“Now,” commanded the king, “put aside your harp.”
Taudde looked at the king’s harsh, unreadable dragon’s face, and ran his thumb gently across the strings of his harp. The notes fell one by one into the room. Everyone hushed to hear them. The king’s mage shifted, but the king moved his hand in quiet rebuke and his mage stilled. Taudde touched the strings once more… and then set the harp aside on the carved table. He left it there, coming forward several steps to stand before Geriodde Nerenne ken Seriantes. “I thought you would bring down the silence,” he admitted.
“And I would have been in no way astonished if you had used your sorcery to fly for Kalches,” answered the king. “But I believed you would not strike at me, and I was actually confident that you would not strike at my son. And there I was not wrong.”
There was a long pause.
“You must understand, eminence,” Taudde said, “I cannot possibly serve you.”
“I don’t ask that of you.”
“And I will wish to return to Kalches before the solstice. Indeed, I must; I have a duty to my grandfather.”
The king inclined his head. “You will not depart without leave. But I shall give it.” Another pause fell, heavy as the weight of a mountain.
Taudde broke it. “I might speak for you to my grandfather. But if war should come—”
“If war comes, of course your loyalty must be wholly to your grandfather and to your country. Until such time, however, and while you are my guest, I will expect you to refrain from striking against my son. Or myself.”
“I will swear to that,” Taudde said cautiously. He winced inwardly, thinking what choice comments his grandfather would have, knowing Taudde had made such a pledge.
“I will trust you to hold to that oath.”
Taudde bowed his head, then lifted his gaze to meet the king’s eyes again. “I may study the magic of the sea? And I will be free to practice bardic sorcery?”
“To practice it and to teach it. I shall expect and require nothing less.”
Taudde bowed again, then turned at last to Prince Tepres. Their eyes met, and held. Taudde saw the dragon’s shadows move behind the prince’s dark eyes, and wondered what the prince saw in his own. He bowed once more, this time to the prince. “I think I may even owe you service,” he said quietly, lifting his gaze to look into the prince’s face.
Prince Tepres shook his head. “No, you have repaid that debt in full, Prince Chontas Taudde ser Omientes ken Lariodde. I hold you free of it.” The Seriantes prince sounded so like his father that Taudde blinked, but then he went on, his tone lighter, “I will have your service, but freely offered, not from the constraint of obligation. And I will return trustworthiness of my own, and no base coin. If you will believe it of a Seriantes.”
Taudde found he had very little doubt of it. Glancing around the room, he found wary distrust in the faces of the guards, cautious interest in the mage’s expression, grim wariness in Benne’s coarse face, and real pleasure in Leilis’s sea-gray eyes. Geriodde Nerenne ken Seriantes rested his chin on his hand, his mouth crooked in irony and satisfaction. His face was overlain, to Taudde’s sight, by the elegant, dangerous lines of the dragon’s face.
CHAPTER 18
After looking in the kitchen, the workroom, and both libraries, Nemienne finally found Taudde, as she ought to have expected, in the music room. He was seated at the room’s only table, a heavy, ornate piece with carved fishes spiraling around its legs and sea dragons inlaid in lapis and pearl head-to-tail around its edge. At the moment, leaves of paper were scattered across the table, each one covered with the complex spidery trails of music notation. Each leaf had been weighed down with a glass bell against the spring breeze that wandered in through the open window. In this house, a spring breeze coming through a window did not necessarily imply that it was actually spring, but, in fact, at the moment the window’s view matched Lonne’s true season.
The tall floor harp with the black-eyed dragon carved down its face stood beside Taudde’s chair, and the sound of a single, deep, pure note lingered in the room. The young sorcerer held an ivory plectrum in one hand and a writing quill in the other.
He glanced up as Nemienne leaned through the doorway. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s a new door in the hall,” Nemienne told him. “It’s made of pine and granite, and it opens onto high cliffs where there’s snow blowing in the wind. You can see a road curving around an angle of the cliffs near the door. I suppose it’s a road. It looks terribly steep.”