crouched cat. The lioness leaped to one side but not fast enough. The ball exploded in a wide spray of liquid flame. The cat ran writhing and screaming away, a living torch. For a few moments more, at least.
The person grabbed him by the arm and hauled him up. He could not see the person’s face, hidden behind a visor, with a hood pulled snug around it. But he recognized the voice.
“Let’s go,” Fingel said. She tugged him into motion. “Fast.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Melio sat on the bench, squashed between Clytus and Kartholome, with Geena just on the pilot’s other side. The bench was too short for all four of them, but it was where a wolf of a man dragging around two hounds had deposited them after the strange events of the clan gathering. Unwashed, bruised, scratched, smeared with dried blood around their wrists and ankles, with staring eyes and faces limp with perplexity, they looked like children rammed together by a callous tutor, being punished for a game that had gotten violently out of control.
“I don’t understand anything,” Kartholome said. He had found a comb somewhere. He dragged it through his beard, causing it to frizz in a manner that he would not have liked at all if he’d had a mirror to see it.
The others grunted.
“Not a damn thing.” And then, indicating the curving metal slivers that a passing man wore as earrings, Kartholome asked, “How do you think I’d look with some of those? I feel less myself with only a single hook in. This lobe has healed up, you know?” He caressed the earlobe from which the bone earring had been ripped back when the league ship tried to run them down near the Outer Isles.
Nobody answered him.
“Is that really Dariel?” Melio asked, watching the prince from a distance.
“Of course it is,” Geena said.
As ever, Melio could not fathom where she got her certainty. The man they watched in heated discussion with a tight circle of strangely tattooed and accoutred foreigners spoke fluently in a guttural language that sounded like Numrek. His face was spotted like a running cat’s from the Talayan plains, and he seemed to have some sort of mark embossed on his forehead. He was one of them. At home amid the strangeness of them. Had Melio no known the man was Dariel-if he had not heard his voice and met his eyes-he would have had no clue to his identity. And that barely helped, for that same man had harangued a chamber filled with the weirdest-looking people Melio had ever seen. Dariel had then been stabbed in the abdomen, a killing slice if ever there was one. Instead of dying, he had shouted out, ripped off his shirt, and displayed himself, bloody and yet unscathed. How could that person be Prince Dariel Akaran? If that was him, what had happened to him? Was he still, somehow, the man Melio had been sent to find?
“How do you know?” Melio whispered.
“His chest,” Geena said. “He’s got Dariel’s physique. And his backside.”
Whatever this second, smaller meeting was, it ended abruptly. All the seated participants rose and bowed to one another. The man who might be Dariel spoke a few last words with a woman whose black hair jutted up from her head in featherlike plumes. As she turned away, Dariel seemed to remember the waiting Acacians. He cast about until he spotted them, then rushed over.
Embracing them one by one, he probed their faces, as they did the same to his. Up close it was obvious that he was the prince. The open lips of his smile revealed the spacing of his teeth, a trait Melio never knew he would recognize as Dariel’s. And yet there it was. And there was the distinctive ridge of bone high on his nose. The prince named each of them reverently, as if their names held sacred power. “Melio. Clytus. Geena… By the Giver, what are you doing here? How are you here? I can’t imagine it. Tell me. Tell me!”
For some reason, the others deferred to Melio to answer. “We came to find you,” he said. “To rescue you. Corinn sent me, and Clytus and Geena, and Kartholome.”
Dariel grinned as he absorbed that. He said Kartholome’s name a few times, memorizing it, and then he backed a step away, taking them all in. “Well, you found me. Rescued me? Not so much. Would I be boasting if I said I rescued you?”
Thinking about the short, brutal captivity they had suffered at the hands of the gray, tusked people-beatings, interrogations in broken Acacian, threats of their pending horrific deaths-Melio said, “Not at all. I think, really, that we came quite close to having a hard time of it.”
Geena barked a laugh, which set the others off as well.
Serious again a moment later, Dariel said, “Oh, there’s so much I want to ask you. And so much I want to tell you. I don’t know where to start. Also, everything is happening here now.”
“I can see that,” Clytus said.
“You’ve no idea what you’ve dropped into. I may have to ask you to go to war with me.”
“A just fight?” Clytus asked.
“Yes, absolutely.” Dariel glanced over his shoulder. A woman with facial markings like his own stood waiting for him, looking uneasy. “I have to go now. One of my friends here is hurt. I must see her. We’ll talk tonight. All of us. I want to know you, too, Kartholome. We’ll talk each other’s ears off as soon as we get a moment. I’ll leave you with Birke, to wash up and rest.” He indicated the wolf-faced youth. “He is a good friend to me. He’ll be one to you very soon.”
A half step away, he paused. “Melio, would you come with me? We could speak a little as we walk.”
Melio joined him. They walked quickly, part of a small group that cut across courtyards, passing from inside to out and back again, down a mazelike series of corridors that occasionally offered views over a stunning cityscape. As on Acacia, a contingent of guards shadowed Dariel. Not Marah but a motley, deadly serious crew, armed with a hodgepodge assortment of weapons. Judging by the sidelong glances they fixed on him, they did not yet trust Melio to be so near Dariel.
What is going on here?
“How are my sisters?” Dariel asked. “Tell me the last news you had of them.”
Melio’s attempts at this got him virtually nowhere. So much had happened since Dariel had left the Known World with Sire Neen that each thing he mentioned was predicated on explaining something else. That, in turn, affected something else that he needed to loop away from, enough so that he was soon unsure he was doing anything other than tying them both in troubling knots.
Stopping at the door into which the others entered, Dariel took his arm. “But they lived? When you left, they both lived?”
“Yes. And-” Melio cut himself off. He could not tell Dariel what Corinn had said about Aliver. It might not have been true. It would be cruel to say it now, in the midst of whatever was happening here.
The prince motioned to someone just inside the door that he would only be a moment more. “And what?”
“I can’t say it now. Later, when we can truly talk.”
Reluctantly, Dariel nodded. He stepped inside. Melio followed him. The entrance opened onto a large living room, filled with silent people. On a wide couch set against the far wall lay a woman, propped on her back, blankets pulled snug across her chest. Her shoulder bulged with bandages. What the injury was Melio could not tell, but that it was grave was obvious. The woman’s skin was a light blue. Her eyes were large in their sockets, her cheeks sunken. The woman with the running cat spots had already reached her. She clung to one of the woman’s hands, speaking close to her, kissing her face with a passion and sadness that made Melio feel he should look away.
Dariel exhaled a long breath. “Oh, Skylene…” Just a whisper. He did not go to her until sometime later, when the spotted woman lifted her head and pointed him out. The blue woman found him and bent her lips up into a weak but sincere smile. On that invitation, Dariel went forward. He kneeled by the spotted woman at the side of the bed and took one of Skylene’s hands. He touched her forehead with his own and they spoke close, too quietly for Melio to hear.
Watching them, Melio realized he had forgotten all about doubting this man’s identity. He was Dariel Akaran. Somehow, he had found a new family in Ushen Brae, a new conflict that he was at the center of. He had a sense of purpose that positively glowed as if a flame burned inside him. Melio did not yet understand what was going on here, but it felt perfectly right that he had come. Mena would want him here. She would want him fighting beside
