The Mark of Ran (6 page)

“I’m thirsty.”

“You cannot drink, not yet.”

“Why did she attack me—that girl?”

Psellos threw back his head and laughed. As he did, Rol could have sworn that for a moment a sharp, finger-thin tongue whipped out from between his lips. It was black.

“Ask her, if you dare. But if she had meant you to be dead, you can be sure you would be, blood of Orr or no. Sleep now, my bonny boy, and be thankful I came home when I did.”

He snapped his fingers with a
crack,
and Rol slept.

Movement on his chest woke him, something warm and heavy slithering there. Frozen by fear, he felt the thing crawl off him, plump onto the bed, and then land with a slap on the floor. His shaking hand felt the place where the girl had stabbed him. It was covered in some manner of slime, and there was a ridged scar, but the wound had closed. He felt clear-headed, incredibly thirsty. The room was dark, save for the guttering stump of a single tallow candle by the bed.

Rol sat up, and immediately a shadow came out of the corner and a cool hand shoved hard against his breastbone, pushing him supine once more. It was the girl, Rowen. He felt his heart thudding under her palm as she held him down. Her hair was hanging dark as a raven’s wing over one eye; the other seemed almost to take on the yellow hue of the candlelight. She was older than he had thought, not a girl but a full-grown woman, his senior by ten years at least. There were shadows under her eyes, fine lines running from the corners of her nose to her mouth. Her lips were dark as a bruise, and on the back of the hand that pinioned him, blue veins stood out stark against the pale skin. Rol was strong for his age, his muscles hardened by work at sea and on land, but he realized that the strength in her slim arm was greater than his own.

All the same, she seemed to him one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.

She took her hand away slowly, as if expecting him to spring up again. Her eyes never left his face. She reached at the side of the bed without looking and took hold of a clay cup. This she put to his lips and tilted backwards. Rol drank cool water greedily, some of it trickling down his chin and neck.

“Thank you,” he gasped.

The girl said nothing, but laying aside the cup, she bent over his chest and examined the place where she had wounded him. Her hair brushed Rol’s ribs and stomach, glided across his navel. He felt the cool fingers on his belly for a moment, before she straightened again.

“Get up,” she said, turning away. “Get dressed.”

He had become erect while she had been examining him, but she had given no sign. He turned his back on her, cheeks burning, and pulled on his clothes. They lay over a stool by the bed, and had been washed and their rents mended. A needle and thread sat to one side. Rol wondered if the neat stitching was his companion’s work, but thought it better not to ask.

Now that he could see the room upright, he saw that it was larger than he had supposed, with several doors and alcoves set about the walls. Many shelves and bookcases stood about, all heavy with manuscripts, jars, pots, and leather-bound grimoires as thick as a man’s bicep. A few small round tables sat here and there, and a yard-high brazier red with burning charcoal heated the place well enough to bring the sweat popping out on Rol’s forehead.

On one empty part of the wall, heavy iron rings had been set into the stone, and from these shackles hung.

The girl drew back a chair from one of the tables and gestured for him to sit. There was a full pitcher of water thereon, bread, apples, cold mutton, and pickles. Rol wolfed it down with a will. He could barely remember the last time he had eaten a decent meal. Ayd would have scolded him for his table manners, but Ayd was dead now—and what manner of thing had she been anyway?

He looked at the girl, Rowen, with a new resolve. If there were princesses and queens in the world, he thought, they must look like her. But he had not forgotten the cold violence he had suffered at her hands.

“Who are you?” he asked, emboldened by the good food in his stomach and the close intimacy of the chamber.

“Who are you?” she asked in her turn, raising an eyebrow.

“I …” He hesitated. “I suppose I don’t know, not anymore.”

She shrugged as though that were answer enough, and taking a poniard from the scabbard at her waist began sharpening it deliberately with a small whetstone.

“Why did you attack me?”

She pointed the blade at his face. “You had a knife in your hand and were hammering at Psellos’s door. That is enough, usually. In Ascari the questions come afterward.”

“Were you trying to kill me?”

She paused in her work. “Yes.”

“Psellos doesn’t think so.”

“He may think what he likes.”

“Are you his daughter, or his wife?”

The unsettling eyes stabbed out at him, as cold and hostile as those of a spitting cat.

“No wife. No kin. I work for him.”

“What do you do?”

She actually smiled, but there was no humor in it, a bitterness rather. “Whatever I have to.”

“Psellos, then.” The exasperation was fraying Rol’s voice. “What kind of man is he? A man down on the wharves warned me against him. How did he know my grandfather, my mother?” The last words were a sobbing croak.

Rowen regarded him with mild interest. “I dare say you’ll find out, in time.”

After that Rol gave up on her. He rose from the rags of his meal and set about exploring the chamber. He was not altogether surprised when he found that every door leading out of it was locked. His dirk was gone, and there was nothing he could see in the place that might serve as a weapon. He did not relish the thought of tackling the girl bare-handed. Rubbing his chest, he leafed through the tattered books on the shelves. He could read, after a fashion, but the words within them were in languages he did not know, illustrated with arcane engravings. There was an unclean feel to some of the tomes, which made him wipe his fingers on his breeches after he had laid them back down.

Hours passed. Rowen sat watching him, patient and untiring as a stone. Rol wondered what time it was—surely the winter dawn could not be far off? He was exhausted. Finally he gave his companion a last glare, and fell asleep leaning against the wall. He disliked the idea of the bed with its ropes.

He was on the bed when he awoke, nonetheless. Sunlight streamed into the room through windows that had been hidden behind drapes the night before. The charcoal in the brazier had sunk into ash. Psellos and Rowen were standing by it with their backs to him.

“He’s full-blooded,” Psellos was saying. “I don’t know how it can be, but old Grayven is never wrong. I knew Amerie must have cuckolded the fool, for all her protestations of love.”

“Who was the father, then?” Rowen asked.

“You have me there. But I mean to find out, one way or another. In the meantime, he’ll stay.”

“Another stray to bleed dry?”

“No—he’s much more than that.” Here Psellos ran a hand up into the black mane of Rowen’s hair. Grasping a fistful, he drew her head back sharply and set his mouth on hers. When he released her, there were red teethmarks about her dark lips. He held out his other hand, and without a word she placed something in it. A clink of coin. Psellos smiled into her pale face, rattled the gift in his palm. “A good night. You got the book?”

“Yes. Now I must change. I stink.”

“I like it when you stink,” he said, grinning. She tugged free, leaving black hairs in his fingers. Psellos’s face twisted with mock contrition. “Everything must have a price, Rowen. It is the way of the world.”

“I know. You taught me well.” She left the room without a backward glance.

Psellos stood shaking his head. Smiling still. Then he pocketed his coinage and, turning, kicked the bed. “Up.”

Rol sat up in the bed.

“Come. If you are to stay here, then we must make you useful.”

The Tower was even more spacious than it looked from without. Rol followed his host up a series of corkscrew stairs until they came out on a wide-open space, the balcony he had glimpsed the night before. Morning had come. They were several hundred feet above the level of the sea here, and in the bright winter sunlight all of Ascari could be seen spread below, and beyond it the blue vastness of the Wrywind extending to the horizon. They were looking east, toward Dennifrey, and a life that already seemed part of the vanished past.

“Rol, is it?” Psellos asked casually. “Well, that will do. I am your master now, Rol. You may stay here under my tutelage as Rowen has, but in return I expect perfect obedience.”

“My boat—”

“Sold this morning. It will help to defray your expenses.”

Outraged into silence, Rol took a moment to master his voice. “What if I do not wish to stay?”

“Then you will never have your questions answered.”

He glared at the man. And Psellos laughed.

“You dislike me. Good. That’s well enough for a beginning.”

Thus the education began.

It was enough, for the moment, that he had stopped running. His mind accepted Psellos’s patronage the more easily because he had nothing of familiarity left in the world, not one face he knew. It was easier to convince himself that there was no alternative. And so he submitted.

But he was not admitted to any degree of intimacy. In fact, Rol was at first little better than a scullion, set to all the menial tasks within the Tower that Psellos’s whim dictated. Perhaps this was meant to humble him, but he had been raised to accept hard work without a murmur. So he scrubbed floors and gutted fish and cleared hearths equably enough, and all the while he watched and listened and learned the running of the Tower household.

It was a large establishment, for all that the Tower itself presented an austere frontage to the world. Psellos, Rol quickly discovered, was a man of wealth and influence, and he kept a certain style. To do so, he must needs surround himself with a small army of attendants and underlings.

There was the cook, Gibble—a short, rotund fellow with a bald pate and ferocious eyebrows. He was absolute master in the subterranean chambers that constituted the kitchens, but lived in mortal fear of his employer. He commanded a platoon of spry street urchins who shopped or stole for him according to the dictates of the day’s menu. When the last course of the night was taken up to the Master’s chambers, Gibble would sink back into a wide-bottomed carver and apply himself to the bottle with a dedication that was awesome to behold, while his stunted underlings gorged themselves on the table’s leftovers as recompense for their errand-running.

A manservant there was also, thin as a fish. His name was Quare and he had long white fingers that left moist tracks on everything they touched. His black hair was greased back from his brow. Clad in sable hose, he padded about the stairways of the Tower as noiselessly as a spider. Rol learned early on to avoid meeting him alone, after a groping encounter in the wine cellars. Quare held a privileged position in that he had access to the Master at all times of the day and night. He was Psellos’s ears and eyes in the lower quarters and was cordially hated by everyone.

There were other servants in ever-changing numbers. Valets, grooms, seamstresses. Maids who would arrive winsome and merry, and over time would become haggard, with haunted eyes, before disappearing to be replaced by yet more. And every week
associates
of Psellos (their own word) would come and go, uniformly obsequious to him and contemptuous of everyone else. A rigid hierarchy existed in Psellos’s Tower, and though to all intents Rol was at the bottom of it (he slept on a pile of rags on the hot flagstones of the scullery) he was nonetheless marked out as different. Quare’s attentions abruptly ceased after the first few days, and he regarded Rol with a mixture of wariness and hatred thereafter.

How Rowen fitted into the household Rol could not quite make out. Everyone deferred to her—out of fear if nothing else—but at the same time gave the impression that they despised her. Only Gibble was different. He treated her almost as a daughter and was always awake, if not entirely sober, when she returned from her nocturnal assignations. He would have food and hot water waiting for her and would see that she wanted for nothing before tottering off to his own bed. As for Rowen, she had a suite of richly appointed rooms in the upper third of the Tower and was often called to join Psellos at table, especially when he was entertaining, but she ate in the kitchen whenever she could and would often take some mundane chore upon herself on a kind of dark whim, working at the long oak table while Gibble clattered pans and chattered to her from the blaring heat of the stoves. She seemed to find the hot semidark of the kitchens soothing, and would sometimes stay there until dawn, sharpening Gibble’s knives and skewers, boning joints with the deftness of a surgeon, or simply staring into the fire. No one but Gibble ever dared to address her.

One night, though, when the entire household was abed, Rol watched her through the scullery door as she stood drinking wine at the kitchen fire. She had just returned from one of her usual forays and was dressed mannishly, in breeches, doublet, and short cloak. Her hair was bound up and she looked almost like some delicate-featured boy. But there was a stiffness about her that marred her usual grace, a care in movement which spoke of some concealed pain.

Rol’s breath stopped in his throat as she began to undress there and then, unaware of his wide eyes watching her. The raven hair was pulled out of its tight coiffure first, falling down onto her shoulders, and then the clothes were discarded with something akin to distaste. Her white skin was washed scarlet by the light of the dying fire, and the taut muscles moved in her thighs and calves, and along the curve of her back, as she examined herself. There was a series of vivid welts and what looked uncannily like bite marks running down her side and flanks, and she bathed them in Gibble’s steaming water, wincing, her face drawn. The vision haunted Rol’s dreams for weeks.

The Tower extended underground for almost as far as it loomed skyward. Days would go by when Rol would not even glimpse sunlight, his work confining him to the kitchens and cellars, the innumerable storerooms and pantries and workshops which were tunneled deep into the hill. He helped unload tall-sided wagons, which came in regularly, loaded with all manner of fruit and vegetable and game and barrel upon barrel of wine, brandy, and beer. These, he learned, were the produce of Psellos’s own estates, vast tracts of arable land and pasture and hunting preserve lying farther inland beyond the Ellidon Hills, farmed by tenants, culled by gamekeepers. A private kingdom over which Michal Psellos was absolute monarch.