The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [170]
In that gray light he finally saw her.
Her eyes really were silver or, rather, a blue-gray so pale that they caught the light that way at times. Her hair, however, wasn’t blond but a thick auburn, cut simply and short. Her cheeks were rounded, as had been hinted in the darkness, but whereas Winna’s face was an oval, Pale’s tapered sharply to the chin. Her lips were smaller than they had seemed when he was kissing them, but they had the natural pout he’d imagined. She had two large pox marks on her forehead and a long, raised scar on her left cheek.
She kept her eyes averted as she drank, then studied their surroundings, knowing he was studying her, giving him his chance.
It was disappointing. Not only was she not Winna, she wasn’t as beautiful as Winna. He knew it was a terrible thought, but he couldn’t deny his reaction. In the phay stories, the hero always won the beautiful virgin and everyone else had to settle for what was left.
Aspar was the hero of this tale, not Stephen; he’d known that for some time. Winna wasn’t a virgin, but she had that air about her, the aura of the hero’s prize.
Pale tilted her head to look at him then, and he almost gasped. He recalled the time Sacritor Burden had been trying to explain the saints to him; he’d produced a piece of crystal, triangular in cross section but long, like the roof of a lodge house. It seemed interesting, even unusual, and when he put it into the sunlight, it sparkled fetchingly. But it was only when he turned it just so that it threw out the colors of the rainbow and revealed the beauty that had been hidden in white light.
When he met her eyes now, there was suddenly so much more than his first glance had found, and her features came into clearer focus. For the first time he saw them as her own.
“Well,” she said, “that’s what you get for kissing a girl before you’ve seen her.”
“You kissed me,” he blurted, realizing in the same breath that it wasn’t what he was supposed to say.
She just shrugged and pushed the hood of her cloak back on her head.
“Yes,” she allowed.
“Wait,” he said.
She turned and cocked her head.
“What’s happening here?” he asked desperately.
“Most likely the praifec and his men are just starting after us,” she replied. “We’ll need mounts, and we can get some just ahead. After that, we might stay ahead of them.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know that,” she replied.
“Well, then? I mean, I hardly know you. It’s simply not reasonable.”
“Where I come from,” Pale said, “everything isn’t reasonable. And we don’t wait a lifetime for a perfect kiss from the perfect person, because then we die alone. I kissed you because I wanted to, and you wanted me to, and maybe we both needed it. And until the sun came up, you seemed to be happy with that and maybe ready to do it some more.
“But here we are instead, and that’s life, too, and not worth dwelling on. We can only get so much done before we die, yes? So let’s go.”
CAZIO HEARD someone shout his name; it was a thin, distant thing.
He’d had most of his attention on climbing, wedging boot tips and fingers into the precarious notches that had been cut into the stone and mortar. He’d been delighted to find them there and wondered who had carved them originally. Some ancient thief? Children exploring the wall, or perhaps a Sefry magician? It didn’t matter, really. He could probably have managed the climb at the intersection of the walls using only the meager purchase offered naturally by the masonry, but the ancient climbers had helped him considerably.
They increased his chances of survival only slightly, however, when he spotted the soldiers who were rushing toward him. He still had a kingsyard to go, and at the rate he was climbing, he wasn’t going to make it before cold iron married him.
With a silent prayer to Mamres and Fiussa, he flexed his knees and leapt as hard as he could up and to his right, toward the first spearman.
The problem with that was that the jump threw him away from the wall. Not much, but enough