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Very warm and relaxing lips.
Ruari did feel better than he had a moment ago. His gut was calmer, and when she put her-arms around him, the room no longer threatened to spin wildly, either sideways or backward. He protested when she released him, but it was only to stand a moment while she undid the laces of her shift. It fell in a dun-colored circle about her ankles, revealing soft curves that glowed in the moonlight.
Ruari rose to his knees, balancing easily on the knotted rope mattress. No trace of his drunken unsteadiness remained in his movements when he welcomed her.
"If you're not death," he whispered in her ear, "who are—?"
"Shhh-sh," she replied, surrendering to his embrace.
Entwined around each other, they sank as one onto the bed linens.
Later, Ruari thought they were flying high above the city.
* * *
Pavek didn't try to sleep, didn't bother going to bed. After the midnight watch bells rang, when his household was at last asleep, he took a lamp and Hamanu's scroll case back to the atrium. Sitting where Urik's king had sat in a youth's disguise, Pavek cleared a place on the littered table and unrolled the vellum sheets.
He set aside the ones that he'd already read and started with the score or so of boldly scripted sheets that his king said contained the truth. Pausing only to refill the lamp when its light began to flicker, he read how Manu became a champion, how a champion cleansed Athas of trolls. The air was cold and the eastern horizon was faintly brighter than the west when Pavek came to the last words: the onus of genocide, rightfully, falls on me, on Hamanu. His heart was far colder.
Not long ago, on a night when he'd bandaged the Lion-King's hand, Hamanu had told him that no mortal could imagine or judge him. As he rolled the vellum and stuffed it into the case, Pavek tried to do both, and failed. He couldn't imagine the forces that had transformed the young man who'd come to his house into the champion who stood and watched the last trolls march silently to their deaths. More than that, he couldn't imagine how the man—and despite the vellum, Pavek thought of the Lion of Urik as a man, now, more than ever—he knew had remained sane.
And without knowing that, without being absolutely certain that Hamanu was sane, as mortals measured sanity, Pavek couldn't begin to judge his king, his master, and— Whim of the Lion—his friend. He could confidently judge Rajaat more evil than Hamanu, but that was no sound footing for judging Hamanu.
The eastern sky was definitely brighter than the west when Pavek sealed the scroll case and got to his feet. His gold medallion thumped against his breastbone. He drew it out and studied the rampant lion engraved on its shiny face. While he wore a medallion, be it gold or cheap ceramic, Pavek was a templar. A templar obeyed his king and left the judging to the guardian.
Lamp in hand, Pavek went from room to room, awakening the Quraite druids whom he'd asked to join him on the south gate tower. Twice before, he'd awakened Urik's guardian spirit and brought it from the depths of Athas to the surface where it had guided him and preserved him. Hamanu believed the city's guardian could surmount one of Rajaat's dragons. After reading the vellum sheets, Pavek was less certain than ever. He was a novice in druidry, with only his devotion to his city and—yes—his devotion to the Lion-King to sustain him. He'd try to justify Hamanu's faith in him, but didn't want to be standing alone on the south gate tower when the Dragon of Urik came calling.
Five of the six druids were awake when Pavek came looking for them. Ruari's cast-off, reeking clothes were heaped outside his door. Considering
how much the slight half-elf had drunk the previous evening and how unaccustomed he was to wine's perils, Pavek expected to find his troublesome young friend curled up on the floor, still too far gone to rouse. Instead, when he opened the door, his lamp revealed an empty room.
The bed-linen was disheveled. The patterned lattice night-shutters weren't merely open, they were gone. And there was a woman's shift on the floor beside Ruari's cot.
Clutching the neck of his shirt and the gold chain beneath it, Pavek shouted Ruari's name and got no response. He levered himself over the high windowsill and peered down into a night-dark alley, two stories below.
Nothing. By then, the other druids had joined him. They searched the house frantically, as aware of the brightening horizon as they were of the missing half-elf. A search of the alley produced a pair of shattered night-shutters, nothing more. A search of all the inside rooms brought word that there was a young woman missing, too.
"She got up in the middle of the night, my lord, put on her shift, and went to the door," a somewhat younger girl explained to Pavek. "I asked her what was the matter, and she didn't answer. She didn't seem to hear me at all. It were passing odd, my lord, but I didn't think no harm would come of it. Whim of the Lion, my lord."
To no one's surprise, the girl identified the linen garment Pavek held in his hand as belonging to the missing woman.
Whim of the Damned Lion, indeed. Pavek swore a string of templar oaths that widened the eyes of Quraiters. But the whim of the Lion-King was the best, the only, explanation he could offer his stunned guests, and even then, Pavek didn't tell them how or why the half-elf might have caught the mighty king's eye.
"He's young. Impulsive and reckless," one of the other druids said. "He'll be here waiting for us when we get back."
"And we'll never hear the end of it," another added.
Pavek raked his hair and stared at the sky. In his heart, he reminded himself that he was not the one to judge Hamanu of Urik and that one life measured against Hamanu's crimes and accomplishments was not terribly significant. It was merely that the life had belonged to a friend, and he'd thought another friend might respect it.
Urik's situation had changed overnight, and not for the better. From the south gate tower, Pavek saw the roofs and kitchen-smoke of four market villages, the velvet expanse of Urik's farmland, and well beyond all that, three dusty, torch-lit smears where the armies of Nibenay, Gulg, and Giustenal had reestablished themselves during the night. Urik's army had fallen back into a thick black line between the farmland and the enemy.
"Orders," Javed said when Pavek stepped back from the tower balustrade. "Everybody's been moving all night. Everybody's tired, and we're jammed up like fish in a barrel. Not enough room to fight. Not for us or them. There's not going to be a battle."
The ebony-skinned elf stared straight at Pavek, expecting confirmation or denial.
"He told me to be here at dawn," was Pavek's answer, until he added—foolishly—"Ruari's missing. Gone from his bed. A girl, too."
It was a foolish remark because there wasn't a full-elf anywhere who'd ever truly sympathized with a half-elf. If the missing girl had been an elf, that might have gotten a rise out of the Hero of Urik, but for Ruari the best Javed could manage was a sigh and an offhand gesture.
