Goddess of the Ice Realm (9 page)

Ilna smiled. It was a lie and she
hated
lies, but from Chalcus's lips it sounded like one of the ballads he and Merota sang. It was a pattern of the sort that Ilna wove into her fabrics, one that made the listeners a little happier and the world around them better by some small amount as well.

“Chalcus is a great man also,” she said. “But in a different way from Garric. As I am different from Princess Sharina, say.”

“But you don't
love
Garric, do you?” Merota demanded.

Ilna laughed again.
The choice is to cry, and that's not a choice.
“I don't know what you mean by love, child,” she said, squeezing Merota before she set her back on the deck.

Because she was looking toward the city to avoid meeting Merota's eyes or those of anyone else nearby, Ilna saw the procession enter the harbor area and make its way toward the waterfront where Garric stood. The escort was a platoon of Blood Eagles. They moved forward despite the crowd, using their shields to push people aside and their knob-headed spears to convince those who didn't want to be pushed.

Despite feeling miserable and empty, Ilna smiled wryly. The Blood Eagles had been set a task; they were doing whatever
was necessary to get it done. Ilna could appreciate their attitude.

The guards had been sent to Barca's Hamlet. There they'd waited for the arrival of a party from Ornifal to make landfall and come overland to Carcosa. Ilna couldn't see the people in the party who were on foot because the escort's plumed helmets blocked her view, but the two chief members rode horses.

Could you carry a horse on shipboard all the way from Valles to Barca's Hamlet? But of course you could, if you were important enough; and this pair was important.

The middle-aged man rode stiffly. Ilna recalled that he'd been clumsy with any physical task when he was Reise the Innkeeper in Barca's Hamlet. He was Garric's,
Prince
Garric's, father. He was coming to Carcosa at his son's call to direct the nobleman who'd have the title of Vicar of Haft and Agent for the Prince.

The dark-haired woman beside Reise was supple and perfectly at ease. She looked about the crowd with the pleased smile of a goddess blessing her worshippers. Though she'd had a long voyage and a difficult trek across the island to reach Carcosa, she was more beautiful than any other woman Ilna had seen.

She was Lady Liane bos-Benliman, the woman whom Prince Garric was to marry.

I don't know what you mean by love,
Ilna repeated in her mind; and hated herself for the lie.

Does it suit you then, mistress?” said Chalcus as Ilna's left hand gently explored the frame of the loom he'd had erected on the second floor of the building to which he'd brought her when they disembarked. “I chose a house close
to the harbor where I could see the water, but if you'd prefer something inland . . . ?”

Ilna sniffed. It wasn't like Chalcus to sound so uncertain. Was she so terrible, then, with her whims and her anger?

Grinning coldly—her anger was indeed a terrible thing, but so was that of the sailor—she said, “Every morning I looked out of my window in Barca's Hamlet and watched the sun rising over the sea, Master Chalcus. The view suits me well, and the building you've taken for us suits me better than I ever imagined.”

Her eyes narrowed and she added, “How did you come by it, then? Because a place like this—”

It stood in a row of brick buildings with shops on the ground floor and the merchants' quarters above. There were two full stories, a garret, and a railed walk around the roof of sheet lead. In back was a walled courtyard behind with grape arbors.

“—shouldn't have been empty for us to walk into.”

“Nor was it,” Chalcus agreed with a touch of irritation, “till my agents rented it last month from the owner and ousted the business being conducted here at the time; which was a brothel, mistress, since you're so suspicious that you might think I'd put a whole flock of innocent orphans on the street in my arrogance. And as for the money I used for the purpose, the Children of the Mistress had amassed a fine collection of plate and jewels in the course of their child-murdering monster worship. When I left Donelle, some part of that left with me. Perhaps this offends you?”

Ilna stood without expression.
I've been a fool many times; but perhaps never so great a fool as I'm being now . . .

Rather than speak—for she'd say the wrong thing, she always managed to say the wrong thing—she took two steps to Chalcus, put her arms around him, and squeezed as hard as she could. It was like hugging a tree till Chalcus put his arms around her also and held her as gently as if she were spun glass.

“I'm sorry,” she said. She wasn't crying because she never cried; or almost never. “If you'd cut the throats of everybody in the building I'd support you, I know you'd have had a good reason. I'm sorry.”

“Now mistress,” Chalcus said lightly. She loosened her grip on his torso but didn't push away; his touch remained the same. “The pirate who might have done such a terrible thing as that is long dead, buried in southern waters and the past. I'm a simple sailor and a loyal supporter of Prince Garric.”

In the garret above, Merota caroled, “
I never will marry, nor be no man's wife. . . .”
The child couldn't have been happier to have a house on the waterfront instead of being shut up in the palace as she'd expected.

Merota was happy more times than not, but Mistress Kaline—who'd sleep in one garret room while her charge had the other—was bustling about in a good humor also. Ilna smiled faintly into the sailor's shoulder. Chances were that Mistress Kaline would've been cheerful in a dungeon, so long as it wasn't on shipboard.

Ilna'd expected to be lodged in the palace—a suite or perhaps a separate bungalow if it was a sprawling complex like the royal palace in Valles. Where she lived—or what she ate and other questions most folk worried about—didn't matter a great deal to her, but here Chalcus had arranged a place where she wouldn't stumble unexpectedly into Garric, or Liane; or Garric
and
Liane. This was much better.

Ilna squeezed Chalcus again before stepping back, embarrassed for half-a-dozen good reasons but refusing to show it in her expression. “We'll need to get cleaned up,” she said. “There's to be a dinner with Garric tonight. And I'll need to tell my brother that Merota and I are—aren't in the palace as he'll expect.”

“Aye, the prince and all his chiefs and nobles,” Chalcus said with an unreadable smile.

He turned to play with the door latch, a heavy arrangement that could be locked from outside but not from within; probably something to do with the building's former use as brothel. Ilna'd known many sorts of hardship and discomfort; but not
all
sorts, and if she'd believed in the Great Gods she'd have thanked them for that mercy.

“Not an assembly I'd ever expected to be part of,” Chalcus continued, now looking out the bank of casements facing east over the courtyard. He glanced sidelong at Ilna. “Of
course if you're determined to greet all your friends and the new lot from Valles . . . ?”

Ilna's smile was grim. Did he think she was a child who knew nothing of his tastes? Chalcus
loved
gatherings of the great and powerful, as surely as he loved clothes that focused all eyes on his swaggering form. But he was trying to be kind, and that was no cause for anger.

“I'll go to the dinner, Master Chalcus,” she said, “and I'll go to Prince Garric's wedding when that's held in a few weeks time. There's nothing forcing me to be elsewhere, and I'm not afraid to recognize the truth. Any truth.”

“No, nobody'd be fool enough to think you were afraid, dear one,” Chalcus said very softly to the open windows.

He turned to meet her eyes and said, “Do you have regrets, Mistress Ilna?” His voice was flat, stripped suddenly of the lilt that was as much a part of him as the smile generally crinkling his eyes.

“Chalcus,” she said, “things are as they should be—for the kingdom, for Garric. For me as well! I wouldn't change a bit of it if I could.”

She smiled like a demon carved from ice. The skills she'd learned in Hell gave her powers beyond the imagining of anyone but Tenoctris of those who knew her. She
could
force Garric, and in time she could force the whole world, to her desire; but she
would
not.

“I'm glad for the way things are, Master Chalcus,” she said. “Though because I'm often a fool, it tears my heart out to see them.”

Ilna opened her arms. Chalcus came to her and swept her up, kissing her; gentle as a cat with her kitten, for all the strength in his scarred body.

Merota continued to sing as she came down the stairs. She'd reached refrain again, and her voice trilled like springwater, “
I'll always be single, the rest of my life. . . .”

“Well, said Cashel, looking around the overgrown garden, “the palace seems a nice place, doesn't it, Tenoctris?”

“It's quiet,” the old wizard agreed. She was being agreeable,
at any rate. “I'd hoped the building might have a library that would give me some guidance about the creature that was loosed on us, though.”

The palace of the Counts of Haft was brick and three stories high on the front where pillars rose from the ground to the roof. Back here in the private areas there were only two stories and all the rooms looked out on little gardens like this one. Sparrows and finches hopped about on the ground, picking at seeds; a pair of gray squirrels were chasing each other up and down the ancient dogwood tree by the back wall, changing places for no reason Cashel could make out; and in a basin filled by the shower earlier in the day, frogs chirped furiously.

The garden wasn't home, exactly, but for Cashel it seemed more homelike than any place he'd been in Valles, let alone shipboard. He didn't mind ships, but he was glad to be on solid ground again.

“Maybe the library's in the part where the count's still living?” he said, nodding toward the back wall. Garric had taken over the front and east wing of the palace, but the count and his personal servants still occupied his private apartments in the west wing. The other side of the back wall here was also a garden—Cashel could see the tops of what he thought were redbuds and a huge weeping willow—but it was part of the west wing, with no entry from where Cashel stood.

“No, I asked some of the older servants,” Tenoctris said. “The library burned in the riots when Count Lascarg came to power. There were volumes in it dating back to the Old Kingdom, the chamberlain thought.”

She smiled wryly. “Volumes as old as I am,” she added.

The Old Kingdom fell when a wizard drowned King Carus—and drowned himself as well in the backlash of the forces that he couldn't control. An event so enormous had distant effects, the way a stone flung into a pond makes waves slap the far edges. One result had been to throw Tenoctris a thousand years into her future, to fetch up on the shore of Barca's Hamlet where Garric had found her.

Cashel cleared his throat, letting the thought form fully
before he spoke. Then he said, “I guess you were sent here for a purpose, Tenoctris. And I guess that means you're going to stay while you're needed. Which I guess is going to be a good long while yet.”

Tenoctris had lived a long life before the cataclysm scooped her up, but she'd already brought more to the present than she'd been allowed to give her own day. Without her wisdom and skill, Cashel knew that the present kingdom, reborn with Garric leading, would have vanished like chaff in a bonfire.

The old woman sniffed as she knelt to look more closely at a stone bench. “I don't accept your notion of purpose, Cashel,” she said. “I believe in chance, and I believe in the forces that I can see and sense; but I've never seen the gods you pray to.”

Cashel grinned. “Chance?” he said. “You mean luck? Then I guess Garric and me and everybody else in the Isles who wants to live a normal life without wizards smashing things is awfully lucky, seeings as you just happened to appear right where we needed you to keep everything from flying apart again.”

Tenoctris laughed as she ran her fingers over the moss-covered carvings on the top of the bench. “Cashel, just as you have faith in the Great Gods,” she said, “I have faith in the blind machinery of the cosmos. Sometimes, I'll admit—”

She turned to meet his eyes, laughing with a serious undertone.

“—I have to stretch farther to justify my beliefs than I would yours.”

Cashel smiled, holding his quarterstaff out at arm's length just for exercise. He wasn't bragging, though he knew there weren't many men who could grip the end of the thick staff in one hand and keep it straight. Cashel didn't have to brag about his strength; it was there for all to see, as surely as Sharina's beauty.

Tenoctris was giving her full attention to the bench, now. “Cashel,” she said, “this is very old. It was part of an altar-stone, originally.”

“Brought here from an old temple, you mean?” he said.

He looked more closely at the bench, but that was just politeness. The marks on the stone wouldn't have meant anything to him if they'd been clear. Now, worn by time and under a fur of moss, he'd have had as much luck trying to read words in the wave-tops.

“I'm not sure,” said Tenoctris, eyeing the rest of the garden from where she knelt. “Those seats there—”

She nodded toward chairs made by cutting down sections of a fluted pillar; her fingertips continued to touch indentations in the top of the bench.

“—are made out of column barrels, and there on the wall—”

Nodding again, this time toward the partition between this garden and its twin in the east wing. Blocks of sandstone formed the foundation, though the rest was old brick.