The Nether Scroll - Lynn Abbey [46]
"What happened? One minute he was standing there, the next she'd snared him. I begged her to let him go, and she looked at me as if I were dirt."
Dru searched his memory for the sound of Rozt'a's voice and found nothing. Perhaps she'd pled for her husband after he'd been hurled across the pool, though he didn't think he'd lost consciousness in the air or after landing. Perhaps they'd seen and remembered different things. That implied some potent notions about Lady Wyndyfarh's magical mastery. Dru gave up on the cave-that-wasn't and joined Rozt'a on the temple side of the pool.
"Gal challenged her," he explained. "Something about taking the goblin's word over Tiep's-"
"Damn! A setup!"
She tried to force her way past him to the glassy stone. In a fight with weapons, Rozt'a had Dru beat cold, but he held his ground easily against her half-hearted shove.
"We better talk to Tiep first, before either one of us goes leaping off a cliff. He had something that wasn't his. When the dog-face made the stuff glow, there was something shining in his shirt. A piece of amber, I guess."
"Damn," Rozt'a repeated herself, this time with a scowl in the youth's direction.
"There might be more. Have you noticed the bugs?"
She gave a puzzled shake of her head and stiffened when Dru reached for her face.
"Steady," he advised and carefully-very carefully- mussed her hair.
The ruby bees took flight reluctantly. They wouldn't have flown where Rozt'a could see them if Dru hadn't been insistent with his fanning.
"We've each got a pair of guardians. Spies, I think, for our host. You've got the pretty ones. Tiep had jet-stone beetles. She said something about murder and defiling just before the fat hit the fire. I thought she meant Gal and I and gleaning the reaver-or maybe I thought I could distract her. The boy must have killed one of his bugs, and not by accident."
Rozt'a's scowl deepened. "I didn't hear her say anything like that."
"And I didn't hear you pleading for Galimer. This isn't an ordinary place, and Lady Mantis isn't an ordinary wizard-"
"You're blaming me for this?" She turned that glower on Druhallen.
He supposed there had been a nasty edge on his voice and that, in the unspoken regions of his heart, he did blame her. One thing did follow another and without Rozt'a's dream-her change of heart-they'd never have followed the goblin out of Parnast. Still, Dru remembered life with five older brothers and knew that blame grew best in guilty soil.
The bees returned to Rozt'a's spiky blond hair. She didn't seem to notice them.
"What's cut stays cut," Dru said to himself and his onetime lover. "Blaming each other isn't going to get Galimer back."
Rozt'a purged her hostility with a sigh that left her chin resting on her breastbone. "We'd better talk to Tiep… find out what he really did… what he thinks happened."
Dru nodded and followed Rozt'a.
Tiep lay flat against the moss as they approached. He raised his head, revealing the face of
remorse which was quite possibly sincere, albeit too late.
"You had to steal some amber," Dru said, a statement of fact, not a question. Tiep seemed to shrink, but that was wishful thinking of the purest, unmagical sort. "What else, Tiep? What else did you do? Think hard-did you step on a bug, a black beetle-y bug?"
If he'd been trying to unnerve their foster-son, Dru couldn't have chosen a better question. He'd seen corpses with better color than what remained in the boy's cheeks.
"Did you?" Rozt'a demanded. Her voice was cold enough to worry Druhallen.
"He set me up. I told him I was going to take the amber out of the tree where I'd hidden during the reaver fight, and he said 'go ahead'… sort of… the way he says things so you think you know what he means, but later, maybe, you don't. Maybe you misunderstood."
Dru shook his head, a gesture wasted on Tiep, who was staring at the ground. "It's not the amber, Tiep. She called you a murderer. We've got watchers… bugs. Yours are shiny black beetles. Do you remember seeing one? Stepping on it?"
The youth's mouth worked silently while he