The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) (48 page)

Alyneri’s heart fluttered at this news. “Really? Do you think it’s true? It would mean…Trell, it would mean the Fifth Vestal works in our best interests still.” She bit her lip and gazed at her hands. “I don’t know why the idea gives me so much hope…I really want to believe he’s a good man, even though everything I’ve heard says otherwise.”

Trell turned her to face him and when their eyes met, she saw a confusing mix of desires in his stormy eyes—so like and yet so different from Ean’s. He drew her body close against his own, and she rested her head against his muscled chest while her breath came sharp with the nearness of him.

“Alyneri,
azizam,
” he said after a moment of holding her, “I’m grateful it was you I found that day.”

Her heart beat faster simply upon hearing him say her name. A tingling current skimmed from breast to her low belly, bringing desire’s heat. “So am I,” she managed, breathlessly. How could he have become so dear to her when she’d known him for so short a time?

             
But you’ve known him all your life.

Yet this truth didn’t fully explain her feelings, which were deeply stirring to her soul. She sensed his own desire radiating through their contact, through the way he held her, so strong and yet so carefully…through the sound of his breath coming faster and deeper. She felt him lift his head from hers, and when she dared look up at him, he  was gazing intently at her.

Her heart fluttered, and she caught her lip between her teeth. He closed his eyes and exhaled, letting his breath alleviate the tension that bound him too. She almost wished he wouldn’t control himself so completely…but at the same time, she was grateful that he could. They were so new to her, these heady feelings that thrilled and terrified equally.

Trell laid his forehead against hers and let their noses touch, the slightest caress. “I find you very beautiful, Alyneri,” he confessed, “and I’m drawn to you in a way that speaks deeply to me.”

“I…” she braved, catching her lower lip again. “I feel the same.”

He drew back to look at her again, and that feeling of connection grew exponentially. He ran the back of one finger down her cheek and gazed into her eyes, a gaze that conveyed the depth of his desire. Heat flooded Alyneri—she thought she would burst for the energy veritably throbbing in her veins.  

He must’ve seen her blushing even in the darkness, for he dropped his hand and took a step back from her. A gentle formality filled the space between them, but it was a welcome respite from the tumultuous longing spawned by his closeness. “I will see you in the morning then, Duchess,” he said, switching back to the common tongue. He gave her a dazzling smile. “Good night, my lady.”

“Your Highness,” she managed, breathless and dizzy and alive in ways she’d never imagined.

***

Trell was wound too tightly to rest as he left Alyneri’s rooms, so he found his way into the gardens to work off the restless energy that had him in thrall. After roaming aimlessly for an hour or so, he emerged from a sculpture garden onto a wide span of lawn that fell away toward a cliff and the dark swath of moonlit sea beyond. Tiny bulbs glowed among the endless waves, the running lights of ships leaving with the evening tide.

Trell headed toward the water, beckoned by the open space of the ocean and the vast starlit sky. His head felt tangled. A jumble of confusions and questions had been energized by his sudden desire for Alyneri, which in turn had to go unsatisfied. She was a Lady after all, and still a girl for all she was ten and eight—and though girls her age or younger were often married off, that didn’t make them any less frightened by the prospect of a coupling with a man. He’d sensed Alyneri’s equal desire, but he could also tell it startled and confused her, and that she wasn’t ready to give in to those desires.

Never mind that their social statuses made any coupling impossible without also involving the politics of kings. That was a problem for another day.

When he reached the edge of the cliff, Trell took a staircase leading down to a swath of beach far below. The sound of the crashing sea came louder there, and the salt air smelled strangely familiar… 

The sudden image of that same beach where he remembered seeing Alyneri flashed to mind, only this time he and his brothers raced on pale horses at the edge of the crashing surf. His older brother had the lead, black hair flying on the wind, while his younger brother’s horse inched nose to nose with Trell’s mount. The boys’ hair was damp from spray, and wet sand clung to their boots and the snapping hems of their cloaks. All were laughing.

Trell felt a terrible longing and loneliness as this memory flashed and faded. New feelings came to him then, resurfacing from of another day—another time, when he’d sat at the ocean’s edge and stared in anger at the sea with his chest clenched in a vise of grief.

“You are very like him,” came a deeply resonant voice from out of the darkness.

Trell spun with a sharp intake of breath, and his hand went automatically to his sword. But it was only the zanthyr who stood further down the beach. He’d been standing so still, Trell had barely noticed him. Exhaling the tension that had risen with his alarm, Trell rested one hand on his sword hilt and walked toward the zanthyr. “Like who? My father, or Ean?”

“Like the First Lord.” The zanthyr turned, and Trell was startled to see his green eyes so clearly in the deep night. He was reminded uncomfortably of a similar moment with Vaile, and the understanding that he faced a creature that was wild, unpredictable and decidedly predatory.

The zanthyr’s powerful gaze caught Trell so off guard that it took him a heartbeat to process his words. But then he shoved all other thoughts aside. “I am like the First Lord?” he repeated, both deeply complimented and intrigued. “How?”

“You are both thoughtful men,” the zanthyr replied, “careful and considerate. You spend too much time in your heads.”

Trell smiled at this, knowing the latter statement was true for him at least. He moved closer to Phaedor, close enough that he could make out the sculpted bones of his face in the moonlight. “How well do you know the First Lord?”

The zanthyr arched a brow. “Your single question of the
djinn
and this is the one you choose to ask?”

Trell did a double-take. He’d mentioned the desert genies to Alyneri only an hour before, but how did this man know of their conversation? Moreover, they’d been speaking in the desert tongue! Yet Trell didn’t for a moment believe the zanthyr had produced the same analogy out of coincidence.

“Very well,” he said, attempting to cover his surprise. “Since you’re offering, I am curious about something.” He exhaled and frowned off toward the glittering lights of the distant city. “Why does the Mage allow so many lies to be spread about him? Why does he let them continue when surely he could set the record straight?” 

“What would be the point in such an effort? A man will believe what he will.”

“But…” Trell frowned.

“You don’t win a game by focusing on things you cannot control. You win it by focusing on those things that you can.”

“A game,” Trell mused, struck again by the familiar analogy. His eyes flew back to the zanthyr’s as he added significantly, “Pieces and players. The Mage wrote of such terms. What do you know of them?”

“I know much.”

“What will you tell me of them then?” Trell amended with a smile.

The zanthyr pinned him with one green eye, the other partly obscured by his raven hair as it tossed on the wind. Trell expected the man to artfully deny him, even as Balaji had so often managed, but he replied instead, “What would you know?”

Surprised and startled by his candor, Trell asked a question that ever hovered on the edge of his thoughts. “Why does the Mage want me to become a player in his game?”

After a moment, the zanthyr answered, “I do not know his plans for you. I do know that the First Lord’s game requires thinking men to act with foresight and conscience if we are to succeed, and I needn’t tell you there is a vast shortage of such men in the realm.” 

Trell admitted that was likely truer than he’d care to think about. He looked out to sea, toward the ship nearly vanished in the west. “I do not know what it means to be a player in the Mage’s game,” he observed quietly then, “but I have this sense that the path I would choose is likewise the one he needs me to walk.” He shifted his gaze back to the zanthyr. “I’d always imagined my journey would end with the discovery of my name, but it seems it’s only just begun.”

The zanthyr regarded him steadily.

“And the path before me,” Trell added with a thoughtful frown, “I often wonder if it will lead me back to him, to your First Lord.”

“You can do no less than walk your path,” Phaedor advised, neither confirming nor denying the possibility, “wherever it leads.”

Trell managed a rueful smile. “Is it strange that I hardly know your First Lord, nor even truly the game he plays, yet…I believe I would give him my oath?”

“He would have it, Trell val Lorian, if you offered.”

Trell felt oddly gratified in hearing this. He gazed at the zanthyr in thoughtful silence. “Alyneri told me you saved my brother’s life,” he said after a moment. “I want to thank you for that.”

Phaedor cast him an unreadable look. “I did not do it for Ean’s sake.”

“Still,” Trell said, not quite sure how to take the comment, “in the end, it is the same. So, thank you.”

Phaedor gave him a barely perceptible nod, accepting of his gratitude, and looked back out to the sea. “Good-night, Prince of Dannym.”

And Trell knew he’d been dismissed. Strangely enough, as with his conversation with Ramu, he did not resent at all being dispatched like a child.

As he made his way back up the stairs and across the wide lawn, Trell considered the zanthyr. Phaedor’s presence gripped you. He was easily as compelling as Ramu, though far less accessible. The others he’d met—Rhakar, Naiir, Loghain, even Vaile, with all he’d seen her do—they couldn’t but cast a pale shadow of this man. 

He is the closest I have ever come to gazing upon divinity…
Alyneri’s heartfelt words, her vision of Phaedor.

As he made his way back to his rooms, at last ready for his bed and sleep, Trell decided that Alyneri definitely had the right of it.

“Suspicion haunts the guilty. The killer sees assassins in every shadow.”

- Errodan val Lorian, Queen of Dannym and the Shoring Isles

The infamous
courtesan Ghislain D’Launier strode into her third-floor salon to find a man waiting for her.

Ghislain could tell much from looking at a man. For instance, she knew that this man thought highly of himself, for he wore a longish moustache and pointed beard despite the style being out of fashion. This told her that he tried to show himself above courtly trends—or at least above the trends of the court to which he was supposedly sworn.

From the state of his clothing, Ghislain knew he’d been traveling for the better part of a month and that he spent much of that time ahorse. This same observation showed her that the man had little regard for others or for himself, for he hadn’t bothered to change his clothing before visiting the home of a famous courtesan. This could also mean he was in a hurry and possibly feared for his life.

Finally, she read from his brazen stance before a lady unknown to him that he was a man of dishonest temperament and likely harbored an ignoble nature.

“Lord Brantley, I presume,” Ghislain said in her deep voice as her assistant, the buxom Riselle, shut the door behind her.

“Indeed,” he clucked. “I am Lord Brantley, Earl of Pent.”

“And how may I help you, Lord Brantley, Earl of Pent? It is not every day that visiting lords whose acquaintance I’ve never made request to meet me in private.”

“I am told you are a woman of information, madam.” 

“Among other things,” she agreed. She walked to the sideboard. “Will you share a drink with me, my lord? Perhaps you could use some refreshment after such a long ride.”

“I certainly could—” Brantley cast her a suspicious look as she turned with goblets in hand. “Who told you I was coming? How did you know where I’ve been—what did they say about me?”

“My sources are inviolate, I’m afraid,” Ghislain returned, handing him the goblet. She took a sip, eyed him over the rim, and then added with a smile, “But of course, you know that.”

Brantley accepted the wine and drank deeply of it. He seemed to have the manners of a stable hand and smelled similarly as fragrant. “I’m searching for a woman,” he told her once his goblet was well drained.

Ghislain settled demurely into her armchair. “Would this woman have a name? There are many women in our fair Free Cities.”

“Her name is Alyneri d’Giverny. She is the Duchess of Aracine.”

“I see. And what do you want with her?”

“That’s none of your concern,” Brantley remarked, twitching his moustache in irritation.

“Oh, but it
is
, my lord,” Ghislain corrected with a smile. “How else shall I gauge how much to charge you for the information on her whereabouts?”