Storm Warning

'Be better than I be thinking,' she told him. 'You be not spending all your time pushing paper around on desks. Now, here be what we be going to do. I not be making a fighter out of you, and I be not going to try. What I be going to do, is I be teaching you some things you be using to be defending yourself with, things that be buying you enough time for help to be getting to you. Real help, trained fighters.'

'That makes good sense,' he said slowly.

'Here be problem, that we be going to be making these things into ways that you be acting without thinking. And we be going to be making you stronger than you be already. So—' she waved at one of the things he had just been using, weights loaded onto ropes attached to pulleys, '—be doing what I be showing you, fifty more times, then we be working on the first move.'

Not what he wanted to hear....

By the time she was done with him, he was weak-kneed with exhaustion, and quite ready to drop, but he already had one move down well enough to use against an attacker who wasn't expecting it. The likeliest scenario, as Kerowyn postulated it, was that he would be attacked from behind by someone who intended to strangle him. She showed him how to use the attacker's rush and momentum to tumble forward, throwing the attacker over as he did so, then get to his feet and run.

With enough practice, he would do just that without thinking.

When she dismissed him and sent him out the door with the admonition to return at the same time the next day, he realized that there had been another effect of the lesson besides exhaustion. He had absolutely, positively, not a single drop of desire in his veins for her, despite the fact that they had been tumbling all over each other, often ending tangled in positions that would have caused her father to issue Karal an ultimatum to marry her—had they been in Karse.

He wasn't certain how that had come about, but there was no denying the effect. If she had stripped herself stark naked and posed for him like one of the street women, he would not have been able to perform with her. She overwhelmed him. She was now, in his own mind, in the same class as Solaris, and therefore untouchable.

He was simply grateful to be allowed to escape.

He dragged himself back to his room—Ulrich was not there, but someone had had the foresight to fire up the copper boiler in the bathing room. Johen? If so, then perhaps that young man was not as unsympathetic as he had seemed.

After a hot bath, the world seemed a little friendlier, and he was ready to face Ulrich, the Court, and whatever else came up. And it was a very good thing that he was prepared for just that, for just as he finished dressing, there was a decisive knock on the door. Before he could answer it, the door opened.

There was a man standing there—a man wearing dark gray leather very like Kerowyn's except for the color. Tall, lean, and dark, Karal had never seen a human being who looked quite so much like a hungry wolf before. His hair was snow-white, and his face seamed with scars; he regarded Karal as measuringly as Kerowyn had, out of a pair of agate-gray eyes as expressionless as a pair of pebbles.

He was Karsite; his facial features and body type were as typical as Ulrich's and Karal's own. There was absolutely no doubt of that.

Which meant that there was only one person that he could be. Karal had forgotten that he was also scheduled for lessons in the Valdemaran tongue.

Karal swallowed, his mouth gone dry, and bowed. 'H-herald Alberich, I-I-I am honored,' he stuttered in his own tongue.

He rose from his bow—Alberich was smiling sardonically. 'Honored? To be tutored by the Great Betrayer? I think not.' The Herald strode into the room and closed the door behind him. 'You are one of three things, boy— diplomatic, uninformed, or a liar. I hope it is the first.'

Karal didn't know what to say, so he wisely kept his mouth shut. Alberich looked him over again, and the smile softened, just a little.

'The first, then. When you report, tell Solaris that I compliment her on her choice of personnel.' He reached for a chair without looking at it, pulled it over to him, and turned it so that the back faced Karal. Then he sat down on it backward, resting his arms along the high back.

Karal took this as an invitation to sit, and took a chair for himself. He was weak in the knees again, but this time from the sheer force of the man's personality.

'First, we'll see just how much Valdemaran you really know,' Alberich said—and then began a ruthless examination. Or rather, interrogation—he spouted off questions and waited for Karal to answer them. If Karal didn't understand or lacked the vocabulary to answer, he shook his head, and Alberich moved on to another question.

During this entire time, Alberich never once took those gray eyes off him, and whether or not it was by