Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey [136]
"'Joscelin," I breathed. "It is taking my last ounce of courage just to contemplate this. Tell me now whether you will aid me or no."
On his knees, he looked up at me, blue eyes framed with tear-spiked lashes, an eerie echo of the face in my dream, though no shadow fell across it but my own. "I would sooner serve you my heart on a platter, love, but it is not what you ask. So be it. I will sell you to this man who calls himself the Conqueror of Death, and Elua help him afterward."
I could ask no more.
FORTY
THERE WERE a good many tearful farewells before we departed for Drujan.
No one was happy with it, and I could not blame them, for once the moment had passed, I myself was riddled with doubt. I questioned my judgement some dozen times a day, seeking to rekindle that ineffable certainty that had assured me this was Elua's plan, the golden presence that had filled me and made me so cursed sure.
It never happened.
Baron Victor de Chalais would lead the delegates home, crossing the Great Rivers before the spring floods began. He was a good man and steady, and I was glad of it. Lord Amaury Trente, Nicolas Vigny and two others would remain, accompanying us to the border of Drujan with Prince Sinaddan's escort. There they would stay, for six months. If we were not back by then, they would reckon us dead or lost.
Renée de Rives fell on my neck, weeping hard and kissing me as she bid me farewell, leaving no doubt that she'd no hope of seeing me alive again. Despite the language barrier, the delegates had managed to get their fill of tales of Drujan; enough to render them certain that we rode toward our doom.
There had been a death in Nineveh, whilst we made our arrangements—a commoner, a potter, had been crushed by his own wares when a shelf had given way in his workshop, after he'd cursed a Skotophagotis who crossed his doorstep.
It was enough to fuel the fear.
Joscelin said little and sharpened his blades, working them endlessly with a whetstone, oiling his scabbard and sheathes and removing the last traces of rust from our rain-sodden journey to Nineveh. We had worked out a plan, such as it was. The Lugal's man, one Tizrav, wouldguide us to the palace of Daršanga. If we reached it safely, Joscelin would pay him half the agreed-upon price from his own purse. Our story was that Joscelin was a renegade D'Angeline lordling who had abducted a peer's wife—that was me—against her will. Having found the price of his escapade too steep, pursued by my husband's kin across several lands, he would be willing to trade my favors for sanctuary in Drujan, where no one would dare seek him.
A simple plan, and a good one. As a surety, Lord Amaury himself would hold the second half of Tizrav's payment, to be rendered only when the Persian returned from Drujan with the appropriate code-word. Joscelin and Amaury had agreed upon the word, and Joscelin would not give it unto the Persian until he was certain Tizrav had not betrayed us.
"What word shall we choose?" Amaury had asked, frowning.
Joscelin had looked at me. "Hyacinthe," he said.
It was only fitting.
There is a point where fear becomes so large it ceases to matter, and exists only in the abstract. I reached it, during those preparations. It was too vast to comprehend, so I went about my business. I met Tizrav, son of Tizmaht; he was not a figure to inspire confidence, a wiry, dirty man with one eye put out by a poacher's arrow, so he said. I considered it a good deal more likely he had been poaching. Nonetheless, the Lugal of Khebbel-im-Akkad vouched for him.
"Tizrav knows the mountains," he said. "He is a coward, but a cunning one, and he will not betray you, not where there is gold at stake."
I'd no choice but to believe him. "Are you willing to lesson me in Old Persian along the way?" I asked. "It is a long road to Daršanga."
"Of course!" he said, bobbing his head agreeably, grinning and fingering beneath his eyepatch.