It was also seemingly prepared just for them. There were low couches lining the walls to one side, seven in number. On the other side of the chamber was set a dining table and other chairs for relaxing and conversing after the meal. A fire blazed in a massive hearth. Food was being brought in and laid on a sideboard.
Morgan found herself wishing quite desperately for a bath.
The company was ushered in, then the servants withdrew and left them to themselves.
There was water at least for the washing of hands and faces and a prettily written note that promised more washing on the morrow if desired. Apparently food and sleep were what the masters of the castle had decided were most important. Morgan had to agree.
So she ate wondrous things with her companions, said fairly intelligent things after supper when they sat before the fire, then found that her only desire was to find a bed and make use of it. She put her pack on the floor but hardly dared crawl between such costly sheets. Miach seemed to have no compunction about the like. He pulled off his mud-encrusted boots and stretched out his filthy self upon a goose-feather quilt. He looked at her as she sat gingerly on the bed next to his.
"Well? Aren't you going to make use of that?"
"I don't dare."
"Dare. You need to sleep." He reached over and pulled her pack up to sit between their beds. "There. It will be safe here and you will be safe there. Sleep, Morgan, while you may. You can be about your business tomorrow."
She nodded numbly. Perhaps it was the length of the day. Perhaps it was the grandness of the surroundings. Perhaps it was a bit of disbelief that she should be in such a place. She lay down and found that tears were slipping from her eyes and dripping down to wet her hair.
Miach reached for her hand and held it. "All will be well," he said, very quietly.
She nodded, but she wondered. The knife in her pack had quieted down, so perhaps sleep was not so unreasonable an expectation for herself. She nodded again, closed her eyes, and knew she would never sleep.
"Miach?" she asked sleepily.
"Aye, love," he said softly.
"Where's Adhémar?"
He snorted. "Slumming with the servants, no doubt."
"Does he know many?"
"Aye."
Morgan nodded and allowed herself to relax. The feeling of Miach's hand around hers was comforting, the bed was nothing short of delicious, and the song of the blade and the ring had subsided to a pleasing echo of a whisper.
"Morgan?"
She would have opened her eyes to look at him, but she was simply too weary. "Aye?"
"I have something to tell you," he said softly. "Something important."
She wanted to ask him if he was going to ask her to marry him, chipped nails and callused hands aside, but she couldn't even manage that. Besides, that was too ridiculous, even for her, so she merely nodded. "If you like."
"First thing," he said. "We have to talk first thing tomorrow."
"Hmmm," Morgan said. She felt herself drifting off into the first safe, peaceful sleep she had had in days. Miach had called herlove. That was worth a dozen pleasant dreams.
Chapter Twenty-three
Miach wrapped himself in a spell of invisibility and walked swiftly through the midnight halls of Tor Neroche. He hadn't considered, truly, how grand a place it was until he had seen it through the eyes of an innocent, honest woman who had never been anywhere so fine. He supposed he might never look at the palace in the same way again.
He'd told her he had something to tell her. And he did. He would tell her who he really was. At least in that much, he would be honest with her.
He ran up the steps to his tower chamber. All was as he had left it. Indeed, a fire burned in the hearth, as if he had merely left to poach something from the kitchen, not flown all the way to Istaur to find his liege lord.
His liege lord that he would have cheerfully strangled if it wouldn't have meant his own neck in trade.
He slammed the door behind him, cast aside his spell as if it had been a cloak, and crossed over to the table still littered with books and sheaves of paper and other things he didn't need and couldn't bear to look at. What he wanted was to be back downstairs, holding the hand of a woman who trusted him; what he needed to do was be about his business quickly so he could?before she woke and found Adhémar right there, more than willing to show the great hall and that interesting sword hanging over the fireplace.
