THE SEA HAG(80)

Dennis put his left arm around the princess. "King Conall," he said formally. "I guarded your herds. I slew Rakastava to save your daughter. Now I ask you for your daughter's hand, for I love her."

He looked at Aria, nestled against his side. "If she will have me," he added.

Aria put her arms around Dennis' neck again and kissed him in the sight of all.

Gannon flung down the hilt of his weapon and ran toward a door. The remainder of the honor guard had been seated nearby. With Dalquin in the lead, half a dozen of them grabbed their one-time champion.

"Kill him!" somebody called. A thousand throats echoed the demand.

Dennis raised his sword so that its point seemed to threaten the high ceiling. "Wait!" he cried; and as the hall quieted, "Wait!" again.

"You don't need Gannon here," he said to the faces watching him fervently. "But you don't need his blood on your hands either."

He was like all the rest of you, Dennis thought but did not say. Only more so.

"Put him in the jungle. He'll survive, if he wants to. And maybe it'll even make a man of him."

As it did me.

King Conall looked Dennis, then at Gannon. He nodded toward the guards. "Yes," he said. "Do so."

The guards hustled Gannon toward an archway, the corridor by which Dennis had first been led into the assembly hall. Gannon began to kick, but they lifted him off the ground with many hands. Then he began to scream, but the sound was drunk by the vast hall and the loud joy of all those around him.

Dennis sheathed his sword so that he could put both arms around Aria. Citizens were crowding the couple on three sides—but not the fourth, where Chester perched high on his limbs.

"Are you smiling, my friend?" Dennis said to the robot's featureless carapace.

"There is no blame in using the portion of happiness fate gives you, Dennis," quoted Chester approvingly.

And the crowd cheered its enthusiastic approval of the royal wedding.





CHAPTER 52




Gannon was in shadow.

Something called out in the jungle. The sun was still high, but it was behind the massive pile of Rakastava.

Gannon looked over his shoulder. There was no help in dark vegetation and vines with spikes like spearpoints. He battered his fists at the slick surface of the city in which he had been born and raised, the city that had been his whole life.

He pounded while he had the strength in his arms, and he screamed as long as his voice lasted. The shadows lengthened. The sky grew black.

And the jungle behind Gannon began to whisper with more than the sound of wind rustling the leaves.





CHAPTER 53




The walls of the bedchamber counterfeited morning light. Dennis stretched luxuriously as Aria nuzzled his chest.

As his wife nuzzled him.

"I'd like to go see the, the pasture, this morning," he said.

Aria lifted her head and pouted, mostly as a joke. "Two days and tired of me already?" she said.

Dennis touched the white line on her upper lip, the only remaining sign of the cut she had received there. "Never, my love," he said. "Never."

She didn't understand the significance of his touching her lip, but no one could doubt the sincerity in Dennis' voice.

"Anyway," Dennis went on, "I thought you might come with me. There are some things I'd like to show you."

"Outside..." Aria said in a tone that Dennis couldn't read.

"It, ah..." Dennis said. "I suppose it could be dangerous. It could be dangerous."

"More dangerous than beneath the city, with Rakastava?"

"No, not—" he started to reply, but she smothered his seriousness with laughter and a kiss.

After a time, they both got dressed.





CHAPTER 54




One of the cows mooed in approval as Dennis led Aria and Chester into the clearing. The princess gasped and shaded her face with her hands.

"Are you all right?" Dennis asked quickly.

"Yes, I'm..." she said. "It's just that I never saw this before. The sun, directly."

Then she added, "Dennis? Could you be happy, living in Rakastava?"

"Do not let your tongue differ from your heart when you are asked for counsel, Dennis," Chester said.

Dennis laughed without humor.

"Love," he said, "I can be adequately happy wherever you are. But if that means Rakastava, I will be happy despite the city."

"Then perhaps we should go back to where you came from, Dennis," Aria said coolly. She put her arm around him. "Would that be better?"

"I don't know," he admitted. "Let's—look at something in Malbawn's hut. I came here to do that anyway."

Scavengers and decay had scoured Malbawn's corpse into a heap of chitinous plates, yellowish and translucent. Aria paused by the hut's opening and stared at them.