Mercedes Lackey - Alta

His estimation of the cleverness of the Healers rose.

On the other side were what were clearly the Healers’ private quarters; quiet, dim corridors lined with closed doors, painted with a long, continuous river scene that showed no humans, only birds, animals, and fish. And finally, after much traversing of corridors, the slave brought him to a small room overlooking a courtyard with a latas pool in the midst of it. It had a wide door standing open and on the other side, a window through which the pool was visible through the curtains of rain. A chair stood beside the window, and that was all he could see of the room from where he stood.

And seated in the chair, reading a scroll (as he might have expected) was Aket-ten. How he knew it was her, he could not have said, because the lady in the chair was nothing like the girl he knew.

She, who favored the simplest of robes and tunics, and wore her hair short, had been—well, the only appropriate term was transformed —rather thoroughly. The wig she wore was a copy of the “royal” hairstyle formerly sported by Toreth, made of thousands of tiny braids, each ending in three beads: one lapis, one turquoise, and one gold. Gone was her collar of a Winged One; in its place was a collar of gold, lapis, and turquoise with no representations woven into it. She wore a light woolen robe dyed a dark indigo blue that clung to her body, and a white woolen mantle embroidered with latas flowers pulled around her shoulders against the chill. In fact, she wore more jewelry than he ever remembered her wearing before; earrings, a beaded girdle that matched the collar, a beaded headband over the wig, armbands, wristbands. . . . That dress showed rather disconcertingly that she wasn’t the “little girl” her brother thought she was.

As for her face—when she looked up at the sound of their footsteps in her door, he saw that she—who hardly had the patience to allow her servants to line her eyes of a morning—now had a full set of makeup; complete kohl lining to the eyes, powdered malachite to the lids, reddened cheeks, reddened lips—

If he hadn’t known, by some inner alchemy, that it was Aket-ten, he probably wouldn’t have recognized her. Which was, after all, the point. If those who were looking for her took thought about what Aket-ten was like, they just might go looking for her among the slaves and the servants. But they would never search for a fine young lady, and even if they believed that this lady really was Aket-ten, they would hesitate to seize someone dressed in the manner of a lady of rank and privilege.

But she leaped to her feet and flung her arms around his neck the moment he entered the room, the scroll she had been reading flung aside like a bit of scrap. “Kiron!” she sobbed into his ear, as the slave took himself discreetly out. “Oh, Kiron! I am so glad you came! Oh, thank you, thank you—”

His first impulse was to pry her arms from around his throat, but his second was to put his own around her and let her cry. He followed through on the second impulse. I don’t know what’s been happening, he thought, as surprise turned to a smoldering anger, But Aket-ten doesn’t frighten easily, and she’s scared. He knew who it was that was responsible, of course.

The Magi. Her father had said something about “pressure.” Aket-ten’s fear told him just how much pressure there must have been.

It was a very good thing that her dress was a dark blue, because the kohl lining her eyes was soon running down her cheeks in streaks, and would have ruined a white gown. He just let her cry; she had obviously been having a bad couple of days. And after a while, he began to enjoy holding her, in spite of her obvious distress. It made him feel unexpectedly strong and protective and capable. It made him feel—expectedly—very angry at whoever had frightened her so. And there were some rather new and entirely pleasant sensations stirring that he couldn’t quite put a name to—

Finally, it was she who reluctantly disengaged herself from his arms and scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand (making the damage to her makeup much worse). She looked down at the mess on her hand and winced.

“Marit-ka is going to kill me,” she said forlornly. “After all that work—”

“Marit-ka is just going to have to do it over,” he replied, and steered her over to the chair she had been sitting on when he came in. He sat her down on it, looked about for a bit of cloth, spotted a towel beside an empty basin on a little table nearby, and took it out to hold it in the rain pouring down into the courtyard. When it was soaked, he brought it in and, with the expertise of someone who had been caring for the soft and tender skin of a dragonet for a year, scrubbed all of the streaked and ruined makeup from her face, taking care to get all of the malachite and kohl from around her red-rimmed, swollen eyes. He went out again for more of the cold rain, rinsing the towel as best as he could, and bathed her eyes again. She let him, holding still beneath his hands, her own clasped in her lap, her back rigid.

“There,” he said at last, looking at his handiwork. “I’ve at least left Marit-ka with a clean surface to repaint. Now, why don’t you tell me what has been happening to make you turn into Great Mother River in flood?”

She giggled weakly at that, which he took as a good sign. “It isn’t so much that anything happened,” she said at last. “It’s that—Father had visitors, nasty and important visitors asking after me, and afterward he was frightened. I’ve never seen Father frightened before. That was the first time they came, and it was right after you brought me home, as if they knew where I had gone.”

Kiron thought privately that the reason Aket-ten had never seen her father look frightened was probably only because Aket-ten hadn’t actually been looking—or else, because Lord Ya-tiren had never brought himself to the attention of ruthless men before. He seemed to live a quiet life, there in his villa, as remote from the world as it was possible for a landed lord to be. Well, the world had come intruding. It was probably as much of a shock to him as it had been to his daughter.

But he said none of this to Aket-ten. “What kind of visitors?” he asked. “What did they say? And what did Lord Ya-tiren do?” He wondered if the Magi had sent someone else to do their dirty work—or if it had been some high- ranking noble acting on their behalf.

“The Magi came themselves,” she replied, and shuddered. “The same ones that came for me that day you rescued me. That was when Father was frightened; I don’t know what he said, but it was probably what I told him to tell them, that I was ill. The next day, they came again. They wanted to know if I was there, and when Father told them I was still ill, they wanted to know how ill, and when I would be well, and what exactly was wrong with me.” She flushed. “I have the Far-Seeing Gaze, and—ah—I’m afraid I used it when I knew they were in the house the second time. I wanted to know what they wanted.”

He shrugged. “That’s only wise,” he told her. “Lord Ya-tiren probably meant well, trying to protect you from knowing what they said to him, but I don’t think he was doing you any favors. It was much better for you to know just how bad things were. So, go on. What did Lord Ya-tiren say to them?”

She rubbed her eyes again; despite his ministrations, they still looked very red and sore. “I think he asked one of his Healer-friends for some advice on what to say. He said that it was woman’s troubles, the kind of thing that got Afre-tatef sent home a few moons ago. They wanted to know why I’d never shown any signs of it before, he got irritated and said, ‘How am I to know? I am only a father, not a Healer or a Winged One!’ Then he told them he had sent me to my aunt on her husband’s estate outside the Seventh Canal for a rest. That maybe I would be back, and maybe I wouldn’t, and it all depended on how the gods dealt with my troubles. Then he tried to ask them why they were so interested in a Winged One when I wasn’t training to be a Magus, and that was when they got very nasty.” She shuddered again. “It wasn’t anything that they said, it was the way that they said it. That Father must be sure to take good care of me, because Fledglings like me were important to the protection of Alta, and the Great Ones took the protection of Alta very seriously, and that I wasn’t just his daughter, I was a resource that he was holding in trust for all of Alta and—well, more things like that.”