The Spirit Stone - Katharine Kerr [133]
‘How could you?’ Sidro snapped. ‘He was a disgusting old man. Eating raw meat like that! I never trusted him around young boys, either. He kept staring at their bottoms.’
‘In his personal habits, most assuredly disgusting, but a good teacher of wizardry nonetheless. Besides, no one deserved to die the way he did.’
Once, Sidro realized, not so very long ago in fact, she would have told him that Hazdrubal had deserved his death because he’d defied Alshandra’s laws. Once.
‘Well, I have to admit it was horrible,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t bear to watch.’
‘No? I should have thought you’d have gloried in it. Your pack of holy fools did.’
‘Not Lakanza! She ran into the temple with me, and we prayed that Alshandra would stop them. Those weren’t our people, Laz, not at that moment. They were like animals, that mob. I mean, tearing a man apart with their hands…’ Memory pictures rose and made her stammer. ‘Horrible.’
‘They came for me next. Did that frighten you, Sisi? To think of your old love being torn to shreds by the fingernails of the faithful?’
‘No.’
He looked at her gape-mouthed, his eyes brimming with hurt.
‘Because I knew you’d get out of it,’ Sidro went on. ‘I have perfect faith, Laz, that you could talk your way out of anything.’
He tipped back his head and laughed in prolonged delight. ‘And so I did,’ he said at last. ‘Though it took a bit of help from my mother. Huh. I was surprised then and I still am now that she cared enough to hide me.’
Sidro reached up and tapped with her fingertip on the blue spiral tattoo in the centre of his forehead. ‘You were First Son.’ She brought her hand down. ‘What she thought of you didn’t matter, compared to that.’
He winced. ‘I suppose it was silly of me to hope for a flicker of maternal love in her dry and stony heart.’
‘She had her heart set on your becoming a rakzan, that’s why. It dried up because she was so disappointed—’
‘—that I turned out to be a coward? That’s how she saw it, you know. I was supposed to want to throw my life away for the mach-fala’s glory. The very first rakzan to come from a mixed-blood clan! What an honour! I didn’t want it.’
‘I thought you made the right decision.’
‘Which is another reason I love you.’ Laz paused for a dramatic sigh. ‘But be that as it may, do you want to learn how to make a protective sphere around yourself? I don’t like the idea of Evan scrying you out.’
‘I don’t like it, either. Please do show me.’
Since she’d already broken her vows, Sidro returned to the dweomer studies she once had shared with Laz with some of her old passion. Since she was damned, she would think, she might as well revel in her damnation. Yet, every time she tried to scry in the white pyramid, she would see the Inner Shrine through the smoke-coloured crystal of its twin upon the altar. The sight made the shame of her broken vows rise up and choke her until she wept, shaking her head in pain like a dazed animal. Laz finally put the crystal back in its locked box and told her to leave it alone.
In their first days together, Laz never left the camp and only rarely left their cabin. Their long years apart had left them greedy for each other. Their scent surrounded them, permeated the blankets, the bed, the very walls, or so it seemed to her. Laz forbade any of his men to enter, for fear that the scent would make them lust after her, too. When they needed food or water, he went and fetched it.
While he was gone, she would stand at one of the cabin’s two windows and look out at the forest, on one side, or the camp, on the other. Occasionally Pir or one of the other men would stop to chat with her, but only briefly, and always from a decorous few feet away. Only young Vek, the boy who would have grown up into a prophet of the gods, had the old gods still held sway in Taenalapan, dared come close. He missed his mother badly, he told her one day.
‘But I had to run away,’ he said. ‘The priestesses would have killed me.’
‘Alshandra’s people,