Стивен Дональдсон - The Mirror of Her Dreams

The corners of the lady’s mouth hinted at a smile. In a formal tone, as if she wanted the reservoir to hear her, she said, “My lady Terisa, I am sorry that I did not persuade you to join me. I believed you when you said you were alone. Clearly, you are a better player of this game than I realized.”

Nothing about her gave the impression that she was caught or beaten.

Geraden, get up!

Abruptly, he wrenched himself to his feet, stumbled sideways, then recovered. His gaze appeared oddly out of focus, as if his eyes were aimed in slightly different directions. Breathing heavily, he bent over and braced his hands on his knees to support the weight of his sore head.

“Blast you, Elega,” he panted, “don’t you know we caught Nyle? Castellan Lebbick has him. I don’t expect you to care what happens to anybody as minor as a son of the Domne, but you ought to care about the fact that he didn’t get through to the Perdon.

“You made a nice speech about defending the realm and restoring dreams. But you can’t pretend that anymore. You aren’t doing this for Mordant. You’re doing it for Alend.”

The lady’s eyes flared.

“Or you’re doing it for Prince Kragen, which comes to the same thing. When you’re done, we’ll all be ruled by the Alend Monarch. Then it won’t be you who decides what happens to your dreams. It won’t even be your personal Prince. It’ll be Margonal. Once Orison falls, you won’t be anybody except the oldest daughter of the Alend Monarch’s worst enemy.

“Give it up before you get hurt.”

As if she were in pain, Elega lowered her gaze. “Perhaps you are right,” she murmured. “You have caught me. I was a fool to believe the word of an Alend.” Her grip on the sack shifted.

Terisa shouted a warning – too late, as usual – as the lady flung her sack over Geraden’s head.

At the edge of the light, it arched toward the still, dark water.

Geraden leaped for it.

So did Terisa.

Before they collided with each other, his reaching fingers hooked the soft leather and deflected it.

They fell tangled together. His arms and legs were all around her: she couldn’t sort her way out of them.

After an interminable instant, she found herself on the floor while he scrambled to regain his feet. She was gazing straight along the smooth stone at the sack. It had landed right at the rim of the pool – so close that she could have put her hand on it.

But it had split open when it hit. A strange green powder was already pouring into the water. As she watched, the sack slumped empty.

Then the light went out.

A heavy splash cast sibilant applause around the reservoir as the other sack sank into the pool.

Across the dark, Elega said, “Prince Kragen is a truer man than you are, Geraden fumble-foot. He will not be false to me.”

Small waves continued to slap and echo against the sides of the pool long after the King’s daughter was gone.

Later that night, a small band of men on horseback launched an attack that no one understood at the time against the heavy gates of Orison. With a great whooping and hallooing, the men charged forward, shot burning arrows into the wood or up at the parapets, then brandished their swords and challenged the defenders to come out and fight instead of cowering inside the walls like girls.

Their arrows had no effect on the gates: some of Castellan Lebbick’s guards had spent the past four days soaking the wood with water. And the attackers themselves seemed more drunk than dangerous. Nevertheless they made enough noise to be heard by every man on duty around the walls.

While the captain in command of the watch readied a sortie, the riders escaped. They could be heard laughing derisively for a few moments after the night had swallowed their retreat.

When this was reported to the Castellan, he had less to say about it than might have been expected. By that time, he had passed from his usual fulminating outrage into a tightly coiled fury that resembled equanimity. He looked almost cheerful as he went about his work, preparing Orison to meet an Alend siege with a totally inadequate supply of clean water.

Sometime earlier, Terisa and Geraden had had the disconcerting experience of appearing to improve his mood by telling him about their encounter with the lady Elega.

When they first approached him, he acted like a man who was savage with lack of sleep. His eyes had a harried cast, and some of his gestures seemed aimless, as if he weren’t aware of making them. His personality changed stress and fatigue into ire, however. His problem was that he had nothing to do: Orison was as ready as possible for a struggle he had no expectation of winning. Because he couldn’t rest, he was in danger of driving his own forces ragged before the real test of their strength began.

He had never been very good at resting. The strict urgency inside him kept him on his feet. Now, however, he couldn’t rest because rest meant sleep – and sleep meant dreams.

His dreams were haunted.

As a younger man, he had occasionally had nightmares about his revenge on the Alend garrison commander who had raped and tortured his wife of four days with such relish and variety. But over the years the stable mildness of her companionship – and the clear worth of the work he did for his King – had taken the sting out of those dreams.

But now she was dead. He was alone – effectively abandoned even by King Joyse. And when he dreamed, he didn’t dream of revenge.

He dreamed that he was an Alend garrison commander with a young Termigan sod’s nubile bride tied helpless in front of him. He dreamed of all the things that could be done to her to make her scream and her husband mad.

He dreamed of relish.

And he awoke trembling – he , Castellan Lebbick, trembling , a man who hadn’t quailed in the face of any dread or danger since the day when King Joyse had cut him free and let him take his revenge.

At the sight of Geraden’s stiff-faced determination and the woman Terisa’s stubbornly controlled alarm – alarm which he instinctively wanted to justify – something leaped through him like fire in a mound of dry brush.

By the time Geraden finished describing what Elega had done, Castellan Lebbick was smiling.

“Congratulations,” he said almost genially. “Here’s another triumph for you. The lady Terisa” – he spoke as if she weren’t present – “gave you the perfect chance to do something right for a change – and what did you do? You decided to be a hero by saving Orison alone. You must be particularly proud of yourself.”

“That’s not fair,” the woman put in unexpectedly. Despite her alarm and her downcast gaze, she had courage. “You make it impossible for anybody to tell you anything. If I turned out to be wrong – if Elega did something else while you were guarding the reservoir – you would accuse us of conspiring to distract you.”

Yes, the Castellan mused, she was an interesting woman. And her turn was coming. Someday soon he would have her in his power. Then she would learn what it really meant to be accused. He would teach her thoroughly.

He still found it difficult to distrust the Apt: as the Domne’s son and Artagel’s brother, Geraden had an automatic claim on Castellan Lebbick’s good opinion. And he had stopped Nyle. That may have been stupid, but it was certainly honorable.

The woman, on the other hand—

Curious, wasn’t it, how she just happened to be the one who became suspicious of Elega – how she just happened to be the one who figured out what Elega was doing. All Lebbick knew of her was that she was an Imager. And that she acted like an enemy of Alend. And that High King Festten wanted her dead. And that she lied to him when the truth would have helped him serve his King. The rest was inference, speculation, dream.