Nights of Villjamur - Mark Charan Newton [147]
“That’s not always for their benefit,” he smirked.
“Randur, come on, be serious.”
“Sorry.” He grinned. “We were once a very wealthy family, before the Empire really took a grip on our island. The one thing I’ve learned is that opportunity is linked to wealth in Jamur territories. Whoever owns the most resources has the most power and influence and opportunity, and that’s just not how life should be. You—you can do anything you could think of in these halls. But back then we once had servants and all that, then we lost our land—my mother never really told me how, but we lost it anyway. Everything was gone; but she brought me up well. She brought me up rather strictly, perhaps. My father, you see, died before I ever got to know him, and I had a couple of sisters but we were never that close. So everything was up to my mother.” After a pause, he added, “I owe her a lot.”
“From all you’ve told me, you shouldn’t blame yourself for what happened with her. You’re a good man, Randur Estevu.”
He shook his head, self-consciously, as if only just beginning to comprehend himself. “Not really. I’m a liar, a thief, a womanizer, and I get in too many fights—a good deal because of the way I dress. I try not to hurt anyone unnecessarily in the process, though.”
“But it’s what you are attempting to do, that carries real honor. This is an age with no great battles to speak of, no heroes for future stories. I think it’s intensely honorable that a son should want to give his mother the chance to live awhile longer.”
He said, “It’s not as easy as that.”
“Talk, Randur,” she urged, dancing a thin line between mockery and seriousness. What would it take for her to get this man to really open up?
“Have you ever come to feel so indebted to someone that, on reflection, everything you’ve ever done merely seems to have let them down?”
She said, “Is this your way of freeing yourself from that guilt then? If you can employ a cultist to add years to her life, then you feel you have redeemed yourself?”
“Think you know so much about me?” he bristled.
“I find you fascinating, that’s all,” she said, wanting to add, in ways you’ll never quite know, at this rate.
“Well, if I’m that much of an open book, you certainly don’t need to try to get me to talk further.” He then steered her into another sequence of moves, where the woman did the leading. She wasn’t quite managing it properly, forcing herself into awkward body-shapes, so he had to keep repeating those same steps until she could do them without thinking.
Eir suddenly felt the need to be more honest about how she herself felt. “Randur, I find you’re quite different from other men about Balmacara. You never try to impress me, and you don’t compliment me for every little thing I do. Quite the opposite, in fact, because you’re downright rude to me at times, and so flippant, and … Well, whatever in Astrid’s name you’re doing, it makes me more interested in you.”
“Makes sense, I suppose, what with my dashing good looks.”
“You know, I’ve also worked out that you only joke because you’re uncomfortable with being honest.”
“Crap, my lady,” he muttered.
“Followed by rudeness when you’re obviously wrong about something.”
Silence for a while, their feet moving with precision across the stone floor.
“One thing more,” Eir finally said. “Given your certain, shall we say, moral indiscipline …”
“Yes?”
“Why haven’t you tried it on with me?”
“Because I value my life for one thing. I don’t fancy being castrated and my manhood hurled over the city walls. Also, your position, you’ve got official channels, as it were, in which you must operate.”
“So, would you otherwise? I mean to say, if I wasn’t the Empress’s sister?”
“Well, you’ve got a great little behind, Lady Eir, a cute smile and more than a handful of the right things in exactly all the right places. Sure, why not.”
Something about his directness, the obvious fact that he didn’t care what he was saying, was so refreshing. And she liked that. She wanted