Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [154]
Naed.
Well, those two lordlings’ purses would be empty long before morning, buying him what he needed to get very, very drunk.
Two floors above where Alusair’s healing potions had been cached, and at the far end of another wing of the vast and grandly sprawling palace, was a state chamber so remote from the great rooms of state that it was very seldom used.
Yet to those who liked crimson draperies and soft, overstuffed beds of matching hues, the Room of the Fire Wyrm was a favorite. It had become so favored for trysts among the palace staff, in fact, that the war wizards had taken possession of its keys almost forty years earlier, and had kept it shut up ever since, except when one of them was present.
One of them was there right then. She had locked the doors from the inside after entering, and she was not alone.
Raereene was her name, and at that moment she wore only a hungry expression and her long, glossy fall of blue-black hair. The young palace server atop her, Kreane, was gasping out her name repeatedly as panting passion seized them both.
Their ardor might have more than cooled if they’d known who was watching them through the eyes of the smiling portrait of King Duar, which hung across the room, facing the great lamp-studded hanging sculpture of the fire wyrm for which the cavern was named.
Princess Alusair Obarskyr had ridden and been ridden by many panting men in her day, and her eyes were two ghostly flames of hunger and longing as Elminster came up beside her in the secret passage.
Without a word, he put his hand on where her shoulder would have been had it been solid, and he bent to look through the eyes of Duar’s queen, where she’d been painted pressed happily against his shoulder.
“Gods,” Alusair growled quietly, “I miss this!”
“As do I,” Elminster muttered. “As do I. Yet enjoy the memories, lass; isn’t that why ye made them? Hmm?”
Alusair gave him an angry glare. “Wizards may decide to ‘make’ memories,” she hissed. “Sane folk do not.”
Elminster shrugged. “No wonder all those sane folk are so forgetful, and so much evil and confusion flourishes as a result.”
He bent his head and devoted himself to peering through the eyes of the portrait, enjoying the view of the lovers.
“Aren’t you going to go down there?” Alusair teased, passing a hand through him.
Elminster winced, and it turned into an involuntary shiver; her “touch” had a chill that was almost heart-stopping. “And frighten or mortify them into rousing the whole palace in their terror? And never helping us, all the rest of their lives, befall what may? Playing the randy old goat got me a surprisingly long way a century ago, and for about a thousand years before that, but I’ve tired of it. And grown increasingly bad at it, too. I mean, look ye at what’s left of me, lass! Who’s going to be charmed by this?”
“Blind women with numb fingers,” Alusair replied promptly.
After a moment of shared struggling to throttle mirth into silence, they sniggered together.
“Seen enough?” Alusair teased a while later.
“Nay, lass, but—forgive me—ye’re too cold for me to tarry near any longer. My old bones …”
“I know,” the ghost princess replied sadly. “I know. ’Tis why I’m watching yon lovers; they’re making me feel warm. Go, then, old friend, and fare you well. New kitchen fires will be lit by now, down nigh the stableyard doors, for the baking. Take the passage along behind the ovens, and you’ll feel warm enough, right soon.”
“Thank ye,” Elminster whispered, patting a shoulder his hand plunged through, leaving his fingers feeling like icicles.
Frowning in pain, he turned away and walked slowly along the passage.
Azuth and Mystra, if he could hand over his tasks and causes to one like Alusair! The Steel Princess as she’d been in life, that is, not the ghost she had become …
If only … nay. That way lay madness and an utter waste of his thoughts