The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [61]
“What’s wrong, mistress?”
“Nothing, oh nothing.” Yet she hesitated, glancing this way and that before she spoke again, a breathless burst of words. “Rhodry, I need you so much. I’ve been so lonely. I worry, too, about what could happen to us, but I need you so much.”
He realized that at last he was seeing not her carefully arranged surface, but her self. “Well, here I am.”
This time, when he kissed her, all his reluctance vanished. In his arms she turned into a greedy little animal, teasing him, pretending to fight him, while he laughed and kissed and finally caught her.
Afterwards they fell asleep in each other’s arms. He woke just as the oil lamps were guttering themselves out and realized that it was only an hour or so until dawn. Even though everyone in the household knew of the affair, he had no desire to be in the mistress’s bed when Disna came in first thing of a morning. Carefully and slowly he worked free of her lax embrace and slid out of bed, grabbing his clothes and sneaking out like a thief to dress in the hall.
By then he was wide-awake and troubled by a sense of unease that had nothing to do with his dangerous love affair. Walking silently on bare feet he went to the kitchen, got the heavy staff, and slipped outside to take a turn round the compound. In the graying light nothing moved out in the garden except a shiver of cool breeze through the silvery eucalyptus; there was no sound at all on the street or from the sleeping neighborhood. Yet when he came to the gate, Wildfolk appeared to shake the hem of his tunic while they looked up with distressed eyes.
“Is something dangerous outside?”
When they nodded a yes, he tossed the staff up onto the flat roof of the gatekeeper’s kiosk, jumped onto an ornamental planter, and scrambled up. The kiosk was just high enough for him to lean on folded arms onto the top of the thick outer wall. Across the street, in the shadows of a pair of trees, stood a man, wrapped in a light cloak and watching the house. Rhodry was so sure of his status in the household by then that he called out without thinking twice.
“You! What are you doing there?”
The man turned and bolted down the street, whipped into an alley and disappeared. Although Rhodry’s first impulse was to start shouting and raise an alarm that would bring the archon’s men, he decided to rouse Porto first and ask his advice. He realized, too, that there was something familiar about the man he’d seen … Gwin? Gwin, by the gods! He went cold all over, thanking his luck that he hadn’t just opened the gates and chased after. Then he jumped down and ran into the house to wake Porto and tell him what had happened without, for some reason that he couldn’t put into words, telling him Gwin’s name. Yawning and stretching, the old man got up slowly and stood thinking for a moment.
“Well, whoever he was, he’s probably far away by now,” Porto said at last. “And the archon’s men are just going off watch, too. I’ll go down to the guardhouse later and report this to the watch captain, and tonight they’ll have a patrol swing by here at regular intervals. Let me see, what’s happening this morning? Any visitors?”
“That wizard from the marketplace is coming to tell our mistress’s fortune, about two hours before noon. She invited him last night at the party.”
Porto groaned in distaste.
“It’s her money, but why doesn’t she just throw it into the gutter if she wants to waste it? I’ll go down to the archon’s when he comes. I can’t abide that sort of nonsense. You stay close at hand the whole time he’s here, boy. I don’t want to find any of the silver missing after he’s gone.”
“I’ll stay right by the door and keep an eye on him.”
“Good. Well, dawn’s breaking. You go start chopping the firewood for Vinsima, and I’ll wake the others.”
Rhodry went outside through the kitchen. As soon as he stepped out the door, the rising sun cast a wash of light across his face. Blinking and swearing, he turned his back and remembered. Jill. He had seen her, she had been there at