Maximilian tensed, looking away from Ishbel and down at his hands, and Isaiah did not miss his discomfort.
“Of course, Ishbel,” Isaiah said. He rose, and joined her outside.
“Is there anything wrong?” he said, once the flap had fallen closed behind them.
“Not particularly,” said Ishbel. “You have something I need. Where is your tent?”
Isaiah indicated a path through the sleeping encampment, and they walked quietly for a while.
“What is wrong with Maximilian?” Isaiah said eventually. “Something has happened.”
Ishbel gave a slight shrug.
“Something has happened, Ishbel.”
“I went to him tonight. I told him that I loved him, that I’d made a terrible mistake, and asked—well, begged—him if there was a chance we could remake our marriage. He, to be blunt, said that no, there wasn’t.” She paused. “Ravenna is pregnant.”
“Oh, the fool!” Isaiah said.
To his amazement, Ishbel actually gave a small smile. “I was the fool, Isaiah. I cannot believe I made such a spectacle of myself, or that I allowed Ravenna to easily best me.” Again, that slight shrug. “Well, no more.”
“What do you mean?”
“It means that I have decided not to allow myself to be buffeted about by everyone else, Isaiah. Dear gods, I have more strength than that! I need to make my own way.”
Now it was Isaiah who smiled. “Maybe Maximilian has done better tonight than I’d first thought. Well done, Ishbel. I have been waiting for this woman to emerge for some time. I don’t suppose…”
As a test, he allowed his mind to linger over some memories of the time when they’d been lovers, wondering if Ishbel was now aware enough of her own power to pick up his mental images.
“Not tonight, Isaiah,” she said, and he smiled again.
“What were you and Axis and Maxel doing so closely closeted?” she asked. “And all of you had great worry lines etched in your faces.”
“Something has happened with Kanubai tonight,” Isaiah said. “It feels almost as if he has vanished.”
“DarkGlass Mountain,” Ishbel said.
“More than likely. We decided we were all too tired to solve the problem tonight, and that we should sleep on it and meet later tomorrow to discuss it. Today, I suppose, as it must be close to dawn.”
“I will attend, as well,” Ishbel said.
“Of course.”
They drew close to Isaiah’s command tent, a great square scarlet extravagance of pennants and bells.
“What do you need from me, Ishbel?” Isaiah said, allowing her to pass through the doorway first.
She waited until they were both well inside the tent, and the doorflap closed behind them.
“The Goblet of the Frogs,” she said, naming the magical goblet that Isaiah had shown Ishbel in his palace at Aqhat. “I assume you brought it with you.”
Isaiah gave a nod. “And you want it because…?”
“Because it is of my family,” she said. “My ancestress Tirzah fashioned it. And I want it because I think it can teach me many things.”
Isaiah studied her for a moment. All the time he had known her there had been an aura of fragility about her, or of worry, or of uncertainty. All of that had now gone.
“What happened tonight, Ishbel?” he said. “What really happened?”
“Maxel and I…everything between us was colored by my fear of the Lord of Elcho Falling. The whispers I’d heard when I was a child in the house with the corpses of my family—”
Isaiah nodded. As an eight-year-old girl Ishbel had spent a month trapped in the charnel house of her family home, the corpses of her family rotting—and whispering—about her.
“—had taught me to fear the Lord of Elcho Falling, for he would bring nothing but bleakness and despair to my world. All through my girlhood and into my marriage with Maximilian, I had visions of how one day the Lord of Elcho Falling would turn his back on me and ruin my world. Maxel and I—” Ishbel made a helpless gesture with her hands. “I wanted to love him, but I feared what he would do to my life. He was the Lord of Elcho Falling and everything I had ever experienced had taught me to be terrified of him.
“Well, last night StarDrifter and Salome convinced me that I had to take the chance. That together Maxel and I could have something extraordinary. So I went to him and begged him, and he rejected me and presented me with his pregnant lover. Then he turned his back on me and walked away.”
Ishbel took a deep breath. “And in the doing, he destroyed my world and fulfilled the visions I’ve experienced over all those years. An extraordinary blackness, a complete despair, overwhelmed me. It crushed me. I collapsed in the snow as he walked away. And then…”
“And then?”
“Fury consumed me. Not at Maxel, nor even at Ravenna—although, by the gods, I despise the woman and will surely have my revenge on her—but at myself. For being so stupid. For allowing myself to be so easily outmaneuvered. That fury was also a release. The worst had happened, and it was my fault, really, rather than that of Maxel, and now I was beyond it, and if I didn’t want this to happen again, I needed to collect myself somewhat.”
“That’s quite a transformation for such a short period of time.”
“It was almost instant, Isaiah. I was suddenly faced with the devastation I’d always feared…but it wasn’t the Lord of Elcho Falling’s fault, it was mine. It was…” Ishbel paused, trying to find the words to describe what she’d felt. “It was as if I’d experienced a gigantic release of pressure, I think. It was done, it was over, I didn’t have to fear any more—not if I decided to take control and take back that strength I had lost.”
“You don’t still long for Maxel?”
“Not on his terms.”
Isaiah stared at her, then he very slowly smiled. “Well, well. I have been waiting to meet this woman for a very long time. Maxel has an uncomfortable time ahead of him, I think.”
She returned his smile. “Ravenna will have to cope with his black moods, not I. For the moment, she is welcome to them.”
Isaiah walked over to a pack in one corner of the tent. He rummaged about in it, then withdrew a carefully wrapped parcel. “For you,” he said. “For the Lady of Elcho Falling.”
“What’s happened?” Axis asked Maximilian once Ishbel and Isaiah had left.
“Oh gods…” Maximilian groaned and rested his head in his hands for a moment. “How did you manage it, Axis, Faraday and Azhure?”
Axis gave a short laugh, remembering that time so long ago when he had loved two women, and thought to have them both. “How did I manage it? Not well, Maxel. What happened tonight?”
“Ishbel came to me, told me she loved me, that she wanted us to remake our marriage.”
“And you said?”
“Ravenna is pregnant, and I feel responsible for her—”
“Ah.”
“—so I told Ishbel that it was impossible. Axis, you have no idea how guilty I felt walking away from Ishbel.”
“You can still assume responsibility for Ravenna’s child and take Ishbel back as your wife.”
Maximilian stared at his hands and didn’t say anything.
“Do you want to take Ishbel back as your wife, Maxel?” Axis asked softly.
“I don’t know. Everything between us…there has always been such dishonesty and distrust, such—”
“Depth of emotion?”
“Such mismanagement, Axis. Do I love her? Once I thought I did, then when I found her with Isaiah, and our daughter dead, then I was certain I hated her. There is such distance between us. She has for years believed that the Lord of Elcho Falling would only ever bring her entire world to despair and dismay, and tonight…well, tonight I fulfilled that prophecy for her.”
Now it was Axis who said nothing, watching Maximilian and allowing the man to talk it out.
“There is so much else I need to concentrate on, Axis. Elcho Falling, and whatever has happened to Kanubai. DarkGlass Mountain, and these damned Isembaardian generals who distrust me and doubtless plot against me. I do not need to be distracted by women just now.”
Axis gave a slight shrug.
“Ravenna hates Ishbel,” Maximilian continued. “For months she has spoken of her in nothing but dark terms and dismal tones. Her constant harping sets my teeth on edge. Tonight, as Ravenna and I walked away from Ishbel, Ravenna thought I was having second thoughts about rejecting Ishbel.”
“Were you?”
Maximilian ignored the question. “Ravenna pulled me into the Land of Dreams, and there she showed me a vision.”
“Of what?”
“Of Elcho Falling laid siege by an army of misshapen creatures, and with Icarii and human alike lying in piles of the dead. A creature, a dark nameless formless thing, walked to the gates of Elcho Falling, and they opened and Ishbel crawled forth and welcomed the creature into the citadel. It told her that it was glad she had done its bidding, not only in allowing it entry to Elcho Falling, but in my murder. Ravenna said that if I again took Ishbel as my wife, then the vision would become a reality. Ishbel will murder me and betray Elcho Falling. She may not mean to, but she will do it.”
“Ravenna has a dark and bitter twist to her, Maxel.”
“But what she showed me…I don’t think she conjured that vision. It must be a true warning.”
“I once thought that Azhure was my deadly enemy, too, Maxel, and I mistreated her so horrifically she almost died. If she had died…” Axis shook his head. “Maxel, I saw a truth, but I misinterpreted it so badly I almost lost the woman without whom…well, without whom I would have accomplished none of what later I managed. Trust your heart, Maxel.”
“Hearts can be wrong.”
Again Axis shrugged. “What are you going to do?”
“Raise Elcho Falling, one stone at a time.”
Madarin was waiting for Ishbel when she left the tent, the bundle carefully held in her arms.
“I have arranged everything, my lady.”
She smiled at him. “Really? Where?”
He led her back the way Isaiah had originally brought her. It was just on dawn now, and soft light permeated the crowded lines of horses and tents and equipment and campfires. Overhead, one of the Icarii drifted down toward a group crouched about one of the fires, while everywhere sleepy men emerged into the new day, yawning and stretching stiff, cold limbs.
“I am glad I can finally be of service to you, my lady,” Madarin said as they walked. “Having saved my life, there is nothing I will not now do for you.”
“I shall not ask anything too corrupt of you, Madarin, but whatever else you can give me, I shall be glad enough of. I think that…oh gods, Madarin, where did you find that?”
Madarin grinned as Ishbel stopped in her tracks and stared ahead. He was a middle-aged man, scarred and toughened by years in the military, and he had thought himself way past deriving pleasure from watching the wondering surprise of a lovely woman, but he supposed that perhaps he wasn’t so hardened as he’d thought.
Ishbel was staring at the tent Madarin had sourced for her. Before she’d gone to find Isaiah, she had asked Madarin to find her a tent of her own. She was sick of sharing with others as if she were a stateless refugee, and she’d resolved that she would now house herself in a manner which befitted her new determination to be her own woman.
She’d imagined that Madarin would find for her one of the small, grayish canvas tents that soldiers used. It might be cramped and lowly, but it would be hers.
Instead, he had found for Ishbel a magnificence that was more beautiful even than Isaiah’s scarlet extravagance.
The tent was of a similar size and shape to Isaiah’s—full square, and large enough to hold within it a large canopied bed, a dining or conference table, and an area set about with cushions and low stools for more casual conversing—but instead of being scarlet it was of a vivid blue, picked out with gold and silver braiding, and hung about with tiny bells and golden tassels.
The tent itself was extraordinary enough, but the great pennant that fluttered from its pinnacle was almost miraculously lovely.
It had been sewn with cloth of a blue far more vivid than that of the tent. On this field of blue someone had stitched a device that left Ishbel momentarily speechless.
The device depicted an outstretched woman’s arm, pale-skinned and delicately fingered. About the arm coiled a slim golden rope, its coils and knots intricate about the upper part of the woman’s arm, but uncoiling to simplicity by the time it reached her wrist.
Behind the woman’s hand was depicted the faint outline of a rising sun.
“I have been working on that pennant for many months,” Madarin said softly, “and looking for the opportunity to give it to you for weeks now. I wanted to give you something, as you had given me my life—something that represented who and what you are.”
“Madarin…” Ishbel didn’t know what to say, or how to thank him.
“The tent,” Madarin said, his voice a little choked at the tears gleaming in Ishbel’s eyes, “is a spare tent that Isaiah carries with him on campaigns. It can be used by him if his usual scarlet tent is damaged, or it can be used for a visiting, or captured, king. I do not think he will mind that now you use it.”
Ishbel wiped away a tear, then turned to Madarin and made a slight bow. “Thank you, Madarin. You have no idea what you have done for me this day.”
The tent was simply but comfortably furnished. Ishbel washed, then unwrapped the goblet. She stood a while, staring at the beautifully caged glass, running a soft fingertip over the frogs gamboling about the reeds.
Then she lay down to sleep, curling her naked body about the goblet under the blanket.
She sighed, and drifted into sleep to the goblet’s soft refrain.
Hold me, soothe me, love me.
Ishbel slept, and for the first time in many years, she did not dream.
An hour or two into sleep, Ishbel’s arms relaxed enough that the Goblet of the Frogs rolled slightly away from her body. The goblet dislodged the covering blanket as it moved, exposing its rim to the night air.
For long minutes after that movement there was nothing but stillness, then something stirred within the yawning mouth of the goblet.
The darkness within the goblet bulged, then something emerged, jumped across Ishbel’s white arm—causing her to stir a little, but not wake—and leaped down silently to the floor.
It was a large gray rat.
It paused a moment, looking about the tent, its dark eyes gleaming, then it scampered for the door and slid underneath its loose canvas bottom.
Minutes later it was moving about the boundary of the encampment, scurrying from shadow to shadow, until it reached open ground and was free to race southward across the snow-covered plains.