Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [64]
The Rusalka finished the last of the bread, and licked her fingers bare of crumbs. Nearby, a nightingale began to sing, adding his voice to the frogs.
“I cannot think of anything else,” she said. “Although there are plenty of evil things there. Plenty. More than enough to give your Katya a nasty surprise.”
He nodded. “But that is a start. Well—” He looked up at the moon. “I should go while there is light to ride by.”
She shook her head. “No. Stay.” At his askance look, she smiled. “I have no designs on you! I scent the Sea King’s daughter about you and I have no desire to challenge her! No, you can safely sleep here. I will guard your rest.” Then she added, softly, “You are a good man, Sasha.”
He flushed. He did try to be. Even if he didn’t know The Tradition as well as he did, he’d have been the sort to share his bread with an old beggar woman….
“Thank you,” he said, just as softly.
Then she laughed. And shook back her hair, and winked at him “And you are a Fortunate Fool! Such are always finding help in unexpected places!”
And so, somewhat to his own bemusement, Sasha unsaddled his horse and left it tethered to graze on the verge, while he rolled himself up in his cloak and slept through the night to the sound of frogs and a lovestruck nightingale, beneath the protection of a Rusalka.
Katya scanned the battlements carefully from her place in the Jinn’s garden. The other girls—and there were more of them now, for the Jinn had added a fifth maiden to his collection—were all in their rock-walled room. The new one might be very useful. She was a Wolf-girl, the opposite of a werewolf, a young Wolf-bitch who could take the form of a human at will—legends said it was by taking off her skin, but Katya had watched her, and she merely shape-shifted. She was very like the bear-people in that way, or a real werewolf, as opposed to the swan maiden who was human to begin with and took the form of a swan by putting on the feather cloak. As a Wolf, the girl was able to sniff out things that the others could not see nor sense. Like drafts or fresh air where neither should be. Katya had her exploring the cellars and dungeon as much as she could without getting caught.
The garden had never been all that lovely when Katschei the Deathless had lived here; he had been much inclined to dark and poisonous plants. In his absence though, most of those, needing nurturing, had died. So the weeds, and what good plants that once had flourished here and had somehow survived, had taken over. And then, just as the garden was at its most tangled, someone had taken a clumsy hand to it.
The Jinn, she supposed, was the one who had ordered some of that cleaned up. The fountain flowed clear, bushes and even trees had been cut back, and paths were newly graveled. But the Jinn clearly could not tell weeds from flowers, and the weeds were slowly choking out the flowers, in all but a few places. Granted, some of the weeds did look very lush and green, but stinging nettles were not what anyone would want in a garden, even if they did look like mint.
She sat next to one of those places where the flowers were winning, a bed of primroses that had completely taken over whatever else had been in there with them. The delicate pink blossoms, only faintly scented, spilled out over the cobbles containing them, looking cool and lively in what to her was dreadful heat.
The heat was enough to flatten anyone used to the climate of the north as she and the other girls were. The devastation this Jinn could wreak here if he spread his desert was appalling. The heat alone would kill many animals—and people, too.
She was here, not because she wanted to be, but because she was both testing something and waiting for her moment to finally act to get some help.
What she was testing was her own ability to tell when the Jinn was moving about invisibly. After a good deal of observation she had realized that like the snow maiden, she, too, could tell when the creature was spying on his captives and his own