“Probably not,” she mumbled.

“Be patient with him. He’ll come around—he’s had a hard time.”

Karigan frowned. And she hadn’t? Who had born the consciousness of Mornhavon the Black within her? Who had been assaulted, stabbed, and manipulated? Why did Alton get to have excuses when it was his behavior that had been execrable? Abruptly she stood and strode out of the chamber.

“Karigan, wait!” Garth called after her.

She kept walking and did not stop till she reached her own chamber. She stepped inside and heaved a long breath. Without a hearth fire to warm her room, it was cool, which in turn helped to cool her temper.

To her surprise, she discovered a white cat sitting in the middle of her bed, staring at her with pale blue eyes.

“Hello,” Karigan said.

The cat stood and stretched, then leaped off her bed, darting past her legs through the doorway. Karigan peered into the corridor, but there was no sign of it.

“Strange,” she murmured. Either the cat was phenomenally quick or she was seeing ghosts again. Ghost kitties? That was all she needed.

She shrugged. The comings and goings of the castle’s mousers, supernatural or not, were the least of her worries. She would sit down and list all the things she would want along with her for her impending journey. It would help her keep her mind off both Alton and King Zachary.

KING ZACHARY’S TREASURE

The Huradeshian dancers wove circular patterns to the beat of drums and rattles, a strange stringed instrument whining in the background. Their dance was not dance as Estora and other Sacoridians knew it; a refined meeting of ladies and gentlemen moving in time to harmonic orchestral music. No, this was something quite different, their dance like a story unfolding in a foreign language that required interpretation. Sacoridians had no point of reference from which to understand it, and watching it proved disconcerting in its alienness, even uncomfortable.

The dancers wore animal masks decorated with feathers, antlers, and fur, some representing specific creatures, others without any semblance at all to the natural world. Many of the masks were nightmarish, sporting huge eyeballs and teeth, some slashed through with scarlet, like blood.

The male dancers wore little more than loincloths in addition to their masks. Even their feet were bare, leaving Estora to speculate whether or not they were cold on the stone floor. As they contorted their oiled bodies as though in the throes of some madness, the ritual tattoos of birds, serpents, and animals emblazoned across their chests and down their backs rippled to life across flexing muscles, and it occurred to Estora that maybe it was the tattoos that they were trying to make dance.

The ceaseless giggling and whispering of the ladies surrounding Estora was ignited by the sight of half-naked men. Evidently they were not put off by the masks or tattoos. Some of the matrons had acquired a high color in their cheeks and were fanning themselves.

Her mother, in contrast, and other ladies of Coutre, had gone stiff, disgusted by the exposure of bare flesh. Her mother, in fact, had grabbed the hand of Estora’s littlest sister and marched her out of the throne room the moment the Huradeshians began their dance, and gave her into the care of her nanny. Her mother then returned to her chair, disapproval etched into her features as if into stone, and sat. She remained, Estora knew, only because she was there at the king’s invitation and did not wish to offend him.

The eastern provinces tended to hold to a more conservative view of life, their values rather strict and restricting. Estora had heard her father and others mutter about the decadent standards of those in Sacor City, and she was sure that King Zachary only confirmed their notions by allowing the Huradeshians to perform in such a “depraved” manner before decent people. A glance at her father sitting next to her mother revealed a stony countenance of dismay. Meanwhile, non-Coutre members of the audience appeared unoffended by the show of flesh, and even seemed to be enjoying the spectacle.

The female dancers were attired more modestly, wearing rough woven dresses dyed with colors so dazzling they overwhelmed Estora’s eyes. They seemed to have taken on bird-type roles and fluttered about the male dancers, mirroring them, shadowing them, teasing them.

Tribal leader Yusha Lewend sat in a chair adjacent to Zachary’s throne. Lewend and the other men of importance from his tribe wore a melding of traditional Huradeshian costume and Sacoridian attire: velvet frock coats with fine stitching over multihued shirts, trousers that matched the frock coats, their feet shod only with sandals. The ensemble was topped off with cloths wound around their heads and tied in intricate knots. One of Zachary’s advisors, Colin Dovekey, explained that each of the knots was symbolic, but what they symbolized, he could not say.

“Barbarians,” muttered Estora’s cousin Richmont Spane, seated to her left.

“Handsome barbarians,” said Amarillene, another of Estora’s cousins, who could not stop ogling the dancers.

Richmont murmured something disparaging under his breath.

Lewend’s escort of Huradeshian warriors stood near the far wall, their arms crossed over bare, brawny chests. They wore bright scarlet head cloths and long, curved blades hung at their sides. Their clothing, or lack thereof, deeply contrasted with the black cloth and leather of the king’s Weapons, but astonishingly their watchful attitudes and stern expressions were nearly identical.

“Is it true,” Amarillene asked Richmont, “that Chief Lewend offered the king a gift of fifty slave girls?”

Richmont shook his head. “Only twenty.”