suffered.
Stretched out with two of Ekrid’s daughters still twined around him the second night, Seregil stared up at the rafters and decided he’d had enough of women to last him for some time. Shifting restlessly in their musky embrace, he caught a hint of answering movement across the way where Ekrid’s sons slept.
One of them had made long eyes at him the evening before—He gave the possibility a moment’s consideration, but resolved dourly that there was little to be gained in that direction. The young man smelled as strongly of goat tallow and old hides as his sisters, and lacked a front tooth besides.
Lying back, he allowed himself a moment’s longing for his own clean bed and a freshly bathed companion to share it. To his surprise, the anonymous figure swiftly transformed into Alec.
Father, brother, friend, and lover, the Oracle of Illior had told him that night in Rhiminee.
He supposed that, after a fashion, he had been father and brother to Alec, having more or less adopted him after their escape from Asengai’s dungeon.
Seregil smiled wryly to himself in the darkness; it’d been the least he could do, considering that Alec was one of dozens of innocents captured and tortured by Asengai’s men during their hunt for Seregil himself.
In the months since then they’d certainly become friends, and perhaps something more than friends. But lovers?
Seregil had kept this possibility resolutely at bay, telling himself the boy was too young, too Dalnan, and, above all, too valued a companion to risk losing over something as inconsequential as sex.
And yet, lying exhausted among Ekrid’s daughters, he suffered a guilty pang of arousal as he thought of Alec’s slender body, his dark blue eyes and ready smile, the rough silken texture of his hair.
Haven’t you had enough hopeless infatuations in your life? he scowled to himself. Rolling onto his belly, he turned his thoughts to the palimpsest, running through its cryptic phrases once again.
Horns of crystal beneath horns of stone. Stone within ice within stone within ice.
Damn, but there seemed little enough to be wrung out of it at this point. Slowly he repeated the phrase in its original Dravnian, then translated it into Konic, Skalan, and Aurenfaie, just for good measure.
Nothing.
Start again, he thought.
You’re overlooking something. Think!
After this came the directions to the chamber. Before it were the prophetic ramblings: first the dancing animals, then the bones, and the strange words of the unscrambled cipher that unlocked the secret—
“Illior’s Eyes!”
One of the girls stirred in her sleep, running a hand down his back. He forced himself to lie still, heart pounding excitedly.
The phrase! The phrase itself.
Those alien, throat-scraping words. If they were the key to the palimpsest, then why not to the magic of the chamber itself?
Assuming he was correct, however, this raised other considerations. If the words were simply a password spell, then he could probably use them without danger to himself or anyone else. But if they worked a deeper magic, what then?
He could go back to Nysander now with what he already knew. Still, the Plenimarans might be beating a trail up the valley at this very moment and Nysander would be too drained from the first translocation spell to send him or anyone else back immediately. Unless, of course, he enlisted the aid of someone more magically reliable rather than risk mishap—Magyana perhaps, or Thero.
To hell with that! I haven’t come this far for someone else to see the mystery’s end. First light tomorrow I’m going up that pass again, avalanches be damned.
As he drifted happily off to sleep, he realized that the wind had dropped at last. Someone pounded on Ekrid’s door just before dawn, waking the household.
“Come to the council house!” a voice shouted from outside. “Something terrible has happened. Come now!”
Extricating himself from a soft tangle of arms and thighs, Seregil
Stretched out with two of Ekrid’s daughters still twined around him the second night, Seregil stared up at the rafters and decided he’d had enough of women to last him for some time. Shifting restlessly in their musky embrace, he caught a hint of answering movement across the way where Ekrid’s sons slept.
One of them had made long eyes at him the evening before—He gave the possibility a moment’s consideration, but resolved dourly that there was little to be gained in that direction. The young man smelled as strongly of goat tallow and old hides as his sisters, and lacked a front tooth besides.
Lying back, he allowed himself a moment’s longing for his own clean bed and a freshly bathed companion to share it. To his surprise, the anonymous figure swiftly transformed into Alec.
Father, brother, friend, and lover, the Oracle of Illior had told him that night in Rhiminee.
He supposed that, after a fashion, he had been father and brother to Alec, having more or less adopted him after their escape from Asengai’s dungeon.
Seregil smiled wryly to himself in the darkness; it’d been the least he could do, considering that Alec was one of dozens of innocents captured and tortured by Asengai’s men during their hunt for Seregil himself.
In the months since then they’d certainly become friends, and perhaps something more than friends. But lovers?
Seregil had kept this possibility resolutely at bay, telling himself the boy was too young, too Dalnan, and, above all, too valued a companion to risk losing over something as inconsequential as sex.
And yet, lying exhausted among Ekrid’s daughters, he suffered a guilty pang of arousal as he thought of Alec’s slender body, his dark blue eyes and ready smile, the rough silken texture of his hair.
Haven’t you had enough hopeless infatuations in your life? he scowled to himself. Rolling onto his belly, he turned his thoughts to the palimpsest, running through its cryptic phrases once again.
Horns of crystal beneath horns of stone. Stone within ice within stone within ice.
Damn, but there seemed little enough to be wrung out of it at this point. Slowly he repeated the phrase in its original Dravnian, then translated it into Konic, Skalan, and Aurenfaie, just for good measure.
Nothing.
Start again, he thought.
You’re overlooking something. Think!
After this came the directions to the chamber. Before it were the prophetic ramblings: first the dancing animals, then the bones, and the strange words of the unscrambled cipher that unlocked the secret—
“Illior’s Eyes!”
One of the girls stirred in her sleep, running a hand down his back. He forced himself to lie still, heart pounding excitedly.
The phrase! The phrase itself.
Those alien, throat-scraping words. If they were the key to the palimpsest, then why not to the magic of the chamber itself?
Assuming he was correct, however, this raised other considerations. If the words were simply a password spell, then he could probably use them without danger to himself or anyone else. But if they worked a deeper magic, what then?
He could go back to Nysander now with what he already knew. Still, the Plenimarans might be beating a trail up the valley at this very moment and Nysander would be too drained from the first translocation spell to send him or anyone else back immediately. Unless, of course, he enlisted the aid of someone more magically reliable rather than risk mishap—Magyana perhaps, or Thero.
To hell with that! I haven’t come this far for someone else to see the mystery’s end. First light tomorrow I’m going up that pass again, avalanches be damned.
As he drifted happily off to sleep, he realized that the wind had dropped at last. Someone pounded on Ekrid’s door just before dawn, waking the household.
“Come to the council house!” a voice shouted from outside. “Something terrible has happened. Come now!”
Extricating himself from a soft tangle of arms and thighs, Seregil
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