“I eagerly await our first kiss,” Conan said, and dodged her mug, aimed at his head.
Calmly turning his back on her wordless shouts, he strolled up the stairs and out of the tavern. As soon as the door closed behind him, his casual manner disappeared. Urgently he looked for Laeta, and smiled when she appeared with her palm out.
Before she could ask he tossed her two silver coins. “There’s more,” he said. “I want to know everywhere she goes, and everyone she sees. A silver piece every tenday for you, and the same for your followers.” Baratses’ gold was disappearing fast, he thought, but with luck it should last just long enough.
Laeta, with her mouth open to bargain, could only nod wordlessly.
Conan smiled in satisfaction. He had Tamira now. After his performance she thought he was a buffoon intent on seduction to salve his pride. He doubted if she even remembered her slip of the tongue. Almost she had said he would get in her way. She planned a theft, and wanted no encumbrance. But this time he would get there first, and she would find the empty pedestal.
Chapter 4
Much of the Zamoran nobility, the Lady Jondra thought as she strolled through her palace garden, deplored that the last of the Perashanids was a woman. Carefully drawing back the vermilion silk sleeve of her robe, she dabbled her fingers in the sparkling waters of a fountain rimmed with gray-veined marble. From the corner of her eye she watched the man who stood next to her. His handsome, dark-eyed face radiated self-assurance. A heavy gold chain, each link worked with the seal of his family, hung across the crisp pleats of his citrine tunic. Lord Amaranides did not deplore her femininity at all. It meant that all the wealth of the Perashanids went with her hand. If he could manage to secure that hand.
“Let us walk on, Ama,” she said, and smiled at his attempt to hide a grimace for the pet name she had given him. He would think the smile was for him, she knew. It was not in him to imagine otherwise.
“The garden is lovely,” he said. “But not so lovely as you.”
Instead of taking his proffered arm she moved ahead down the slate-tiled walk, forcing him to hurry to catch up to her.
Eventually she would have to wed. The thought brought a sigh of regret, but duty would do what legions of suitors had been unable to. She could not allow the Perashanid line to end with her. Another sigh passed her full lips.
“Why so melancholy, my sweetling?” Amaranides murmured in her ear. “Let me but taste your honey kiss, and I will sweep your moodiness away.”
Deftly she avoided his lips, but made no further discouraging move. Unlike most nobly born Zamoran women, she allowed few men so much as a kiss, and none more. But even if she could not bring herself to stop her occasional tweaking of his well-stuffed pomposity, Amaranides must not be put off entirely.
At least he was tall enough, she thought. She never allowed herself to contemplate the reason why she was taller than most Zamoran men, but she had long since decided that her husband must be taller than she. Amaranides was a head taller, but his build was slender. With an idle corner of her mind she sketched the man she wanted. Of noble lineage, certainly. An excellent horseman, archer and hunter, of course. Physically? Taller than Amaranides by nearly a head. Much broader of shoulders, with a deep, powerful chest. Handsome, but more ruggedly so than her companion. His eyes … .
Abruptly she gasped as she recognized the man she had drawn in her mind. She had dressed him as a Zamoran nobleman, but it was the sky-eyed street-ruffian who had disrupted her return from the hunt. Her face flooded with scarlet. Blue eyes! A barbarian! Like smoky gray fires her own eyes blazed. That she could consider allowing such a one to touch her, even without realizing it! Mitra! It was worse done without realizing it!
‘‘ … And on my last hunt,” Amaranides was saying,”I killed a truly magnificent leopard. Finer than any you’ve taken, I fancy. It will be a pleasure for me to teach you the finer points of hunting, my little sweetmeat. I … .”
Jondra ground her teeth as he rattled blithely on. Still, he was a hunter, not to mention nobly born. If he was a fool—and of that there was little doubt in her mind—then he would be all the more easily managed.
“I know why you’ve come, Ama,” she said.
“ … Claws as big as … .” The nobleman’s voice trailed off, and he blinked uncertainly. “You know?”
She could not keep impatience from her voice. “You want me for your wife. Is that not it? Come.” Briskly she set out through the garden toward the fletcher’s mound.
Amaranides hesitated, then ran after her. “You don’t know how happy you’ve made me, sweetling. Sweetling? Jondra? Where are you … ah!”
Jondra fended off the arms he tried to throw around her with a recurved bow she had taken from a gilded rack standing on a grassy sward. Calmly she slipped a leather bracer onto her left arm for protection from the bowstring. Another bow, a second bracer, and two quivers, clustered fletchings rising above their black-lacquered sides, hung on the rack.
“You must … equal me,” she said, gesturi
ng toward a small round target of thickly woven straw hanging at the top of a wide wooden frame, which was three times the height of a man, a hundred paces distant. She had intended to say ‘best,’ but at the last could not bring herself to it. In truth, she did not believe any man could best her, either with a bow or on horseback. “I can marry no man who is not my equal as an archer.”
Amaranides eyed the target, then took the second bow with a smug smile. “Why so high? No matter. I wager I’ll beat you at it.” He laughed then, a shocking bray at odds with his handsome features. “I’ve won many a purse with a bow, but you will be my finest prize.”
Jondra’s mouth tightened. Shaking back the hanging sleeves of her robes, she nocked an arrow and called, “Mineus!”
A balding man, in the short white tunic of a servant, came from the bushes near the frame and tugged at a rope attached near the target. Immediately the target, no bigger than a man’s head, began to slide down a diagonal, and as it slid it swung from side to side on a long wooden arm. Clearly it would take a zig-zag path, at increasing speed, all the way to the ground.
Jondra did not raise her bow until the target had traversed half the first diagonal. Then, in one motion, she raised, drew and released. With a solid thwack her shaft struck, not slowing the target’s descent. Before that arrow had gone home her second was loosed, and a third followed on its heels. As the straw target struck the ground, she lowered her bow with an arrow nocked but unreleased. It was her seventh. Six feathered shafts decorated the target. “The robes hamper me somewhat,” she said ruefully. “With your tunic, you may well get more than my six. Let me clothe myself in hunting garb—are you ill, Ama?”
Amaranides’ bow hung from a limp hand. He stared, pale of face, at the target. As he turned to her, high color replaced the pallor of his cheeks. His mouth twisted around his words. “I have heard that you delight in besting men, but I had not thought you would claim yourself ready to wed just to lure me to … this!” He spat the last word, hurling the bow at the riddled target. “What Brythunian witch-work did you use to magic your arrows?”
Her hands shook with rage as she raised her bow and drew the nocked arrow back to her cheek, but she forced them to be steady. “Remove yourself!” she said grimly.