"Believe me, I know," Garin called to her. "This din is like nails in my head this morning."
She turned away from him.
His stomach wrenched yet more painfully. "What's wrong? You have a headache, too?"
Wren turned back and leaned over the set so quickly he feared she would tumble to the floor a dozen feet below, but she clung on as the gold in her eyes spun furiously. "No, I don't have a headache. And if you have to ask, you're an even bigger ass than I already knew!"
Garin stared at her, pain giving way before his astonishment. "Did I do something?"
For a moment, he thought she'd spit down on him, the way her mouth screwed up. Then with a furious huff, she pulled herself back up and out of sight.
"Don't mind her, my boy."
Garin whirled, heart thumping, the ache in his head returned in full. Falcon Sunstring stood behind him wearing a strained smile. He only saw you kiss his daughter, he tried to placate himself and found it only made his heart race faster.
The Court Bard was studying him, head cocked to one side, gold-green eyes narrowed despite his smile. "She always gets tense on performance days. Nerves and all that. But I'm sure you don't know anything about that, do you?"
"Not at all," Garin said weakly.
Falcon laughed like it was the funniest thing he'd heard all day. "Excellent! First, you play the pageboy; then, who knows what you'll move up to?"
Garin backed away, trying his best to wear an agreeable smile. "Let's just see if I survive this one."
The gold in his eyes seemed to stir. "Yes. Let's see."
Tal jerked around, weary mind sensitive to any movement in the small, stuffy room. But he breathed a sigh of relief when he saw it was merely Aelyn, attempting and failing to sit up in his bed.
"By the devils, I should be stronger," the mage groused, even his voice weak.
"After what that soulshade put you through? By all rights, you should be dead."
He made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a curse as he lay back down. "The pendant. I must continue the work. I'm too close to breaking it."
"The only thing you'll continue is your rest." Tal rose with a groan, knees clicking, back aching, old wound in his side throbbing. He rolled his head around, trying to relieve the soreness that had crept in overnight, though he knew it would do little good. "We're two old and ailing men now, aren't we?"
"Speak for yourself, human." Aelyn managed a small sneer. "I have two centuries yet to see — longer, if I can avoid any more of those abominations we faced last night."
"I'll be surprised if I have a year at this rate." Tal laughed, though even he found little humor in it. "Regardless, there's not a chance in any heaven or hell that you'll be able to finish the job. We're going to need to bring in a new master of the occult arts."
"Who? You?"
Tal rolled his shoulders. "I'm flattered you think so highly of me. But no, not me. The only other magician we can trust within easy reach."
Aelyn's scowl deepened. "I'd hardly say I trust the Warlock of Canturith. Hard to trust a man who abandons his brothers, isn't it?"
"If you can trust a man with as colorful of a past as me, you can trust him." Finishing his stretches, Tal made for the door. "Now, if you can survive for a few hours, I've been holding in a leak that won't stay any longer. That, and our warlock needs fetching."
"I'm sure I'll manage."
Tal flashed him one last mocking smile, then slipped from the room.
Soon after, he stood before the door to the east tower and knocked. A few minutes passed, then the door cracked open. A dark eye peered through the gap.
"You're still alive," Kaleras noted.
As usual, a tumult of conflicting emotions flooded him upon seeing the old warlock, but Tal hid them behind a crooked smile. His eyes wandered to the chain that kept the door from fully opening. "Expecting trouble?"
"Preventing it. Your protege and that minstrel girl have been too inquisitive for their own good." The warlock smiled thinly. "Time was when I'd have let them find out what it means to intrude upon a wizard. I must be growing soft in my old age."
"Soft as a stone, I'd wager."
Kaleras raised an eyebrow. "Much as I'd love to exchange pleasantries, I'm rather busy at the moment. Farewell."
As the warlock began to close the door, Tal jammed his boot in the gap. "Wait a moment. I need to ask something of you."
The warlock's one visible eye narrowed. "Fishing for more ways to insult me, I trust?"
"If asking a favor is an insult. But I think you'll be more than willing to grant me this."
"I'll be the judge of that."
Tal glanced up and down the hall. This far out on the periphery of the Coral Castle, the corridor was deserted, but he still spoke in a whisper. "Aelyn Cloudtouched has been attempting to crack open a pendant. A pendant belonging to a certain adversary we share."
"The Extinguished." He said it calmly as if he'd known all along. And perhaps he has. Maybe that's why he returned to Halenhol in the first place.
"If the elf had completed the trace," Tal said, "we'd have located the Soulstealer within the castle."
The warlock raised an eyebrow. "Would have?"
"He was attacked last night."
"Attacked?" Kaleras frowned. "I felt and heard nothing."
"I suspect that's because of the nature of the fiend. A soulshade, Aelyn called it."
"A soulshade?" The warlock's eye narrowed as it wandered to the floor. "No release of energy. Done skillfully, that might have escaped my attention."
Tal rolled his stiff shoulders. "It felt pretty damned skillful. But we managed to banish it in the end. All that to say, now we need you. Will you help?"
Kaleras met his gaze, then nodded sharply. "Give me a moment."
"Take as long as you need," Tal called softly after him as the warlock closed the door. "It's not as if all our souls are lined up for the gallows."
He waited for a moment, listening. But hearing no laugh and doubting that any would be forthcoming, he leaned against the wall and waited.
"You wound me, My Liege!" Mikael cried in high drama from the stage, his voice only slightly dampened by the curtains hanging between him and Garin. "You accuse me of disloyalty, of treachery — as if my heart wouldn't break at the barest hint of such filth!"
A few spare laughs echoed from beyond the stage, but they stirred nothing in Garin. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the frame. He'd heard every line before, a hundred times, a thousand — or near enough. His speaking line was only a couple pages away when he brought in the missive that overturned the scene, mistakenly exonerating the wheedling duke, whom Mikael was playing, of treachery and accusing the king's own queen — to great tragedy, of course. Have to give the audience what they came for, he mused. Can't name a play Kingmakers and Queenslayers and expect every monarch to escape alive.
He cracked open his eyes and observed Wren standing further back behind the stage, barely visible from where he leaned. After her outburst, she'd hardly spoken two words in his vicinity and refused to even look at him, aside from glares cast across the room when she thought he wasn't looking. What he had done to offend her, he still couldn't say. He'd tried to grope his way past the fog that had settled over his thoughts, like a fisherman casting his line out into a mist-wreathed lake even as his hook came up empty every time. It didn't help matters that his headache had only recently eased, and that he'd had to hold his tongue to keep from snapping at others all day.