The privacy flap smacked shut like a slap, but her attempt at warning passed unnoticed. The notes built and blended and sprang separate while Arithon laid his cheek against the curve of resonating wood. His eyes were closed, his whole being intertwined with the notes that danced under his hands.
A slipped finger shattered the spell. There came a pause while his wrist lifted. Then his hands dipped again, through a jarring, heavily plucked statement that skirted the edge of discord.
Arithon silenced the strings with an impatient caress, then turned his hand to find his cut split, and a bead of blood welling through.
Dania discovered herself half-dizzied from some reasonless urge to hold her breath. She moved another step, just as the prince looked up.
The emotion in his eyes struck her with the force of a stormfront alive with the beat of summer thunder.
She gave way and sat across from him. ‘I didn’t intend to eavesdrop. But I have to admit you have a gift even Halliron must envy.’
Mention of the Masterbard pricked Arithon to an irritable glance down. Had the instrument in his hands not awed him, he might have answered his first impulse, and flung it away as though his skin hurt. ‘Lady, your praise is far too generous.’
He did not blot the burst burn on his tunic. A tiny start unsettled her as she wondered if somehow he
Dania absorbed the awkward moment by rearranging the skirt over her knees. Blue cloth settled a ring of twilight over a tawny landscape of flax hassocks, and her hands, like paired birds, nestled together in her lap. Arithon ducked quickly forward and hoped his fallen hair would shade his face. His breathing was harder to temper; Steiven’s wife had a vivid, magnetic beauty beneath the wear of hard living and the fullness lent by child bearing. The fact she tracked his mind without effort evoked an intimacy that played havoc with drug-heightened senses and provoked him to shameless response.
Preternaturally conscious of her quick, timid glance toward his face, he turned his head.
‘Something troubles you,’ she said. ‘Is that why you seek my husband?’
Her voice had that velvety timbre associated with wind through high grass. A fine-grained tremor shook him and he shut his eyes fast as the dregs of the tienelle fanned a flare of heat through his veins.
‘Some things are best let lie.’ He stamped down the flicker of vision too late. Prescience arose, full-bodied and ugly enough to choke him, of Lady Dania sprawled in black leaf mould, the leathers she wore for workaday ripped down to expose muddied thighs, and her throat slashed open by a sword stroke.
Dimly, he realized she was speaking. ‘If it were up to me, I would drop every weapon in Etarra into the bogs of Anglefen, and hire you as bard of Deshir.’
Arithon opened his eyes, flashed her a glance hot and molten as brass tailings stirred in a crucible. He said no word, but hooked back the lyranthe with an urgency concealed behind languidness.
Dania was not deceived. Neither could she deny the compulsion that drove him, rooted as it was in the gentleness that tonight for some reason he could not mask. The music he loosed with his hands held a spirit that gave easy surcease from talk.
He took the release she allowed him with gratitude that sang through E major, then plunged in sliding falls to tread deeper measures that rang lyrically placid and dark. He tempered his impatience in the mathematical progression of schooled notes. Pinched between physical discomfort and the horrific pageant of images inflicted at random upon his innermind, Arithon longed for Steiven to come, that he could finish this business and be alone. He wanted the forest, with the calls of whippoorwills and running water to smooth his abraded nerves. He needed delicate, exacting concentration to unbind the residual taint within his body. Yet the urgency of the final revelation which had shown him clan girls and wives lying slaughtered disbarred the solitude he required.
Arithon channelled himself into music as a substitute for thought until steps at the doorflap spoiled his cadence.
‘Must you deal behind my back?’ Halliron’s demand shattered the spell before the last note had quite faded.
Dania started and jerked her scented skirts aside to allow the bard space to take a seat. ‘How long have you been here?’
Arithon damped the dwindling ring of silver strings and proffered Elshian’s lyranthe to her master.
Halliron took back his instrument, derisively abrupt. ‘I heard it all. The fragment preceding as well.’ Pale, hard eyes touched the prince with a look as inimical as a knife-thrust. ‘I know the voice of my lyranthe better than that of my own child. You should have known she would call me. Did you lack the guts, not to speak to me beforehand?’
‘I’m sorry.’ Arithon’s hands balled up. He forgot his torn scab and tension rimmed one fingernail brightly scarlet. ‘I was thoughtlessly selfish. Here’s my promise not to meddle, after this.’
‘Meddle!’ Dania had never heard the bard’s voice so charged with fury. ‘You arrogant, manipulative young fool! Don’t insult my intelligence by playing your falsehoods on me. It’s an Ath-given talent you’ve been hiding. I say it here, you’ve no right to see that strangled.’
Arithon sat back sharply, discomfort plain upon his face. The bard had managed to shock him, as nobody else ever had, and his recovery lacked courtesy or grace. ‘That was not my intent.’ For once too upset to try pretence, he hitched his shoulders in dismissal. ‘Of course, I’m touched by your regard. But I saw no reason to inflict my inadequate fingering upon you.’ The sarcasm used in desperation bloomed now to drive back tearing anguish. ‘My sword, you’ll recall, is now wedded to the cause of a kingdom.’
Halliron shrugged off the protestation. ‘The mechanics of your playing can definitely be improved upon.’ He cradled the lyranthe against his shoulder, set fingers to strings, and repeated several bars of Arithon’s work. Beneath his skill, melody emerged refocused into a rendition to make the heart leap for pure pain.
The effect left Dania with her fingers pressed to her lips, and the Prince of Rathain dead white.
Halliron damped the strings with a slap the exquisite soundboard magnified like a shout. ‘With work, you shall surpass me. Study, apply yourself to life training, and no one alive could match your style.’ The Masterbard pressed
