Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [70]
If this was the start of some suave dalliance, she was too tired to deal with it. If it was something else . . . she was much too tired. She finally managed, “How did you imagine me?”
He waved vaguely. “Taller. Eyes more blue. Hair more pale—honeyed gold, the court poets said.”
“Court poets are paid to lie like fools, but yes, it was lighter in my youth. The eyes are the same. They see more clearly now, perhaps.”
“I did not picture eyes the color of winter rain, nor hair the shade of winter fields. I wondered if your long grief brought you to this sad season.”
“No, I was always a dull dab of a thing,” she tossed off. He did not laugh. It would have helped. “I grant you, age has improved nothing but my wits.” And even they are suspect.
“Royina—if you can bear to—can you tell me something of my father?”
Alas, I didn’t think this interest was all for my rain-colored, weeping eyes. “What is there to say that all men do not know? Arvol dy Lutez was good at all things to which he turned his hand. Sword, horse, music, verse, war, government . . . If his brilliance had any flaw, it was in his very versatility, which stole away the sustained effort that would . . .” She cut off her words, but the thought flowed on. Dy Lutez’s many great starts, she realized at this distance, had not been matched by nearly as many great finishes. Fragrant in the flower, green and cankered in the fruit . . . Yes. I should have realized it then, even then. Or, if my girl’s judgment was too weak, where was that of the gods, who have no such excuse? “He was the delight of every eye that fell upon him.” Except mine.
Arhys stared down at his horse’s withers. “Not dull,” he said after a moment. “I have seen more beautiful women, but you anchor my eye . . . I cannot explain it.”
A suave courtier, she decided, would never commit the blunder of admitting the existence of women more lovely than his current auditor, and would have gone on to explain himself at poetic length. Mere dalliance might be dismissed with a smile. Arhys’s remarks were considerably more worrisome, taken in earnest.
He continued, “I begin to understand why my father would risk his life for your love.”
Ista, with regret, forbore to scream. “Lord Arhys. Stop.”
He glanced across at her, startled, then realized she did not mean halt his horse. “Royina?”
“I see the romantic rumors penetrated all the way to Caribastos. But there is no lapse in his exquisite taste to explain away, for Arvol dy Lutez was never my lover.”
Taken thoroughly aback, he digested her words for a moment. At last he offered cautiously, “I suppose . . . you’ve no reason, now, to tell other than the truth.”
“I never told other than the truth. The clapping iron tongues of rumor and slander were not mine. I was silent, mostly.” And any less at fault, therefore? Hardly.
His forehead wrinkled as he worked this through. “Did Roya Ias not believe your protestations of innocence?”
Ista rubbed her brow. “I see we must back up a little. What have you imagined to be the truth of those fatal events, all these years?”
He frowned uneasily. “I believed . . . I concluded . . . my father was tortured to confess his fault in loving you. And when, to protect you or his honor, he would not speak, the inquisitors went too far in their duress, and he died in accident there in the Zangre’s dungeons. The charges of peculation and secret dealings with the roya of Brajar were got up to cloak Ias’s guilt, afterward. A truth tacitly admitted by Ias when the dy Lutez legacy was not attaindered, as real traitors’ estates are, but let to flow to his heirs.”
“You are shrewd,” she remarked. And about three-quarters correct. He lacked only the secret core of the events. “Dy Lutez was very nearly as brave as that, indeed. It is as good a tale as any, and better than most.”
His gaze flicked to her. “I have offended