her lip above her teeth, as though she were about to snarl or even bite.
“Oh, I’ve just remembered,” Luian said suddenly. “I left my nicest shawl in that little retiring room here yesterday—there, in the corner.” She pointed to a shadowed doorway far back between two rows of boxwood hedges. “But I’m so hot, I think I’ll just sit down on this bench. Will you be a dear and get it for me, Qinnitan? It’s rose-colored.You can’t miss it.”
Qinnitan hesitated. There was something strange about Luian’s face. She suddenly felt frightened. “Your shawl… ?” “Yes. Go get it, please. In there.” She pointed again.
“You left it… ?” Luian almost never came to this garden, and it was famously warm. Why bring a shawl here? Luian leaned close and said, in a strangled whisper, “Just go and get it, you silly little bitch!” Qinnitan jumped up, startled and more fearful than ever. “Of course.”
As she approached the dark doorway, she could not help slowing her footsteps, listening for the breath of a hidden assassin behind the hedges. But why would Luian resort to something so crude? Unless it was the autarch himself who had decided it had all been a mistake, that Qinnitan was not the one he wanted. Perhaps the mute giant Mokor, his infamous chief strangler, was waiting for her inside the doorway. Or perhaps she wasn’t important enough and her death would be effected instead by someone like the so-called gardener, Tanyssa. Qinnitan looked back, but Luian was looking in another direction entirely, talking rapidly and a little too loudly with her slaves.
Her nerves now stretched tight as lute strings, Qinnitan let out a muffled shriek when the man stepped from the shadows.
“Quiet! I believe you are looking for this,” he said, holding out a shawl woven of fine silk. “Do not forget it when you go out again.”
“Jeddin!” She threw her hand over her mouth. “What are you doing here?” A whole man in the Seclusion— what would happen to him if they were caught? What would happen to her?
The Leopard captain quickly and easily moved between her and the door, cutting off her escape. She looked frantically around the small, dark room. There was nothing much in it but a low table and some cushions, and no other way out.
“I wished to see you. I wished to… speak with you.” Jeddin stepped up and caught her hand in his wide fingers, pulled her deeper into the room. Her heart was beating so quickly she could scarcely take a breath, but she could not entirely ignore the strength of his grip or the way it made her feel. If he wished, he could throw her over one of his broad shoulders and carry her away and there would be nothing she could do.
Except scream, of course, but who could guess what she would earn for herself if she did? “Come, I will not keep you long,” he said. “I have put my life in your hands by coming here, Mistress. Surely you will not begrudge me a few moments.”
He was looking at her so searchingly, so intently, that she found she could not meet his eye. She felt hot and feverish again. Could this all be some mad dream? Could the priest’s elixir have driven her mad? Still, Jed-din looked disturbingly solid, huge and handsome as a temple carving. “What do you want with me?”
“What I cannot have, I know.” He let go of her hand, made his own into a fist. “I . . I cannot stop thinking of you, Qinnitan. My heart will not rest. You haunt my dreams, even. I drop things, I forget things…”
She shook her head, really frightened now. “No. No, that is…” She took a step toward him and then thought better of it—his arms had risen as if to pull her toward him, and she knew that more than his strength would make it hard to break away again. “This is all madness, Jeddin . . Captain. Even if… if we forget why I am here in the Seclusion, who has brought me here…” She froze at a noise from outside, but it was just two of the younger wives shrieking with laughter as they played some game. “Even if we forget that, you scarcely know me. You have seen me twice . !”
“No, Mistress, no I saw you every day that I was a child and you were a child. When we were children together. You were the only one who was kind to me.” The look on his face was so serious that it would have been comical if she had not been in terror for her life. “I know it is wrong, but I cannot bear to think that you will… that you are for… for
She shook her head at this blasphemy, wanting only to be far away. There was something about the young Leopard chieftain that made her heart ache, made her want to comfort him, and there was no question she felt something for him that went beyond that, but she could not push away her growing fright. Each moment that passed she felt more like the quarry of some ruthless hunting pack. “All that will happen is that we will both be killed. Whatever you think, Jeddin, you scarcely know me.”
“Call me Jin, as you once did.”
“No! We were just children.You followed my brothers. They were cruel to you, perhaps, but I was no better. I was a girl, a shy girl. I said nothing to any of my brother’s friends to stop them.”
“You were kind. You liked me.”
She let out a murmured groan of frustration and anguish. “Jeddin! You must go away and never do this again!” “Do you love him?”
“Who? You mean the… ?” She moved closer, so close she could feel his breath on her face. She put a hand on his broad chest to keep him from trying to embrace her. “Of course I don’t,” she said quietly. “I am nothing to our master, less than nothing—a chair, a rug, a bowl in which to clean his hands. But I would not steal a washing bowl from him, and neither would you. If you try to steal me, we’ll both be killed.” She took a breath. “I do care for you, Jeddin, at least a little.”
The anxious lines on his forehead disappeared. “Then there is hope. There is reason to live.”
“Quiet! You did not hear me out. I care for you, and in another life perhaps it could be more, but I don’t wish to die for any man. Do you understand? Go away. Never even think of me again.” She tried to pull away, but he caught her now in a grip she could not have broken in a thousand years. “Let go!” she whispered, looking in panic toward the doorway. “They will be wondering where I’ve gone.”
“Luian will distract them a while longer.” He leaned forward until she almost whimpered from the size and closeness of him. “You do not love him.”
“Let me go!”
“Ssshh. I am not long for this place. My enemies want to throw me down.” “Enemies?”
“I am a peasant who became chieftain of the autarch’s own guards. The paramount minister Vash hates me. I amuse the Golden One—he calls me his rough watchdog and laughs when I use the wrong words—but Pinim-mon Vash and the others wish to see my head on a spike. I could kill any one of them with my bare hands, but in this palace it is the gazelles that rule, not the leopards.”
“Then why are you giving them this chance to destroy you? This is beyond foolishness—you’ll murder us both.”
“No. I will think of something. We will be together.” His eyes went distant and Qinnitan’s speeding heart bumped and seemed to miss a beat. In that moment he looked nearly as mad as the autarc.h.”We will be together,” he said again.
She took advantage of his distraction and yanked her wrist out of his grasp, then backed hurriedly toward the doorway. “Go away,Jeddin! Don’t be a fool!”
His eyes were suddenly shiny with tears. “Stop,” he said. “Don’t forget.” He threw her the rose-colored shawl. “I will come to you one night.”
Qinnitan almost choked. “You will do
“Are you mad, too?” she whispered to Luian as she handed her the shawl. A few of the other wives were watching her, but with what she prayed was no more than a bored interest in the comings and goings of a fellow prisoner. “We will all be executed! Tortured!”
Luian did not look at her, but her face was mottled with red underneath the heavy face paint.”You do not understand.” “Understand? What is there to understand? You are…”
“I am only one of the Favored. He is the chief of the autarch’s Leopards. He could have me arrested and killed on almost any pretext he chose— who would believe the word of a fat castrate in women’s clothes over the master of the Golden One’s muskets?”
“Jeddin wouldn’t do such a thing.”
“He would indeed—he said so. He told me he would.”
Qinnitan was shocked. “He thinks he is in love,” she said at last. “People do mad things when they feel that way.”
