He stood up abruptly, catching Elspeth by surprise; she jumped when he moved and looked up at him with round eyes.
'I need a bath and a soak,' he said, 'And the pool under your ekele is the nearest two-layered one I know of. Would it disturb you if I used it?
'Would it disturb you if I joined you?' she asked.
At first, he thought she was making some kind of an overture, but a moment of reflection told him that she couldn't possibly be doing anything of the sort. She was just as tired as he was-even if she wasn't bruised from riding for furlongs on the sharp and protruding hipbones of her Companion. Even if the two of them had been ready to tear one another's clothes off in a fit of unbridled lust, neither of them would have had the energy to do so. No, she was just being polite.
But at least she wasn't as shy as she had been. And she was still an attractive woman. There might be some hope after all.
'It surely won't disturb me,' he told her, and offered her a polite hand to help her rise. 'In fact, I doubt very much if it would disturb me to share a pool with-' He stopped himself before he said 'with that basilisk'; realizing at the last moment that the comment could be construed as saying that he did not find her attractive. Which was not the case, at all.
'-half the Clan,' he concluded. 'All I want is to get this stink off and soak my muscles until I can sleep.'
'Good plan,' she said, and smiled. 'I'll make you a bargain. If you find some of that fruit drink, I'll get soap, robes and towels from my treehouse.'
'I'll take that,' he said instantly. Elspeth disappeared into the greenery while he sought one of the storage areas, and dug out a tiny keg of a peculiar, mineral-rich drink Elspeth had gotten very fond of. Normally he didn't care much for the stuff, but when he was as parched and exhausted as he was now, he downed it with the same enthusiasm as she did.
Keg under one arm and a pair of turned wooden mugs in the other hand, he retraced his path and followed in Elspeth's wake. When he arrived at the pool, he found that she had been as good at keeping her word as he. There was strongly herb-scented soap beside the lower of the two heated pools, and towels and robes hanging nearby on a couple of branches, with one small mage-light over each pool providing just enough light to see by.
Elspeth was already in the upper soaking pool. He left the keg and mugs beside it as she waved at him indolently from the steam, then he stripped and plunged straight into the lower pool.
It took three full soapings before the last of the stench was gone and he felt clean again. By then he was more than ready for a mug and a long, soothing soak.
'I think I took all my skin off,' Elspeth complained languidly from her end of the pool as he slipped across the barrier between the pools and into the hotter water of the second. 'I scrubbed and scrubbed every time I thought I was clean, I could still smell that thing.'
'Worse than skunk or polecat,' he agreed. She seemed very relaxed for the first time since he had met her. 'Did you see how much Iceshadow liked that idea of yours, moving the basilisk with noise?'
'But it was your idea to use pure-tones in dissonance,' she said immediately.' I had just thought of using volume, or maybe make it sound like the cave was falling in.' He allowed himself to feel pleased about that part of it. 'Well, I guess that I'm going to have to admit that you are right about trying new things even in magic. just because they aren't the way we've always done something, that doesn't mean new ideas aren't going to work.
Change comes to the Vales; quite a concept.' She laughed heartily. 'I thought I'd never hear you say that! But I have to make a confession to you, though. I have been pushing you, just because you were being such a- mud-turtle about things. Not wanting to try anything new. But-well, now I know that there's good reasons why some things aren't done in the Vales and in this one in particular.
Hydona's been explaining things to me..
Her voice trailed off, and he thought she was finished, until she spoke up again. 'You know, Hydona reminds me a great deal of Talia.' that old friend of hers. The one that's some kind of aide to her mother, and not the one that's the weapons teacher.
'In what way?' he asked.
She waved steam away from her face. 'She made me give her a promise back when I was a child-that I would never simply dismiss anything she told me just because I didn't want to hear it, or that I was angry at her or anything else. That I would always go away and think about it for a day. Then if I couldn't agree with any of it, I had the right to be angry, but if I could see that she was right in at least some of what she'd said, I would have to come back to her and we'd talk about it as calmly as we could.' Well, if that isn't an opening chance to talk about her attitude' I know we don't know one another as well as you and Talia do,' he said tentatively, 'but could you grant me that same promise as a wingsib?
'oh, dear,' she said, her voice full of ironic chagrin. 'Been a bitch, have I?
He wanted to laugh, and decided against it. Still, he smiled. 'Not exactly a bitch. But your attitude hasn't been helping me teach you.
That was one reason why, when the gryphons volunteered to help, I agreed.' ' Attitude?' she asked; her voice was carefully controlled to the point of being expressionless. Not a good sign.
'Attitude,' he repeated, getting ready for an outburst. 'You're very self-important, Elspeth. Very aware of your own importance, and making sure everyone else is aware of it, too. Take what you just said, about being a bitch. You laughed about it; deep down, you thought it was funny. You think you are so important it doesn't matter if you're offending those around you. You just make some
perfunctory apology, smile and laugh, and that's that. But nothing has really changed.' She was quite silent over there in the steam~ but he wondered if he'd just felt the temperature of the water rise by a bit. That silence was not a good sign, either.
'The truth is, Elspeth, right now you're an enormously talented liability.' She wasn't going to like that, one bit. 'I never heard of your land, outside of something vague from the old histories. You could be a bondslave from Valdemar, and we would be treating you the same as we are now. Your title doesn't matter, your country doesn't matter, and your people don't matter. Not to us.' Little waves lapped against him as she shifted, but she remained silent.
