Dragonspell: The Southern Sea

‘Rhodry, you’re weeping.’

‘I’m sorry, mistress.’ He choked back the tears and wiped his face on his tunic sleeve. ‘Forgive me. I loved her very much, and she was forced to go with another man.’

He looked up to find her watching him with a startled expression, as if he’d just materialized like one of the Wildfolk.

‘No, you forgive me. I forget that you weren’t always a slave.’ She looked down at the tiles and frowned, then swept her hand through the pattern. ‘Just take that fruit away, will you? Do whatever you want until it’s time for dinner.’

Since he had no other privacy, Rhodry went up to his bunk in the men’s quarters and lay down, his hands under his head as he stared at the ceiling and listened to the rain. Slowly he pieced together a few of his memories, but only a few. He knew that he had loved, that he still did love, with a fierceness that shocked him, this woman named Jill, but who she was, where he’d met her, why she’d been dragged away from him – they were all mysteries still. He wept again, but only briefly, a few tears of frustration more than heart-break.

Although Alaena never referred to the incident again, from that afternoon on Rhodry was aware of a change in her attitude toward him. At times, he caught her watching him with a little puzzled frown, as if he’d become a problem for her to solve. Outwardly, nothing seemed to have changed; he spent his afternoons with her as before, learning the protocols of greeting and announcing guests of various ranks, and none of the others seemed to have noticed anything except, perhaps, Disna. Suddenly Rhodry noticed that the maidservant had grown cold to him; whenever he complimented her she gave him the barest trace of a smile or even a downright nasty look. When he tried to turn the whole thing into a joke and tease her about it, she refused to answer, merely walked away fast with her nose in the air, making him wonder if all those love-affairs that had appeared in the tiles were doomed to remain in the past.

After some days the rain stopped, and Alaena went out to the marketplace. Since everyone in town seemed to be there, catching up on their shopping and gossip, they left the litter on a side-street, hired a shopkeeper’s lad to watch it, and walked to the market itself. Carrying his ebony staff, Rhodry followed a few paces behind the mistress while she went from booth to booth, looking mostly at jewellery and silks while merchants grovelled before her. Finally she motioned Rhodry up beside her and pointed at some silver brooches set with bits of semi-precious stones.

‘I want to buy a present for Disna. Do you think she’d like the one with the large turquoise?’

‘I have no idea, mistress. I don’t know anything about jewellery.’

‘You should learn. It helps you judge people when you first meet them – their taste in things, I mean, not just what they can afford to spend. But I don’t think these will do.’ She walked on, motioning him to walk at her side. ‘I have heaps of things Pommaeo gave me at home, of course, and some of them are quite fine, but …’ All at once she flashed one of her wicked smiles. ‘No, I have a different use for them. Come along. There’s another jeweller over here.’

This particular jeweller was a fat man who reminded Rhodry of Brindemo. On each hand was an amazing collection of garish rings, and he wore a dozen different pendants around his neck, too. Among his collection of merchandise was one pin so different from the others that it seemed to call to Rhodry, a tiny rose, worked in fine silver, no more than an inch long but so life-like that the leaves seemed to stir in the breeze. Alaena picked it up.

‘What an odd thing,’ she said to the merchant. ‘What kind of alloy is this? It’s much too hard to be pure silver.’

‘I don’t know, oh exalted and beautiful exemplar of womanhood. I won it in a dice game actually, from a man who said it came from the barbarian kingdom.’

‘Indeed? How much do you want for it?’

‘Two zotars only, for one as lovely as you.’

‘Bandit! I’ll give you ten silvers.’

The haggling was on in earnest. At the end, Alaena had the pin for twenty silvers, about a sixth of the asking price. Rather than having the man wrap it, she turned and pinned it onto Rhodry’s tunic, near the collar.

‘A barbarian trinket for a barbarian,’ she said, smiling. ‘I rather like the effect.’

‘Thank you, mistress.’ Rhodry had learned that gifts like this were his to keep, even if he chose to turn them into cash some day. ‘I’m flattered you’d think so well of me.’

‘Do you know what kind of metal that is?’

‘Well, yes. I had a knife made out of it once. In the Deverry mountains are little people called dwarves, who live in tunnels and make precious things out of strange metals like this kind of silver. Some of their trinkets have magic spells on them. Maybe this one does, too, but we won’t find out unless it chooses to show us.’

‘How charming you are when you want to be.’ She laughed and reached up to pat his cheek. ‘What a darling story! Now let’s find something for Disna.’

Eventually she found a pair of long gold earrings, shaped like tiny oars, that she pronounced suitable. Rhodry took the parcel and started to follow her out of the marketplace, but again she had him walk beside her.

‘That was fun, but now everything wearies me again.’ She sighed gently. ‘Do you think I should marry Pommaeo?’

The question took him too much by surprise for him to think of a properly-phrased answer. He gawked at her while she laughed.

‘Well, I think he’d be mean to you – and far too interested in Disna,’ she said at last. ‘So perhaps I won’t. Besides, he can be the most wearisome thing of all when he wants to.’

At that she moved ahead and let him walk behind until they reached the litter.

When they returned to the house, Alaena closeted herself in her bedchamber with Disna while Rhodry went to the kitchen to haul in firewood for the evening meal. In some half an hour Disna rushed in, the earrings glittering as they framed her face in a most appealing way.

‘Guess what? The mistress won’t marry that awful Pommaeo after all. She’s going to ask Mistress Malina to find her other possible suitors instead.’

The staff raised a small, dignified cheer.

‘My thanks to holy Zaeos, to all the Goddesses of the Many-Starred Sky, and to the Wave-father,’ Vinsima said. ‘Any member of Mistress Malina’s family is bound to be a fair-minded and generous man.’

‘I think,’ Porto said, ‘that we may have some extra wine with the evening meal. To toast the gods for smiling upon us if nothing else. Girl, does the mistress require anything?’

‘Yes.’ Disna glanced at Rhodry, her smile disappearing in an oddly abrupt way. ‘She wants you to run an errand. She’s in her bedchamber at the moment.’

Rhodry assumed that he was to take a note over to Malina’s, but when he came into the chamber, he found Alaena sitting, as carelessly as a girl, on the floor in front of her jewel chest. When he hovered uncertainly in front of her, she motioned for him to sit down, too, with a flick and a point of one slender hand. Beside her on a cushion lay a tangle of emerald necklaces and two heavy gold arm bracelets.

‘Pommaeo gave me these. I want you to take them over to the temple of Selenta as a gift to the priestesses. They run an orphanage, and they can sell these off a bit at a time when they need coin.’

‘Very well, mistress. Are you going to give me away, too?’

Alaena laughed in a peal of musical amusement.

‘No, I don’t think so, really.’ She reached up and put her hands on either side of his face. ‘Well, come along. Kiss me.’

More in shock than pleasure, Rhodry kissed her on the mouth.

‘You do that much better than Pommaeo ever did. Yes, I think I definitely like the slave better than the stupid master.’ She glanced at the jewellery beside her. ‘Oh, that can wait.’

The meaning was unmistakable, but Rhodry hesitated, half-panicked. All his intuitions were screaming that it would be very unsafe for both parties if a slave had an affair with his mistress, no matter how common it was for men to take their female slaves. No doubt it’s worse for the slave, too, he thought; I’ve no desire to end up getting flogged in the public square or suchlike.