Between (24 page)

Felt her own wings, spread wide to catch the updraft of
wind, soaring ever higher, the earth below a brightly colored patchwork of field and town and river…

Alarmed, she opened her eyes and took a deep breath of the here and now, letting the scent of the herbs fill her head, driving away the smell of the dragon, and with it the fear.

Esme’s voice floated through the room like a vapor of steam. “My Lady? Please sit up. You must be washed.”

Vivian didn’t answer. The herbs seemed to be drawing the pain out of her shoulders; she imagined that if she could look behind her she would see swirls of black poison being sucked from her flesh and washed away.

The voice was insistent. “My Lady, the time is short.”

“All right, all right.” Vivian sat up, feeling exposed and embarrassed as Esme’s competent hands picked up a sponge and began to wash her back, easing around the long gash. “Tell me about the dragons,” she said. Partly because she needed to know, partly for distraction from the pain.

Esme’s hands faltered, stopped, then began moving again. “What did you wish to know?”

“I’m curious. Everything here is dragons—painted on the ceiling, woven into the tapestries. And they fly around attacking people, and the man who defended me got in trouble for it.”

“I don’t understand your question, My Lady.”

“They’re frightening, marauding, evil, and yet—”

Again the sponge faltered, and Vivian heard a sharp intake of breath. “Do not say such things, My Lady, I beg you. The dragons are—sacred.”

“That’s what Duncan said. How are they sacred?”

“It is best, My Lady, not to speak of these things. Lie back—we need to wash your hair.”

Again the wall of silence, first from the healer, now from the maid. The fear took on a three-dimensional quality, filling up the room.

Esme began pouring water through her hair, and Vivian brought her mind back to the business at hand, calmed her breath with an effort of will. Esme washed and rinsed her hair three times with three different solutions. The final
herbal cycle clogged her sinuses with a perfume that set her coughing and made it difficult to breathe. Rebellious, she ducked her head under the water and rinsed out as much of the scent as she could, enough to allow her to breathe freely at least, and refused to allow any further ministrations.

“That’s it,” she declared, climbing out of the tub. “We’re done.” Testing her muscles, she realized that she could move more freely. The herbs had done their work.

Poe, with a sidelong glance at her, climbed into the tub with a splash of his flippers. “You’ll be sorry,” Vivian told him. “You’ll stink for a year and a day. No other penguin will speak to you.”

A moment later, still damp and shivering in the thin robe, she confronted a rainbow of velvet and satin gowns, all low cut and tight waisted, all beribboned and befrilled. She tried on one after another, finally flinging the last aside and turning her mounting frustration on the hovering Esme.

“They’re impossible.”

“What do you mean, My Lady? They look beautiful to me.” Envious hands smoothed the wispy blue silk trimmed with peacock feathers, obviously her favorite.

Vivian looked at her reflection in the oval mirror, taller than she was, framed in dark polished wood, carved with images of the inevitable dragons.

“Why don’t
you
wear it, then?” Vivian snapped. The girl flinched at her tone, and she was immediately contrite. “Look—too much cleavage, and it shows the scars on my shoulders. Plus it’s so tight I can’t breathe—”

“But it’s the fashion, My Lady. And…” She stopped, looked down at her hands.

“And?”

“The Chancellor picked them out.”

“He did, did he?” Vivian remembered the scornful eyes and the insolent touch. A flush of anger moved through her, from toes to forehead. Jared or Gareth or whoever, she’d seen that look before; her casual style never measured up to his idealized vision of what she ought to be.

She turned to the rack and sorted through the gowns that remained. “If this is what I have to wear, then I won’t go.”

Esme looked like she’d proposed cutting off her own head with a dull sword. “But—you have to go.”

“Then find me something reasonable to wear.” Seeing that the tears were about to begin again, Vivian sighed and tried to summon up a modicum of patience. “Look, Esme, things may be different in your world, but no man is going to tell me what to wear. If I must go to this feast, can you find me a gown that hasn’t more than three frills and isn’t so goddamned tight in the waist that I can’t breathe?”

“You’ll be out of fashion,” Esme wailed.

“I don’t give a damn about fashion. Bring me sensible shoes while you’re at it. I can’t walk in these things.”

“I’ll try, My Lady. But he won’t like it.” Esme scuttled out the door like a frightened crab. Vivian nearly laughed but quickly sobered at the thought of the girl’s genuine terror.

After the door closed, she used the waiting time to look over the tapestries as the healer had suggested. There was one of a man, a maiden, and a dragon, arranged in a stylized triangle. Above their heads, dragons flew across the sky. The next tapestry depicted a larger version of one of the tiles—a maiden in white chained to a rock, with a predatory dragon ready to strike. A man in a crimson robe with a raised staff stood off to the side.

One tapestry held her attention longer than the others. Another dark-haired woman, this time wearing a sober black gown. A dragon flew overhead, and in what was meant to be the sky, a number of doors stood open, some round, some rectangular, and through them reached things best not seen. A tentacle, a claw, an amorphous mass that looked like swollen, skinless flesh.

A wafting of scent and a bump against her knee signaled the arrival of Poe. He stood beside her, contemplating the picture as though deeply interested, and then waddled over and poked his head around behind it, pecking at the wall. There was a sliding sound, stone on stone, and he vanished.

“Poe!”

Silence. Vivian peered around the tapestry to see Poe standing at the center of a large walk-in closet, his white patches ghostly in the near-dark. When her eyes adjusted, she could make out two garments hung on elaborate hangers. One was a trailing white gown, the other jet black, plain.

Familiar.

Dream memory flooded through her; the voices in her head surged in volume. Vivian let them carry her into the closet. She slid the black gown from its hanger. The fabric was silky, cool to the touch. A moment’s pause, and then she shrugged out of the dressing robe and slipped the gown over her head. It fit so perfectly it might have been tailored for her.

When she stepped back out into the chamber, she thought for an instant that someone else was in the room. It took the space of several breaths to realize she was looking into the mirror.

This mirror self was not familiar, not ordinary Vivian in jeans and T-shirt. Her skin against the black of the dress was ghostly pale, except for the purplish swelling on her left cheek, a mark left by a blow struck in dream. And then, even as she stared, the gray eyes shifted to green and then to gold.

Vivian moved closer to the mirror, turning her head from side to side to change the light, but there was no mistaking. Her eyes were a dark golden amber, flecked with threads of green. Worse, the scars on her shoulders had healed into black circles, surrounded by what looked like an intricate tattoo of overlapping scales in shimmering gold, purple, and green.

The buzzing of voices in her head intensified to a dizzying crescendo.

Experimentally, she rotated her shoulders, one way, and then the other. No more pain. When she brushed over one of the marks with her fingers the skin was smooth and even; no thickening, no scarring.

Standing there, staring at this self that she no longer
knew, with the alien room behind her made doubly so by virtue of being a reflection, she felt disconnected and wraithlike, with nothing solid to cling to. She stretched out one hand to the mirror, half-expecting to pass through into something beyond.

Her fingers touched glass. Cool, slightly dusty, and decidedly solid. And looking into it, an ordinary woman with scarred shoulders, a crazy woman with voices in her head.

A woman with golden eyes that once were gray.

V
ivian was still looking in the mirror when the door opened and the Warlord stepped into the room. His reflected eyes met hers with a look that was anger and hunger and something else that defied naming. His long dark hair was neatly braided, and he wore a well-cut gray tunic, plain and serviceable.

If she didn’t turn around, if she kept him like this, as an image in the mirror, he would be only a fantasy, not a part of this absurd world that was re-creating her as some freak from a picture-book tale that could not be true.

One word sorted itself out from the babble and rang clear in her mind like a bell.

Destiny.

Vivian turned and made him real.

“What are you playing at?” He crossed the distance between them in a few long strides, his eyes raking over her. Vivian lifted her chin a little higher and held his gaze without flinching.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Let me be more clear. What exactly are you doing here? Why did you come?”

“I can’t see what business it is of yours.”

“It’s my job to protect the kingdom. You have brought
trouble with you.” There was no mistaking the fury in his voice. He towered over her, and she took a step back but found her own anger rising to meet his.

“You brought me here. I don’t recall having a choice in the matter.”

“Your eyes have changed. What manner of woman are you?”

She chose not to answer.

He stretched one hand toward her shoulder, and she flinched, half-expecting a blow.

“I don’t hit women,” he said. His eyes flicked pointedly to her cheek, and her own hand lifted to cover the bruise.

“Explain,” he said. “Nobody survives the dragon poison.”

“Except me, apparently.”

“Tell me who you are and what you are doing here.”

She sighed. “My name is Vivian Maylor. I came—through a dream. Don’t all dreams lead to Surmise?”

His face remained implacable, eyes shuttered and cold.

“What does it matter to you? What do you want with me?”

“Because of you, a dragon is dead.”

“Your turn to explain. How is this a bad thing? They are vile creatures—”

His hands clenched and his voice softened, low and dangerous. “There is a law in Surmise. When a dragon dies, so, too, must somebody else.”

A flash of intuition turned her cold. “Who?”

He laughed, a harsh, strangled sound. “Whoever killed it.”

The pieces fell into place. “Oh, God. Duncan. You have to help him—”

“Nobody can help him.”

“Not that it matters to you—”

“Don’t speak of what you do not know, My Lady.” He swung away, pacing across the room to the windows.

“In case you’re wondering, I don’t understand about the scars,” she said to his back. “Or why I survived the dragon poison, or why my eyes changed color. It just happened.”

“Just like that. No rhyme or reason. And the gown? Was
that an accident also? I hardly think that’s what was laid out for you to wear to dinner.”

“How could you possibly know what I was expected to wear to dinner?”

“I know the Chancellor, and the evidence is hardly difficult to spot.” He nodded toward the litter of gowns, and Vivian felt herself flush.

“I had no interest in wearing frills and lace and tripping over my own skirts. This gown suits me. It’s much more practical.”

“Practical? Is that what you call it?” He kept his back to her; she couldn’t read the tone of his voice, but he no longer sounded angry.

“What’s wrong with it?”

Poe picked that moment to make his presence known. He squawked and waddled close to the Warlord. The two inspected each other in silence for a moment.

“Will there be more of these—birds?”

“Penguins? I rather doubt it.” Even as she said it, Vivian realized that she had no idea. One penguin was so unlikely as to be impossible, and yet indubitably here one was.

The Warlord shook his head. “Forget the birds. Answer me—are you creating this look on purpose?”

“What look?”

“Don’t play stupid with me, My Lady. I’m not buying.”

“I like this gown. It suits me.”

“The gown, the eyes, the marks of scales on your shoulders. Are you a sorceress, My Lady?” His voice sounded weary, maybe even sad, but his face revealed nothing.

“A sorceress?” She laughed bitterly. “Sadly, no. Things would be so much easier if I were.”

“I don’t know what to do with you.”

“Why don’t you forget about me and go do something about the man who’s going to die because he tried to protect me?”

The words hung in the air between them. Something lethal flashed in the agate eyes.
Stop, Vivian. Back away.
But she was possessed by a mad rage, equal parts hurt, fear,
and outrage, and she couldn’t seem to stop. She stepped forward, spread her arms wide. “Go ahead. Kill an unarmed woman in cold blood. That would make you a real man.”