Winter's Heart (The Wheel of Time #9)

Winter's Heart (The Wheel of Time #9) Page 121

“Well?” Bayle demanded. “What about that?”

Wide and solid and strong, just the sort of man she had always favored, he was standing beside the bed in his shirtsleeves, a frown on his face and his fists on his hips. Not a pose a so’jhin should take with his mistress. With a sigh, she let her hands drop onto her stomach. Bayle just would not learn how a so’jhin was supposed to behave. He took it all as a joke, or play, as though none of it were real. Sometimes he even said he wanted to be her Voice, no matter how often she explained she was not of the High Blood. Once, she had had him beaten, and afterwards he had refused to sleep in the same bed with her until she apologized. Apologized!

Hastily, she ran through what she had half-heard of his growling. Yes; still the same arguments after all this time. Nothing new. Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, she sat up and ticked points off on her fingers. She had done it so often, she could deliver them by rote. “Had you tried to run, the damane on the other ship would have snapped your masts like twigs. It was not a chance stop, Bayle, and you know it; their first hail was a demand to know whether you were Seahawk. By bringing you into the wind and announcing we were on our way to Cantorin with a gift for the Empress, may she live forever, I allayed their suspicions. Anything else — anything! — and we would all have been chained in the hold and sold as soon as we reached Cantorin. I doubt we’d have been lucky enough to face the headsman instead.” She held up her thumb. “And last, if you had kept calm as I told you to, you would not have gone to the block, either. You cost me a great deal!” Several other women in Cantorin apparently had her same taste in men. They had pushed the bidding up extravagantly.

Stubborn man that he was, he scowled and scrubbed at his short beard irritably. “I do still say we could have dropped it all over the side,” he muttered. “That Seeker had no proof I did have it aboard.”

“Seekers do no need proof,” she said, mocking his accent. “Seekers do find proof, and the finding do be painful.” If he was reduced to bringing up what even he had conceded long since, maybe she was finally nearing the end of the whole thing. “In any case, Bayle, you have already admitted there is no harm in Suroth having that collar and bracelets. They can’t be put on him unless someone gets close enough, and I’ve heard nothing that suggests anyone has or will.” She refrained from adding that it would not matter if someone did. Bayle was not really familiar with even the versions of the Prophecies they had on this side of the World Sea, but he was adamant that none mentioned the necessity of the Dragon Reborn kneeling to the Crystal Throne. It might prove necessary for him to be fitted with this male a’dam, but Bayle would never see it. “What is done is done, Bayle. If the Light shines on us, we will live long in the service of the Empire. Now, you know this city, so you say. What is there interesting to see or do?”

“There always do be festivals of some sort,” he said slowly, grudgingly. He never liked giving up his argument, no matter how futile. “Some may be to your taste. Some not, I do think. You do be . . . picky.” What did he mean by that? Suddenly he grinned. “We could find a Wise Woman. They do hear marriage vows, here.” He ran his fingers across the shaven side of his scalp, rolling his eyes upward as though trying to see it. “Of course, if I do recall the lecture you did give me on the ‘rights and privileges’ of my position, so’jhin can only marry other so’jhin, so you do need to free me, first. Fortune prick me, you do no have a foot of those promised estates, yet. I can take up my old trade and give you an estate soon enough.”

Her mouth fell open. This was not something old. This was very, very new. She had always prided herself on being level-headed. She had risen to command by skill and daring, a veteran of sea battles and storms and shipwreck. And right that moment she felt like a first-voyage fingerling looking down from the main peak, panicked and dizzy, with the whole world spinning around her and a seemingly inevitable fall to the sea filling her eyes.

“It is not so simple,” she said, surging to her feet so he was forced to step back. Light’s truth, she hated sounding breathless! “Manumission requires me to provide for your livelihood as a free man, to see you can support yourself.” Light! Words flooding out in a rush were as bad as being breathless. She imagined herself on a deck. It helped, a little. “In your case, that means buying a ship, I suppose,” she said, sounding unruffled, at least, “and as you reminded me, I have no estates yet. Besides, I could not allow you to return to smuggling, and you know it.” That much was simple truth, and the rest not really a lie. Her years at sea had been profitable, and if the gold she could call on was small gleanings to one of the Blood, she could buy a ship, so long as he did not want a greatship, but she had not actually denied being able to afford one.

He spread his arms, another thing he was not supposed to do, and after a moment she laid her cheek against his broad shoulder and let him enfold her. “It will be well, lass,” he murmured gently. “Somehow, it will be well.”

“You must not call me ‘lass,’ Bayle,” she chided, staring beyond his shoulder toward the fireplace. It would not seem to come into focus. Before leaving Tanchico she had decided to marry him, one of those lightning decisions that had made her reputation. Smuggler he might be, but she could have put a stop to that, and he was steadfast, strong and intelligent, a seafarer. That last had always been a necessity, to her. Only, she had not known his customs. Some places in the Empire, men did the asking, and were actually offended if a woman even suggested. She knew nothing of enticing a man, either. Her few lovers had all been men of equal rank, men she could approach openly and bid farewell when one or the other of them was ordered to another ship or promoted. And now he was so’jhin. There was nothing wrong with bedding your own so’jhin, of course, so long as you did not flaunt the fact. He would make up a pallet at the foot of the bed as usual, even if he never slept on it. But freeing a so’jhin, casting him off from the rights and privileges Bayle sneered at, was the height of cruelty. No, she was lying by avoidance again, and worse, lying to herself. She wanted wholeheartedly to marry the man Bayle Domon. She was bitterly unsure she could bring herself to marry manumitted property.

“As my Lady do command, so shall it be,” he said in a blithe