lifting the compact laser from her belt. 'Steady, girl! Steady!'
The animal looked at her, eyes rolling, ears pricked, teeth bared in fright and pain. She stepped closer, kneeled beside the head, lifted the laser to rest its muzzle within the confines of an ear.
'Now,' said Charles firmly. 'Now!'
A click and it was done, the beam drilling through flesh and bone into the mass of the brain bringing quick and merciful peace.
Rising she looked down at the dead animal. It would be waiting for her and, should she follow it, they could ride again. As Charles would be waiting and so many others. A touch and it would be done.
'Lavinia! Lavinia, don't!'
She heard the shout and the thud of racing hooves, turned to see the dim figure in the dying light. Roland with a spare mount at his side.
'Up, girl!' he said urgently as he drew to a halt at her side. 'Mount and ride!'
Delusia? The animals were real and Roland was alive as far as she knew. Quickly she mounted and felt the pound of hooves as the beast carried her down the road. Ahead loomed the bulk of the castle, the gates wide, closing as they rode past them, slamming shut as the great curfew-bell sent throbbing echoes into the air.
'My lady, you are safe!' Old Giacomo, his face creased and seamed like the skin of a dried fruit, helped her to dismount. 'The Old Ones heard my prayers!'
'And mine, my lady.' A younger man, his son, she thought, touched a finger to his brow with due respect for her rank. Already he had presumed too far. 'I also begged for the Old Ones to protect you.'
'And I, my lady! And I!'
A sussuration, a chorus of voices, muttering, blending into a drone, turning words into things without meaning. For a moment she swayed, seeing the great courtyard filled with a great assembly, the host dotted with familiar faces. Fan de Turah, Ser M'tolah, Chun Chue, Tianark L'ouck- uncles and cousins and forebears whose portraits now hung in the galleries. Nobles who had come to stay and fight and die for the Family. Strangers whom she had never known but who now filled her castle. Generations which had lived and died before her own parents had been conceived.
'Lavinia!' Roland was at her side, his hand on her arm, his face anxious. 'My dear, are you ill?'
'No.'
'You look so pale.' Gently he pushed back the thick strands of hair which had fallen over her cheek. 'And your tunic is soiled. Did you fall?'
'Yes.' She anticipated his concern. 'It was nothing. Some bruises, perhaps, but nothing more.'
'Even so a physician should examine you. Tomorrow I will send for one or, better, accompany you into town.'
'No!' Always the tone of authority irritated her and yet she realized her sharpness had been uncalled for. He meant well and, of them all, he alone had ridden out for her. 'No, Roland,' she said more gently. 'I'm not hurt. A hot bath and some massage is all I need.'
He said, stiffly, 'As you wish, my lady. I have no right to order, and yet I think you are being unwise.'
'My lady?' She smiled and shook her head. 'Roland you are my cousin and my friend. What need of such stiff formality? And where would I be now if you had not come to rescue me?'
A question he chose not to answer. Instead, as they walked from the courtyard towards the inner chambers, he said, 'You were late, Lavinia. I was worried. What happened? Delusia?'
'Yes.' She threw back her hair as they entered the corridor leading to her apartment. 'Charles came to ride with me. He looked as I remembered him when we first met. Do you remember?'
'I was off world at the time,' he said. 'A business trip to Olmeyha.'
'But you remember Charles, surely?'
'Yes.' He looked down at his hands. They were thin, the knuckles prominent, the fingers too long for perfect symmetry. Only the nails, carefully polished and filed, revealed the fastidiousness of his nature. 'Yes,' he said again. 'I remember him.'
'The way he talked,' she mused. 'He opened doors for me which I didn't even know existed. The things he had done and intended to do. Had he lived I think I would have shared them.'
'As the consort of an aging degenerate?' His tone was sharp, savagely dry. 'Charles was older than you suspected, Lavinia. You were young then, little more than a child, trusting, impressionable, a little-'
'Foolish?'
'I didn't say that.'
'But you meant it.' Anger glowed in her eyes and turned the dark orbs into pools of smouldering fire. 'Is that what you think of me?'
'No. Lavinia, don't jump to conclusions.'
'Young,' she said. 'Little more than a child. Trusting. Impressionable. Well, perhaps all that is true, even though I was more than a child. But foolish? No. Not unless it is foolish to ache to learn. Stupid to want to be a woman. Do you still think I was a fool?'
'To be charmed by Charles, yes.' Stubbornly he refused to yield. 'I knew him, perhaps not too well, but better than you did. He was a lecher, a gambler, a degenerate. Think, girl, it was written on his face. You saw him at the last.'
'He'd been ill!'
'Yes.' Roland looked again at his hands. 'Yes, he'd been ill.'
Wasting from the effects of a corrosive poison fed to him by an outraged husband, but what need to explain that? The girl was enamored of a dream, the slave to memory.
She said, gently, 'Roland, my friend, we have been quarreling and that is wrong. I owe you my life. Between us should be nothing but harmony. If I have offended you I beg your forgiveness. You will give it?'
He took her extended hands into his own, feeling their soft firmness, their grace, their warmth. Tilting his head he looked into her eyes, deep-set under high-arched brows, studying the glow of light reflected from her cheekbones, the line of her jaw. The mouth was full, the lower lip, swollen from the impact of her teeth, a ruby pout. Her ears were small and tight against the curve of her skull. The hair, disheveled now, was an ebon mane streaked with a band of silver.
'My lady!' He stooped so as to hide the worship in his eyes.
'Roland!' Her hands freed themselves from his grasp, one touching his hair, running over the thinning strands. 'My friend! My very good friend!'
'Lavinia!'
'I must bathe and change.' She turned from him, seeing a figure standing beside her door, waiting. 'We shall meet again at dinner. And, Roland, once again my thanks.'
Charles accompanied her through the portal and stood watching as she stripped. The bath was hot, the scented water easing aches and pains, a cloud of steam rising to dim the lines of the chamber, the figure of her maid.
'A dreadful thing, my lady,' she said. She had heard the news as servants always did. Often Lavinia had wondered just how they knew all that was going on. 'To think of you being shut outside! Lord Acrae insisted the curfew shouldn't be rung until he'd brought you safe inside and he set men to enforce his orders. But what if something had happened, my lady? Suppose his mount had fallen? What if night had fallen before you were back inside?'
'If you had wings, girl, you'd be a bird.'
'My lady?'
'Forget it.' It was cruel to talk in ways the girl couldn't understand. 'True night falls when the curfew is sounded,' she explained. 'Or, to put it another way, only when the curfew bell is rung has true night fallen. Do you understand?'
'I-I think so, my lady.'
She didn't and Lavinia waved her away. She was too ignorant to understand the subtle difference between night falling and a bell sounding the falling of night. A bell could be delayed and Roland had done just that. He had been shrewder than she'd known. The difference could only have been in minutes, perhaps, but those minutes would or could have made all the difference. At least the Pact had not been obviously flaunted and the Sungari had no grounds for complaint.
