She did other stuff, too, things she really didn’t let us see.”
Delivegu considered that a moment. With all the things Corinn was letting the world see these days, what sort of sorcery might still merit secrecy?
“I’m hungry,” the girl said, stretching back across the cot and sliding one leg over the other, as if this were what one did to combat hunger.
“Of course you are. How about I get you something?”
“Are you serving me?”
Delivegu leaped to his feet and looked around for his robe. “Exactly. What would you like? Bread and cheese? Some of that roasted venison?”
She puffed out her cheeks. “Cheese gives me nightmares. And venison? I’m sick of the stuff. I could never eat another deer in my life.”
“Ah, what then?”
“You’ll get me in trouble.”
“Nobody in this place can say a word against me, or against you, if that’s my pleasure. What will you eat? Be quick. I feel a stiffness coming on.”
“Custard. Bring me custard. Do you know how to find it? I should show you.”
“What would be the use of my serving you? Just lie there looking ravishing.”
The notion did not seem nearly so romantic as he scurried down the exposed passageway toward the kitchens. The wind batted his robe around, thoroughly shriveling his sex in the process. He paused at the kitchen door, first to check that he was alone, and then a moment longer to listen to a wolf’s lonely call floating up from the valley. “Hello, brother,” he whispered, and then opened the door and entered.
A single oil lamp burned in the center of the preparation table, and by its light Delivegu began his search. He was not looking for custard. It did not take him long, for the servants had left the bottle in easy reach. It stood aligned with the condiments and relishes that had earlier been cleared from the table. He picked up Wren’s bottle of palm wine, uncorked it, and sniffed. Just as foul as before. Strange girl, Wren. Something about the fact that she drank this stuff without flinching brought the blood back to his groin. In different circumstances, he would have loved to have a drinking contest with her. Another life, maybe.
He stood still a moment, listening, letting his eyes roam the dark corners of the room. Satisfied that he was alone, he slipped a vial from his robe’s inside chest pocket. He plucked out the vial’s little cork and measured a few drops into the mouth of the palm wine bottle. Wren’s little poison indeed.
A few minutes later, bottle set back in place, Delivegu slipped into the chill air of the corridor again. He carried a large bowl of custard, enough for two. He would enjoy the night and be on his way in the morning. The queen would want a report.
Bralyn would, alas, not be going with him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The view over the rooftops of Avina had always transfixed Skylene, never more so than now. From where she stood on the balcony of the offices that had once belonged to the Lvin Herith, the city looked endless. It thrust up to the south in a jumbled bulk that went on for miles, farther than she could see: all the towers with their sun-bright colors, flags of the clans hung now just as they always had, lines of smoke rising to a certain height, at which point the wind bent each column and sent it off to the west. Seabirds and starlings and pigeons cut arcs through the sky and filled the morning air with their calls.
“The only city I’ve ever truly known,” Skylene said to herself. A child of the Eilavan Woodlands, she had only ever seen Aos from a distance, on the march that took her to the league transport that began her life in bondage. Her memory of that city was that it was vast, but she suspected that was not true. A child’s perception of things. This city, Avina, truly was vast. It had been too large to occupy entirely even when the Auldek lived in it. Now, with them and their chosen servants and the divine children gone, the dead haunted the city as much as the living. It did not have to be that way, but the glory that could have been a free Avina had already started to fracture.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a person emerge through the archway that led onto the rooftop. Tunnel strode toward her, moving his bulk with a heavy, muscular grace. Standing beside her, he touched the metal tusks curving up from his face. “We should go now.”
Skylene nodded. She let her gaze linger over the city a little longer and then she turned and walked back toward the arch, down the slope, and onward. Beside Tunnel, she was as slim as a reed, a figure drawn with the smooth lines of a thin brush. Her skin powder white, nose the elongated point customary of selected Kern slaves, hair tufted in a manner that made her otherwise peaceful visage look potentially savage, touched with avian anger. She might need some of that for the meeting they headed to, the first summit of leaders of the clans of the quota slaves of Ushen Brae.
Randale of the Wrathic had called for a full gathering of the people; Dukish of the Anet and Maren of the Kulish Kra had balked, saying they should decide some matters at the level of the chieftains before airing their differences in public. Skylene did not welcome talk of chieftains. Nor did she like that they already defined themselves by the clan groupings of their enslavement. She agreed to attend only to buy time until Mor returned- and the elders, too, if that was possible.
Since Mor had left her in charge of the Free People of Avina, Skylene lived a troubled life. Part of it was being without her lover. They had slept entwined together for several years. Trying to find slumber by herself proved difficult, and her dreams rushed unpleasantly at her when she did sleep. She woke most mornings knotted in her sheets, more desolate for realizing it was only linen that bound her, not Mor’s shapely limbs.
The Avina she found on kicking off those sheets challenged her in new ways each day. In the first days of freedom the city’s occupants huddled nervous, unsure that what appeared to have happened really had. The Auldek gone? All of them? The divine children with them and many of the other slaves as well? They had all watched it happen, but they stayed in the same rooms, in the same buildings, finding it hard to believe that the Auldek would not appear again suddenly, ready to punish them for even daring to think themselves free.
Some youths rode out of the city on an antok. They returned a week later with verification that the Auldek carried on to the north, making haste, none of them looking back. At Skylene’s suggestion, the People agreed to set up watches to the north of the city to provide a warning should the thing they feared return to them. With that in place, they rejoiced. People ran through the streets, reveling in their new freedom. They were as giddy as the children they had not been allowed to be, laughing and dancing, feasting and making love and dreaming of what they would do with a city-an entire continent-all their own. It was too much for them, vast and filled with another race’s history-such a challenge, but a challenge all their own now. The very thought of it made them drunk with joy.
Skylene made speeches often during these early days. She reminded the revelers that the Free People had always planned for this day. The Council of Elders had lived far from them, but they had never ceased laboring for them, taking in the abandoned, hiding those who had run from abuse, keeping alive a dream of unity once they were as free in reality as they were in moral truth. Soon, she told them, Mor and Yoen and the others would join them. Together they would build their nation. It sounded wonderful. It was all true and all possible. But barely had the tail of the Auldek migration slipped over the northern horizon before the problems started.
By the end of the second week one man had killed another in a dispute over who had rights to an estate. The slain man was of the Kulish Kra; his murderer, an Anet. Skylene was at the trial called to decide the matter. She was one of the many who agreed to the punishment of a tattoo identifying the Anet as a murderer to be stenciled across his shaved scalp. Before the sentence was carried out, a group of Anet mobbed the chamber in which the man was imprisoned. They bashed their way in, freed him, and fought a battle in the streets to escape. They claimed the trial had been unjust. It was biased against Anets. Only other Anets had the right to try their kind, they claimed. How could they know justice was done otherwise?
The one who led them was a short man named Dukish, an Anet who had once been a golden eye, one of the quota slaves who handled financial affairs for the Auldek. He had been a man of some station, but he had not been chosen to go with them. Declaring himself the clan’s chieftain, he called on other Anet slaves to join him in putting clan interests first, saying none should govern them but themselves. Many flocked to him. He armed them, seizing a
