Prisoner of Haven

14

In a tone of amused patience, Loren said, “I’m still here, Usha.”

Usha looked up from her easel, then returned to work on the canvas she was scraping free of the last coat of pa’ressa. When she was finished, it would have the texture of an eggshell and be about the same shade of white, ready for her paints. She worked to have something to do with her hands while she considered Loren’s request that she paint a portrait of his daughter.

She’d heard nothing from him since the night he’d been called away from Steadfast by Sir Radulf. She’d wondered why but decided to let the matter be. She could see that Loren was attracted to her. That was enough, for she was not a foolish girl to fret after her first suitor—and he was no suitor.

He’d surprised her this morning, a simple knock on the door of her studio, announcing him. He’d hoped she wouldn’t mind his intrusion, and she’d said, “I like visitors, most especially when I’m doing the very uninteresting work of priming canvas.”

Usha scraped, and Loren left his post at the desk to open the window shutters wider. She liked the look of his strong, straight back as he leaned out one of the windows. He looked out at the river.

“You miss it,” she said.

“The ships and the sails filling with wind ... oh, yes. I miss that. I shipped aboard my father’s vessels for years before his death. I imagined I’d captain one of those fine ships until I was old and gray.”

“But that didn’t happen.”

“No. What happened is that soon after my father died, I married, then Tamara was born ...” He ran a hand up the side of his face and through his dark hair. “And then her mother died. I became landbound for Tamara’s sake. For my own, too, I suppose. Or I haven’t suffered, anyway. The business my father left me grew, and it needed me in the accounting house.”

Loren turned from the window, and as Usha watched him lean against the desk she wondered how true it was that he didn’t suffer the loss of the sea. His eyes were always looking out over the city walls, looking for the river and the way to the wide ocean.

“And so,” he said, as though picking up the thread of another conversation, “I’m still waiting.”

“Yes, you are.”

Usha had to admit that Loren had waited longer for a simple answer than she would have. But it wasn’t a simple answer, not really, and she still had none for him. She smiled behind the canvas. To his credit, Loren didn’t say that the matter wasn’t so serious as to deserve all this thought. By the look of him, he might be thinking so, but he didn’t say so.

Once more, Usha looked around her studio at the two series of sketches tacked to the east and west walls. She calculated the time she would need to paint the portraits she’d contracted. One was of a young man, promised to his ailing grandfather. The other was of a woman whose children wanted her to portray their mother exactly as they knew her—a queen among women. Usha shook her head as she did every time she looked at that set of sketches. The subject was the most unqueenly of women. She’d promised to deliver the portraits within the month. It was a lot of work, but possible, and the fees were generous. One fee alone was enough to pay her and Dez’s expenses for the past month and the next.

All that was true, but when she looked again at Loren, Usha realized that none of it had to do with her hesitation to give him an answer. She set down the scraping knife and came out from behind the easel.

“Loren, when you saw the portrait of your nephews, you were afraid Lorelia or Havelock would be harmed by it, yet here you are wanting to commission a portrait of Tamara. Aren’t you afraid the portrait I paint might work in your daughter’s life in some magical way?”

He pushed away from the desk and took her hand. Before she realized it, her fingers curled comfortably around his. “You asked me to trust that if you worked with a good will your magic would cause no harm.” He lifted her hand, the fingers speckled with flakes of pa’ressa. “I trust that this hand would never harm my child, mysterious Usha.”

“Mysterious?” She shook her head, withdrawing her hand and paying no attention to the flutter of excitement his touch had caused. “That’s an odd naming.”

“No, it isn’t. You are a mystery to me, Usha. I have known you for weeks, and I don’t really know anything about you.” He looked around her studio, at the easel, the buckets and pots for mixing paints, the baskets of brushes. He looked at the sketches, his eye lingering over the emerging details of a woman’s weathered, old face. “This is all I know about you. You are an artist of remarkable talent, and you live in Solace. For the rest, you might have drifted into Haven like a feather on the breeze.”

There was so much more he shouldn’t know about her—not the least dangerous her connection to an underground organization that ferried refugees out of Haven. Uneasy, Usha turned back to her easel.

“Who are you, Usha? Who are your people, your family?” He hesitated, but only for a moment. “Who are you to have magic when all of magic is fading from the world?”

Usha paid close attention to her work now, a little thread of fear in her heart.

His voice low, Loren said, “What of your husband, Usha Majere?”

Usha’s blade rasped over the pa’ressa. It took an effort not to use too much pressure. Her voice flat, she scraped carefully and said, “I didn’t drift on the breeze, Loren. Dez and I came here on business for her father’s inn.”

Loren cocked an eyebrow. He did not often mention Dez, and Usha never did. His attention could quickly become Sir Radulf’s ... or worse, Lady Mearah’s.

“And now my sister-in-law and I are trapped here. As for my people, they are ...”

She stopped, for how could she tell him the story of the infant raised by the Irda and deny the naming “mysterious?” What words could she find—what words had she ever been able to find?—to tell him of the haunting sadness of being a human child among people whose physical beauty surpassed any legend’s telling? How to tell the story of a child who’d known herself as desperately ugly among the most beautiful creatures in Krynn, who became a woman without a country, with no family but that of the husband who’d deserted her?

Of these things she’d hardly spoken to anyone. For all her life the pain had felt too raw.

“Usha, what of your husband?”

She scraped carefully, steady, even strokes. The blade whispered to the canvas.

Into that whisper, Loren said, “You ask for my trust, Usha, yet you won’t give me yours.”

It was a flat statement, but it felt like an accusation. Grimly, she admitted that given the reason she accepted—no, be honest, encouraged—his interest in her, the word “trust” was something to wince from. She didn’t.

“Loren, there is no mystery about my husband other than where he might be right now. Palin Majere is a man who has been pleased to step out of my life without so much as a fare-thee-well.”

Considering the matter closed, Usha returned to her canvas.

Surprise, like the breath of lightning, lifted the fine hair on her arms. Where she’d been working, an image, ghostly and indistinct, shimmered and became a figure she hadn’t painted, one she had not contemplated painting. But it was there, a trick of intuition.

“Come here,” she said, her mouth going dry as the image resolved itself.

Perhaps he heard the quiver in her voice, for Loren came around the easel at once.

“Do you see that cloaked man? That is Palin Majere, a mage who suffers the inability to trust his magic, as all mages do these days, but who shares nothing of his feelings with me, not a word of this thoughts. He journeys on errands he will not speak of. He returns in despair and he leaves in anger, and I don’t know where he goes or why. He’s been gone from me for a long time.”

Loren moved closer, his sleeve brushing against her arm. The image on the stark canvas faded. In moments it vanished as though it had never been. Loren drew an astonished breath.

Shaken, Usha said, “Our last parting was the bitterest of all. I don’t look to find my husband returned should I ever get out of Haven.”

“Usha,” he said. “How can you bear a loveless life?”

Usha gasped, a small sound, like flinching. The question, so gently, compassionately asked, called up a memory she’d been a long time trying to forget—that of the look in Palin’s eyes the last time she’d seen him. It used to be that she could look into her husband’s eyes and see the light of his love. It had burned brightly in youth, warmly in their middle years. But the last time she’d looked into Palin Majere’s eyes, with the echoes of recrimination, anger, and suspicion still hanging in the air between them, what she’d seen recalled a spent and guttered candle.

Loren touched her cheek, his gray eyes filled with both sorrow and longing. Again, her skin prickled, and again Usha thought of how it felt when lightning passed close by outside the window. In a bright moment of clarity, Usha knew she could accept the caress or turn from it.

She turned.

“I... I have a lot of work to do, Loren, if I’m to deliver two portraits when they’re promised.”

The words no sooner spoken, Usha regretted them, but Loren had stepped away from her and the moment was lost.

“Will you consider my commission, Usha?”

A business-like request, and there was no sign of wounding in his voice. Usha knew better.

“I will consider it.” She gave him a long, level look, then nodded gravely, though the gravity was belied by a smile. “Come tomorrow and we can talk again.”

How can you bear a loveless life?

Loren’s question haunted Usha. Unspoken in every conversation she had during the day, behind even the most mundane thought, it haunted her. She didn’t try to avoid it. In truth it seemed she’d been trying to avoid it long before she came to Haven. She’d begun to think that was why she’d come to Haven, to answer the question. She thought in Madoc’s strange metaphor now.

Perhaps I’ve come here to see what shape emerges next in the design, or perhaps I’ve come to make a new shape....

A new shape for her life? For love? Women did it. So did men. Marriage grew old. People grew apart. They no longer tried to mend what kept breaking, yet they did not dissolve the bonds of family. It was done that way among the highborn folk in Palanthas. Discreetly came lovers, and then people stood in different relationships to each other than before.

The problem occupied her mind, but Usha didn’t languish. She worked, preparing canvas for the two portraits she’d promised—mixing paints, scraping her palette, and selecting sketches of her subjects. She slipped into her work as she’d slip into a familiar river—easily, trusting the currents to take her where they willed, confident that if magic was one of those currents, it would take her where it must.

Loren’s question slipped away a little, hushed by work, and then eclipsed by something else—rumor, bright and deadly.

There is a secret path.

Not more than that was said, a tantalizing promise, a teasing hope. A secret path, a way out of Haven ... and no one mentioned it when there were knights around. It was hardly spoken aloud, but people whispered and they wondered. Some scoffed. Others said the wise man keeps his mouth shut about such things in case Sir Radulf should hear and decide he needs to execute someone for it.

Still, people did speak—those who hoped and those who wondered. They spoke very quietly of the family of dwarves down in the wharf district, the Stonestrike clan who had vanished one and all—mother and father, the last son, two daughters, and even the dog. They simply vanished. There one day. Gone the next.

Usha heard that story and others—all in whispers, hurried speculation between Bertie the cook’s boy and the girl from the chandler’s shop, and the murmuring of house maids as they traveled in little knots under the cold stares of the soldiers who strode along Haven’s streets and atop Haven’s walls. With increasing unease, Usha wondered whether Qui’thonas had been discovered.

One day, she heard about the secret path from Loren.

He had come back at her invitation, but neither spoke again of a portrait for Tamara. It had become Loren’s habit to arrive at her studio on the mornings he knew she’d be working. He made himself good company from the first day, a man who knew when to talk and when to be silent while she worked. On that first day, he’d come with a book from his library. As a young man, he’d been to see the great library in Palanthas and ever after longed to have a library of his own. Five shelves of bound books he owned now, and Usha exclaimed, “Wealth!” each time she saw a book.

This morning he’d come, book in hand and rumor on his lips, a tale of a secret path out of the city. “Some fond hope among the servants.” He’d looked troubled and said it was his own hope that none of his people came to believe the rumor. “There’s nothing but heartache and grief there.”

“Disappointments,” Usha said, agreeing.

The skin around his eyes tightened, and his lips became a hard, thin line. “Deaths. Sir Radulf has been talking about patrolling outside his perimeter.”

Usha frowned, not understanding. “Is he bringing in more soldiers?”

“No. More dragons to patrol from the sky. That should kill the rumors and any foolish idea of acting as though rumor were truth.”

Usha agreed, but what he said changed worry into dread that Aline’s efforts would soon be detected.

“Don’t worry about rumors,” Dez said. “Where are you hearing them, anyway?”

Usha shrugged. “Around. In the street, in the market.”

The night was dark, the sky hung with clouds. In the empty garden behind the Ivy, Usha sat on the stone wall and Dezra stretched out on the ground beside hedges overgrown by thick, fragrant wisteria. They’d not seen each other in nearly a week. Usha hadn’t heard even the quiet sound of Dez slipping into the inn at late hours.

“What’s your friend Loren Halgard say?”

Usha plucked a rose bush of its hard, red hips and piled them on the wall. Dezra knew about Loren’s morning visits. She wasn’t often at the inn these days, but when she was it was usually to be found on her way to bed. She and Loren had twice passed each other in the corridor outside Usha’s studio. She didn’t ask Usha about it, and Usha volunteered nothing more than that he was interested in having his daughter’s portrait painted. But Usha knew Dezra was wondering, for she’d asked her question carefully.

“He says something you want to know.”

Dez sat up, suddenly tense. “How would Loren Halgard know about... anything I’d like to know?”

“He doesn’t. But I do. Sir Radulf is calling in more dragons.”

“Not knights?”

“Dragons, Loren says. Radulf is afraid that people are going to start wanting to make the rumors true. The sky patrols are going to double. You have to be careful, Dez.”

Dez grunted. “We are.”

“Will you pull back for a while?”

“That’s up to Aline. Whatever she says, we’ll do. We’ll be all right.”

Usha looked around the weary garden, the roses browning from lack of rain, the herbs outside the kitchen door going to seed. It hadn’t rained in Haven in long weeks. It had doubtless been longer than that where the river had its headwaters, for where it slid past Haven, the White-rage had grown narrow, the verge on either side brown mud flats where stranded fish died and the air stank.

“I wish I had your confidence.”

Dez pitched a pebble over the wall. “I wish Qui’thonas had half the fine bolt holes out of the city everyone seems to think.”

This was more specific news about Qui’thonas than Usha had heard in a long while. Sweeping little piles of rose hips into the sluggish stream, Usha sat forward. “You don’t?”

“Not so many. Things change all the time. What’s here today might not be there tomorrow. You know those fine citizen patrols your friend Loren got for the city?”

“Yes. To give the people a hand in what’s happening.”

Wind kicked up, and the clouds began to shred. Through the rent in one the light of a moon only two days from dark shone down. Dezra’s face was a mask of shadow, her expression hidden.

“They do a pretty good job of freeing up knights and foot soldiers, too.”

“Dez, I don’t know—”

Dezra’s temper flashed. “You’re right, you don’t. You don’t know what it’s like outside this pretty inn and you don’t know how it is not to be able to trust anyone but those you go out into the night with. And not even all of them.”

That she meant Madoc was clear without having to be said. They continued to be uneasy allies, the two, and each for the sake of Aline. That might keep them safe as trust would, and it might not. But the decision was Aline’s to make, and she’d chosen to keep them both.

Dez sat up, and Usha saw her face, all hard lines. “It’s a dangerous place, this city. I—” She stopped and shook her head.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She laughed, but as though at herself. “I really want to get out of here. I want to see home again. I want to see my father and my sisters.” She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “I want to know if they’ve learned anything about Palin. He’s been gone a long time.”

“Yes, he has.” Usha’s voice sounded flat, even in her own ears. “I’m tired. The day started early, and it’s ending late.”

Dez got to her feet and dusted down her breeches. “Early again tomorrow?”

Usha tried to gauge the meaning of the question, to know whether it touched on Loren. Dezra’s expression gave away nothing.

“Yes. There’s a lot of work to do on the last portrait.”

Dez sat still, chewing her lower lip as she did when she was thinking. “What are you doing, Usha? With Halgard? What are you doing?”

“Will you find what I told you helpful?”

“You know I will.”

“That’s what I’m doing. Trying to help.”

Dez had a look on her face like she wanted to say, Only that? Nothing else? But in the end, she said nothing. Uneasy silence stretched between them, drawing out until Usha rose and shook out her skirt, sending rose hips skipping to the ground.

“That’s all I’m doing, Dez—listening to what Loren has to say and seeing if there’s anything that can help you. Will you let Aline know what I told you?”

Dez jerked her head, a nod of assent. They went indoors in silence, and at Dezra’s door Usha bade her good luck, in case she was going out with Qui’thonas.

“Be careful, Usha. All right? Be careful.”

It did not escape Usha that her sister-in-law’s warning had more than one meaning.

Dezra left the Ivy in the small hours, slipping out the bedroom window and dropping down to the grass and away. Her routes were secret, known only to her, and they changed every night. This night, with Usha’s warning still echoing in her mind, she took the quickest, safest way to Rose Hall. She slipped through shadows, crossing alleys and little streamlets. Madoc Diviner might know the pattern of each night’s patrol, and that was handy, but when she must make her own way Dez traveled nighttime Haven simply assuming she’d meet a knight around ever corner. It never failed her and within a very short time of leaving the inn she was jumping the low stone fence two blocks north of the corner where Rose Hall loomed. From there, she’d find very little cover until she came to the part of the street where trees grew thickly, right opposite Aline’s thorny rose garden.

She grinned, her blood warming to the dare, and crossed the distance—a no man’s land where trees didn’t arch and no shadow fell. There was no cover, and nothing for it but to make her way across as best she could. She listened but didn’t hear horses or voices. She waited until she saw Dunbrae come around the corner as he usually did, the knights be damned. The knights weren’t damned, and they’d come to know Dunbrae’s route well enough to consider him within bounds as long as they saw him keep to his regular walk.

The dwarf lifted his head when he came around the corner, like an old hound sniffing the air. He saw her and waved her on. Dez started into the street then stopped when she saw a shadow slipping down the alley between Rose Hall and the stable of the neighboring house. She’d killed a man of Sir Radulf’s there only a month before. This shadow-goer, though, was known to her. To Dunbrae as well, for the dwarf muttered a curse, the end of which Dez heard when she came up beside him. Halfway down the alley, Madoc Diviner saw them and didn’t miss a stride. He sauntered the rest of the way to the street as though it were noon and he was expected.

Dez glanced at Dunbrae. “Someone call him here?”

“Not that I know. Probably doesn’t matter if anyone did. He comes and goes at will—her will.”

Aline’s will.

Dez waited for more, though by the look of him, more might have unleashed a few hours of listening to the dwarf’s grumbling and snarling. She waved Madoc on and said, “I need to talk to you both, and Aline.”

“What about?” Madoc said, looking up the street and down to be sure it was still clear.

“We have to talk about Usha.”

Aline plumped the cushions on the bench against the west wall of the solar, the one that still held the day’s heat. Through the open window the scent of roses drifted. She sat and pulled her bare legs under her night robe, never blushing though it was clear she’d been awake and not awakened, that she had been waiting for Madoc, now sitting in the chair opposite her. Dunbrae’s brow was thunderous; lightning seemed to kindle in his eye. Madoc managed not to smile, and Dez thought it best to maintain the most neutral expression she could.

The lovers long separated, she thought, had become lovers in fact—and by the look of them, some time ago.

“What have you come to tell us about Usha?” Aline asked. “Is she well?”

“She’s fine,” Dez said, thinking of Loren Halgard and looking at the two lovers. “She’s fine, but she has news.”

The three listened closely to the warning Usha had passed on to Dez, and Aline’s face went still and pale.

“We have two teams outside the walls tonight, don’t we, Dunbrae?”

The dwarf nodded. “They’re checking old routes, the ones we used when we first started taking elves out of Qualinesti.”

Aline drew a breath and let it go slowly. “Do you know when these dragons are coming in, Dez?”

“No. Usha didn’t say. I don’t think Halgard knows.”

“Do you think he knows what he’s talking about?”

“I don’t think he’s puffing himself up to impress Usha.”

Eyebrows went up all around, discreetly.

“Well, he’s been underfoot since she did the portrait of his nephews. Anyway, I don’t think he’s the type.”

Madoc’s lips twitched. “Underfoot, is it?”

Dez glared.

Aline changed the subject. “I think you’re right, Dez. Halgard isn’t the kind of man who needs to embroider his stories. If Usha believes him, I do.” She turned to Dunbrae. “How quickly can you get word to the teams that are out?”

“I’ll make sure they hear before noon. They’re not too far away. I’ll either pull them in or send them someplace they can’t be spotted.”

“Do it now,” Aline said. “Come back when it’s safe.”

Dez rose to join him, but stopped when Aline gestured. “Dez, what’s Usha doing?”

At the door, Dunbrae stood to listen. Madoc kept still. His cocked grin vanished, the wicked gleam gone from his eye. Dez wanted to say that she didn’t know what Usha was doing or why she was doing it. She wanted to speak out against Halgard for the sheer satisfaction of making her complaint. Instead she shook her head.

“She’s passed along information she knew we’d need. She says she’ll do it again if she can, and she says she’ll keep up her association with Halgard as long as it looks like it will benefit Qui’thonas. We didn’t talk about this before. We’d said she’d keep clear. But I don’t know how you can pass this up, Aline.”

“I have no intention of passing up Usha’s offer,” Aline said. “I hope she’s careful, though. I hope... she knows what she’s doing.”

Aline thought of the danger, that much was clear. But Dez thought of something else, the look she saw in Usha’s eyes when she spoke of Loren Halgard—the look a woman gets when she’s feeling things she doesn’t dare think about. She glanced at Madoc, sitting quietly beside Aline. As she did, Aline’s hand moved to his, as though she weren’t even thinking about it.

Probably, she wasn’t, Dez thought with a pang, remembering that intimate familiarity, that way of touching a man and knowing he not only welcomed the touch, he’d been waiting for it.

“I hope she knows, too,” Dez said, and. she followed Dunbrae.

In the corridor outside the solar, Dunbrae said, “I hate the bastard.”

“I know,” Dez said, and she also knew he wasn’t talking about Loren Halgard. “But why?”

The stairs were unlighted. They went carefully down. “Because he doesn’t deserve her. He brought her here, turned her over to Lir Wrackham and left, just like he was taking her to market. Then he came back, moping and skulking around until she—” He shook his head. “He’ll leave her again. He’ll break her heart. And I’ll break his head. It’s comin’, Dez. I know it.”

Might be, Dez thought, and it might not be. For her part, she didn’t hate Madoc Diviner. She simply didn’t trust him.

Usha looked around the edge of her easel when Loren put aside the book he’d been reading, a small volume of elven poetry.

“You aren’t going to tell me the poems are dull, are you?”

“No, they aren’t dull.” He chuckled. “Some even make sense to me.”

It had surprised Usha to learn that he could read Qualinesti, until she learned that he could read Dwarvish and something of the language of the nomadic desert people who live outside of Tarsis. “People all over Krynn speak Common,” he’d said, “but they think in their own language. That’s how you want to read their poetry and hear their songs.”

“Usha, we haven’t talked about Tamara’s portrait.”

They hadn’t, and Usha had thought the matter forgotten—or perhaps that he’d regretted asking. Whatever the reason, he’d never brought up the subject after the day he first mentioned it. In truth, she’d come to hope the matter of the portrait was forgotten, for she’d never been able to think about it without the image of Tamara walking in the garden behind the Goat. She would not like to take that image to the easel and try to compose the kind of portrait a father would be pleased to have.

“Do you still want a portrait?”

“Of course,” he said, surprised. “Why would you think not?”

Usha moved so that her shadow slipped off the white canvas. She inspected the quality of the whiteness and decided she’d scraped enough. The canvas was ready for whatever would come to it.

She trod carefully in her reply. “You haven’t asked again, and I don’t think Tamara would have much time to sit for sketches. It seems Sir Radulf has most of her time.”

Loren sat very still, the book open on his knee. “Yes. They’re often together.” Then, as if he’d felt a shadow of judgment over her words, he said, “He courts her openly and properly in my home, Usha.”

Stung by his curtness, Usha almost told him that the knight courted Tamara outside Loren’s home as well. She caught herself, unwilling to explain what she’d seen at the Goat. In these days of rumor and unease, it would be foolish to remind him of her connection to Madoc.

Thinking of Tamara with the knight gave her the same kind of chill as thinking of a child reaching out to play with a viper.

Loren turned a page in the book, then another, not reading but occupying his hands, and Usha thought she’d gone so far down this road that she might as well go farther.

“It still surprises me, Loren, that the knight has your blessing.”

He turned another page, the sound a whisper. “My blessing? I don’t think that is the proper word. Sir Radulf does not have my objection.”

Usha tossed the scraping knife onto a table. Loren looked up at the clatter.

“You’re quibbling, Loren.” She came out from behind the easel, wiping flakes of pa’ressa from her hands, hard swipes down the sides of her skirt.

“I am not—”

“Then you’re rationalizing, if you like that word better. Whatever you call it, you’d best look hard at what’s going on.”

Loren’s eyes were like winter ice, gray and hard. With the careful motions of a man controlling himself, he set his book aside. “You’re right. I am rationalizing, and it isn’t worthy of the conversation. My feelings about this should be no surprise to you at this late date. I don’t like the man—gods know I don’t—but I do what I must. For Haven and for my daughter. Let it go.”

She could not. His stubbornness and his willingness to fool himself angered her. Her words tumbled out, long held in and urgent now.

“No matter how much you hope it, Loren, Sir Radulf isn’t going to be your daughter’s savior. Times are changing. You hear the rumors in the city as well as I do. Of course they are only that,” she said, covering what could have become a dangerous lapse. “Just rumors, but they do suggest that people aren’t as willing to tolerate the occupation as they used to be.”

To her surprise, he didn’t didn’t defend himself or his choice. He laughed.

“People are fools,” he snapped. “They run after every rumor of a way out they can find. Times aren’t changing, Usha. They have already changed. The sooner people realize it, the easier their lives will be.”

It sounded like something Sir Radulf might say. “And so you’ve changed your own survival strategy.”

Loren’s eyes grew even colder. “What do you mean?”

“You were willing to trade your influence to the occupation so that all could go easily and well. And now—” She stopped. His face grew pale, his eyes hard. The icy silence between them now was like a challenge and, dared, Usha spoke her heart. “Loren, you traded influence for survival, and now you’re trading your daughter.”

Loren’s head came up with a snap, his eyes flashed warning. “You know nothing about it, Usha.”

It was on her lips to demand why he thought that, and to tell him how much she really did know. She caught back the words, for if she once began to talk about what she’d seen at the Grinning Goat, every question he asked would lead relentlessly to the name Qui’thonas.

Tears pricked suddenly in Usha’s eyes. In her heart a bitter voice accused her of betraying Tamara in favor of Qui’thonas. She could say no more, stayed by loyalty and betrayal. Usha went back to her easel, the canvas a wall between them.

“Loren,” she said, her voice even and cool, “I think you’ll find more congenial conversation elsewhere today.”

He stood with the blue leather book in his hand, his thumb absently tracing the length of the spine. From behind the easel she could see his face only if she moved. She did not.

“No,” he said. “I’m not leaving like this, not in anger.”

“It isn’t your choice to stay.” The canvas felt brittle under her touch, it still smelled faintly of the priming coat. “Please leave.”

Silence spread out between them, and Usha became aware of sounds from the street below—the clop of horses, the rumble of a carriage wheel. A gull cried, and out the corner of her eye she saw it sailing, gray-winged against a small patch of blue sky.

Then, in a mild voice, like someone curious and musing, Loren said, “You accuse your husband of running away, Usha.”

Usha gasped, a sharp hiss, as though she’d been struck. “You have no right to speak of that.”

He ignored her. “You accuse him, but what are you doing now? You order me to leave, but it’s you who are running away.”

Usha flared in anger. “Go! Leave right now.”

But Loren was relentless, quiet and relentless. “You hide, Usha. You’re hiding now behind the canvas.”

Her face flushed, her blood rising in anger. “How dare you? You have no right to speak of Palin to me.” With two long strides, she left the easel and put herself eye to eye with him. “You don’t know a thing about it.”

Loren shook his head, a little rueful smile on his lips. “You’re right. I don’t know a thing about it—or about you. You veil yourself in mystery. Your glances, your sighs suggest regret for a life you won’t let go—or decide to hold onto.”

“Loren, I warn you. Stop it.”

What she warned him against, she didn’t know. Whatever it was, Loren didn’t seem to care. He came closer, so close that she could feel the warmth of his body. “Is he truly gone, Usha? This husband of yours. Is he gone?”

Usha wanted to back away from Loren and from what he was implying, from what he dared to ask. She lifted her chin, refusing to move even half a step.

“You know nothing about it. How dare you speak of it!”

He was implacable now, hunting for something, for an answer. “You say your husband is gone. I see no evidence of it.”

“You don’t know one thing—”

He stood so close to her now that she trembled—with anger, she thought, sheer fury that he would dare to speak of her marriage as though he knew even the smallest thing about it.

Loren shook his head, again the small, almost regretful smile. “I do know one thing, Usha.” Soft, he said, “I know I love you.”

Usha stood still, she heard only the rush of blood in her ears, the hammering of her heart as Loren put a hand on each shoulder, very gently.

She said, “Loren.”

He kissed her, first gently, then with sudden, frightening urgency. She could do nothing else but return the kiss, and she returned it fully.

His voice rough with emotion, he asked the question she’d never adequately answered. “Who are you, Usha?”

Over his shoulder Usha saw the easel, and the back of a white canvas waiting. Negative space. That’s what artists call the white space, that place where nothing is and something might be.

Her throat closing tight around a surge of anger and fear and uncertainty, Usha knew she’d been like negative space since she left Solace, a stark white canvas, waiting for color and shape and her own hand, her will to begin the work. She took Loren’s hand and brought him to the easel. In face of the emptiness of negative space, the woman whose life began in mysteries without answers took a bold step.

“I can tell you who I am not. I am not of the Irda, though they raised me. I am not a mage, though I have magic.” She laughed, the sound of it a little shaky, and she held her arms out from her sides. “I am not the young girl I seem to be. I am a mother of two grown children.”

Silence, for a breath of time.

“I am Palin Majere’s wife. Once I believed that his uncle, the dire mage Raistlin, was my father. Rumor said so, for a long time. Raistlin’s daughter they called me. But I’m not his child. I don’t know who my parents were. I’m told they are dead.”

He slipped an arm around her waist, and Usha realized with a sudden pang that it had been years since a man had held her so easily, so warmly. Her throat closed. It had been too many years since she’d felt the sweep of this kind of warmth rushing through her.

“I don’t know who I am, Loren. I never have.” She reached out and touched the white canvas, the glaze cool under her fingers, the texture only barely noticeable, like that of an egg’s smooth shell. “I’m that, I suppose. Negative space.”

When he bent to kiss her again, Usha shook her head, pushing him gently away.

“Go.”

“Usha, please—”

“Go, Loren,” she whispered. “Now.”

That whisper was a ragged sound. In her own ears it sounded more like a plea than a command. Still, he obeyed.

When he was gone, Usha sat in the chair he’d occupied all morning. She picked up the book of elven poetry he’d left behind and closed it. She sat with the book on her lap, keeping very still until she heard the faint sound of the inn’s door closing. Then she wept.