“I am thinking about this, Brecia.”
“No, you are not. You are thinking about me being naked. I know because just look at how you’re licking that wretched plum.”
He took a final lick, the final bite, and tossed the plum pip to her. “You should eat something as well,” he said.
She took some sloe berries out of a beautiful old glass bowl that was filled with red and green shadows and popped them in her mouth as she paced back and forth in front of him. She stopped suddenly, in midstep.
“I know what to do,” she said, and she drew in a big breath. “I know what we will do.”
He suddenly heard a soft sibilant sound coming from outside. It was different levels of voices, and they were humming, in harmony. It was a gentle sound, and it pulsed through him.
“My ghosts,” she said, her head cocked to the side, her incredible red hair falling halfway to the ground. “They are pleased. Isn’t that strange? I believed they wanted me to remain as I was, but I was wrong. They are pleased with you, pleased with what has happened.”
“Are they also pleased that my son grows within you?”
“Aye,” she said, “they are.”
He smiled, nodded. “Now will you tell me what you think we should do about Mawdoor?”
She ate some more sloe berries, then said, “We will leave at first light.”
“Should I take off my clothes?”
“Why would you do that?”
“If you already know what we’re to do to Mawdoor, then I don’t have to think about it. I can have you again.”
She whirled about, fisted her hands, then opened them with her fingers splayed in front of her face. She grinned at him through them.
He was naked.
She began to laugh when he realized that he was sitting in the midst of huge platters of food—deer, squirrel, hedgehog, hare—wearing only his knife sheathed on his forearm.
“Replenish yourself first, prince. I can now judge how the meat improves you,” she said, and laughed when he settled his perfect naked self cross-legged on the floor in the middle of all those platters of meat. He spent a few moments making his selection, then picked up a small bit of hedgehog. He never looked away from her face as he ate it. She looked at his strong, beautiful body and stepped toward him, such a powerful urge it was, and she didn’t deny it. He gave her a slow smile—blinked once, then twice at her—and she too was naked. He made room for her between the woodcock and the quail.
“I’m a demanding wizard,” he said. “You need to keep your strength up as well.” He fed her, caressed her just as she was caressing him between bites, and the air was pungent with the smell of the blue smoke and the roasted meat rising above their heads.
And outside in the courtyard, the smell of sweet wood-smoke filling the air, the ghosts sat by their small fires and sang their blessing, their sweet harmony rising and dipping, floating through the branches of the oak trees, and into a night that was warm and soft, and all knew that no enemies were in the oak forest that night.
27
Sometime Else
MAWDOOR HADN’T LAUGHED so hard since the time fifteen years before when his vicious grandmother had granted him two wishes because he’d cut out the heart of one of her enemies. He would never forget the look on the old witch’s face when his second wish was to have her walk into the sacred oak forest blindfolded, and stay there.
Aye, the look on her face had made him feel very clever indeed. He’d waited, his own cleverness pumping through him, to see what his grandmother would say. She hadn’t said anything, nor had she gone into the forest. What she’d done was to cover his face with a soggy red rash for a full three months. Still, even with a face that brought scores of averted eyes, he’d believed it worth it.
Mawdoor was looking at the men he’d sent to kill the prince. They were all tangled together, one man’s leg twisted through another’s clasped hands, another man’s head sticking between yet another’s legs, eye level to his behind, and Mawdoor couldn’t stop laughing. And Branneck—just look at Branneck, hanging there, as if by invisible cords from the heavens, screaming his head off, still holding the bloody knife that, Mawdoor hoped, had indeed slain the damned prince of Balanth.
Such a short time ago Mawdoor had been willing to live and let live, a philosophical stance he’d had no choice but to adopt when he realized it wouldn’t be at all an easy thing to kill the prince of Balanth.
But all that had changed when he’d seen Brecia, that witch of the oak forest, who with one look made him as hard as the rune diamond that blinked like spun light, and whose symbols meant nothing he knew of. And he’d found out very quickly that the prince wanted her too.
He wanted the prince dead.
And now Mawdoor knew that Brecia had taken the prince, alive or dead, to her fortress deep in the oak forest, a place he’d never seen. He’d only heard whispered tales about it in the deep of the night.
In hindsight, Mawdoor realized he should have given the men more than just a dash of power. As soon as he thought it, he dismissed it. No, that wouldn’t ever be a smart thing to do. Mortals fast became monsters when given even the simplest of powers. All had seen over the years how mortals, given even a dash of a wizard’s power, enthusiastically tried to tear the earth apart in a very short amount of time, and each other with it. Mortals were a distrustful, lame lot, worth about as much as demon piss.