The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,113
a gasp.
"What about Gil?"
"Gil sent a message to me." She shook back her rumpled hair with fingers that trembled. "That's why I came here. She-she said you were dying."
"What?" Rudy pushed himself up to a sitting position. " Gil said that?"
"She sent me a note."
"Tonight?"
"Just now. Just..." She fell silent, her eyes staring, huge and frightened, into his. There was the sudden reflection of torchlight under the door, the tramp of boots in the hall.
"Oh, Christ." Rudy made a move to roll off the bed, to do something-anything -when the door was hurled open with a crash, and the glare of torches and the whiter light of glowstones stabbed into the dark heart of the room. Alde stumbled to her feet, her face blanched with terror, and hurried to meet the man who came striding out of that blaze of brightness.
Eldor did not so much as look at her. With terrible strength he hurled her aside, and the Guards who filled the doorway and crowded the hall beyond caught her and held her when she tried to run back to the King.
For a long instant, Rudy and Eldor faced each other in silence. Behind the eye slits of the featureless mask lay nothing but darkness, but Rudy could feel the King's bitter gaze resting on him in smoking hatred. Then Eldor stepped forward and knocked him to the floor with a backhand blow.
Rudy caught himself on one knee and forced himself to stay down in spite of the consuming wave of rage that went through him. It would help neither him nor Alde to return the blow. As he knelt there, his head ringing with the force of it, he looked at the Guards in the doorway and saw that the man who held Alde back, the man who stood foremost of them with a slight, scornful smile on his full lips, was Alwir.
He knew then who had sent Alde the note that had brought her here.
A shadow fell over him, and he looked up into the blackness behind the slits in the mask.
"You love an impatient woman, young man," Eldor said softly. "It would have been better had you waited until I was away from home."
There was a hypnotic quality to that featureless face that dried Rudy's voice in his throat. He stammered, "It's not- not how it looks."
The King laughed bitterly. "Is it ever?"
"Eldor!" Alde pulled desperately at her brother's grip. "It isn't his fault. I came to him. He told me to leave. Eldor, listen to me! I had to speak to him..."
He faced around on her, and she shrank from the demon glitter that she saw deep behind the mask-holes. He took a step toward her with that swaying gait that was so oddly terrifying, and she pressed back against Alwir's immovable, velvet bulk.
"If you went to him," Eldor whispered, his voice poison-soft, "he had more than time enough to send you away. I understand your whoring after him when you thought that I was dead, and perhaps even now, when you wish that I might be." He reached out to touch her face, and she flinched from the deformed hand.
There was a kind of amused satisfaction in his harsh voice. "I suppose that even in the dark, you would know that you shared the pillow with this face. But you are the Queen and the mother of my heir. There are ways of making sure of the paternity of my other heirs."
He loomed so close above her that his shadow seemed to cover her; her eyebrows stood out like streaks of ink against a face chalky with terror. But her voice was steady as she whispered, "Let me talk to you. Alone. Please, before you do anything."
The twisted fingers caressed her tousled hair, then her cheek, and this time she did not pull away. "There will be time," he replied, "for you to plead your case at leisure. As I said, I understand your desire for a young and well-favored lover, with time on his hands to entertain you. You are young, and the young bore easily. But I will not have all the Keep saying that the King is a cuckold, not even to oblige you, my sweetest of queens."
"It's not like that."
His voice hardened suddenly. "Then perhaps you can tell me what it is like when a woman bribes and suborns her way out of her room, to creep in darkness down to join her lover."