Part 63 (2/2)
”You look better,” Jecks offered as he seated himself.
”Not as though I'd die on the spot?” Anna reseated herself.
”You are surely in better health,” he said with a smile.
”Because I'm back to my old snippy self?” She even felt like smiling in return.
”All were worried.”
”You were upset because you don't see what this sorcery will accomplish besides flooding fields?”
”And killing Defalk's sole hope of prevailing against the Liedfuhr.” He smiled. ”I mean you, my lady.”
”You don't worry about Sturinn?”
”We have no ports and need little of what is traded across the Western Sea.”
”Forty s.h.i.+ps in Dumar doesn't bother you?”
”The Liedfuhr has fifty thousand lancers, it is said.” Jecks shrugged. ”Forty s.h.i.+ps carried a tenth of that number.”
Anna forced a smile. Jecks was being logical, and she couldn't fight logic with logic. Her intuition told her he was wrong, that Sturinn posed a far greater danger than Mansuur. But how could she convince him? She took a slow breath.
”You fear Sturinn more than Mansuur.” His words were even, not quite a question.
”Yes. I can't explain why or how, but Sturinn is a greater danger.” Anna took a sip of the wine, a drier red that was far better than the honeyed stuff she'd swallowed when first recovering. Her legs felt stiff, and she pushed back the straight-backed chair and stood.
Why did she feel like an arthritic old woman? In the mirror, she looked like a worn-out twenty-year-old, but that wasn't the way she felt at the moment.
She needed to get stronger. That she felt, but it had been almost two weeks since the dam had been com- pleted, and she was still slow and tired. Each day she tried to walk farther, get more exercise, but she continued to feel drained.
Her feet took her to the window, and to the gray clouds piling in from the east.
'Sturinn may be a greater danger,” ventured Jecks, ”but Mansuur is closer.”
Anna nodded. She couldn't argue with that, either. ”We'll have to do something about Dumar or Ebra.”
”None will gainsay your right to back one side in the conflict there,” Jecks pointed out.
More d.a.m.ned politics. ”I suppose not. We don't p.i.s.s off either the Sea-Priests or Konsstin, not openly.”
She shook her head. Or worry the beloved lords of the Thirty-three. . . . Lord!
”You could go by way of Synope,” Jecks offered placatingly.
”I could.” Why did she feel so d.a.m.ned tired? She yawned. ”I still think Dumar is the bigger problem.”
'You still are tired.”
”Yes,” she admitted, reluctantly. Her eyes felt heavy. Just how long would it take for her to feel normal again?
He stood. ''I must go.”
Anna walked toward the high bed. Her eyes were closed within moments of the clunk of the door.
86.
ESARIA, NESEREA.
The heavy, gilt-framed mirror in the hallway to the bedchamber swings away from the wall. A single low candle lights the corridor behind the barred door. On the other side of the door are two Mansuuran lancers.
After several, moments a cloaked figure slips from the opening made by the swiveled mirror and toward the archway leading to the bedchamber. In the bed a man lies, sleeping on his side, his closed eyes facing the archway. He does not move as the intruder enters the room.
The figure in deep brown, far less visible at night than black, steps up to the table by the bed, deftly takes the stoppered wine pitcher from the tray and replaces it with another.
As silently as he has come, the intruder eases his way back behind the mirror. The mirror swings back into place, and without even a click, seats itself so that it again appears built into the wall.
As he steps down the stairs to the narrow pa.s.sage set partly below floor level, Rabyn murmurs, ”You will notice nothing, taste nothing, good Nubara. Not for a long, long time.”
He pa.s.ses several other niches in the wall, each behind a mirror. He also must duck upon occasion when the pa.s.sageway' s ceiling lowers to accommodate windows in those rooms it borders. He turns two more corners and comes to the place where he entered.
There, at the top of the three narrow steps, he presses a lever, and another mirror swings out from the wall. Once he is inside his own rooms, he closes the mirror and carefully checks the boss on the left side, wiping it carefully with the fabric of the brown cloak.
With a smile, he walks to his dressing room, stopping in front of the three-yard-wide polished-wood wardrobe, and drawing wide the double doors. After he opens the hidden compartment at the back of the wardrobe and replaces the enveloping brown cloak, his eyes go to the miniature portrait on the long dressing table.
The dark-haired woman seems to smile at him, and he smiles back.
”Yes, you taught me well. As that lizard Nubara will discover.”
87.
The sound of heavy raindrops on the walls of Abenfel echoed into the dim study in the late afternoon.
”How long is this rain going to last?” Anna asked, her eyes going to the closed shutters of the study. She felt almost trapped inside the dark-paneled room. The faint odor of wax and burned candlewicks made her nose twitch, even as she stifled another yawn. Would she ever stop feeling tired?
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