Treasures of Fantasy - Margaret Weis [79]
“What do you know about this boy?” Zahakis asked.
“He is an orphan I took in,” said Skylan. “I know nothing about him except that he claims to be the son of a faery princess.”
“The boy lived among us for a long time,” said Aylaen. Her red curls straggled around her face in the damp. The flaring fire of her green eyes seemed the only light in the gray, bleak dawn. “He never harmed anyone.”
The warriors added their avowals to Aylaen’s. The Torgun considered Wulfe strange. He could cause the birds to come down from the trees, light on his hand. He claimed he could speak to animals and understand them. He spent a great deal of time with Owl Mother, an old woman many thought was a witch. Still, Wulfe was one of their own. The very fact that the detested traitor Raegar hated the boy was a mark in Wulfe’s favor.
Zahakis looked very grim. “I tell you this for your own good, Skylan. If the boy returns, hand him over to me.”
Skylan stood stubbornly silent, his arms crossed defiantly over his chest.
Zahakis eyed him, then said, “Meantime, the Legate wants to speak to you.”
“Hang the Legate!” said Skylan angrily. “I need to find Wulfe—”
One of the soldiers jabbed Skylan in the gut with the butt of his spear and Skylan doubled over, clutching his belly.
Zahakis looked at the others. “I am in no mood to play games. I see you men want exercise. I am happy to accommodate you. There is a field that needs to be cleared of stones.”
He rounded on his heel and walked off. The soldiers seized hold of Skylan and shoved him along, prodding him in the back with their spears if he slowed. The other soldiers rounded up the Torgun, including Aylaen, and ordered them to start marching.
Skylan glanced back to the see the Venjekar adrift on a sea of mist, and he was reminded suddenly and unpleasantly of the ghostly voyage he had made aboard the ship returning from the ill-fated trip to the Druid Isles. The Goddess Vindrash had been steering the vessel. She had taken the body of his dead wife, terrorizing him, forcing him to play, night after night, games of dragonbone. Only at the last, on the Dragon Isles, had the goddess revealed herself to him in her true dragon form.
Skylan’s skin tingled, the hair prickled on the back of his neck. The goddess stood at the ship’s stern. He stared, amazed. She raised her hand, palm outward, in what might have been a salute. Then, deliberately, she spread her fingers and made an emphatic gesture. The number five.
“Get moving, lout!” said the guard, giving Skylan a shove. He slipped in the wet grass and stumbled, almost losing his footing. He regained his balance and walked on. He glanced back. The goddess was gone.
CHAPTER
7
* * *
BOOK TWO
In the villa, in the largest and prettiest of the bedrooms that looked out upon the atrium, Acronis paced back and forth, his hand rumpling his grizzled hair.
“Chloe, are you sure about this?” he asked.
The Legate was one of the most powerful, most influential men in the nation of Oran. He commanded his own private army. He was known as a brave warrior who bore proudly the scars of battle. He was a scholar, an inventor, a scientist and philosopher. The Empress often sought his counsel.
And one fifteen-year-old girl, slender and small for her age, had only to look at him with her winsome smile and brown eyes and say, “Oh, Papa, please!” and he was helpless as a newborn lamb.
Chloe lounged on her bed, propped up by pillows, holding a bronze mirror while Rosa, one of the female house-slaves, arranged the girl’s curly hair into the latest style. Rosa first wound the hair into a bun at the back of Chloe’s neck and then encircled the bun with a length of braided hair. She finished by twisting tendrils of the hair to hang loosely about the girl’s face.
“There, Papa, how do I look?” Chloe asked, laying down the mirror and lifting her face to her father.
“As beautiful as the dawn,” said her fond parent.
“That is to say that I am gray and dismal,” said Chloe with a pert glance out into the