Qatal’s hands slapped over his face as soon as he stepped into the room—even before he understood what had horrified him. His terror of his sadistic master was so primal as to be a reflex, and he hid his unmasked face as he might have snatched his hand out of a fire.
On the surface Murchad’s dream seemed much like the sort he often had. He was naked and shame-faced in a public place, and aside from forgetting his pants, he knew he had done something terribly wrong and dreaded being discovered. Eirik was there, too: ever a sure sign of his imminent humiliation in life as well as dreams.
Now that she slept alone, Eithne dreamt of the dead. They shuffled up to meet her at the mirror of her sleep, cradling amber-colored fire in the cups of their eyes. Their fogging mouths blackened the silver. Their fingers slimed the glass.
“So,” Gwynn whispered eagerly once they had shivered and snuggled their way down between the chilly sheets. “Now we may talk!”
Old Belsar had preceded them all the way up the stairs, turning back every few steps to make certain they were coming, and then running a short space ahead to howl. He threw open doors with the hurled weight of his body, thumped against the legs of startled servants to clear the way, and at last pulled up sharply in the hall with an ear-splitting crescendo of barking that would have rivaled the royal herald himself, if ever it came to announcing a very large crowd of people who all were named Woo-woo-woo.
Lar glared until the smiles on all the upturned faces below him had begun to waver. In fact he had nothing to reproach these elves, but he had just spent an hour with Seven, and afterwards he was always a little surly. He did not know why. At least it kept them guessing.
Sigrid sat up hopefully at the sound of thumping in the hallway. Like Eirik’s old, faithful dog, her heart still leapt at any Eirik-like sound, in spite of a thousand thousand past disappointments.
And this sound was so very Eirik-like! Not because he was clumsy, she thought proudly, but because he was a tall and mighty man who could never learn the habit of stooping to the level of lesser beings, in spite of a thousand thousand past bumps to the head.
In the life of a young lord, there were few sounds more gratifying than pages of parchment cracking on the table as they were scooped together and definitively straightened and stacked. It was the sound that marked the end of tedium, whether of lessons, letter-writing, or business; and just as his belly grumbled at the first whiff of dinner, the sound made a young lord’s feet itch to run away.
Kraaia did not think her heart would ever stop pounding until whatever was about to happen had happened, or until she died of the strain.
All down the path Osh had been having what the Old Man would have called a bad feeling. The ladies had merely been fussing over the babies in the hall, but there was a sharpness in their clucking and cooing that he did not like. It reminded him of the chicken coop in the hours before their half-wild Scottish hens would turn suddenly—and seemingly without warning to anyone but him—against one of their number and peck her to death.
“Maybe I can throw in some tedious backstory and unnecessary details?”
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