A Meeting at Corvallis (70 page)

“Oh, it's so
good
to be back with my own people, Rudi!” she said; then put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, I'm sorry!”

“Nah, don't worry, Matti. You could handle it, so I guess I can.”

Dessert was ice cream, and little round pastries baked with sliced brandied pears in their centers, the glazed flaky crusts around that drizzled with chopped hazelnuts. Rudi ate two and was thinking wistfully about another one—there was something in it that was
really
good and brought out the taste of the fruit, probably some sort of spice that wasn't available outside the Protectorate any more.

The rest of the company hadn't switched to water, except for the priest, and things were getting a bit more uproarious than they would at most Mackenzie gatherings, except on special occasions. Which this was, of course, but…

Occasional snatches of song came from the lower tables, and roaring choruses from outside in the courtyard. Tiphaine was moving with her usual feline grace, but it looked as if she had to think about it a little, and occasionally a feral grin broke through her calm front as she looked around.

Yeah, she's realizing it's really real,
Rudi thought judiciously.

The priest asked a question. Tiphaine shrugged. “God knows,” she said. “We got a good swift punch in the nose from the kilties and they killed the Marchwarden, and the damned Corvallans showed up to help the Bearkillers, I'll tell you that much. Whether we'll come back for a second round and try—”

Then she frowned and stopped and went on more carefully. “—is of course up to the Lord Protector, however his servants may have failed him.”

To cover the remark she signed for more wine. Delia bent over her shoulder with the decanter, and whispered something in her ear as she did; the seigneur of Ath gave another startled snort of laughter and then smiled down into her glass before she replied, equally quiet-voiced, nodding as she did so.

Just then Mathilda's nurse waddled forward and bent to touch Tiphaine's shoulder. The blond woman with the pale eyes started, then stopped her hand moving towards her dagger.

“Oh, yes, you're right. Time for the children to get to bed. Party's getting a bit rough for the kiddies.”

She stood, leaning one hand on the table. It took a minute and then a shout to produce a drop in the roar of noise, a valkyr call that might have cut through the noise on a battlefield; Ruffin's girlfriend was sitting on his lap now, feeding him bits of pastry between her lips, and things were less decorous elsewhere.

“To the Princess Mathilda, our Protector's heir!” she called, and a blast of cheers answered until the great concrete room rang with the echoes.

Mathilda rose and everyone bowed. That was the signal for all the youngsters to withdraw, some carried asleep by their mothers, and the priest left as well. Rudi rose and brushed himself with his napkin; the tunic he was wearing was some sort of silk stuff, and it caught crumbs something fierce. Bending that way let him catch what Tiphaine muttered to herself after the toast; he had very good ears.

“And I hope when it's her turn the snippy little bitch does a better job than her Daddy's doing right now.”

Ooooh,
he thought, as they turned past the guards and up the darkness of the spiral staircase.
I bet she'll wish she hadn't said that, if she remembers it.

The two floors above the hall were the lord's private quarters; Mathilda was yawning and her nurse puffing and wheezing by the time they reached the fourth level just below the tower top, which held the guest suites. She waved good-bye to him as they went into their rooms; he heard a muffled squeal from hers that sounded like…
a kitten!

His own chambers had tile over the concrete floor, wallpaper with a floral pattern, a nice-looking rug and a small fireplace currently banked but sending out comfortable warmth. There was also a little bathroom with a toilet and sink and a shower that had hot water if you asked an hour ahead of time; it struck him as a bit superfluous. The castle had a perfectly good bathhouse of the type Dun Juniper used, with shower and hot and cold plunges—two, in fact, one with fancy fixtures for the lord and his family and another in plain concrete for the commons.

The bedchamber also had a table of some shiny, carved wood with writing gear and a good lamp—lit right now—and cupboards and bookshelves, with stuff he and Matti had picked out before leaving Castle Todenangst. That included a lot of his favorites and a couple by Donan Coyle he'd never read himself—
Sir Guilliame,
and
The West-Country Rising,
which Sir Nigel had told him about. Someone had put a glass of milk and a plate of raisin-oatmeal cookies beside the big four-poster bed; he stretched and yawned and reminded himself to thank whoever did it.

People around here don't say thanks enough when someone does something nice for them,
he thought.
The Threefold Law is going to smack some of them good and hard, if they don't watch out.

And over by the window…

His breath caught, and he walked over, stepping up on the footstool beneath it. The opening was narrow, too narrow for a grown man to get through even if the wall hadn't been four feet thick, and shaped like a V with its broad side in the room and the narrow part looking out—there was a hinged glass window, but it was an arrow-slit and nothing else.
He
could have gotten through it, with a little squeeze, but there was no point—it was nearly forty feet down onto sharpened steel, where the inner moat separated the keep from the courtyard. He'd checked that first thing this afternoon.

But in the brackets beside the window was a bow;
his
bow, neatly strapped in its leather carrying case, with his quiver and dirk, just the way they'd been when he was taken prisoner, when Aoife died.

He put his face against it, drawing in the familiar scent. Tears rolled down his face and onto the soft breyed leather. After a while they stopped, and he went into the bathroom to splash water on his face, and then to brush his teeth and undress. Then he took the candle and holder from beside the bed, lit the wick at the lamp, turned that out and carried the candlestick over to a bookshelf on the north face of the room.

He made a space for it after sketching the sign of Invocation, then knelt and watched the candle, making himself breathe until he really felt things—how tired and full he was, how the carpet was prickly under his feet, how people outside were singing as they danced around the bonfires; something like “Life is a lemon/And I want my money back,” whatever that meant. His mind went quiet as he imagined ripples spreading in a pond, smoothing themselves out until there was only the glassy water, still and silent but with shapes moving in the depths.

After a while he began to chant himself, softly:

When he blew out the candle and got into the bed, he was asleep before he'd finished arranging the pillow.

Tiphaine Rutherton woke and winced, throwing her left forearm over her face; then she smiled, letting it grow into a grin as she remembered that she was now Lady Tiphaine
d'Ath,
baronet. Things got hazy after she arrived yesterday afternoon, but she remembered
that
quite well.

The title had a very nice ring to it, even when her head felt like an Inquisitor had a steel band around the temples and was turning the tightening screw, and the dim light of the narrow window stabbed through closed eyelids. Not to mention the vague nausea…Then she winced again, when the effort of smiling made her temples pound even worse. She didn't do this often, but the sensation wasn't exactly unfamiliar either. Her bladder suggested that getting up was fairly urgent, however much she hated the thought.

Oh, God, a band of Eaters crapped in the fur that's growing on my tongue. I didn't drink
that
much, did I?

She cautiously removed her arm, blinked gummy eyes open and saw an empty wine bottle on the bedside table. That led her gaze down to the floor; another bottle lay on its side on the rug peeping out from under a tunic.

That's
cherry brandy,
half full. God, I was mixing my drinks! I shouldn't drink that much, even at a celebration. I do impulsive things when I drink too much and I can't afford to be reckless.

She rolled over, coming up to one elbow; the mattress was too soft and she'd have to do something about…

A fan of tousled black hair rested on the next pillow, with bright blue eyes peering out through it. Delia the seamstress brushed back her locks, smiled up at Tiphaine and wiggled her fingers.

“Hi!” she said. “You snore, my lady.”

That wasn't my tunic I saw, either.

Tiphaine closed her eyes again, then flopped back and stared at the bed canopy above her.
Oh, God.
The room smelled of lavender sachet inside the stuffing of the pillows, fresh sheets, snuffed lamp wicks, perfume, stale wine and, slightly but definitely, of sex.

Then her eyes opened wide, despite the too-bright dimness; the memory of leading a conga-chain came back to her in flashes of exhilaration and whirling torchlight, dancing around the castle courtyard, then up a stair and around the curtain-wall fighting platform.

“Look, I did
ask
you to go to bed with me, didn't I?” she said.

Because my self-esteem might not survive the shock if I just threw you over my shoulder and went reeling up the stairs like Sappho the Cimmerian. And it would sort of deconstruct my don't-abuse-the-peasants speech, although that looks like a happy smile you've got on. Plus it wouldn't do my reputation any good to get into a fight with the Church right after getting the estate. Oh, please, God, tell me I wasn't
that
stupid with the senior priest of the Domain watching!

Delia laughed, a sort of gurgling chuckle, and came up on one elbow in her turn. “Actually, my lady—”

“Oh, hell, we're in the same
bed
.”

“—my lady…Tiphaine, I asked
you
if you wanted to see the designs I put on my underwear, since you liked my needlework so much,” she said. “You let me in by the postern wall-gate.”

“Ah.”

“You even said,
That's really lovely embroidery on the hem, I like the flowers,
before you pulled my drawers off, too. Then you said,
Pretty as an orchid
and—”

“Ah.”

“I won't tell Father Peter if you don't.” Then she put a hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh. “I'm
sorry,
but you were so cool and elegant at first and now you look so…so
rumpled
.”

Tiphaine smiled again despite herself, made another noncommittal
ah
sound, swung her legs down and stood. She steadied herself against one of the bedposts and squinted at the sun glinting through glass into the big bare room through the narrow window-slit. If she remembered correctly, that one faced east—and if she remembered correctly, the sun rose in the east, too. In which case it was still fairly early; there was barely a gleam there, and it still looked rosy.

As if to confirm it, a rooster decided to tell the world he owned it. That set off a chorus of them, mostly sounding a bit farther away, doubtless from coops in the hamlet outside the castle gates. She repressed an impulse to put her thumbs over her ears and walked in a straight line to the arched doors of the bathroom; blinked around at the unfamiliar facility for a moment, turned up the lamp, used the toilet, ran a big sink full of cold water and immersed her head, then drank several large glasses despite a minor rebellion from her stomach—hangovers were mostly dehydration. Of course, the rest of it was toxins. A groping hand found a bottle of aspirin, and she followed a few of those with still more water and dunked her head again.

I look like a debauched dandelion,
she thought, regarding the dripping image in the mirror.

Her face was surrounded by tangled wet tufts of blond hair pale enough that even water couldn't darken it much. She raked at it with her fingers to get some of the sleep-snarls out, and wished she could cut it shorter than the pageboy bob. Then she kneaded her neck muscles with her thumbs to get the blood flowing again, working hard. She also smiled at herself as memory of the recent past returned; it didn't make her body feel any better right now, but it put the sensations in perspective.

That was really nice, mutually so.
There were certain aspects of enthusiasm impossible to counterfeit.
You are not only the most deadly warrior in the Association, you are not only the newly ennobled holder of this castle and fief, you are one hot babe, Tiphaine d'Ath!