Guardians of the Desert (Children of the Desert) (46 page)

Deiq sighed in mild annoyance that she’d followed him after all, but waited patiently as Alyea wandered the downstairs rooms, understanding the fascination the murals would hold for her; she would think the priests responsible for the decoration of the tower. He wouldn’t disillusion her; in a way, it was true.

All he’d really done was to draw the prayers humming through the air, after all. Every time he’d entered Bright Bay since Ninnic’s death, he’d taken a few precious days to expand on the previous murals; it was the only thing that made his visits bearable. He’d completed the last one just this morning.

Now this tower, this place which so many people hated as a symbol of a hell endured on earth, could gain new life with her support. He could feel the passion, the awe, waking in Alyea as she looked through room after room. She would bring more people here. She wouldn’t be able to help herself. And they would see, and maybe understand, just a little bit, a side of the story they’d never heard before.

By the time she climbed the stairs and stood behind him, her initial anger had smoothed into a subdued, wondering peace.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, and moved, after a moment of no reply, to stand beside him at the wide window.

They looked out over the sun-drenched city together. He could sense she’d been shocked into a new awareness by the murals, and really
saw
it, the way he did, for a moment: the vast, glittering ocean, the expanse of small, rambling homes and buildings, the tiny, tiny lives moving, swarming, creating the city as they went about their daily businesses, like ants building their giant hill one grain of sand at a time.

She drew in a sharp breath and leaned against him. He put an arm around her without really thinking about it and relaxed into a long moment of unaccustomed peace. Awareness caught him at last; he stiffened and withdrew from the contact, sharply rebuking himself for the weakness. Another moment and he’d have reached for her; and once that started, he’d be unable to stop.

Never again
, he told himself, and put himself several paces away, each step an agonized effort.

She stood still, looking at him with eyes that saw far more than he’d expected, and said, “It’s all right, Deiq. I understand what you need, and I know you’ll be as gentle as you can.”

He sucked in a breath, his determination wavering, and almost went to his knees with the effort of not moving. He’d been so relieved by her initial anger; it would have been easy to fan it further, to send her away in a strengthening fury.

Calm acceptance had never crossed his mind as a possibility; but then, she was the first human to see the murals. He hadn’t anticipated his artwork having such a strong effect.

“I
won’t
,” he said through his teeth, and tried to think of a way to make her angry enough to go away.

She turned her hand over, showing him a grey stain on her fingers, and he felt a sick chill: she knew. He hadn’t wanted that. It would have been so much better for people to think the priests left the murals.

“They’re beautiful,” she said quietly.

He looked at the floor, unable to answer for a long moment, then said, “Thank you. But I won’t hurt you. Please . . . please just go away.”

“I think,” she said, not moving, “it’s probably not going to hurt as much as what Tevin did to me. I don’t think it will hurt as much as the blood trial of Ishrai did. And I think it won’t hurt nearly as much as the pain you’re already feeling because you’re too godsdamned stubborn to take care of yourself. So take what you need.”

He did go to his knees then, as the only way to stop instinct from driving him forward.

“
No
,” he said again; regretting, deeply, that he’d chosen this place after all. He didn’t want to taint the purity he’d built with the screaming pain she’d go through if he gave in. He didn’t want that sound added to the songs in the air. He’d never be able to come back here.

And after feeding as deeply as he would if he let her any closer, he’d have no real choice but to live. He wouldn’t want to die any longer; the surge of energy would be too intense, too strong. He’d spin through another hundred years of increasing agony before growing depressed enough to attempt this again.

He couldn’t go through that again. Wouldn’t.

“No,” he said again as she came forward. Dimly, he realized that she seemed to hold absolutely no fear of him. He tried to remember if he’d ever encountered that before; only images of trembling, white-faced desert lords too terrified to resist his need rose to mind.

Nobody had ever
offered
, not like this, not so openly and fearlessly. Even Eredion had forced himself to help, drugged himself into submission to endure something he hated giving almost as deeply as Deiq hated taking.

He couldn’t make himself reach for the stibik oil. The table seemed miles away, the effort too much for even ha’ra’hain muscle and bone to endure.

She stood in front of him, well within arm’s reach, and took his face lightly between her hands. He threw his head back, trying to pull away; a howl built in his throat. If it let loose, he’d be lost; he moaned, desperately commanding his disobedient body to flee.

“
No
,” he said again; almost screamed the refusal.

She smiled down at him with a paralyzing peace in her eyes.

“It’s all right,” she said, and traced a feather-light touch down his cheeks with her fingers.

The howl broke free.

She went down with him, hard, into a deep moment of endless need.

Eredion left Alyea staring at water patterns on the tabletop and went to his suite in the palace to wait. Either she’d stand up to her responsibility and force a confrontation with Deiq, or she’d run away; if she chose the latter, Deiq would be knocking on the door soon enough. With the foresight of experience, this time he’d prepared for either route before his talk with Alyea. His room held enough strong, coarse liquor to get even a desert lord properly drunk.

He contemplated the jugs and bottles, trying to think of nothing in particular, and waited.

At last, a shivering howl broke through the air, a sound that Eredion suspected nobody but a desert lord or ha’ra’ha could hear. It raised the hair on the back of his neck, along with other things; he wished ruefully he’d thought to have a servant girl present.

But damn, he hadn’t thought Deiq would lose control so
completely
.

“At least it wasn’t me,” Eredion muttered, and reached for the first of the jugs stacked neatly by his chair. “Welcome to the wonderful world of being a desert lord, Alyea.”

And at least, he added to himself, setting the empty jug aside a few moments later, he was reasonably sure nobody would interrupt his badly needed bender this time. He grinned with absolutely genuine cheer for the first time in too long as he reached for the next jug.

A knock on his suite door, a moment later, brought a savage frown to his face. He shouted, “Go away! I’m busy. I’m ill. I’m sleeping. I’m not here!”

The silence hung long enough that his frown began to shift into a relieved smile; then the door opened and Wian stepped in, shutting the door behind her.

“My lord,” she said coolly, studying him with eyes that seemed too large and dark for her thin, pale face. “You can’t possibly be all of those things at once, you know.”

“I’m about to try,” he growled, taking another swig from the jug in his hand. “Go away, girl. I’m not in the mood for your games right now.”

She moved forward a deliberate pace. “And just where should I go, my lord?”

“To all the hells at once, for all I care,” he snapped, and took another swig.

“That’s farther than I care to travel,” she said. “And you’re much closer.”

Eredion lowered the jug to his lap and squinted at her, acknowledging that at least she’d dropped all pretense: this was the real Wian before him, cynical, spirited, and unafraid.

“What makes you think I want you?” he asked bluntly.

“You’re a desert lord,” she said, with an oddly twisted smile, and unfastened her dress, letting it fall to the floor. Stepping out of it brought her another pace closer. “And I haven’t heard a single servant gossip about being in your bed, ever.”

“That doesn’t mean I want
you
,” he said, aware that his breath had grown rough and his pulse faster. The bruises patterned across her body had faded into dull yellow and brown splotches, no distraction at all from an abundance of curves in all the right spots.

She took another step, her smile widening. “Stand up and say that,” she suggested.

He stayed still, watching her with abruptly cold calculation. Dropping the pretenses didn’t mean he could trust her; it only showed that she understood lying to him wouldn’t get her what she wanted.

“And what do
you
want, Wian?” he asked. “Another protector? Another master?”

“If that’s all you have to offer,” she said with an indifferent shrug. “It’s preferable to taking my chances on the streets of Bright Bay. I don’t exactly have many friends there.”

“Why
me
?”

She raked an amused glance over him from head to toe. “Why not you? You’re handsome, you’re rich, you’re not likely to die and leave me stranded any time soon, and I’m fairly sure you won’t beat me for your own pleasure.” She cocked her head to one side, a wide grin spreading across her face, and slid one hand in a slow circle across her hip, stomach, and chest. “And I’m
very
curious to find out if what they say about desert lords is true.”

Not bad reasoning, from her point of view; he couldn’t fault it. Still, she was a complication, and he had enough of those in his life already. He drew in breath to refuse, to send her away; but the echoes of that hair-raising howl still hung in the air, and he found himself saying, instead, “Come here, then.”

She settled in his lap, purring, and he put the liquor jug aside in favor of pursuing another, more pleasant method of obliterating thought for a time.

As she leaned in, he sensed a shift: artifice slid a smile without truth onto her face. He put a hand between her breasts, holding her away from him, and said, “No. Be honest or get out.”

She froze, staring at him like a frightened rabbit; he stared back without flinching. After what felt like a long time, she said, in a muted voice, “I
don’t . . . My lord, I don’t know how.”

He let out a long breath. “That,” he said, “is a damn good start.”

Song drifted through the air, from avian and human throats alike: gulls from the western harbor, immigrant mystics from much farther south greeting the dawn. Warm sunlight crept across the windowsill, down the wall, and across Alyea’s upper body. She lay still, listening, eyes half-shut and not thinking of anything in particular.

Deiq lay sprawled against her, one arm under her neck, breathing evenly. She turned her head a little, listening to his pulse thud in her ear, and studied his face. His hair lay loose, scattered across his face like a thready mask; his eyes were shut, his mouth relaxed and even hanging open slightly.

The muscles of his face shifted and twitched with dreaming; sunlight brought multicolored striations to his black hair. For just a moment, she thought she saw a faint tracery of silver lines across his face, but it was gone in less than a blink.

She inhaled through her nose, tasting the aromas of sweat, paint, and dust on the back of her tongue; exhaled, watching dust swirl through the shafts of sunlight now pouring in the wide tower window. A seabird called, hoarse and loud, from somewhere nearby: Deiq twitched, his breathing stuttering towards conciousness.

Alyea lay still and watched Deiq’s face; his eyes fluttered as though starting to open, then winced shut, spreading pained creases across his temples. Tension began gathering in his lean body, his pulse staggering to a faster beat.

She said nothing; waited, her breathing deliberately even, until he finally opened his eyes and met her gaze, his own murky with shame and dread.

Then she let herself smile, and watched disbelief spread across his face; after a moment, like a sunrise lighting clouds, understanding broke through.

“I didn’t hurt you,” he said, sitting up, and stared down at her in bewildered astonishment. “How—what—?”

She laughed, unable to hold it back, and sat up. Her whole body felt lit with a satisfied glow of boundless health. She stretched out her arms: even the remaining tracery of healing scars and bruises had disappeared.

Deiq ran a hand up her arm, his expression so bewildered that she grinned at him like a newborn fool. “This isn’t
possible
,” he muttered from the back of his throat, blinking hard.

She shrugged, flexed her fingers, wiggled them in his face, and laughed again at his bemused stare.

“It didn’t
hurt
you?” He seemed unable to grasp that idea.

“Not at all.” She didn’t remember much of what had happened once his hands closed around her arms, dragging her close; but
pain
wasn’t any part of the picture: only vague images of floating in warm water, like an ocean-sized hot bath, and a sensation of being touched, inside and out, everywhere at once. She remembered a rocking sensation, like being a child in the cradle again; and a steady, attentive presence, right there with her through every moment.

It hadn’t been anything like her blood trials at the Qisani; and she found herself wondering if, perhaps, the ha’rethe was doing something wrong.

Her thoughts darted around, wheeling like the seagulls still crying outside the window. Everything seemed so clear, so simple. She would go back to Peysimun Mansion and set her mother straight. She now saw exactly how to ease her mother’s ruffled feathers while maintaining her own standing. She knew how to handle Oruen, saw the delicate dance she’d have to go through with him from now on. She understood Eredion’s flaws and strengths, and saw how he’d been navigating the complex traceries of desert politics as they mingled up against northern negotiating styles.

Chabi was easy: she was vaguely surprised so many people had problems understanding the rules. It all made sense. Absolutely perfect sense, as though she’d been playing it for years.

Deiq was staring at her, his expression still lost and worried. “It didn’t,” he whispered, blinking hard. “And you’re
healed
. But I can’t do that! I thought you’d—” He stopped, wincing, then shut his eyes and shook his head.

She saw, in the agonized creases angling across his face, that he’d truly expected her to hate him. In a flash of insight like the one that had foretold Lady Arnil’s death, she realized that he’d even been ready to kill himself to avoid hurting her; with deep compassion, she decided to keep the tone light.

“You did tell me,” she said, smiling, “that you’re my guardian, and that you wouldn’t hurt me.”

He stared at her, mouth open as though hunting for words; then lowered himself to an elbow, pulling her down, and buried his face in the curve of her neck. His hands trembled against her back and head.

“I don’t understand,” he murmured into her hair. “I don’t
understand
.”

“Hells if I know,” Alyea said. His hands felt warm, solid—safe. She didn’t want him to let go. “Does it really matter?”

He pulled back and stared at her from arm’s length. “Yes,” he said muzzily. He traced the curve of her face with one large hand, his eyes hazing and dilating; she felt her own pulse kick up. Warmth flared through her entire body, leaving her dizzy for a moment. She barely heard his next words: “And no. Right this moment—no.”

He gathered her close again, with a much more human hunger; and she matched that fierce need with her own.