The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [172]
She glanced back at the Sefry house. She and Austra had backed up to witness the action on the wall, but Mother Uun was still waiting in the shadow of her doorway.
“I apologize for the distraction, Mother Uun,” she said, “but I would be pleased to discuss the Crepling passage now.”
“Of course,” the old woman replied. “Please come in.”
The room where the Sefry took them was disappointingly ordinary. It had touches of the exotic, to be sure: a colorful rug, an oil lamp made of some sort of bone carved into the form of a swan, panes of dark blue glass that gave the room a pleasant, murky underwater feel. Except for that last feature, however, the room could have belonged to any merchant who traded in goods from far away.
Mother Uun indicated several armchairs arranged in a circle and waited until they were settled before she herself took a seat. Almost the instant she did so, another Sefry—a man—entered the room with a tray. He bowed without upsetting the teapot and cups he was carrying, then placed it all onto a small table.
“Will you have some tea?” Mother Uun asked pleasantly.
“That would be nice,” Anne replied.
The Sefry man seemed young, no older than Anne’s seventeen winters. He was handsome in a thin, alien way, and his eyes were a striking cobalt blue.
He then departed, only to return moments later with walnut bread and marmalade.
Anne sipped the tea and found it tasted of lemons, oranges, and some spice she wasn’t familiar with. It occurred to her that it might be poison. Mother Uun was drinking from the same pot, but since she’d touched the Sefry assassin and found him so wrong inside, she thought it possible that what was poison to a human might be pleasing to a Sefry.
Her next sip was feigned, and she hoped Austra was doing the same, although if her maid drank it, at least she would know if it was poisoned.
Horror followed swiftly on the heels of that thought. What was wrong with her?
Austra’s face crinkled in concern, and that only made matters worse.
“Anne?”
“It’s nothing,” she replied. “I had an unpleasant thought.”
She remembered that her father had had someone to taste his food. She needed someone like that, someone she didn’t care about. But not Austra.
Mother Uun sipped her tea.
“When we arrived,” Anne began, “you said something about watching someone. Will you explain that?”
In the dense blue light from the windows, Mother Uun’s skin seemed less transparent, because the fine veins were no longer visible. Anne wondered idly if that was why she’d chosen indigo for her glass rather than orange or yellow. She also seemed somehow larger.
“You’ve heard him, I think,” Mother Uun said. “His whispers are loud enough now to escape his prison.”
“Again,” Anne said impatiently, “of whom do you speak?”
“I will not say his name, not just yet,” Mother Uun replied. “But I ask you to recall your history. Do you remember what once stood where this city now stands?”
“I was a poor student in every subject,” Anne replied, “history included. But everyone knows that. Eslen was built on the ruins of the last fortress of the Scaosen.”
“Scaosen,” Mother Uun mused. “How time deforms words. The older term, of course, was ‘Skasloi,’ though even that was merely an attempt to pronounce the unpronounceable. But yes, here is where your ancestress Virgenya Dare won her final battle against our ancient masters and pressed her booted foot on the neck of the last of their kind. Here the scepter passed from the race of demons to the race of woman.”
“I know the story,” Anne said absently, interested by the Sefry’s odd turn of phrase.
“When the Skasloi ruled here, it was known as Ulheqelesh,” Mother Uun continued. “It was the greatest of the Skasloi strongholds, its lord the most powerful of his kind.”
“Yes,” Anne said. “Why do you say ‘woman,’ though, and not ‘man’?”
“Because Virgenya Dare was a woman,” Mother Uun replied.
“I understand that,” Anne said. “But the name of her race was not ‘woman.’”