in vain where her father and Klaus Luncani were concerned ... but at least he had saved young Vidra Gogosita! When the night watch returned she'd have them bring him to her small caravan (hers now, aye, and lonely at that), where she could give him the care he deserved.
Which was exactly what she did.
But most of the camp slept on, with the majority knowing nothing of the night's events; nor would they know until they got up to eat, tend their animals, take turn at watch. Unless something should happen before then, to break the routine.
And the stars turning in their endless wheel, dappling the clearing at the edge of the woods; and high in the mountains a lone wolf howling for his mistress moon, to rise up again and lend him her light for the hunting ...
As Maria Babeni prepared for bed behind a curtain, she heard Shaitan stirring, then his moan. Making fast her night clothes, she went to him where he had her father's narrow bed at the other end of the caravan. By the light of a wick burning in oil, she saw that his face was pale as ever, with long, dark hair swept back, the colour of a raven's wing, and lips very nearly as red as a girl's. He would be perhaps forty years old (his looks, at least); his proportions perfect, his brow high, intelligent, lordly. For a man, Shaitan was quite beautiful.
And she thought: Wherever he comes from, he is not Szgany.
Then Shaitan opened his eyes.
And now there could be no mistaking it: his eyes were red!
Maria gasped where she leaned over him. And quick as her thoughts - just exactly as quick - he grasped her arm, rose up half-way on an elbow ... then closed his eyes, released her and fell back. And knowing what she had seen, he said, 'My eyes ... my eyes! They hurt. There's blood in them. Someone struck me there ...'
'Bloodshot?' The word fell from her lips as if conjured, which it had been, half-way. His eyes were bloodshot? So very evenly?
For a moment, only for a moment, Maria had seen something other than a handsome man. Something hideous lurking behind the beauty. But... it could only be the strangeness of the situation: this man in her father's bed, and Maria alone with him in the night. Maria, who for all that she was nineteen years old, had known only her father's close company since the day of her mother's death. And the fact of a new bereavement slowly sinking in. The aftershock; the enormous hole inside of her; the loneliness. Of course she saw shadows where there were none, and phantoms to inhabit them.
He moaned again, tried to sit up, again opened his eyes - but kept them half-shuttered. She helped him, propped him up, said, 'How did ... how did he die? My father, Dezmir Babeni. He was the short one, bearded, laughing.'
Shaitan avoided the question. 'I didn't see it all,' he answered. 'I only heard their cries, and went to help. But ... your father?' And glancing around the caravan, as if noticing his whereabouts for the first time: 'Where am I?' His question was so innocent, childlike.
She sat on the edge of his bed and told him everything he desired to know. About the Szgany Hagi, the Szgany in general, herself, her situation - everything. And as his eyes opened more fully (but oh so slowly, so gradually), so Maria's small feelings of anxiety retreated, her ill-formed suspicions fell away, her will was subverted.
His voice was so low - like the rumble of a great cat, deceptively gentle but full of a fierce energy - and fluent despite its as yet alien use of her tongue. And behind every word a hint, a suggestion, an enticement. Shaitan beguiled, entranced, seduced; of course, for he was the great seducer. He seduced with his eyes, his tongue, the lure of his magnet personality, so unlike anything Maria had ever known before. And despite his strangeness, and the strangeness of her own innermost feelings, awakened now for the first time, she was drawn like a moth to the blood-red fire of his eyes.
She knew his fingers were at the fastenings of her night clothes, turning them back, laying her flesh bare; but as if to salve each burning brush of those fingers against her sensitized skin, Shaitan poured forth his balm of words. And his furnace heat enveloped her, spreading into every