She used to relish long soaks. It had been one of the most enjoyable applications of her elemental power, a gentle fire beneath the tub to keep the water at a constant temperature, while she made elaborate, fanciful sculptures with water droplets in the air.
The prince set her down and dismissed his valet. The latter left with a bow and closed the door. Leaning against the wall, the prince pulled off his stockings. As he walked toward the amethyst tub, he yanked his shirt over his head.
He was lean and tightly sinewed. Her little bird heart thudded.
He glanced at her, his lips curved in not quite a smile. The next thing she knew, his shirt had flown through the air and landed on the cage, blocking her view toward the bathtub.
“Sorry, sweetheart. I am shy.”
She chirped indignantly. It was not as if she would have continued to watch him disrobe beyond a certain point.
“I know you would rather inspect my superlative form, but may I recommend admiring the tapestry behind you instead?” continued the prince. “It is a depiction of Hesperia the Magnificent destroying the Usurper’s stronghold. Rumpelstiltskin himself wove the tapestry. Do you know the nonmages have turned him into a villain in their tales? Poor fellow, they have him forcing some poor innocent to spin gold from straw.”
A splash of water, then a sigh as he settled himself in the tub.
She closed her eyes, the absurdity of the situation momentarily overwhelming her. She was a bird in a cage. The prince was stark naked not six feet from her. And the saintly Rumpelstiltskin, who had willed his life’s savings to help indigent children, slandered as a greedy boor.
He sighed again. “Why am I talking to you? You will not remember anything from your time spent in bird form.” He paused. “I have just answered my own question.
“Do you know what I did one time? I decided to record my time in bird form. In Morse code—a nonmage means of transmitting messages, with dots and dashes to represent letters. I had it all planned: I would use my beak to punch small holes in the paper to represent a dot, and make scratches with my claw for dashes.
“Except when I came to, the sheet of paper was in shreds. So much for that idea.” He was silent for a moment. “And you will draw a similar blank come tomorrow.”
Did this mean he was about to tell her something he wouldn’t normally? Her ears perked—figuratively, since her ears were now feather-covered holes in the sides of her head.
He laughed softly. “You know, you are almost enjoyable to talk to, when you do not say anything back.”
She willed the water in the tub to strike him in the face.
There was a loud splash. “Hey!” He sounded surprised, but not unpleasantly so. “Interesting. You are still capable of elemental powers. But stop—or I will feed you to the castle cats.”
She struck him again.
“All right, all right. I take it back. You are almost enjoyable to talk to, even when you do talk back.”
She wished he would stop speaking—she did not want this glimpse of the kind of rapport they could have had, had things been different.
Say more, thought a less sensible part of her.
He obliged. “You know what I should be worried about? Your inability to control air. Lightning is very dramatic, but armored chariots are built to withstand lightning strikes. You need to generate a cyclone to have a chance against them. It is no good when you cannot create a breeze to save your life.”
Her wings quivered. She was supposed to fight against those machines of death?
“I should be thinking about new and better ways to break through your block. But I cannot think at all when the Inquisitor is going to question me tonight.”
She’d never before heard fear in his voice. So he did experience it. Good. It was a sign of madness to not be afraid when one ought to be.
“The first time I met her face-to-face, I was eight.” He spoke quietly; she had to strain to hear. “My grandfather had died two months before, and my coronation was the next day.
“When you are born to the House of Elberon, you are trained to act serene and superior no matter what you feel. But the Inquisitor was—she has frightening eyes. I tried, and I could not make myself look at her. So as she spoke, I looked down at my cat.”
“Minos was actually my mother’s cat, as gentle and sweet as she. After she died, he went everywhere with me and slept in my bed at night.
“That day he was on my lap. I scratched his head and he purred. At some point he stopped purring. But it was not until the end of the audience, when the Inquisitor rose to take her leave, that I noticed he was—he was dead.”
The catch in his voice shot her through with a violent emotion she could not name.
“I wanted to cry. But because she was watching, I tossed Minos aside and said, the way my grandfather would, ‘One would think a cat of the House of Elberon would have more breeding than to die before an esteemed guest. My apologies.’
“I have only kept birds ever since—birds and reptiles are immune to a mind mage’s powers. And I have been terrified of the Inquisitor ever since.”
He fell silent.
She turned around and stared at the tapestry, willing herself to feel no sympathy for him.
And not succeeding.
CHAPTER
TITUS DROVE HIMSELF, ACCOMPANIED BY a phalanx of mounted guards. A team of four Pacific golden phoenixes pulled his chariot—the head of the House of Elberon being the only mage in the Domain entitled to use phoenixes as beasts of burden.
There was a possibility, thought Titus, that the edict had been set down so that the ruling prince or princess would not be distracted from the task of governing by the need to invent ever more ostentatious ways to show up at a Delamer gala.
Lady Callista’s spring gala was the worst. One year some idiots decided to arrive in a chariot drawn by hundreds of butterflies, each the size of a handspan. The butterflies began dropping of exhaustion as the chariot approached the landing platform, causing a nasty crash.
The year before that a group of guests came on turuls—giant Magyar falcons. Another set of lords and ladies brought along a pair of imported Chinese water dragons. As it turned out, turuls and Chinese water dragons despised each other with a white-hot passion. A messy spectacle had ensued.
Titus’s cavalcade approached the expedited airway, built two hundred years ago during the reign of Apollonia III to facilitate travel between the castle and the capital. Fairfax had been perched on his shoulder, her claws digging lightly into his overrobe. But now he took her in hand and tucked her inside his tunic. “I would hold you,” he said, “but I need both of my hands.”
Phoenixes were fractious animals and cared not the least for expedited airways.
“Brace yourself. It will be a hard slam,” he warned her. Probably unnecessarily. As a native of Delamer, she would have daily used the city’s vast network of expedited ways, both on the ground and in the air. And if not daily, certainly more than he, with his upbringing in the mountains.
The thrust came suddenly. He could not breathe. His lungs grew emptier and emptier. Just when he thought he could stand it no more, the chariot was spat out the other end of the airway.
The phoenixes cawed harshly. He yanked them under control, reached for Fairfax, and set her on his shoulder again.
“You all right?”
She was busy gawking at the city that had been her former home.
Delamer was one of the greatest mage metropolises on earth, a glittering spread of pink-marble palaces and stately gardens, from the heights of the Serpentine Hills to the edge of the cool blue sea, aglow in the last rays of sunset.