enslaved or in hiding or imprisoned. I would want them all here in Tahalian. I will not be the only one.”
Perrin cleared his throat skeptically, but Mena said, “That will be done. Write a summons yourself so that your people will believe it. I will pen a sealed note to accompany it. We can send it tonight. There are birds fed, rested, and ready to fly.”
“I have your word on it?” the man asked. “Truly?”
Mena met Perrin’s eyes a moment, then slipped a hand down her collar. She fished out a chain, on it a silver pendant. Pinching it in her fingers, she held it up for Haleeven to see. “I found this at the base of a great tree. It is the reason I fought and killed the eagle goddess Maeben. It was not a present or a gift or payment, even. It’s a burden. It was sent so that I would remember the children sacrificed in the name of the goddess I served, then abhorred, and then killed. I made a mistake. When I realized that, I did the best I could to correct it. That’s the way I am, Haleeven.” She pulled the chain taut, letting the curves of the serpentine figure on the pendant catch the light. “I swear on this, on the children I carry with me, on the wrongs I will yet see righted. Fight with us, Haleeven Mein, and if we live, your people will live as well. I swear it.”
Haleeven drew his head back and then let his eyes drift up and around the great arched roof. Finally, he said, “I am not without ideas.”
Mena nodded, curt. “I thought as much.”
“The air is not flowing properly. It should not smell of sulfur. Someone has opened a ventilation tube improperly. Send me a few capable men. We’ll survey the heat ducts. Before anything else, we must see to that.”
“As you advise,” Mena said, not quite smiling but close enough that he responded with a not quite smile of his own.
CHAPTER TWELVE
On the night he arrived at Calfa Ven, Delivegu Lemardine lingered a while over the scene rolling out beneath his private balcony. The King’s Preserve, a vast stretch of woodland deep in the mountains of Senival. Unending crowns of trees crowded the entire view, broken here and there by granite protrusions. Plumes of orange and brown, some bursts of yellow: the leaves still displayed their late autumn brilliance.
Why he stood so long watching the night creep over the landscape he could not say. Perhaps it was nostalgia for some aspect of his forgotten childhood. It was not that he remembered a view like this, or had any particular fondness for the notion of roaming the wilderness beneath that canopy, but he was Senivalian by birth. He had spent his first years in some village or another near here. Perhaps the memory was in his blood. Perhaps he should spend more time here. Not this trip, though. This trip had a particular purpose and would be brief.
That evening’s banquet had a rustic charm. Delivegu went to it dressed in a manner he felt fit the occasion. He wore a shirt of thick Senivalian cloth, its collar a tall ring around his neck. He squeezed his private parts into tight black trousers. He was particularly fond of his crimson leather boots, strapped snug all the way up to the knee. One should always take care with one’s appearance, Delivegu believed, even when far from court.
The lodge’s guests gathered in the winter dining room, a crowded space centered around a single oval table. Wall lamps lit the place, but something about the dark wood walls, the pelts pinned there, and the heads of several stags and a boar jutting from them gave the room a somber air. Two fires roared in large fireplaces at either side of the room. That was another thing Delivegu had noticed about the lodge. Many corridors opened to the outside air. Windows often sat crooked with age in their frames, rattling in the wind and spilling warm air and letting in cold. Instead of correcting these things, the servants set blazing fires in every room. Inefficient. Wasteful, really, but there was a certain style in this rugged excess. Delivegu approved.
He did not, on the other hand, much approve of his dinner company. Nothing wrong with them per se, but not one seducible maiden among them: Gurta, so fat with Rialus Neptos’s pup she would have been better off rolling than waddling around as she was; a senator from Aos, his middle-aged wife and several other relations; along with an old merchant and his two teenage sons, the latter flushed from the day’s adventures. Adventures that featured Wren, Dariel’s mistress. She was pregnant with the prince’s child, though from the story the two sons told she was not much hindered by her condition.
“Mistress Wren warned us it would be a long ride in any event,” one of the sons said. The guests stood in a loose circle, sipping the mint liqueur that was customary for early winter evenings at Calfa Ven. “We rode north through the valley and then up along a ridgeline she called Storneven. Wren knew the route well.”
“Or the horses did,” the other son, slightly younger, said.
“No, she knew it. She’s ridden it several times during the weeks she’s been caretaker here.”
Caretaker? That was a clever way to describe her situation. Better than she who is banished until the queen decides what to do with her. “She rides so often?” Delivegu asked.
“Every day,” Gurta said. “Keeps her from going insane with boredom.”
“There was no chance of that today,” the younger son piped. “We had a run-in with a wolverbear!”
“An old wolverbear,” the other corrected. “Peter, the warden, said so. It picked up our trail about halfway around Storneven, spooked the horses. It followed us for a good hour, sometimes right out in the open. It loped along as if it were just biding its time until one of us fell off our horse or something.”
“Peter said that’s what it was doing. Said if any of the horses had gotten lamed-or if one of us had fallen-the thing would have been on us like a flash. He got it off us by tossing down two of the squirrels he had shot. When the wolverbear couldn’t resist them, we took off as fast as Wren could ride.”
“Dreadful,” the senator’s wife said. “Those creatures are beastly. They should hunt every last one of them.”
“Oh, you don’t mean that,” Delivegu said, finding himself drawn to flirt. Force of habit. “There need to be wild things in the world. Things to give you chills at night thinking about them.”
“My wife has far too many chills already,” the senator said. “Goes to sleep wrapped in three layers of undergarments.”
“That’s a pity,” Delivegu said. “A crime, I’d say. No woman should go to sleep so encumbered.” He flashed her a smile and sipped his liqueur. Then he wondered why he had bothered. He had no interest in her. And then he realized that without knowing it his senses had picked up on a person of interest. The sudden rush of vigor he felt was not for the senator’s wife at all. It was for one of the girls setting the table for dinner. Oh, yes, that was it. He watched her bend over the table, arranging cutlery. What is it about youth? he wondered. Even though her body was half hidden beneath her simple frock, unadorned and meant to go unnoticed, Delivegu saw the contours beneath the fabric. No Acacian beauty, this one. She was of Senivalian stock, clear enough in her short stature, with hips that would go wide in a few years, breasts that stood at attention for the time being, and dark hair she wore clipped at the back. He decided he would see those locks flow free. Reconnecting with his ancestral roots. That’s what it would be.
When he caught the flow of conversation again, the senator’s wife was saying, “If you ask me, it’s just reckless. Why put the child in danger like that? I enjoy a good brisk ride myself, but there’s a time for all things.”
Delivegu tried to imagine her enjoying a brisk ride. It was not a pleasant imagining, too full of jiggling flesh for his liking. He glanced at the serving girl again and caught her watching him. Oh, good. She’s noticed.
“Mistress Wren!”
She walked in with a careless air, as if she had happened on the place by accident and was not entirely sure she would stay. She was pretty enough. Small and lithe, she had the body of an acrobat. “Ready to eat?” she asked. “I could eat an entire wolverbear.”
Delivegu managed to secure a place across the table from her. Despite her reckless riding and adventures with wolverbears, she did seem fully aware of the child growing inside her. It was a small bump yet. She rubbed it often, making him wonder what it felt like. It was sensual in a way he had not considered before. As was the way she ate, heartily, without any courtly reticence. He was not sure why Dariel would invest so much in her, but such things were often hard to explain.
“To what do we owe the pleasure of your company, Delivegu?” the merchant asked.
“Yes,” Wren asked, slicing through her roasted boar, “why are you here?”
