Shadowheart (16 page)

She lifted her chin. “And what is yours?”

His gaze lingered on her hand upon the table, then moved upward to her face. No more than she could fathom a panther’s mind could she have said what was in his.

“Let that question be your ultimate examination,” he said. “We will discover if you are cunning enough to solve it.”

For the night he took her to sleep beside the great kitchen fireplace, a captive within a close embrace, held against his chest as he leaned back on the hearthstone. Zafer stood silent guard. The rest of his servants lay ranged about the chamber in what comfort they could find, shapeless lumps of shadow in the ebbing firelight.

All night the storm whistled and shrieked. Elayne slept only fitfully, plagued by uneasy dreams. She woke once to find the white pup’s chin resting on her calf as the young dog lay sprawled on its back, belly up and paws all askew within the wedge of space between her leg and the pirate’s. Dario had taken up guard, his face lit faintly by the pulsing red ember glow. She could feel the Raven sleep—strangest of all, for she had come almost to believe that he never did. But the soft touch of his breath was slow and even in her hair, his arm across her waist an insensible leaden weight.

He had a name, such a deceptive, unapt name that she could not bring herself to employ it with him. Allegreto, he claimed to be called. The English tongue had no such word, but in the Italian and the French it meant something cheerful and light—even joyous.

He did laugh, but only in mockery. He smiled as a cat might smile while it toyed with a mouse. She wondered if he had ever in his life had a fit of honest mirth, the way she had laughed sometime with Raymond, both of them falling into hilarity, piling one childish jest upon another until they could not draw breath.

She doubted it. Those who knew the Raven used a title more apt than his own font name. Fitting enough, to call him after the black-winged harbingers of death and war.

She had learned to distinguish the scent of three poisons since supper, and watched Zafer empty a vial of powder, hidden in his napkin, into the salt. She had watched him do it four times, and never once detected the faint turn of his wrist until he slowed the motion and lifted the cloth for her to observe each step of the action. Then Margaret—composed and determined—had demonstrated how to apply venom to a cloak pin and stab Zafer as she aided him to dress. She was not very accomplished at it, and apologized profusely to my lord and my lady for her inexperience while Zafer held a dagger to her heart, having turned off the maid’s assassination attempt with a move as quick and simple as a striking snake.

The pirate had watched his apprentices with calm attention, remarking quietly on their work in the way a good master would appraise his students’ efforts and offer methods of improvement. He recommended that Margaret attempt a scratch instead of a stab, as less likely to arouse suspicion, and equally effective with the proper poison. He advised Elayne to cause any sharp fastener to be dipped in water and wiped before she touched it, and to place it in her clothing by her own hand. He slipped the daggers he wore from their sheaths and showed how poison subtly discolored a blade—the one for his left hand was always envenomed, he warned her, the one for his right was clean.

Despicable it was, to put children in the study of such evil things. And yet they all—girls and boys, from the youngest up to Dario and Zafer and Fatima—looked to him eagerly, vying to show the degree of their scholarship in his deadly arts. In his own manner he treated them with a grim sort of kindness. When Margaret’s babe had begun to wail from its basket slung on ropes near the hearth, she was granted quick reprieve from any further mayhem in order to attend her child. Matteo, skulking miserably in a half-lit corner, was called forward to make another try at a proper poison tasting. After a multitude of attempts, he possessed himself sufficiently to pour a full cup without shaking so that he spilled drops all over the tablecloth, and performed the credence. When at last the Raven, without praise or censure, simply lifted Matteo’s offered goblet and drank from it, the boy’s face broke into a glow of tear-stained relief and pride.

Elayne could see the pirate’s fingers dimly now, entangled in her loose hair, intertwined with her own black and rain-washed curls as if he had woven them together by design. Like enough he had, to be vigilant of her every move even while they slept—and yet a stray lock coiled across the back of his palm, lying softly against his skin, like a black lamb curled there in innocent affection.

His hands fascinated her: their swift ease with the blades, on the wine cup, the rough jerk in her hair as he had yanked her away when she bit him. He had smiled then— smiled—and the thought of it sent an ache all down her body, a liquid pain that seemed like bliss.

He drew her to him, a lodestone against her own will, as if all she had been taught of good and right, all she knew of joy and mirth, held no strength against the beckoning darkness. She wanted to wound him again. She craved to do it. Just that way, that shocking moment of power, to make him hurt and shudder and lose himself in her again.

With a shiver, Elayne pulled the wizard’s robe close around herself in the night. She felt the pirate come instantly alert. Dario stood straight.

She shifted a little within the wider space the Raven made as he lifted his arm. When she was still, he lowered it again, holding her entrapped. The puppy turned over and heaved a sigh.

He gave her scrolls to study. They were nothing like the texts that Lady Melanthe had provided for her education. As the storm still slashed and rumbled overhead, she read a Latin compendium of toxic substances, divided into sections, first those natural and then those made by the hand of man: their manufacture, their modes of delivery, their effects. Dry mouth; rapid heartbeat; hot, dry; agitation and delirium … certain death.

In the margins were notations. Other effects—large pupils, muscle spasms; the names of men, some of them scratched through.

She might have been sitting in the kitchen at Savernake, on a bench and trestle borrowed from the great hall, with the smells of bread and cooked onions and soot, the watery storm light falling down from high window slits onto the parchment. She might have been studying her notes of Libushe’s herbs and potions. Except she was not. She was reading how one man might kill another, or make him impotent or blind, while children sat about her chopping dates and talking cheerfully and Dario pumped the wheel of a whetstone, making a pitched whine above the rumble of the storm as he sharpened their proffered daggers and little knives, sending sparks flying to the tiled floor. Margaret’s baby played at her feet while she mended buttons on Elayne’s torn shift.

Il Corvo sat midway up the stairs to the kitchen gallery, dressed in black velvet, one leg extended—like an illumination in a book Elayne had seen once, of a nonchalant fiend overlooking the souls in Purgatory, lounging between the curves and struts of the letter E.

His languid glance came to hers as she lifted her eyes. Heat suffused her, dread and pleasure. She would have looked away, looked down, but it seemed as if that would be weak—an admission that she even noticed him. That she remembered—vividly. Between them now there was potential; he spoke of Monteverde and taking power there, but closer and more real to Elayne was the babe that tumbled at Margaret’s hem. Libushe had explained it. Elayne knew it well enough; she had seen the animals at Savernake couple, seen the foals and lambs come spring. In her fondest dreams, she had seen herself picking wildflowers in the woods with a bright-haired son of her own and Raymond’s—but somehow the gap between chastity and that vision had not seemed to invite very close examination.

He held her look. With a slow move, like a lazy caress, he touched his fingertips to his shoulder, to the place where she had bitten him. Instantly she felt a spring of hot sensation, a violent dream of her power to mark and wound him as he arched under her hands. He smiled at her, a mere hint in the greenish light of the storm.

Elayne looked down, snatching a quick breath, as if the atmosphere had closed upon her.

Perchance it was a spell he had laid on her, that made her blood run in a tangle and her breath come strangely when she thought he was remembering as she was. She had never in her life before wanted to hurt any creature. It was not anger, though anger was a part of it. But it was more than that, more—it was all twined and twisted with the way he looked beneath his lashes and smiled as if he knew.

Perhaps it was a curse to make her foreign to herself. He would perceive how to make such a thing, and not bungle it with mismatched feathers.

He rose from the stairs and came down in one graceful bound, scooping up one of the youngest ones as the child was about to reach for a newly honed knife that Dario had just laid aside. With a flick of his wrist, Il Corvo sent the blade spinning end-over-end above them. It reached a zenith and flashed downward; Elayne’s heart stopped as the little boy looked up at the weapon descending toward his head.

An arm’s-length above the child, the pirate plucked the dagger from the air.

“Hot,” he said, holding the blade before the boy’s face. He set the child on the floor. “Don’t touch it too soon.”

The boy shook his head vigorously.

“It’s cool now,” the Raven said. “Take it.”

The little boy reached for the knife, but the pirate moved it. Instantly the child assumed a stance, his short legs spread, rocking forward on his toes; an echo of Il Corvo’s agile pose. For a few minutes they feinted and sparred for possession of the blade. Fifty times the cruel edge came within a hairsbreadth of slicing the child’s soft skin, but he ducked and twisted, moving in under Il Corvo’s arms.

Somehow the pirate made it appear as if the boy really did dispossess him of the weapon, emitting a suitably foul oath and dropping the knife when the child cracked him on the knee-cap with a sudden, awkward kick.

“Well-placed,” he said as the student bore his prize away. He sat down next to Elayne, rubbing his joint, and gave her a sideways smile. “A promising brat.”

She did not return the smile. “Would not grown men serve you better?” It came out like an accusation. “Why children?”

He leaned back, his elbows on the table. “Because they are wholly mine.”

Elayne turned her face away from his faultless profile. “They seem a frail force.”

“Do they?” he asked idly.

She rolled the edge of the scroll under her finger. Her heart seemed to pound in her ears when he was so close to her. “Would you bring up your own child in such a manner?”

She felt him look at her. Before he spoke, she added, “And you need not enlighten me—I am certain it is how you were fostered. Would you make the same of your own blood?”

The sound of the whetstone wailed, searing metal to stone. His body was perfectly still beside her. She thought he was more frightening when he was motionless than when he wielded any weapon.

“Tell me what choice I have,” he said softly.

Elayne wet her lips. She had not expected him to give her a serious reply. But he waited, as if he meant it. She frowned down at her knuckles, finding that mere admonitions to do good and not sin seemed foolish. She could not give a sermon on it. It seemed utterly wrong, to corrupt children, to bend them to such service, and yet she could only offer platitudes about abandoning his iniquity and seeking rectitude. Platitudes to the man who swore to guard her from such murderers as himself.

“I asked your sister the same once,” he said. “And she had no answer for me either.”

She bent her head. Then she took a deep breath and looked toward him. “If you desire that I will bear your children, then you must find one.”

He never moved. His lashes flicked downward and up again. He remained gazing at Dario’s back as the youth pumped the grinding wheel.

“Libushe taught me many things,” Elayne murmured, barely above a breath. “Even if you force me, I can prevent a child.”

It was a lie; Libushe had taught her herbs and methods that might prove successful at preventing a conception, but the wisewoman had not promised certainly, and warned her it was a deadly sin to use them. But Elayne thought even a wizard might not be sure of what a woman of knowledge could impart.

He looked at her then. Instead of the cold fury or disgust she had prepared for, it was a mystified look, as if she had spoken some riddle that made no sense to him. “Why?”

“Because it would be mine, too,” she said, “and I will not have any child of mine brought up to be what you are.”

His fine mouth hardened. “A bastard?”

“A murderer. Like these.” She inclined her head toward the others.

“You wish him to have no defenses?”

She paused at that. “No,” she said. “But…” She put her palms together, trying to find words for what she meant. “No more than other people. Not corrupted and trained to slay as if it is a game.”

She thought he would mock her and call her foolish. He only frowned a little, then sprang up. He walked to the foot of the stairs, put his boot upon the lowest step, then turned and came back. He looked down into her eyes, still with that faint frown. “If I swear this to you, then you will not resist me?” he demanded in a low voice. “You will conceive?”

She felt her cheeks burning. His word could hardly be trusted. She did not want to be his wife. The idea of bearing him sons and daughters was horrifying and frightening and exhilarating all at once. “If God wills it,” she heard herself say, in a voice that barely whispered in her throat. But it did not seem that God’s will could have any link to what she felt.

“Then I swear,” he said at once. “Man child or girl, their education belongs to you. I will not teach them what I know.”

The storm lasted two nights and swept past, leaving wreckage and a crystalline atmosphere, a chill that made these warm-blooded southerners shiver and chafe their hands. The air felt revitalizing to Elayne, but even she huddled close in her mantle as they toured the storm-clawed rooms and loggias. She felt as shattered as the beautiful carved doors that hung askew on their hinges—as if she were someone unknown to herself, born of the destruction to a new and harsher spirit.