Forget Me Not, (4 page)

Her smile matched his as
he studied her until he covered the fruit in her palm with his own
larger and darker hand.

“
You speak of magic and
choice in the same breath. Your magic, your religion would call
your position destiny. Is relying on fate so much better than
depending on state?” His smile widened as he held up his hand, and
slid the plum in her open mouth, cutting off her response with the
warm, sweet fruit. He took her arm and guided her away from the
stall as he threw a coin to the seller.

She followed unresisting
with the taste of ripe plum and the smell of cimarron filling her
senses.

___

The Lady of Perr blinked
as the gardener pulled her upright, away from the Barbarian's
warmth. She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself, barely
noticing the throb in her ankle. The ludicrous idea that she should
host Barbarians should never have occurred to the High Precept.
Memories like that, memories that felt real enough to taste
shouldn't happen to her. Maybe it hadn't been a memory but a
fantasy. Of course, that must have been it. She'd been an
ambassador over a century ago. Everyone from that visit would be
dead and buried by now. That knowledge should have filled her with
satisfaction, but instead her heart throbbed with pain.

“
Hatia?” the Barbarian
said in a low voice she knew as he reached towards her with his sun
kissed hand.

She took a breath that
sounded more like a gasp, glad for the pain that shot through her
ankle when it touched the ground. She trembled as she leaned
heavily on the gardener. Who had told the Barbarian her
name?

“
Welcome to the House of
Perr, Viceroy Balthaar. Pardon my clumsiness.” She turned away but
not quickly enough to miss the look of bewildered anger on his
face.

It wasn’t until she sat in
the kitchen with her ankle soaking in cool water infused with herbs
that the gardener took her hand in his, squeezing her fingers
painfully until she looked up at him.

"You called him Balthaar.
Are you familiar with the Barbarian?"

She frowned, shaking her
head. "Of course not. All the Barbarians I knew would be dead by
now. Why are you crushing my fingers?" she asked, looking closely
at him. He was only the gardener, but he seemed like someone else,
something else that made her heart race. A memory balanced on the
edge of her mind before he relaxed his grip and turned
away.

She frowned down at her
bare foot, smeared with the brown potion the gardener had applied
to her pale blue skin. She touched the stuff, feeling the coarsely
crushed herbs, grainy in her fingers. His dark skin had been close
to that hue. The warm color matched his warm skin. Maybe if she
painted herself pink or orange, she wouldn't be so cold all the
time. Who would name a Barbarian Balthaar? It seemed a strangely
elemental name for a Barbarian.

She must have imagined the
dusky smell of cimarron.

Chapter 8

Balthaar stood in the
hall, his heart beating hard in his chest. He’d tried to forget her
name, hadn’t spoken it for a hundred years, but it rolled off his
tongue as if it had been yesterday.

___

The pungent smell of
humanity toiling in the hot sun filled the courtyard while shouts
rang through the air, echoing off the tall earthen walls
surrounding the market. Balthaar escorted the ridiculously naive
Elsyrian girl through the narrow stalls, blocking the malevolent
glares and the evil signs with his body, signs she never
noticed.

Balthaar had been assigned
to watch her, protect her. He’d quickly dismissed the assignment as
beneath a viceroy, one who would join the ranks of the Bashai, the
priests of the Emperor, but over time he had grown to accept and
almost enjoy the ridiculous creature. Her naivete and innocence
came with a shocking breadth of knowledge and intelligence while
her eyes, shifting between amethyst and darker blue sapphire
mesmerized him. Balthaar had been wary of her using her magics on
him, been warned by the Emperor's own high priest Targen, but so
far she hadn't done anything other than argue eloquently for a
cause other than her own.

Balthaar watched in
amusement while the slaves in her periphery shifted, taking
aggressive stances. He barely paid attention to his own words as he
prepared for unpleasantness. He spoke about slaves, animals, the
part they all played, watching her expression shift, her eyes widen
in shock before they gazed up at him beseechingly as she defended
the slaves, her own elevated position.

The voices behind him
rose, the hissed curses came before the flung fruit. He leaned into
her, close enough to smell the delicate scent of her skin, some
kind of foreign flower while he felt the sting and thud on his
armored back with flecks of over-ripe fruit splashing up his
neck.

So close he only had to
whisper. “Unlike you? Daughter of an Empire? Ambassador of the High
City?”

She turned away from him
as he’d intended, escaping the threat behind Balthaar, never seeing
it. Her vulnerability stirred something, envy maybe for a creature
who had lived without the need to anticipate violence.

She faced a seller behind
a stall who froze with wide eyes and slack mouth as she spoke to
Balthaar about becoming a soldier, one of the legendary Elven Rasha
the silver armored soldiers who fought like lightning. The idea
that his young companion could choose a life of fear and rage when
she didn't even notice an attack made the Barbarian’s stomach
clench. He covered the plum in her hand, a plum with purple streaks
that matched her eyes.

Magic. Her eyes must be
filled with elven magic if they could make Balthaar feel so
protective towards one who was not his own kind. She smiled
unconsciously as Balthaar took the fruit, filling her mouth with
its flavor as he took her arm, too intimate a gesture, but those
behind had not stopped their hissing.

Balthaar led the way past
the fruit seller, throwing more coin than the plum was worth to the
man. The merchant, who knew who oiled his cart, wheeled his wares
into the space behind them, blocking the slaves and allowing them
to exit the market without her knowing how close she'd come to
tasting the slaves' fear and loathing for the blue-skinned
demon.

___

Balthaar stood for a long
time in the cool hall at the bottom of the stairs with the two men
from the ship as his silent companions.

“
You know Wind Spinner,”
the green-skinned man said in a voice with a hint of anger beneath
the calm. He’d never spoken before to Balthaar.

“
Wind Spinner?” Balthaar
repeated, struggling to control his emotions, his voice thankfully
hard and even.

“
Lady Perr, or Hatia you
called her. We call her Wind Spinner,” the green creature said
stepping forward to raise his chin and show his teeth in a subtle
challenge.

Rasha did not usually
threaten. Their swords would slash and bodies would fall. The blue
Elsyrian put a hand on the other’s shoulder. “He does not know of
her. You can see it in his eyes. Also, I fought this Balthaar
before the fury.” He spoke Elsyrian in a low voice that Balthaar
shouldn’t have been able to understand.

They knew who he was,
general of Barabbas, merciless killer of their kind. Why did they
not draw their swords and take him to the dungeon, or at the very
least, separate his head from his body?

The green-skinned man
dropped his angry eyes, nodding as his features regained their
passivity before he turned and left in the direction the woman,
Hatia, the Wind Spinner had gone.

“
Why do you call her
that?” Balthaar asked, after waiting a long stretch of
moments.

The blue-skinned man
simply stared at the wall to the left of Balthaar, arms crossed
over his silver breast-plate. Finally, Balthaar turned and walked
up the steps she’d come down. They’d taken his trunks in that
direction. He needed to bathe, to change, to have space and time to
clear his head.

“
Why do you call her
Hatia?” the blue-skinned man replied in a low voice that Balthaar
thought he may have imagined.

“
I knew a woman so named
once,” he answered softly as he took the stone steps two at a
time.

“
Is she why you went to
war?” the man asked, strangely persistent.

Balthaar stopped in the
upper hall, grand stone ceiling curved above with elaborate wall
hangings on either side.

“
Yes.” He continued
walking. The Elsyrian must have pushed Balthaar, used some small
magic to wrangle the confession. He would never otherwise reveal
something he guarded so closely.

“
My name is Hortham. I
also knew her before. She returned home from your country, released
from the dungeons of the Bashai. They marked her, laid curses in
her skin, curses we cannot cure. You saw the madness. I believe
they did it intentionally, to raise the Elves to the fury. Before
The Wind Spinner returned broken, the Elsyrians were not united
against Barabbas.”

Balthaar stopped, frozen,
fighting the urge to trace his own arms and chest, the marks the
Bashai had left on him. “It is impossible for the Bashai to mark
any that are not their own,” he said in a wooden voice before he
continued away from Hortham. How dare he lie, to spread the poison
of doubt through Balthaar’s mind against his kind? He determined to
be more on guard against these Elsyrians who used the weakness in
the past against him. Perhaps she was mad, but the Bashai could not
curse those who did not embrace their mark. Balthaar’s own mind and
will was the Emperor’s, that was his destiny as one of the
Emperor’s blessed, or cursed, but no Elsyrian could be touched by
Bashai. He’d seen proof of failed experiments that showed the
limits of the Emperor.

Chapter 9

Hatia stayed in the
kitchen fingering herbs while her ankle ached. It would heal soon
enough from the ministrations of the gardener. Elsyrians were
supposed to be renowned for their grace. Ordinarily it wouldn’t
bother her that she had the unhappy circumstance of being the only
Elsyrian lady clumsy enough to fall down her own stairs.

The Barbarian diplomat
must think her such a fool. Had he truly said her name? How could
it be? Perhaps he was a descendant of Herrin Balthaar, from one of
the many from his numerous concubines no doubt.

Hatia could still feel his
hands, calloused and rough, catching on the flimsy fabric of her
dress. He hadn’t had the soft pads of a dignitary.

Hatia limped up and down
the passageway between the kitchen and the morning room, passing
through sunbeams and motes of dust that carried the scent of
faraway places. The air had been stirred by the Barbarian's
presence. When Hatia realized that she had been focused for hours,
not slipping out into the gentle oblivion that was customary to
her, she paused, leaning against the cool pale stone
wall.

Things were changing.
Could it be for the better? Of course not. Nothing to do with
Barbarians was good. She knew that much even if she couldn’t
remember why. She frowned and tried to focus on the new pain in her
ankle, the sharp bright pain that would keep her from thinking of
the old wounds that had never healed, but the gardener had done his
work well. She frowned at him as he approached with the graceful,
ageless walk of their kind. He seemed so familiar, but he’d come
with those the High Precept had sent. She didn’t know him, did
she?

“
When is the Convotion?
How soon shall we leave?” she asked, testing her ankle with her
weight.

"You remember about the
Convotion?" he responded, his eyebrows lowering over his golden
eyes.

She frowned back at him.
“Obviously. What is your name? How long have you worked here? I
know you, don’t I?" She studied him as she walked beside him,
barely using the crutch.

"I’m the gardener,” he
replied, and gave her a slight smile, as mocking as their kind
could get. “Is my lady Perr going to the Convotion in her present
state of dress?”

His tone was one of
complete condescension. At some times in her life that tone would
have bothered her. She looked down at the dress, aged and worn, not
exactly exalted. She shrugged. She'd fallen down her own stairs.
The dress matched her frame of mind. “I don’t see why not. Is he
ready?”

“
He?” the gardener folded
his arms over his chest, an overt sign that matched his flared
nostrils and bared teeth.

“
The Viceroy.”

“
I thought he was an
Ambassador.”

She frowned, biting her
lip. “Yes, of course, the Ambassador. Pardon my error, errors..."
She sighed. "Is the Ambassador prepared for the
Convotion?"

"It has been moved to two
days hence."

"Why?" she asked, stopping
to stare at him full in the face.

"After the Ambassador's
long journey, they assumed it would befit him to rest in
your..."

"Nonsense." She cut him
off, brushing past him, leaving the unnecessary crutch against the
wall. "He must be greeted immediately by the High Precept unless
this entire debacle is nothing more than pretense. Why not tar and
feather him at once if there is no intention of following protocol?
And why in the name of the five magics have I been involved if not
to use my experience as an actual ambassador of the
Barbarians?"