‘And now I’m to hurry to his beastly inn and deliver it before he leaves. Oh well, at least he’ll be gone all winter. He’s not the type to travel in the rain.’
‘Our mistress can read and write?’ Rhodry was honestly amazed.
‘Of course she can.’ Disna wrinkled her nose at him. ‘That barbarian kingdom of yours must have been awfully primitive, that’s all I can say. You’re surprised by the strangest things.’
‘Well, so I am. I hope you don’t think too badly of me.’
Disna merely gave him a slow smile, hinting of many answers, then hurried off on her errand.
That afternoon Alaena summoned Rhodry to her side. Dressed in a simple white tunic, she was sitting cross-legged on a cushion at the low table and frowning at her fortune-telling tiles when he came in. A pair of warty-brown gnomes materialized at his entrance and grinned at him.
‘There you are. Now that I’ll have the time, we’re going to start educating you.’ She swept the tiles to one side, then looked up to consider him. ‘You don’t do too badly when it comes to serving food, but you’ve got to learn how to carry my fan properly and other things like that. And then there’s the way you talk. Your accent’s dreadful, and we’ll have to spend some time on correcting it.’
Although Rhodry was hoping that Alaena would tire of teaching him such dubious skills as the proper way to fold scarves and arrange cushions, she took every detail so seriously that he soon realized she was quite simply bored with her life. Thanks to her inherited wealth, she had to work or wait for nothing, and while she understood financial affairs perfectly well, one of her many brothers-in-law did all the actual work of managing her properties. Twice a week this Dinvarbalo would come to lunch. Over a long feast of many elaborate courses, they would discuss her investments in land and trading ventures; she would ask sharp questions and make sharper suggestions while he wrote her wishes down on a wooden tablet covered with wax. Once he was gone, the spirit would slowly fade from her eyes again, and she would summon Rhodry for one of his lessons. Usually she would be irritable, too, slapping him across the face for the least mistake or even sending him away in a flood of insults. Yet, the next time that she called him back, she would be pleasant again, if strict.
Porto and Disna told him something of her history. She’d been born the second child of ten to a poor oil-seller down in Ronaton, in poverty so extreme that she’d nearly been sold as a slave to feed the rest of the family. Her beauty, however, had saved her by catching the eye of a rich merchant who had most honourably married rather than bought her. Since he was fifty-two when she was fourteen, the marriage had been far from happy, even though her childhood sufferings had made her obsessed with being the perfect wife. More from his incapacity than any other reason, they had no children before he died at seventy-four, after a long debilitating illness during which she nursed him with her own hands. Now, although she was far from eager to bind herself to another husband, she also knew that her beauty was sure to fade, sooner rather than later. Cosmetics and herbal baths filled her mornings. She often sent Rhodry to the marketplace as soon as it opened to buy rose petals, fresh cream, and beeswax while she and Disna closeted themselves like alchemists in the bath chamber.
Much to his surprise, Rhodry found himself growing sorry for her. Although he wanted to hate her for keeping his freedom locked up on a bit of paper in her jewel-chest, he simply couldn’t. There came a time, in fact, when he realized an even more bitter truth about himself. With cosmetics for the mistress and spices for the cook, he was jogging home from the market one morning when the air was fresh and crisp with the scent of coming rain, and the last of the summer’s flowers bloomed bright over painted walls. He found himself singing. With a shock he realized that for a moment he’d been happy, that he’d come to accept his new life. All day he noticed other things, how pleased he was when Porto praised him, how he laughed at jokes in the kitchen, how he smiled when as a sign of her favour Alaena gave him a silver piece. He realized that if he someday took Porto’s place, being a trusted warreko would give him security no matter whom Alaena married.
At first he’d wondered why slaves didn’t rise up in open revolt; now, he was beginning to understand. For a slave with his standing, life wasn’t cruel enough to take the risk. Any slaves such as the tin miners who might well be driven to desperate measures were kept branded, chained, and half-starved, and their lives were too short for long-term plans. Any slave like himself who had a firm commercial value had every necessity in life, a few comforts, even, and the possibility, though a chancy one, of someday earning freedom. If he’d remembered his former life, he decided, he would have felt differently, longing, no doubt, for freedom with a hiraedd befitting a man born free, but as it was, Deverry was a thing of shadows and patched memory to him. His only certainty was that he’d been a silver dagger, a despised outcast without clan or home, a shamed man without honour, doomed to fight endlessly in one petty lord’s feud or another until an early death claimed him. There were plenty of times when being Alaena’s footman seemed a better throw of life’s dice.
Yet there was one memory that kept contentment from trapping him. Baruma. Every afternoon, when the entire household, slaves and mistress alike, took a couple of hours to nap or at least rest on their beds, Rhodry would remind himself that he owed Baruma a bloody death, even though it would cost him his own life. What’s the swine done with my silver dagger? The question became an obsession, as if the weapon itself, those few ounces of dwarven silver, contained his very honour the way a body contains a soul. Every now and then he dreamt of killing Baruma and taking the dagger back; after one of those dreams he would be silent, wrapped in himself all morning, and he would notice that everyone would avoid him then, even the mistress.
There came an afternoon, as well, when he recovered another memory of his lost life, one that stabbed him to the heart. After a grey morning rain broke, a chilly drizzle that set everyone grumbling. Since he couldn’t work outside, Rhodry went to attend their mistress, who was as usual poring over her fortune-telling set. For some time Rhodry merely sat beside her and handed her tidbits of dried apricots and sugared almonds when she held out an impatient hand. The rain droned on, the oil lamps flickered, while Alaena laid out tile after tile, only to sweep them impatiently away and start all over. When she finally spoke to him, he was nearly asleep.
‘This wearies me, and don’t yawn like that.’
‘I’m humbly sorry. Shall I put them away now, mistress?’
Alaena shrugged, pouting, and held out her hand. Rhodry gave her an apricot, which she nibbled while she considered.
‘I know.’ All at once she smiled. ‘I’ll tell your fortune. Sit round the other side and start mixing up the tiles.’
He’d seen the fortune-telling game so many times now that he knew what to do. After the mix he picked twenty-one of the ninety-six tiles at random, then laid them out in a star-shaped pattern. Alaena helped herself to an almond and ate it while she studied the layout.
‘Now of course, this is all in the past, because you’ve never had your tiles read before. Sometimes you get several readings that refer backwards before you start going forwards again. I don’t know why. The scroll that came with the set didn’t say.’ She paused, thinking. ‘By the hem of the Goddess’s robe! I never knew you were a soldier. I see lots of battles in your past.’
‘That’s certainly true, mistress.’ Rhodry moved closer, suddenly interested in this game. What if she could find out other things about him, ones he didn’t know?
‘And you fought in many different places.’ She pointed to a tile of two crossed spears. ‘This indicates you were a mercenary, not a citizen volunteer.’
‘I certainly was.’
‘How very odd, because it looks as if you were born to a highly-placed