His Majesty's Elephant (8 page)

Rowan smiled, she hoped sweetly. “Oh, I like them when they're young and awkward. They're so new to it, you see. So energetic. And so grateful to be noticed.” She widened her eyes, all innocence. “I don't suppose you know about that. Gisela has always preferred them a little more seasoned. Do you mind giving her back her relic? Father will be so annoyed if he finds out she's given it away.”

Kerrec's breath stopped short. Michael Phokias seemed briefly, much too briefly, at a loss. But his tongue was supple, and he had no shame that she could see. “Oh, you saw that, did you, my lady? She entrusted it to me for safekeeping. It's very valuable, you know. Much more valuable than she seems to understand.”

“I'm sure she doesn't understand,” Rowan said. Her heart was pounding hard, but she had gone too far to stop. “Really, I think it would be best if it went back to our father's treasury. What if the Caliph discovers that a man of Byzantium has taken it? He might put the wrong interpretation on it. And Byzantium is so much closer to him than we, so much easier to attack.”

“I doubt that that will happen, my lady,” said Michael Phokias. “This relic is safe with me. I give you my word on it.”

The word of a sorcerer. Rowan was not quite mad enough to say that, even now. “It will be safer in the treasury,” she said, “your excellency. As I'm sure my father will agree.”

There. Let him read that for a threat. He smiled slightly, one might almost have thought kindly. “Perhaps he may. Meanwhile, I shall guard the relic with all the care that it deserves, against the day that he will ask it of me.”

“I think it best that I be the one to guard it,” Rowan said, holding out her hand. “If you please, my lord?”

“My lady,” he said, still sweetly, still smoothly, “I think not. It was never meant for a woman's gentle hand. What if it should wake, and burn you to the bone? Such tender white skin, to be so marred.”

“No Christian relic ever burned a Christian hand,” said Rowan.

“Did I say that this was Christian?” asked Michael Phokias. “No, no, princess. The Caliph may be your father's friend, but this is no friendly thing. Believe me when I tell you that it were best under guard, and far from your father's hand.”

“How do you know?” Rowan asked him. “Are you a sorcerer?”

Even that did not take him aback for more than a instant. “Why, princess, I know a little of the hidden arts. So does any educated man. This is a work of those arts, and not of their gentler face, either. Come, continue your tryst with your clever ragged boy, and trust that I shall do as I best may, to guard this relic from the East.”

He did not lay any spell on her that she knew of, but she could not stop him as he walked past her, bowing to her ladyship, taking the Talisman away.

When she could move again, he was gone, and Kerrec was spitting with rage. “Why in the name of every saint and angel did you tell him everything we knew?”

“Because,” said Rowan, too tired and drained to be angry, “I thought it would do some good. You didn't get it away from him, did you?”

“No,” Kerrec snapped, clenching and unclenching his fists. One of them looked red and blistered.

Rowan would hardly spare him any sympathy, but it did bear mentioning. “You touched it?”

“I touched something,” he said. “He's got it wrapped in sorceries already. If he hadn't, I could have plucked it, neat as a bezant from a drunken prince's purse.”

Rowan got hold of his hand, though he tried to evade her. It was blistered indeed, as if he had caught it in a fire. “You'll want a salve for this. And not a squeak out of you. It's a wonder he didn't see it, and understand it all.”

“It's a wonder he didn't catch on when you told him everything. What ever possessed you to yatter on like that?”

“Prudence,” said Rowan. “Hiding in plain sight. He has us marked now. You're my peasant paramour. I'm the princess who pries where she shouldn't.”

“So you are,” growled Kerrec.

“I had to try,” she said, stubborn. “He might have given in.”

“And the trees might have stood up and walked.” Kerrec dropped down in a tangle of legs and arms. “He knows we know, now. And he has the Talisman.”

“But can he do anything with it?”

“Would he have taken it if he couldn't?” Kerrec worked fingers into his hair, rumpling it worse than ever. “We should both have kept quiet and watched, and then gone to find someone to help.”

“Who?” Rowan demanded. “A priest? A philosopher? Old Hilde the herbwoman?”

“Hilde might know how to put a sorcerer to sleep and steal what he's stolen from your sister.”

“Hilde has no magic in her at all.” Rowan had not known it till she said it. The magic was loose again. She did not know how to stop it. “There isn't anyone, Kerrec. There's only us.”

“There's your father,” said Kerrec.

“No,” said Rowan. “When I tried to warn him, he wouldn't listen. What makes you think he'll pay any more attention now?”

“It might make a difference to him that your sister has lost the Talisman.”

Rowan shook her head. “Even if he did decide to listen—what if it's a trap? What if we're supposed to run to him, and catch him in the Byzantine's spell?”

That stopped Kerrec, at least for a moment. Rowan pressed on through his silence. “Is there someone in Brittany who can help?”

Kerrec looked as if he might have said more about the Emperor, but he answered Rowan's question instead. “Not soon enough,” he said. “We can't fly. We're not that kind of witches.”

“You're not much of any kind of witch, are you?” she said bitterly. “You can see things in pools, that's all, and play cutpurse's tricks.”

“Can you do any more?”

She glared at him. For some reason her eyes were full of tears. She swept her hand up, then down. Chains of magic shredded and tore. “I don't know what I can do. I don't want to know. But I have to, don't I? I can't get away from it.”

“This time I wouldn't stop you if you ran away. The Elephant might, but if you start now, you can outrun him.”

It was tempting. Oh, it was a beautiful thought, to saddle Galla and ride away from everything.

Too late now for that. She had seen the Talisman in Michael Phokias' hand. She had to get it away from him. She did not even care why. She had to, that was all.

She looked at Kerrec. He stared back, mute for once. “You can't touch the Talisman. He was right in that much—it will burn. But maybe I can. It was made for my father, wasn't it? And I'm his seed. If anyone gets it back, it has to be me.”

“And I called you a coward,” said Kerrec, as if to himself.

“Oh, I am,” Rowan said. “I'm dead stark terrified of what that man will do if he keeps the Talisman long enough to use it.”

“But we couldn't get it away from him when he was caught off guard. How can we get it now that he knows we know?”

“I don't know,” said Rowan, “but I'll think of something.”

Kerrec did not have a very high opinion of her resourcefulness, from the look on his face. Neither did she. But it was the best that anyone could do. It would have to be enough.

Rowan tried to sleep.

Bertrada, as usual, was snoring. Rowan never minded it much, but tonight, the longer it went on, the more she wanted to scream.

She had kept herself admirably in hand, she thought, through all of that interminable day. She had even been able to eat dinner not a spearlength from the sorcerer, as outwardly calm as he was, or so she hoped, although she paid for it now: her stomach felt as hard and cold as a stone.

Rowan could not sleep, but she could not get up, either. Where could she go? The chapel was full of her mother's memory. The baths were terrible with the remembrance of magic. The gallery still echoed with Kerrec's presence.

Her back ached with trying not to move. Carefully she turned onto her side. Her shoulder started to ache. She lay on her stomach. She never had been comfortable sleeping that way. She tried lying on her back again.

None of it did any good. She got up, pulled on her shift and then her gown.

Bertrada's snoring changed tempo. She muttered, flailed, and sprawled across the whole of the bed.

Even with no moon to vex Rowan's magic, the dark had a power of its own. But fear or no fear, memories or no memories, she had to get out.

She was not at all surprised to find Kerrec sitting on the rim of the fountain in the women's court. There was just enough starlight to see the fall of the fountain, and the shape in shadow that was Kerrec.

“He's using the Talisman,” Kerrec said without greeting, as if no time had passed since the morning.

“You see him?” Rowan asked. Her voice was shaky.

“I don't need to. I feel it. Don't you? Or did you just come out here to bay at the moon?”

“There isn't any moon,” said Rowan, sharp with mingled anger and fear.

“No moon,” he agreed, impervious to her temper, “but magic enough.”

Rowan did not need him to tell her that. Her skin was all aprickle with it. “So? And what do you intend to do about it?”

“Nothing,” he said. ‘There's nothing anyone can do.”

“Nothing?” she echoed, incredulous. “Nothing at all? You can say—”

She broke off and peered hard at him. He was a shape of dark on dark, not even light enough to see the pale smudge of his face. No, she had not imagined it, or misheard. He had sounded quenched, all his sharp edges gone blunt with despair.

“What did you try to do?” she demanded. “Did you try to get the Talisman again? He laid a spell on you, didn't he?”

Kerrec did not say anything. Maybe he shrugged. Rowan seized his shoulders. They were thin, brittle-boned like a bird's. “He did. Didn't he?”

“I didn't... do anything.” Kerrec had trouble getting it out, maybe because Rowan was shaking him so hard. “I just... watched by his door. And let him see me do it.”

Rowan's breath hissed between her teeth. “That was unbelievably stupid.”

“Not any more stupid than you telling him everything.” There was a little more life in Kerrec's voice. Yes, thought Rowan: get his pride up. Make him angry enough to shake off whatever it was that sucked the life out of him. “We can't storm his room and demand the thing back, can we?”

“My father can,” said Rowan.

He made a disgusted noise. “You're the one who said we shouldn't try—he'd just tell you to stop fretting, and then forget all about it.”

“So I made a mistake,” Rowan snapped. “So I've had time to think. Get up and come with me.”

“Where? To beard the sorcerer in his lair?”

“No,” said Rowan with heroic patience. “To watch over my father. Unless you're pickpocket enough to steal the Talisman from the sorcerer in the middle of his working?”

“I'm not a thief!”

There. That was Kerrec, prickles and all, and never mind that he had tried to do just that, this past morning.

Rowan was too scared to be relieved. It was crazy to imagine that either of them could do anything, crazier to try to do it at the target instead of at the weapon. But they had tried to face the Byzantine when he was off guard, lazy with complacency, and not yet fully in possession of the Talisman. Now he had had time to build his fortifications.

An archbishop with book and candle might have knocked them down, but no archbishop Rowan knew of would listen to a pair of children. Especially a pair of children who confessed to witchcraft.

She could only hope that if they stayed near her father, they could protect him from harm. She could only pray that it was not too late. She should have been on guard since she left the garden, not dithering and fretting and being no use at all.

She was still dithering. She scrambled herself together and went where she should have gone long hours ago.

oOo

The Emperor had rooms in the palace's heart, with strong guards on them, full-armed and armored. The men in the armor were friends of Rowan's; she had known them since she was a baby.

They were not used to seeing her there at such an hour, but they were not suspicious either, even of Kerrec stalking stiffly in her shadow. Kerrec was not wearing his ragged elephant's-boy clothes tonight; this tunic was plain but well and richly made, and he had combed his hair, and he had a short sword in a sheath at his side.

Rowan wondered if he had been trying to pass for someone who belonged in the sorcerer's company. Or maybe he had been going courting when he smelled the reek of magic.

She did not think she liked that last thought.

Whatever had made him change his clothes, he looked like the lord's son he was, for once. A princess could well seem to ask for his company as she wandered the corridors at night.

Kerrec kept quiet as Rowan talked her way past the guards. “His majesty's asleep, then?” she asked as innocently as she could.

“Sound asleep,” said Bodo, who had been the love of her life when she was five years old and he was as tall as the moon. Now he was just a little taller than she was, and growing bald; but he was still her friend, insofar as a guard could be friend to a princess. “He came to bed late, just fell right in, and no company there, either.”

Rowan drew a small breath of relief. That was often a concern with the Emperor; he did not like to sleep alone.

“Oh, he's lucky,” she said. “I couldn't sleep at all, and there's nothing to read in the women's hall. I thought I'd find something in his library that might put me to sleep.”

She widened her eyes a little as she spoke, not too much, just enough to look innocent. In fact she had raided her father's library before, if never quite so late; she was wagering that Bodo would remember, and not ask questions.

“Well,” he said, “I suppose I can let you in. If you promise you won't wake him up?”