Fires of the Desert (Children of the Desert Book 4) (56 page)

Best not to test it, all the same. She drew in a mist-thick breath and sat up straight, listening to the creaking of damp leather and the scrape of hooves and booted feet on a gravel-scattered road. Letting it soak into her mind as the drizzle soaked into her hair. Wondering, vaguely, if the oilcloth coating of her pack and saddlebags would hold. Allowing minor thoughts to take over, hazing tension into a safe, dull travel-daze.

Deiq, walking steadily beside the horse’s head, said nothing at all.

Going home, this time, did not involve a barrage of hostility from Alyea’s mother. Nor did it mean, as it turned out, a Scratha-empty household. Servants came out promptly, bowing, to lead the horse away. The courtyard was well-swept, the planters trimmed and tidied. Fresh torches, hooded against the possibility of rain, stood ready for night use; in another handful of hours, they would be set blazing.

The front doors, the formal set, opened while Alyea’s foot was still on the first step; light spilled from inside, along with the scent of lemons and rosemary. Alyea’s eyes blurred: her mother wasn’t standing there, but a stranger, a tall, well-rounded woman with light brown hair and a ready smile.

“Lord Peysimun,” the stranger said. “Welcome home. I’m Rill, your new head housekeeper; subject to your approval, of course.” She didn’t seem concerned over potential rejection. “Lord Stass,” she added with a deferential nod to Deiq. He made an odd choking noise, more than likely laughter, and her mild face creased in dismay. “Did I use the wrong title? I’m so sorry. What ought I to call you?”

Deiq tilted a deliberate, questioning glance at Alyea, leaving it to her. She bit the inside of her cheek and said, steadily, “Do you know, Rill, I’m not at all sure on that one at the moment. Let’s discuss it later, if you don’t mind.”

“Chicken,” Deiq murmured, too softly to carry beyond her ears. She clucked just as quietly and received a low chuckle in response.

Rill’s expression returned to serene courtesy. “Of course, Lord Peysimun. If you’ll follow me? Your rooms have been readied, and dinner is almost on.” As they advanced up the stairs, her gaze flickered to Deiq again, a visible doubt entering her expression.

Alyea pursed her lips against a grin and said, blandly, “Lead on,
s’a.
Our thanks.”

That small hint was enough to clear the anxiety from the housekeeper’s face. She nodded and turned away without further question or comment.

Alyea followed her through the oddly unfamiliar halls of the mansion, looking around with recurring surprise. Entirely new furniture and decorations met her eye; vases filled with fresh herb cuttings and colorful pots with live plants predominated, and the overall colors seemed to incline towards silvery and blue tones.

“Gods,” she muttered, astonished. Looking down, she found closely woven mats of some sort of reed underfoot, rather than the thick, ornate carpets her mother favored.

“Someone’s done a good job repairing this place,” Deiq said at her back.

“Must have been Eredion. I turned Peysimun over to his hand while I was out of town. Gods, he’s done a job, all right—”

“You gave your family lands over to
Eredion?”
Deiq said, incredulous, then hooted with laughter. “Gods, do you have any idea—No. Obviously not.”

She stopped walking and turned to face him, scowling. “What’s wrong with that? He was the most logical choice.”

“He’s Sessin,” Deiq said, still grinning broadly. “You gave Sessin Family control of your lands, through Eredion. He could have taken everything you own, declared you yourself to be bound to Sessin Family, and put you out on the streets, if you rejected that, landless and without a brass bit to your name. All perfectly legal, under any law you like. And I’ll guarantee you’re lucky there wasn’t enough time for word of it to reach
the
Lord of Sessin Family, because he would have ordered just that to happen. Eredion’s too damn nice for his own good. Lord Sessin will skin him alive for missing this opportunity.”

Alyea stood still, horror draining all the blood to her feet. “He wouldn’t,” she said faintly. “And Lord Scratha—didn’t he cede his lands to the king?”

“No. He’s too nice, which is good for you and damn bad for him. I’ll have to have a word with him, once you’re settled back in. And the situation with Scratha was different; that was a northern king, not another desert Family. Nobody would have tolerated Oruen making that sort of grab for power, and Scratha knew it; that’s the
only
reason none of his advisors or Hidden brought him the idea of annexing Scratha Family. It would have put a war in motion. I told you: Scratha’s a lunatic.”

“No, it took my mother to bring Oruen that idea,” Alyea muttered.

He caught her arm and turned her around, gently. The housekeeper waited a stone’s throw further along the hallway, expression suspiciously blank.

“Never mind all that right now. Let’s go see what they’ve done with—” He winced, his gaze skittering away from her own, and didn’t finish the sentence.

“My rooms,” she said under her breath, and shut her eyes. His hand tightened on her arm, then dropped away as she started forward again. “Have they found my mother yet?” she asked at more normal volume as she neared the housekeeper.

“Lord Eredion asked that I send you to him for that question,” Rill said. “I believe there was a small difficulty while you were gone.”

Alyea’s heart dropped to her stomach. “Is she—dead?”

“I do not believe so,” Rill said. Her tone was a warning: Alyea bit her tongue and shut up.

They turned into a passageway. Repainted in a pleasant off-white, refurnished, with masses of plants everywhere and a startling amount of sunlight coming in from overhead, it looked like an entirely different corridor than the one Deiq had so comprehensively wrecked. Alyea glanced up to find new ceiling-tubes shunting light from above, and shook her head in wonder.

“All this in a matter of three days,” she murmured. “Incredible.”

“Expensive,” Deiq said dryly at her shoulder. “Start figuring the cost before the bill comes due. You’re in debt to Sessin, like it or not, and while Eredion might not pull that string, someone else along the way
will.”

She didn’t say anything; Rill was pushing the door to a suite open. Not her rooms. The passageway had looked strange because it was a different passageway entirely; apparently she was more disoriented by the weight of recent changes than she’d been allowing herself to realize.

It took everything she had to advance into what had been her mother’s rooms.

Lady Peysimun won’t be coming home again, apparently. At least not as Lady Peysimun.

Alyea put questions aside and beckoned Deiq forward to stand beside her.

“I’ll send a servant when dinner’s ready,” Rill murmured as she withdrew.

Thin blue curtains, streaked with silver thread, draped over silver tie-backs shaped like vining roses. A thin layer of white linen screened the open windows against the possibility of rain but allowed light and air to breeze through the room. Underfoot were more tightly-woven reed mats; here again, plants in colorful ceramic planters lined the walls and hung from the ceiling. A long, broad couch nestled among the leafy abundance. Two thick blankets, one grey, one a rich deep blue, lay neatly folded, one over each arm of the couch.

A series of staggered shelves beside the couch, easily reachable, held every one of her wooden carvings, including the wren.

Alyea put a hand to her mouth, her eyes flooding with tears at what that said about the entire situation. Deiq’s hands closed over her shoulders from behind a moment later.

“You couldn’t keep your rooms at the palace forever,” he said into her ear.

She just shook her head, unable to speak against the lump in her throat. He stood still, letting her recover from the shock. At last she said, thickly, “I know. I know. I just—I thought I’d be the one to—I didn’t expect this.”

“Eredion’s too damn nice,” Deiq said, and sighed. “And so am I.”

“What should you be doing?” she said before thought stopped her.

His hands went rigid, fingers digging into her shoulders hard. A moment later he jerked his grip free and said, “Don’t ask that. Go—wash up. I’ll be back later.”

“What—” She turned to a view of his back as he yanked the door open. “Damnit, Deiq!”

The door slammed shut behind him.

She let out a frustrated sigh through her nose, and spoke with bleak sarcasm to the empty room: “Welcome home.”

As the door of his suite shut and locked behind him, Eredion caught himself just before letting out his usual sigh of relief. After a moment of feeling oddly strained and self-conscious, he gave in and sighed anyway, then felt considerably better; which made him grin like a moon-struck idiot for a moment.

He stood still, listening. In the bedroom, Wian rolled over, her breath hitching a little. So she was awake, and waiting for him to come in. He shut his eyes, thinking of the remaining jug of liquor hidden away in the sideboard, then shook his head. That wasn’t the answer this time.

Moving through the dark with practiced accuracy, he went into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. A long moment of silence passed; then Wian murmured, “My lord?”

“Wian,” he said. “Do we need to talk?”

Another long silence. Her hand found his back, pressed flat against it for a moment, and withdrew. “You’re tired,” she said. “I can wait for morning.”

He hesitated, deeply tempted, then shook his head again. “No,” he said. “I’ve had worse discussions on less sleep. Go ahead.”

She sat up and scooted to lean back against the headboard, drawing her knees up; all sounds he knew the meaning of without having to see the motions.

“I’m not angry,” she said. “I understand...what you did. I’m not happy over it. It was humiliating, and—well. When I calmed down, I started thinking: this is going to happen again, with southern nobles coming into town now. And some of them...probably won’t be shocked or bothered at what they see. You won’t be able to stop them all from...from witching me. They’ll do it just to score points against you. Am I right?”

“Yes.” No point at all in lying or shading the answer to that question. Wian did, when pressed to it, display a sharp understanding of politics.

Her voice gathered some heat. “I don’t want to go through that again. I won’t. I’m not a whore, as you keep telling me, and I’m not a slave. I shouldn’t
have
to stand there for a stranger like that, or be a—a treat, a toy to hand around and use for status games. Not any longer. And—I know, I know you don’t care about my feelings. I’m not asking for—for a promise, or an apology.” The last words faded away to nearly inaudible.

He’d had no intention of providing either. That thought reminded him of Fimre’s request, though, so he said, “Lord Fimre sends
his
apology over the matter. If that helps.”

“A little,” she said. “It’s nice of him to say that.” She paused for a while. Eredion let the silence hang, waiting it out. “My lord....”

He felt his stomach tighten at the change in her voice.
Here it comes,
he thought.

“You don’t love me, do you?”

“I never promised you that,” he said, exasperated. “Wian, you’ve been with me less than a month!”

“I know. I didn’t mean it that way. I don’t expect you to, and I won’t lie and say I love you, either. But I want to hear you say it. Please. I need to know for sure.”

Eredion opened his mouth to say
You don’t already know?;
then stopped, thinking it over. At last, he sighed. “No,” he said. “Wian, I like having you around. I don’t love you.”

“Thank you,” she said in a remarkably steady voice. “I didn’t think you would. But you’ve been kind. I haven’t been treated so well in a very long time. I’m grateful.” She paused again, then went on. “Sometimes it’s tempting to see a kindness as something more. So I just needed to be completely sure.”

Eredion didn’t say anything. There seemed nothing worth answering with.

“You don’t trust me, and I’ve done nothing to earn that from you,” she said. “I’ve never been so honest with anyone for so long, but you still expect me to lie and steal. And—yes. I lied about the cleaning. Not about the letters. I don’t know who took them. I wasn’t here.”

Eredion bit the inside of his cheek and waited.

“I’ve been going to the kitchens,” she said. “To learn. The head baker says I have a good hand with the pastries, and the head cook says I have a good sense for spicing. And being a cook or a baker is an honorable trade for a woman. I can earn my own way. I like the work. I was hoping to surprise you, sometime, with a dinner I’d made myself.” She cleared her throat. “There’s not much point in that, though, is there?”

“Wian—”

“No,” she said. “I know where I stand now. I’m not angry. You’re kind; it’s nothing more than that, and more than I deserve from you to begin with, I suppose. But you’ll never see past what I was, or trust me to change. I’m surprised you haven’t already ordered something slipped in my meals to end the pregnancy. Once I told you Kippin was probably the father, I knew you’d think of it, at least.”