The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [67]
Some hours before sunset they presented themselves at the door of Malina’s compound. Since the afternoon was warm and still, the mistress of the house and her two daughters received them out in the garden, at a table under a bower of pale pink bouganvillea. While Salamander predicted that the daughters would make splendid marriages and hinted of possible suitors, Jill half-drowsed over a cup of wine. Once their fortunes were told, Malina sent the girls away so the wizard could read her tiles in private. After a few platitudes, Salamander struck.
“Now, I don’t like the look of this, my dear lady, the Four of Swords so near to the Two of Flowers. I greatly fear that some friend of yours—no, closer than an ordinary friend—some dear and treasured companion will be touched by painful scandal.”
Jill was suddenly wide-awake and all attention. Malina had gone a bit white about the mouth.
“The tiles also tell me that you’ve been worried about something distressing. May I guess that the two things are related?”
“It would be a clever guess, yes. Um, I don’t suppose you’d tell anyone what you saw in someone else’s tiles?”
“Normally, no, but I felt very sorry for Alaena.”
Malina winced.
“She’s so vulnerable, isn’t she?” the lady went on. “And the city’s full of envious snips who love to say terrible things about her. Her life would have been so different if only she’d had children. Her husband was much older than she, you see. Oh by the Fire-mountain herself! If you could only have seen her when Nineldar brought her home! Just fourteen years old, a child who should have been playing with dolls, and as thin as a stick. It made me weep to see the beautiful face on that skinny little stick of a body, like a flower on a stalk. Nineldar wasn’t a bad man, only so lonely, and he honestly pitied her when he found her for sale. He brought the child to me and begged me to teach her how to be a wife.”
“Doubtless the marriage was far from … shall we say, satisfying?”
Malina slapped her hands palm-downward on the table.
“Just what are you implying, my fine showman?”
“This is no time for fencing, is it? I heard distressing rumors, and I dismissed them as that, too—just rumors. But when I saw a horrible scandal in her tiles, well, I wondered if they sprang from more than envy and wagging tongues.”
“Rumors about what?”
“That handsome barbarian boy.”
Malina wept, a thin scatter of tears that she controlled almost at once.
“Nineldar spoiled her, trying to make things up to her. She’s gotten used to having anything she wants, even if it’s something forbidden.”
Salamander looked her full in the face with an expression so sincere that Jill nearly believed him herself.
“I tried to buy the boy from her for my show. She wouldn’t sell him. That’s what made me wonder if the rumors were true.”
Malina looked away, her mouth a little slack as she thought things through.
“I’ll go speak to her,” she said at last. “And I’ll talk long and hard. There are several other things that we haven’t even touched upon yet, have we, my dear sorcerer?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Now, that I simply don’t believe. But have it your way; I don’t blame you for wanting to keep your own scandal buried in decent silence. I’ll send one of my slaves to your inn with a message, one way or another. You may leave me now. Hie sooner I speak to her the better.”
All morning, after the wizard left, Alaena paced round the garden. Every now and then she would call for Rhodry; when he came, she would look at him so intently that he wondered if she were trying to memorize his face, then either give him a kiss or a slap and send him away again. Finally, when the household retired for the afternoon nap, she insisted he spend his with her.
“Mistress, it’s really not safe, here in the middle of the day.”
“Who do you think you are, to be arguing with me?”
“I’m only trying to spare you grief. That wizard saw a scandal, didn