a token bench into the fray, then withdrew towards the bar with Erron.
Two serving women joined them there, and the press of events greatly facilitated a rapid acquaintance.
Going upstairs, hand in hand with Marna, the taller of the two, Kevin’s last glimpse of the tavern floor was of a surging mass of men disappearing in and out of the smoky haze. Diarmuid was standing atop the bar, lobbing whatever came to hand upon the heads of the combatants. He didn’t seem to be choosing sides. Kevin looked for Paul, didn’t see him; and then a door was opened and closed behind him, and in the rush of dark a woman was in his arms, her mouth turned up to his, and his soul began its familiar spiral downward into longing.
Much later, when he had not yet completed the journey back, he heard Marna ask in a timid whisper, “Is it always so?”
And a good few minutes yet from being capable of speech, he stroked her hair once with an effort and closed his eyes again. Because it was always so. The act of love a blind, convulsive reaching back into a falling dark. Every time. It took away his very name, the shape and movement of his bones; and between times he wondered if there would be a night when he would go so far that there was no returning.
Not this night, though. Soon he was able to smile at her, and then to give thanks and gentle words, and not without sincerity, for her sweetness ran deep, and he had needed badly to drink of such a thing. Slipping inside his arm, Marna laid her head on his shoulder beside his own bright hair, and, breathing deeply of her scent, Kevin let the exhaustion of two waking nights carry him to sleep.
He only had an hour, though, and so was vulnerable and unfocused when the presence of a third person in the room woke him. It was another girl, not Erron’s, and she was crying, her hair disordered about her shoulders.
“What is it, Tiene?” Marna asked sleepily.
“He sent me to you,” brown-haired Tiene sniffled, looking at Kevin.
“Who?” Kevin grunted, groping towards consciousness. “Diarmuid?”
“Oh, no. It was the other stranger, Pwyll.”
It took a moment.
“Paul! What did—what’s happened?”
His tone was evidently too sharp for already tender nerves. Tiene, casting a wide-eyed glance of reproach at him, sat down on the bed and started crying again. He shook her arm. “Tell me! What happened?”
“He left,” Tiene whispered, barely audible. “He came upstairs with me, but he left.”
Shaking his head, Kevin tried desperately to focus. “What? Did he . . . was he able to. . . ?”
Tiene sniffed, wiping at the tears on her cheeks. “You mean to be with me? Yes, of course he was, but he took no pleasure at all, I could tell. It was all for me . . . and I am not, I gave him nothing, and . . . and . . .”
“And what, for God’s sake?”
“And so I cried,” Tiene said, as if it should have been obvious. “And when I cried, he walked out. And he sent me to find you. My lord.”