Page 126 of Play of Shadows
I started to answer, but was cut off by a quiet voice next to me. ‘He needs someone to be his Ajelaine,’ Shariza said. Her long dark curls fell over the shoulders of a gauzy indigo gown. ‘This is the nearest match I could find to the dress Roslyn wore that night. . .’
My eyes drank in the sight of her while I prayed her presence could light the magic to send me back to the dewy-wet grass outside Pierzi’s fortress a hundred years earlier. My breathing slowed as my senses shut out everything happening around me, all save for her. . .
Nothing happened.
‘Focus, brother,’ Beretto urged.
I shook my head. ‘Something’s wrong. . . It’s as if I’m trying to play a song on an instrument that’s not properly tuned. I can’t—’
Shariza looked at me as if she understood, although I couldn’t imagine how. ‘I think. . . I think I’m not meant to be a prop for you to gaze at, Damelas. Tell me of Ajelaine. What was she—?’ She stopped suddenly and gazed off into the distance for a moment.
‘No,’ she said then, ‘not Ajelaine. Tell me aboutRoslyn. What was she doing during the performance? What was going on in her head that night? Something that might have united her with Ajelaine in the past?’
‘Ajelaine andRoslyn?’ I was aghast. ‘You couldn’t find two people with less in common. Ajelaine was sitting outside Pierzi’s fortress, playing a lute and periodically stopping to write in a leather-bound book. She was waiting for Corbier, hoping for just a brief moment with him, a single kiss to—Oh, saints, that’s it!’
‘What is?’ Beretto asked.
‘Roslyn.She was obsessed with this idea that we should rile up the audience that night by going off-script. She wanted to add a stonking great kiss to our scene.’
The big man grinned. ‘Ah, a magical kiss! I suppose that makes for a more suitable miracle than Abastrini parading his genitals for the audience.’
‘No,’ Shariza said firmly, ‘we mustn’t kiss.’
I was taken aback by her vehemence. What had made her suddenly so averse to kissing me that she’d risk losing everything to the Iron Orchids?
Shariza took my hands in hers. ‘It wasn’t the kiss that united Ajelaine and Roslyn that night.’ Her dark eyes rose to meet mine, enthralling me, binding me to her. ‘It was thelonging.’
Of course, I thought,the feeling, not the act.
‘I can bethatAjelaine,’ Shariza said, smiling, and with that smile, ensorcelling me all over again. ‘I know something of what it is to crave the kiss of a man I know I cannot have.’
This was the closest either of us had come to giving voice to our feelings – that strange, unexpected and undeserved desire to be loved by someone so different, yet so. . . familiar. I tried to pull her closer, to say her name, but the sweltering, stinking air around me had begun to cool. My cheeks and hair were dampened by the mist as the world quieted, and the name I spoke was. . .
‘. . . Ajelaine.’
Chapter 64
Ajelaine
She was waiting for me outside the fortress, as she’d been the first time I’d slipped into this strange world of memories and spirits. A woman of twenty-six now, her hair had darkened since our walk in the orchard, blonder strands giving way to a deeper chestnut shade all the more enticing to Corbier’s eyes.
My entire city is under siege, I reminded him.Do you suppose we could focus your recollections on something other than her looks?
Still the torn soul trapped in those brief seconds after he’d fled her bedroom, with the spray of her blood on his cheeks and the desperate need to avenge her murder a drumbeat in his heart, he relented.
You are right, Player.Ajelaine is dead, and if history is correct, then retribution was denied me. My vengeance is irrelevant now. Only her legacy matters.
Pierzi’s two lieutenants loomed over her, the disdain and mockery more transparent now than when first I’d come to this place. Their words struck a far more troubling chord this time.
‘. . . for even the loveliest pertine bows before the Court of Flowers.’
The taller of the two men gave a curtsey so shallow it wasan insult, serving only as a means for him to flaunt the ornate iron emblem at his collar. He pinched it between thumb and forefinger, smirking, as he and his confederate walked away from her.
I very badly wanted to chase after them and wipe the grins from their faces with the tip of Corbier’s rapier, but this time, it was Corbier who restrained me.
A sword makes a poor weapon with which to fight the tide of history. You taught me that, Player. Truth must be our blade now. Truth, and love.
‘Raphan?’ Ajelaine asked, seeing me step out of the shadows. She set her lute aside and rose from the carved oak bench, glancing nervously back the way the two men had come. ‘You should have waited until—’
