Eventually Harmin returned the flagon and cups, helped her to her feet, and they made their way back to the barge and the drowsy sailors. The sun was lipping the horizon, seeping orange-yellow through the dust motes hanging in the air, tinging Sheritra’s skin with a golden hue and becoming netted in her hair. She ascended the ramp, almost staggering to the cabin, and sank onto the pile of cushions with a gusty sigh. Her legs ached pleasantly and she was beginning to be hungry. Soon Harmin joined her and the craft slipped away from its mooring and turned to the north. Sheritra sighed again. I feel almost beautiful, she thought happily. I feel carefree and frivolous and full of laughter. She turned to Harmin, who was beating the dust off his kilt and staring ruefully at his filthy feet. “This has been wonderfull!” she said.
He agreed, half laughing, she knew, at her uncharacteristic enthusiasm, but she did not take offence. “Today we did things of my choosing,” he said. “Tomorrow I must attend to various duties at home, but the day after you may decide where we go.”
Her eyes widened. “You want to spend yet another day with me?”
“Don’t be foolish, Princess,” he admonished her, and she heard a mild disapproval in his voice. “If I did not want to see you again I would not have suggested it. Is there to be a return to the suspicious Sheritra of old?”
She felt chastened but not insulted. “No, Harmin,” she said meekly. “I do not believe that you are dissembling with me. Very well.” She folded her hands primly and stared thoughtfully at the sunset-drenched water lapping by. “I know,” she said finally. “We will take Father’s barge and Amek and Bakmut and float south past the city to the first secluded stretch of river, and we will spend the day swimming and catching frogs, and then we will eat sitting on the bank and then we will hunt duck in the marshes! Yes?”
He glanced down at his smudged kilt. “Alas no,” he said sadly. “I cannot swim, Highness. Like my mother, I am afraid of water. I do not mind being on it but no power on earth can coerce me into it.” His face came up and Sheritra saw it entirely sombre. “I would enjoy watching you swim, though, and the frogs and ducks, well, I can manage that.”
She reached out and stroked the warm, stick-straight hair. “I am sorry,” she whispered. “Then I will plan something else, a surprise, and you will not know where we are going until I come for you. Agreed?”
He nodded, seeming still in the grip of some cold thought, but then he smiled. “I have a confession to make to you, Sheritra,” Harmin said quietly. “I hope it will not offend you.”
Sheritra met the steady dark eyes regarding her own. She had forgotten her self-consciousness, forgotten to remember that the face he was scrutinizing so closely was mildly repugnant to most men and therefore a thing of shame. “You will not know until you try me,” she answered and then blushed, aware of the unintended provocativeness of the words, but he either ignored or genuinely did not notice their baser meaning. With a small gesture he took her hand, running his thumb gently over her open palm.
“When I came to beg your father to treat my mother, as I was leaving and was waiting for him, I heard you singing.”
Sheritra gave a low exclamation and tried to pull her fingers from his grasp, but he restrained her.
“No, do not recoil,” he went on. “I had never heard such a glorious sound. I had intended to go down to the watersteps but I lingered, unable, to move. Such sweetness filled me, Sheritra! I stood there until your father found me, wondering if the beauty of the singer’s face matched her tones.”
“Well now you know that they do not,” Sheritra said curtly. But in spite of her cutting words she searched his expression with a hidden desperation looking for a flicker of insincerity, the well-known, tiny falter of deceit. She did not find it. Harmin’s eyebrows descended in a frown.
“Why do you do yourself so much injustice?” he asked. “And how do you know what I regard as beautiful? I will have you know, foolish girl, that I had imagined this singer as a woman of fire and spirit. That, to me, is beauty, and you have both, do you not, under that diffident exterior?”
She looked at him wonderingly. Oh yes! she thought, yes. Fire and spirit I have, Harmin, but I am a long way from betraying myself to you, for I have too much …
“You have too much pride to show yourself to anyone but your family, don’t you?” Harmin smiled. “You fear that you will be repulsed, and your gifts belittled. Will you sing that song again for me now?”
“You ask a great deal of me!”