Master of Crows (8 page)

He stepped around her and strode to the door that opened to the bailey.  “No one at Neith receives special treatment, but I do need you to work to your best ability.  You aren’t there today.”  He waved her to him.  “Come.  I’ve something to ease your aches.”

Dread and curiosity played across her features, but she followed, keeping a distance behind him as they crossed the bailey yard and wove through rows of Gurn’s rose bushes before reaching a small outbuilding attached to the south side of the manor.

It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the stillroom’s darkness.  He found candles in a box by the door and lit four.  Martise put two in the holders he pointed out at the long table in the center of the room.  He set his own candles in place and waited while she surveyed her surroundings.

The stillroom, smothered in the smells of orange flower and olive oil, was his true money maker.  He and Gurn broke their backs each season harvesting cart loads of oranges for sale at Eastern Prime’s busy marketplace.  It made enough to keep them both fed.  But it was the neroli oil and petitgrain he distilled which brought him the greatest profits.  Luxury items made in small batches and sought after by the wealthy aristos, they fetched a high price at market.

His apprentice, fascinated by the rows of bottles and decanters filling every space on the tables and shelves built against the walls, strolled around the room, occasionally touching an empty distillation vat or a decorative perfume bottle made to catch a woman’s eye.  The table held an array of candlesticks, bowls, strainers, mortars and pestles.  Dried herbs hung in decimated strings from the low beams, and the scatter of dried orange flowers crunched under foot.

“You make perfumes.”  A faint yearning colored her statement.

“Among other things.  We harvest flowers from a set number of trees in late spring, along with leaves and young twigs.  The oils and petitgrains go for a higher price than the syrups and elixirs, but the last two do well enough.  We’ll harvest again in autumn.  The yield isn’t as good or as high-quality, but people still buy.”

“Madam Dela-fé always wore orange flower scent.  I disliked the woman but loved the way she smelled.”

Silhara lifted a staying hand when she tensed and parted her lips for the inevitable apology.  “You’ve brightened my morning with that bit of knowledge, Martise, but the apologies are tiresome.”  He didn’t expound on the pleasure he took in knowing Cumbria’s deranged wife bought his products.

A large, weathered cabinet stood in one corner.  The doors were removed, revealing shelves lined with small jars and crocks.  He took one and set it on the table near where Martise stood.

“Remove your clothing,” he said.

He scowled at the burgeoning horror in her gaze.  He’d earned his notoriety, done many things in his lifetime that had made him outcast amongst his neighbors, acquaintances and the powerful priesthood who sought to control him.  But he’d never raped a woman, and had no intention of doing so now.

Her wondrous voice was reduced to a mouse’s squeak as she pleaded with him and backed against the table.  “Please,” she whispered, holding up one hand to ward him off.  “I beg you…”

“Martise.”  He kept his own voice devoid of inflection and pointed to the jar he’d taken from the shelf.  “I’ve a liniment to ease the pain in your back.”  He waited, unmoving as his words seeped into her panic-ridden mind.  “Don’t you think if I wanted to force you, I would have done so by now?  Even Gurn, despite your friendship with him, wouldn’t stop me.  Nor could he.”

She stared at him, eyes still huge with fright, but her breathing had slowed at his words.  Silhara noted that while she cowered before him, the hand not holding him symbolically at bay was searching the table behind her for a weapon.  He inclined his head in approval.  Terrified she might be, but not beaten.  She’d fight him, despite overwhelming odds.

“Whether you accept my help or not means little to me.  You can continue picking oranges in all your noble suffering, just as long as you pick.  Make up your mind.  The day is wasting.”

Several tense moments passed in silence while he waited.  Martise took a deep breath and relaxed, one knotted muscle at a time.  “My back and shoulder hurt.”

“I imagine they do.”  He motioned for her to present her back and pulled the cork stopper from the jar.  “Gurn makes this liniment, not I.  If I didn’t know better, I’d think he uses spellwork in the making.  It’s that effective.”  He kept up a steady stream of conversation as she presented her back to him and began unlacing her tunic and leine.  “He’s a cagey bastard with the recipe.  Refuses to reveal his secrets.  I suppose I’ll have to torture it out of him one of these days.”

Martise lowered her garments to rest against the crook of her arms.  Her voice was prim.  “That should be enough.”

He might have laughed were he not so distracted by the sight before him.  Her nape, darkened to a honey color from working outside, contrasted sharply with the ivory skin of her shoulders.  Shrouded in her castoff woolens, she presented a shape with all the allure of a potato.  Not so when the clothes came off.  The graceful line of her back flowed into a slender waist and the gentle curve of her hips.  Two shallow dimples marked her lower back, tempting him to press a finger into their indentations.  Silhara was no sculptor, but he suddenly understood why men with such talent were inspired to carve beauty in stone.

That flawless back was currently marred by a misshapen ripple of muscle curving below her right shoulder blade.  Another lump swelled where her neck met her shoulder.

Martise, still as a marble pillar, tensed even more beneath his silent perusal.  She hissed in pain for her troubles and reached automatically to massage the top of her shoulder with the opposite hand.  Silhara caught a brief glimpse of the curve of one breast before she remembered her position and pulled her hand back in place.  He chuckled at the blush reddening her nape.

“Your modesty is wasted on me.”  He slapped a dollop of cool liniment on her back, ignoring her gasp.  “I’ve seen more bare tits in my lifetime than a guild of wet nurses.”  His fingers worked steady circles on her back and shoulder, massaging in the healing salve.  The frozen muscle below her shoulder blade was unyielding at first, and he wondered how she’d managed days of harvesting without uttering a word of complaint.

“Before my mother contracted the pox, she worked in a brothel catering to aristos.  I earned a coin or two running errands or delivering messages for the other
hourin
.  It was common practice for a
houri
to bare herself—an easy and effective way to display her wares to a potential customer.”

She turned her head a fraction.  Her sidelong gaze was curious.  “How old were you?”

“Six or seven.  It was much the same when I was older, and my mother worked the docks.”  He continued kneading her back, moving up to the tight ridge along the top of her shoulder.  He smiled as she slowly relaxed under his hands.  “And I had my fair share of novitiates at Conclave Redoubt.”  He pressed the heel of his hand into a tight band of muscle and Martise yelped.  “Now, if you had three breasts, I might be curious enough to ogle you.”

Her laughter filled the small room before she cloaked it in a cough.  That, more than the silky glide of her skin under his palms, bewitched him.  He’d never heard her laugh before.  As lyrical as her voice, her laughter transformed her from peahen to swan.  Standing behind her, he had only a view of her tightly bound hair and supple back.  He could look over her shoulder and see the press of her cleavage against her folded arms, but he couldn’t see her face.  The urge to turn her around so that he might watch her laugh again was almost overwhelming.

His slippery hands slid to her waist, fingers pressed against her sides as his thumbs came to rest in the dimples that had teased him when she first revealed her back.  A surge of heat suffused his limbs.  Martise, smooth-skinned, smelling of flowers and warm woman, stood close enough that her heartbeat skated vibrations across his chest when he leaned into her back.  She didn’t move, but her stillness was that of trapped prey.  She breathed in shallow pants, and a rosy flush dusted her neck and shoulders.

He backed away, snapped out of his stupor by the awareness of her fear.  He wiped his hands on his shirt hem and stoppered the liniment jar.  “We’re finished here.  Get dressed.”  He congratulated himself on the coldness in his voice.

She yanked tunic and leine up in one tug, retying her laces without looking at him.  He slid the jar toward her.  “Here.  I suspect your legs feel as your back did, but you can tend those yourself, lest we forget who is master here and who isn’t.”

He poured a wealth of scorn into his words, angered by his brief lapse of control.  Martise faced him, her face expressionless, eyes gleaming in the stillroom’s shadows.  She clutched the jar.  “Thank you, Master.”

He strode to the door.  “Take it to your room, then meet me in the library.  Gurn will show you where it is if you don’t already know.  It’s time I used you for the purpose that keeps you under my roof.”

He stalked out of the stillroom and headed for the house, muttering the entire way about lazy dogs, insolent servants, interfering gods and the evils of womankind.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Martise reached between branches bristling with thorns and snipped a cluster of oranges.  They fell into her palm hard enough to press her hand down onto a nearby thorn so that it pierced her glove and jabbed her middle knuckle.

“Ouch!”  She jerked away from the evil-looking spike protruding from its branch.  The thorn broke, leaving a sharp ache radiating into her fingers.  She dropped the oranges into her satchel and pulled off her glove to check her injury.  Nothing more than a red pinprick, it felt as if Cael had sank one of his canines into her.  She glared at the tree.  Harvesting oranges was dirty, painful work—very different from harvesting olives.  So far she’d been poked, stung and bitten by the various insects crawling on or flying about the trees and by the trees themselves.  The crows were another pestilence.  A day rarely went by that she wasn’t cleaning droppings off her hat.

Thank merciful Bursin for Silhara’s library.  She looked forward to lunch and the hours following it.  Spending the latter part of the day and evening among musty-smelling tomes and translating dead languages was preferable to this, even if she battled the occasional spider over a manuscript.

A wet splat struck the brim of her hat.  Above her, a crow perched on a branch and eyed her with a beady black stare.  She shooed it with her loose glove.  The bird fluttered his wings and hopped out of range but refused to give up his place.

“Master of Crows,” she muttered.  “More like Master of Ants, or Master of Wasps, or Master of Bird Droppings.”  She yanked her glove back over her sore hand and glared at the crow.  Silhara might disapprove of Cumbria’s use of magic to harvest his olive crop, but from where she stood, balanced on a rickety ladder and wedged between branches bristling with thorns, the idea had real merit.

She stared at the crow.  Time had flown at Neith.  More than a month had gone by, and she was no closer to finding evidence of Silhara’s suspected crimes than when she first arrived.  Cumbria would have grown impatient for news.  Martise had none to give him other than the Corruption star seemed to hover over the manor these days, and the mage studiously ignored its presence.  The bishop might be interested in knowing she now had access to the library, but there was little to tell other than she’d been set the task of finding a kill ritual that could destroy the god.  It was better than nothing.

With the hundreds, if not thousands, of crows residing in the grove, there was no telling if Cumbria’s messenger crow was nearby, waiting for her to summon him.  If only he’d had chosen another way for her to call Micah to her.  Though she’d been graced with a speaking voice that mesmerized crowds, she couldn’t sing a single note.  The servants of Asher had begged her not to chant with them as they walked wool, pressed olives or performed the endless chores that kept Asher running smoothly.  And the hunting hounds never failed to set up a chorus of howls if they heard her.

She shrugged.  It was Cumbria’s idea that she sing to the bird to summon him, and she was an obedient slave.  She descended two rungs of the ladder and peered under the branches.  The grove around her was quiet, empty.  Silhara harvested the trees in another corner of the orchard, and Gurn was in the house preparing their lunch.  She was alone here, except for the crow who’d graciously decorated her hat.  Martise hoped he stayed long enough to hear the first strains of her lullaby.  A fitting revenge.

She ascended into the tree again, grateful for its cover this time.  Braced on the ladder, she cleared her throat and sang the first chorus of the Nanteri lullaby.  As she predicted, the crow quickly abandoned his perch and flew away.  No bird returned to replace him.  Martise finished the lullaby, wincing at the off-key notes warbling from her lips, and waited.  Micah didn’t come.  She tried again, a little louder.  Still no messenger crow.  She tried a third time, almost shouting the words so the bird would hear.  In the distance, Cael howled in response.

Far into the second chorus and almost hoarse with her efforts, she didn’t hear her visitor until the branches around her shook.  She screeched in surprise when her ladder thumped against its supporting branch.  Leaves rustled and parted, revealing Silhara’s sharp, dusty features.  His eyes were wide with astonished horror.  He’d climbed her tree and balanced on a thick limb just below her.  His height put him at eye-level with her, and she blushed at the appalled look on his face.

“What in Bursin’s holy name is that?” he snarled.

If it were possible to die of embarrassment, Martise was sure she wouldn’t survive the next few minutes.  “I was singing.”

His eyebrows rose almost to his hairline.  “Singing.  Is that what you call it?  It sounded like someone was torturing a cat.”

“I thought I might work faster if I sang.”  She wiped the perspiration from her forehead with a gloved hand and regretted the action.  The swipe of citrus oil she’d left on her skin burned.  Cael continued to howl, and a door shut with a bang.

"That will be Gurn coming to rescue us from whatever demon he thinks is attacking."  The branch supporting Silhara creaked as he adjusted his stance and leaned closer to her.  “Tell me something, Martise.”  A leaf slapped him in the eye, and he ripped it off its twig with an irritated snap.  “How is it that a woman, blessed with a voice that could make a man come, sings badly enough to frighten the dead?”

She was saved from having to answer the outlandish question by the quick thud of running footsteps.  Silhara disappeared briefly from view when he bent to greet their visitor.  Unfortunately, his answers to Gurn’s unspoken questions were loud and clear.

“That was Martise you heard.  She was…singing.”

“Trust me, I’m not jesting.  You can unload your bow.”

His next indignant response made her smile.  “No, I wasn’t beating her!  She’s the one tormenting me with that hideous wailing!”

Martise hid her smile when he reappeared before her.  His scowl was ferocious.  “Don’t sing.”  He pointed a finger at her for emphasis.  “You’ve scared my dog, my birds and my servant with your yowling.”  He paused.  “You’ve even managed to scare me.”

“I’m sorry, Mast...”  She halted when the scowl deepened.

“Don’t sing,” he repeated.

She nodded.  He eyed her one last time in warning before dropping from the branch and climbing nimbly down the tree.

Well, Martise thought.  That ended in utter failure and humiliation.  She didn’t know how Cumbria expected her to send him messages when his messenger wouldn’t respond to her calls.  Then again, if Micah had any sense, he’d flown away with the rest of the crows at her first shrill note.

Her thoughts caught on Silhara’s coarse comment regarding her voice.  The most left-handed compliment she’d ever received, it still managed to send a pleasant heat through her.  Most often, she dreaded such remarks from people, even the more refined ones.  They were usually accompanied by the callous observation of what a pity it was her face didn’t match her voice.

She had never held any illusions concerning her appearance.  She’d been fooled once into thinking it didn’t matter to someone else and had come away with a bruised heart for her mistake.  The small cuts about her plainness, whether purposeful or inadvertent, hurt less after so many years, but the pain never truly faded.  She was grateful that Silhara, as abrupt and snide as he could be at times, had only once commented on her looks.  Even then, she wasn’t sure if she’d misunderstood his offhand remark about not bothering to primp for them.  If he thought her as drab as others did, he kept his opinions to himself.

She paused in reaching for another cluster of oranges and shook her head to rid herself of the memory of her time with him in the stillroom.  Rape didn’t require beauty.  Silhara’s blunt command that she undress had nearly driven her into a blind panic.  Only the obvious disinterest in his eyes and the half bored, half irritated note in his rough voice calmed her.  He’d massaged the liniment into her back with strong fingers, kneading tight, aching muscles until she almost fell in a boneless heap on the floor.

He had good hands.  Graceful, adept.  They were the hands of a scholar save for the rough calluses that covered the pads of his fingers and toughened his palms.  He’d eased the pain in muscles still unused to the rigors of orange harvesting, all the while entertaining her with anecdotes of his past.  He’d suffered a harsh childhood, yet he spoke of it and his mother in a matter-of-fact tone, as if every six-year old lived in a brothel and acted as messenger to
hourin
and the men they serviced.  He’d even surprised a laugh out of her.  His was an irreverent humor, dry and often sarcastic.

Martise frowned and cut the cluster of oranges from their branch with more force than necessary.  He fascinated her, drew her in ways no man ever had before him.  Not even her old lover Balian, whom she once thought she loved.  The sensation of Silhara close behind her, smoothing her skin with rough hands, had mesmerized her.  Her first fear had evaporated, making her aware that she stood alone with him in the dark, fragrant stillroom.

That awareness had changed to a humming tension which danced along her spine when his hands lowered to her waist, fingers flexing gently against her skin.  He’d curved his tall frame into hers, and she’d drowned in a myriad of sensations—the smoky sweetness of tobacco and orange flower, a whisper of cloth, the puff of air tickling her ear as he drew closer.   Thank Bursin he’d stepped away when he did, or she might have been tempted to lean back into his warmth, forgetting her purpose at Neith and the many reasons why she should despise him.

He was an enigma.  To anyone except maybe Gurn.  Son of a prostitute, poor landowner, Conclave-trained, a mage of notoriety instead of renown, he was a strange combination of opposing roles.  Eloquent and vulgar by turn, he was quick with a quip or an insult.  His methods for making her Gift manifest were terrifying and extreme.  Martise had been relieved when he pronounced them useless and halted them.  He was a strict taskmaster, chiding her when she did something wrong but just as willing to show her the proper way of completing the task.  He worked her and Gurn from dawn to dusk and even later, when she toiled away at translations and research in the candlelit library.  No one questioned who ruled here, but Silhara worked as hard, if not harder, than they did and never put himself above any chore.

Even now, he was ensconced in an orange tree nearby, probably swatting wasps and dodging bird droppings as he picked fruit and cursed her name for bludgeoning his ears with her lullaby.  The image made her grin and chased away the seductive heat pooling in her belly.

She was saved from further introspection by a loud clang.  Gurn called them to lunch.  Her stomach rumbled in response, and she made quick work leaving the orchard, stripping off the hat and cleaning her face and hands at the well pump.

The servant’s blue eyes glinted at her as he signed from the kitchen door.  Martise, used to his particular language now, blushed and raised her chin.  “You’re exaggerating.  My singing wasn’t that bad.”  He snorted in disagreement and nudged her toward the table.

She was seated and pouring tea for everyone when Silhara came through the door.  His face, still damp from a quick wash, was grim.  He sat in his customary spot across from her.  Martise expected additional acidic commentary about her singing, but he only addressed Gurn.

“We need rain.  This drought’s lasted too long.  Some of the younger trees are dropping leaves.  If this keeps up, we’ll have little flowering come autumn.”

Gurn’s normally amiable features went as dark as Silhara’s.  He finished laying out the rest of their lunch and sat down.  The kitchen was dead quiet until Martise, eaten with curiosity, spoke.

“What will this mean for your orchard?”

Silhara filled his plate with cheese, bread, slices of smoked pork and small tomatoes from Gurn’s garden.  “A poor harvest for next year.”  He slid the ever-present bowl of oranges toward Gurn.  “Too much leaf-drop means fewer flowers.  Fewer flowers mean less fruit.  Less fruit to sell, less money made.  We starve.”  He wore that familiar, derisive half-smile.  “Good thing I’m a crow mage.  We sell our magic like
hourin
sell their bodies.”

Martise didn’t answer.  Everyone knew of Conclave’s distaste for the mages who sold the labors of their Gifts for money.  Silhara’s given title of Master of Crows was no compliment.

She was content to sip tea and listen to him converse with Gurn and plan their trip to Eastern Prime.  She no longer watched in astonishment while he ate.  The first time he had sat down to lunch with her and Gurn, she’d gawked as he consumed a loaf of bread, half a small wheel of cheese, an entire chicken, five boiled eggs and a bowl of olives.

She’d expected him to eat more at lunch than he did at breakfast, but he amazed her.  After working hours in the grove, she was starving by lunchtime, and that was with Gurn’s porridge sticking to her ribs.  She didn’t know how Silhara managed to work on so little breakfast.  His scant meal of tea and two oranges in the morning wouldn’t hold a child until midday.  He made up for it at lunch.  It was no wonder the servant baked enough bread for an army and kept a coop full of nesting hens.