When Arkady regained consciousness she was no longer surrounded by a terrifying vortex of swirling sand. It was dark when her eyes flickered open. From the feel of the hard stone beneath her, and the muffled, distant howling of the wind, she realised she was in some sort of cellar. She could hear the sandstorm raging beyond the thick walls, but she was safe from it.
She opened her eyes a little wider. A torch flickered fitfully in a bracket on the wall above her head, another near the entrance to the cavern, leaving the room in as much shadow as light. She was half sitting, half lying on the floor of a dark, cavernous hall, her head resting against someone’s shoulder, strong arms holding her safe from the nightmare. She closed her eyes again, relishing the feeling for the moment or two it took to register the fact that someone was holding her and then she sat up in a panic. On the floor beside her lay Tiji, her shroud discarded, apparently asleep. There was a bruise on the Crasii’s cheek and a trickle of blood leaking from the corner of her mouth.
“Careful!”
She scrambled free and turned to find she hadn’t been hallucinating earlier.
“Cayal? What happened? Where are we? What’s wrong with Tiji?” Arkady leaned over and shook the Crasii, to no avail. “Tiji?” The Crasii didn’t respond. Worriedly, Arkady shook her a little harder. “Tiji? Can you hear me?”
“I had to knock her out.”
The Immortal Prince was sitting with his back to the wall he’d been leaning against, holding Arkady while she slept.
“Why?” she asked, not sure if she should be thankful or afraid to discover he’d rescued them.
“She’s a Scard.” He pushed off the wall, climbed to his feet and walked to the corner where the luggage sacks they’d left tied to their saddle on Terailia were lying. He tossed the sacks aside and picked up the waterskin.
Arkady rubbed her gritty eyes and leaned over to feel Tiji’s forehead. The Crasii’s scaly skin was smooth and cool to the touch and she seemed to be breathing normally. Arkady turned to look at Cayal. “Was being a Scard reason enough for you to knock her unconscious?”
“You were the reason,” he said, in a tone that made her want to squirm with the memory of him finding her in the storm. He walked back to where she knelt over Tiji and squatted down beside them. “Don’t you remember? You were frantic and wouldn’t move without her. Your little Scard here got hysterical when I tried to dig her out of the sand, so I had to quiet her down. How are you feeling?”
Arkady hoped he was talking about her physical condition. She certainly wasn’t in the mood to discuss the conflicted emotions she had to deal with every time she confronted this man. “Like I’ve been scrubbed raw with a hasp file. Where are the others?”
“They’re probably dead by now.”
Arkady stared at him. “Dead?”
“I suppose.”
“But you don’t know for certain?”
Cayal shrugged. “If this storm keeps up much longer it wouldn’t make any difference, even if I did know.”
Cayal’s calm and detached appraisal of the fate of the rest of the caravan left her breathless. She scrambled to her feet. “Can’t you help them?”
He looked genuinely puzzled by her question. “Why would I want to?”
“Because you can?” she suggested, reminding herself as she did, this is why he’s so dangerous. The reason he wants to die. He doesn’t feel things like a mortal. He doesn’t feel some things at all. “Because you can walk through that storm with impunity and they can’t?”
He shook his head. “You’re crediting me with heroic abilities I don’t have, Arkady. That gale’s been blowing sand over your travelling companions for the better part of a day and night. They’re nothing more than featureless lumps in the sand, by now. Tides, I only found you because you panicked and tried to leave the only shelter you had.”
“But you found the camels,” she said, pointing to the sacks. The idea the rest of their caravan—Farek, with his endless “hurry-hurry,” the boisterous cameleers and the nervous young acolytes heading for Brynden’s abbey—might be dead already was too unbearable to contemplate.
To think she might have survived when the others didn’t was more troubling. That she survived because Cayal, with his god-like powers, had decided that she could live while the others would have to die, was even worse. That notion came with a burden of guilt she wasn’t equipped to deal with.
“I didn’t need to find the camels,” Cayal said. “They found this place on their own. Camels are smarter than humans in a storm. They have enough sense to find shelter and stay there.” He thrust the waterskin at her. “That was a really stupid thing you did, by the way. If I hadn’t found you, you’d be dead, too.”
If you hadn’t found me, I might be safer. And the others might have lived.
“I thought I was suffocating.”
“You probably were. Didn’t make trying to wander about in a sandstorm any less dangerous, though. We’re less than a mile from where you were standing, by the way. Why didn’t your guides just bring you here when they saw the storm coming?”
“I can’t believe you just let them die.”
Cayal didn’t answer her. Clearly, he didn’t feel the need to justify anything he’d done. She glanced around, only now thinking to wonder where she was. “What is this place, anyway?”
“Brynden’s old palace.”
Arkady understood now, why Farek and his cameleers had refused to seek shelter in the ridge so close to where they’d dug in to weather the storm. “They feared it was haunted.”
“Idiots.”
Arkady frowned, recalling Cayal telling her of this place when they were still in Lebec. Of his meeting here with Brynden and Kinta. With Lukys.
And of making love to Medwen in the chill darkness of Brynden’s austere fortress.
She forced that image from her mind and looked around again, afraid Cayal might guess what she was thinking. “How can this be Brynden’s old palace? You said it was on the edge of the Great Inland Sea. We’re a hundred miles or more into the desert here.”
“I emptied the sea the better part of six thousand years ago. The desert’s spread, since then.” He squatted down beside her, pointing at the waterskin. “Drink it slowly or you’ll make yourself sick.”
She lifted the waterskin, tipped her head back, letting the tepid water stream into her mouth. It was stale and faintly metallic and tasted better than the most prized wine ever served in Lebec Palace. When she was done, she lowered the skin and looked at Cayal, as another thought occurred to her. “Are you responsible for this storm?”
The Immortal Prince shook his head. “No.”
“Can you stop it?”
“It’d be safer to let it run its course.”
“Safer for whom, exactly?”
“Everyone living in the southern hemisphere of Amyrantha, actually. Messing with the weather’s a dangerous thing, Arkady. Believe me, I know.” He examined her more closely, reaching out to brush an errant strand of hair from her face. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
Instinctively, she flinched from his touch. “I’m more concerned about Tiji.”
He dropped his hand. “She’ll come to. Eventually.”
“Are you sure?”
Cayal sat back on his heels, frowning. “You think I want your Scard to die?” Despite his words, the contempt in his voice when he spoke of the Scards was disturbing.
“How do you even know she’s a Scard, Cayal?”
He glanced down at the unconscious Crasii before answering. “Better than half of all the reptiles were. The behavioural compulsion to obey us never really took with them. That’s why we didn’t pursue them as a species. Too hard to control. I was surprised to find you had one, truth be told. They were rare, even back when we were experimenting with them. Tryan thinks he got rid of all the Scards. He’ll be peeved to realise he didn’t.”
“She’s not mine, Cayal. Quite the opposite. Tiji’s the diplomat. I’m the servant.”
He shook his head, as if such a circumstance was beyond his comprehension. “That’s just wrong.”
She smiled wanly. “How very Tide Lordish of you to think so.”
Cayal ignored the jibe and pointed at the waterskin. “Drink some more.”
She did as he instructed, letting the moisture work its own particular magic on her parched throat, and then glanced around the cellar, wondering how long they would have to remain in the ruin. The danger of being effectively alone in this place with Cayal notwithstanding, she felt exhausted, dirty, gritty and yet—contrarily—safe for the first time since Stellan had left Ramahn. That was a dangerous thing to allow herself to feel. Cayal wasn’t her knight in shining armour. In reality, she was trapped in a long-forgotten ruin in the middle of a sandstorm in the Torlenian desert with a self-confessed mass-murderer who couldn’t decide whether he loved her or hated her.
How can you possibly think you’re safe here with Cayal? she asked herself sternly.
“How long can we stay here?”
As if he could read her mind, he reached out to touch her cheek in a gesture that was as tender as it was dangerous. “As long as you want to. The cisterns are full and the pack camels have most of your caravan’s supplies still tied to their saddles.”
As long as you want, he’d said, not as long as you need to. Arkady wondered if it was a slip of the tongue, a warning, or if she was reading more into his statement than it warranted.
Then she realised what else Cayal had said. “Cisterns?”
He nodded. “This place is fed by a hot underground spring. Always was. Brynden’s one concession to luxury. His baths.”
Arkady’s eyes lit up, and not only because she might have found an escape from Cayal for a time. “There are baths here? And they’re full?”
“Down on the next level,” he said as Arkady scrambled to her feet. “Did you want me to show you?”
Arkady didn’t answer him. She didn’t even hear him calling her back as she snatched a torch from the wall and hurried toward the cavernous cellar entrance and the dark halls beyond.
Tides, there are baths, here. Hot baths. She didn’t need directions. Arkady was so desperate for the unexpected chance to be clean again—and the excuse to get away from Cayal’s disturbing presence—she reckoned she could find them with nothing more than her sense of smell.
As it turned out, her sense of smell was exactly what led Arkady to the baths. The faintly sulphuric spring bubbled out of a broken clay pipe in the wall on the lower level, into several large pools that steamed even in the desert heat. The spring tumbled down a rock face worn smooth by thousands of years of falling water. Below the fall, the water flowed over a series of man-made steps which ended in the first of the pools. The torch wasn’t bright enough for her to see beyond the first pool. She sensed rather than saw the other pools stretching away in the vast, low-ceilinged vaulted cavern.
Looking around, Arkady spied a bracket on the wall to her right. She reached up and dropped the torch into it and then scrambled up the slippery steps to the cascade. In the distance, she could hear Cayal calling her, but she ignored him. Closing her eyes, still dressed in her storm-shredded clothes, Arkady pressed her face against the warm rock and let the water splash over her.
It was only a moment—barely time to enjoy this unexpected bounty—before Cayal grabbed her arm and turned her around to face him, his body pressed to hers. “Don’t you run away from me like that.”
Arkady was drenched. The water tumbled over her, over them both, like a warm embrace. He was too close. Too overpowering. The cavern was dark and steamy and the flickering light from the torch fractured into myriad rainbows as it beaded on Cayal’s dark hair.
And in the last few hours he’d knocked Tiji unconscious for being a Scard and let a score of people die because he didn’t have enough humanity left in him to save them, she reminded herself.
“Let go of me.”
“I won’t hurt you, Arkady.”
“You can’t help yourself, Cayal,” she said, trying to shake free of him.
“But I saved you. And your wretched pet.”
“Why? Because you love me? I don’t think so.”
He didn’t answer her. Arkady held her breath, part of her afraid he’d try to kiss her again, another part of her afraid he wouldn’t.
And then he did let her go. As if aware no sensible conversation was likely to take place under a waterfall with her so close, he stepped back from her, out of the tumbling cascade, and pushed his wet hair back off his face as she collapsed against the wall partly in relief and more than a little disappointed. “Tides, you’re like a burr under my saddle blanket, woman. You irritate me. You rub me raw.”
Arkady closed her eyes. Oh great…we’re back to “I hate you” again. “If I’m such an irritant, Cayal, why not let me die like the others? Why don’t you leave me in peace?”
“Because you remind me I’m alive, Arkady.”
She opened her eyes again and looked at him, knowing much of the danger of Cayal was that she could almost empathise with his pain. But letting him know that was the short route to a place she wasn’t prepared to go. “Something you’re not fond of being reminded about, Cayal.” She pushed herself off the wall and stepped out of the water, wrapping her arms around her body. The water had soaked her through, plastering her tangled hair to her body and making her clothes all but transparent. She was intensely aware of that and could tell it hadn’t escaped Cayal’s attention either. “Why did you save me and Tiji, Cayal? Really?”
“Because I need you, Arkady,” he said.
“For what?”
“To be my envoy.”
It took a moment for her to get what he was driving at and then Arkady recalled where they were headed and she nodded in understanding. “You need me to speak to Brynden for you. Why?”
He hesitated and then shrugged, as if it made no difference to tell her the truth. “Because Lukys thinks he’s found a way to put an end to this, Arkady. But Brynden won’t speak to me.”
“You need Brynden’s help to die?”
Cayal nodded. “I need Brynden’s help to die.”