one night and drove me back to the Schloss. Rhion was still laid up—I don’t think he’d have told me some of the things he did if he hadn’t been doped up and hurting and scared. He...” She paused, and Saltwood felt, rather than saw, the change in the way she sat, the lessening of the reflex tension of her muscles as she forgot where she was, remembering only the darkened room, the pudgy hand desperately gripping her own.
Then she shrugged, rearranging the first thoughts to cut less close to her own heart. “He talked to me then about his woman and his kids back in Oz or wherever the hell he thinks he comes from. About his old master who was supposed to come here with him but died or disappeared on the way through this Void thing he talks about, and about how his parents wrote down in the family Bible that he’d died the day he told them he was going to be a wizard. The whole setup—he claims his woman’s father is a Duke or something—makes me think he might be a Hungarian or Austrian Jew from one of the old university towns, except that, when I met him, he claimed he didn’t even know what a Jew was. A Freudian would say that’s significant in itself.
“But you know,” she went on softly, “he didn’t have to do what he did. He didn’t have to give von Rath that Spiracle in the first place, or let them make him teach them how to use the device it’s a control to, if there is one. I mean, Papa and I had no claim on him. He’d only met me about three weeks before, only broke Papa out of the camp because of some magic ceremony he claimed he needed to work down in the cellars under Schloss Torweg.”
“Then he isn’t...” Tom began, with elaborate casualness, swinging the car to the right and heading down the two-lane strip of asphalt through the dark, tree-sprinkled fields that would eventually lead to the old Prussian capital. “You and he aren’t...”
He hadn’t thought so, watching them together—the physical stiffness, so at odds with the sensuality of her face, was noticeable with him, as well. But though the affection between them seemed casual, it clearly ran very deep. His impression was that she regarded the Professor as an uncle or an older brother... only not quite. And in the panic confusion of flight from Berlin, of the bombing and getting through the blockades and out into the open darkness of the countryside, there had been no time for unnecessary words, no way to tell for sure. He felt more relief than he’d have cared to admit when she laughed, startled and tickled, and said “RHION? Oh, Christ...” and laughed again.
Good, he thought.
“But you know,” she added more quietly, switching to English with a quick glance at her father, who was deep in trying to calculate, with a pencil stub on the back of a ration book, some elaborate kamea regarding the superimposition of the number keys of all of their names over the Seal of Mars, “if I ever do get interested in a man again, it’ll be because...” Then she shied away from that train of thought, too. “Well... Rhion was the first man I’ve met in—oh, years—who wasn’t a bastard.” She spoke a little defensively, seeming to retreat in on herself again, and Tom felt a flash of anger at them, whoever they were: the man or men who had put that wariness in his dark-haired girl’s eyes.
She’d been a hostage, a prisoner of the SS—the way she watched him, the way she’d pulled away from the touch of his hand, the grim set to her mouth as she’d gotten back in the car, might, he had thought, have stemmed from that. But now he wasn’t so sure. Very carefully, he said, “Be that as it may—whatever happens, I promise you I’m not a bastard.”
Their eyes met, and held; then Tom flicked his gaze back to the dark road unwinding before them. The sinking glow of the fires in Berlin was to their left now and farther off in the darkness. Overhead, the gypsy moon did a fan dance with the clouds.
“Thank you,” Sara said softly, and after that was silent for some time.
It was a hundred and sixty miles to Kegenwald, eastward toward the Polish border. Beyond that, according to Sara, it was another fifteen or twenty to Schloss