Read Online Ivory Lyre by Shirley Rousseau Murphy - Free Book Online

brothels late at night, to listen to gossip.
He had found that if he dined with the king and lingered politely
afterward, he was soon released to spend the rest of the evening as
he chose.
    Seastrider would not let him go alone this
time. She took the shape of a great gray wolf with some difficulty,
not a speaking wolf but a wild, roving wolf such as she sensed in a
small band on the black mountain. Teb went among the city flanked
by a natural killer. Though they were watched and followed, no one
came close to him. He asked oblique questions, lounging at tables
dressed in his old, stained leathers, and drank too much mithnon,
for which he was sorry the next day. He learned little of real
interest and felt stifled and shamed by the sick townsfolk stinking
of drugs. The white powdered cadacus was easy to come by, and he
was stared at strangely when he refused it.
    No man would speak against the king, or
against the dark leaders from the north, though one old man said,
glancing around him with caution, “ They aren’t afraid of the
dark ones. They hide things from them. . . .”
But when Teb tried to learn who they were, the old
leather-faced man took panic and fled the tavern. Teb dared not
follow; too many eyes were watching.
    He learned nothing about the palace page,
Kiri, on these night visits. He saw little of her until the morning
she stood watching him from an alley that led off the main palace
courtyard.
    He had been talking with Prince Abisha. He
left him as quickly as he could to follow her, but she had
disappeared. He saw her again two days later as he left his
chambers, her face dull and without expression; but her dark eyes
were alive before she turned away quickly through a side door. The
door seemed a private one. He didn’t follow her. Then one afternoon
he saw her in the city, trading for candles at the shop he had been
watching.
    It was a tiny building made of rough boards
set against two walls of a stone ruin. It sold only candles, yet
its customers seemed many for such a place, and most of them strong
young people. Kiri went in carrying a string bag. He could see her
bartering a clay crock for candles. He stayed in the tavern across
the way, beside its small open window. When she came out, a mob of
roving boys no more than twelve were lounging around a small horse
corral attached to the tavern. They saw Kiri alone and, moving
quickly, were around her, striking at the heavy string bag with
sticks, and then at her legs and arms. Teb left through the window.
He gathered four of them by their dirty collars. The other three
fled up the muddy lane. Kiri stood gawking at him.
    She was not in her page’s tunic but in dirty
rags, her face smeared with dirt, her feet bare. The two crocks in
the string bag, those she had not traded, were broken. Thick globs
of golden honey ran down through the mesh to puddle in the muddy
street. Teb saw the knife in her hand and knew without her saying
that she had been loath to use it on such children. She saw him
looking at it and, with no false modesty, lifted her skirt and
slipped it into the sheath tied against her leg.
    “Children,” he said. “But they meant to hurt
you.”
    She nodded. “Thank you. I would have had to
hurt them.”
    “Yes.”
    She looked down at the string bag, then
emptied it into the gutter, retrieving a dozen stubby candles
first, staring with regret at the pieces of broken crock scattered
in the honey and mud. “Gram’s good crocks. She had them a long
time.”
    “Are you going back to the palace? I will
walk with you.”
    Above them, as they climbed, the rising
hills with their crowded houses and stone ruins were all in shadow.
The high ridge of the mountain above the black castle flared red
with the setting sun. The smell of a hundred suppers cooking mixed
with the smell of soggy animal pens.
    Teb said, “He does quite a business, that
candle-maker.”
    “He makes the best candles in Dacia.”
    Teb studied her. “It seems strange that