The Palace of Impossible Dreams (3 page)

That had been a dark time of seasickness and guilt. Fortunately, the seasickness had faded.

Now only the guilt remained.

“You're looking very forlorn.”

Tiji turned from her perch in the bow to find Azquil, the chameleon who'd help kidnap her off the streets of Elvere (just as she was on the brink of saving Arkady Desean from being shipped off to the Tides-alone-knew-where as a slave), making his way forward.

The chameleon Crasii who'd kidnapped her proved to be a highly organised group of reptilian Crasii. Known among their own kind as the Retrievers, that's precisely what they did. They hunted down and retrieved the Lost Ones—children stolen from their hidden settlements, deep in the humid wetlands of Senestra, by hunters seeking the special skills of the chameleon Crasii. The more successful raiders stole the smallest children, they told Tiji, and then sold them to circuses and freak shows as curiosities.

And sometimes to spymasters like Declan Hawkes because of their camouflage abilities.

The Retrievers had sympathised with her when she'd told them about her life in Glaeba, appalled she had been used so foully, first by the circus where Declan had found her, and then by Declan Hawkes himself, whom they likened to an evil tyrant, bent on destroying her spirit with his overbearing control over her. At first she couldn't understand why. She'd thought her life quite good. Yes, she was a slave, but she'd had a master for
whom she would have cheerfully died, an interesting job, was cared for, fed, sheltered and never wanted for anything.

Azquil and his friends didn't think that was anything to get excited about.

Despite her protests, the Retrievers were convinced she'd been held against her will. She couldn't explain to them, especially Azquil, that her loyalty to Declan was motivated by affection not fear.

In fact, when she mentioned she loved Declan, even though she'd meant it in the most platonic sense of the word, the young reptile had looked at her with great concern and whispered, “Among our kind, such a relationship would be considered, well, more than a little unnatural. Perhaps it would be wise not to mention, to others, your . . . attraction . . . to this male of another species.”

“I'm not attracted to him.”

“You claim to love him.”

“I love seafood too, but that doesn't mean I want to settle down with a lobster.”

Azquil had laughed then and hugged her. “You are such a delight, Tiji. Most of the Lost Ones we retrieve are such tragically damaged souls. I've never met one with a sense of humour before.”

Tiji had smiled too, and felt her skin tones flickering, which was the chameleon equivalent of a blush. It wasn't his compliment that had made her feel that way, however; it was the fact that he hugged her.

Tiji was quite taken with the notion of being hugged by Azquil.

It wouldn't do to let him know that, however. She had no idea of the customs among her own people about that sort of thing. For all she knew, Azquil had a wife and a dozen younglings hidden away in the swamps and he was just being nice to another “tragically damaged soul” he'd rescued.

“I was just thinking,” she said, as Azquil settled in beside her, looking over the railing to the water below.

“You seem to do that a lot.”

“Are we not a thoughtful species?” Tiji found it strange that she had to ask that, but she knew nothing of her own people; not their traits, their likes and dislikes, their fears . . .

“Thoughtful, perhaps,” Azquil said. “But maybe not as lost in it as you seem to be. Is something troubling you?”

She nodded, seeing no point in lying. “I've abandoned my friends.”

“You talk of the humans who enslaved you, Tiji. They were never your friends.”

“I wasn't mistreated, Azquil.”

“The Trinity says that if you cage a bird and shower it with the best food and endless affection, it won't alter the fact that the bird cannot fly free.”

“I wasn't caged,” she said, not sure who the Trinity was, and not particularly interested in their homespun wisdom. “I had diplomatic papers, for pity's sake!”

Azquil smiled at her tolerantly. “Tiji, please, I am not trying to demonise your former slave-masters, who, by the sound of it, were better than average. It's just, well, freedom can take some getting used to. The Trinity says finding the courage to move on is the only thing that stops us looking back.”

“When I look back, all I can think of is seeing Lady Desean in that slave wagon, heading for the docks, on her way to the Tide-alone-knows-where. My job was to keep her safe, and I let her be sold into slavery.”

“You didn't
let
her do anything. This human woman you fret about so, is not your responsibility.” He leaned forward and took her hand. “Can you not see that, Tiji? Can you not see how conditioned you are to believe their self-serving lies? This woman was your master, and yet, when an ill befalls her, you somehow believe it was your fault.”

“I should have done something!” she insisted, pulling her hand away. This guilt wasn't going anywhere soon and she needed to explain—even to someone who patently didn't care about the fate of the Duchess of Lebec—why she felt responsible.

“What could you have done?”

“I . . . don't know.” And that was the rub. There was probably
nothing
she could have done to prevent Brynden taking his revenge on Cayal by selling the one person on Amyrantha the Immortal Prince seemed to care about into slavery.

“Tell me what happened.”

“Why?”

“Because this is bothering you so much you're barely eating. Perhaps, if I understand better . . .”

Tiji smiled, feeling her skin flicker in a multi-coloured blush. “Actually, me not eating has more to do with your cooking, Azquil, than my despair.”

“Even so,” he said, smiling, “it's eating you up. You will never be truly free until you have put this behind you.”

He was probably right, so Tiji took a deep breath and gave Azquil an edited version of what had happened since she'd left Glaeba. She told him of the death of the King and Queen of Glaeba; about how Arkady had been disinherited because her husband was implicated in their deaths. She told him of Arkady's friend, Chintara, the Imperator's Consort, who'd arranged to hide Arkady in the Torlenian desert at the Abbey of the Way of the Tide, without actually mentioning that Chintara was the immortal Kinta. Or that Kinta's lover, Brynden, the Lord of Reckoning, was holed up in the abbey, awaiting his chance to take Torlenia as his own, once the Tide returned.

She told them of running into Cayal, the Immortal Prince, although she didn't refer to him as that. She called him Kyle Lakesh, the name he'd been using when he was a condemned prisoner in Glaeba. She told Azquil how Kyle had saved them from a sandstorm and then escorted them to the abbey, where he was heading anyway to ask a favour of an old enemy.

And then she told him of the deal between Kyle and the monk at the abbey (neglecting to mention the monk was actually the immortal Brynden), resulting in Arkady being left with him as a hostage, while Kyle went to fetch another . . . friend . . .

And then she explained how she was supposed to meet up with Arkady in Elvere, only to discover the monk had betrayed Kyle and sold Arkady into slavery.

When she finished her tale, Azquil searched her face with concern. “And you somehow think this is your fault?”

“I should have followed Arkady. I know I probably couldn't have stopped Bryn . . . the monk, selling her into slavery, but I could have bought her out of it again. I had diplomatic papers on me and she's a member of one of Glaeba's most prominent families.”

“Then don't you think someone else will go looking for her?”

“Anybody else looking for Arkady at the moment is likely to want her arrested or dead,” Tiji predicted grimly.

“Then your duchess is probably safer where she is.”

“What do you mean,
safer
? She's a slave, Azquil! Who knows
what
they're doing to her.”

Azquil wasn't moved. He shook his head. “You claim you were well looked after as a slave. In fact, you almost resent having been granted your freedom, you're so adamant on that point. Why, then, do you assume this human woman's slavery will be any more onerous than you insist yours
was? Perhaps, like you, she will find a good master and gain the very protection she went into the deserts of Torlenia to seek.”

Tiji couldn't really answer that, and in the end she didn't have to, because at that moment a school of dolphins surfaced beside the
Liberator
's bow and began racing the little sloop across the waves. At the shout of delight from the Crasii at the helm, which alerted them to the dolphins' presence, everyone on board hurried to the side to watch them leaping out of the water, laughing delightedly at this good omen.

Despite herself, Tiji couldn't help but be enchanted by the smiling creatures leaping so joyfully across their bow. She was soon laughing so hard she could pretend, for a time at least, that Arkady's fate wasn't going to be as bad as she feared.

Declan Hawkes woke to the sound of rain on the shingles. He lay there for a time, in the darkness, listening to the downpour, the sound comforting and ordinary. It was just before dawn; his ability to sense such things now magnified beyond belief since surviving the fire that had made him immortal.

A few feet away, on the other pallet they'd crammed into the lean-to beside Maralyce's cabin to cater for this influx of unexpected visitors, Stellan Desean's deep even breathing indicated the former Duke of Lebec was still sound asleep. Declan guessed the others in the cabin would still be asleep too. Shalimar would be snoring softly on the pallet in front of the fire, while Nyah, the little princess Declan had rescued from Caelum, would be curled up in a ball beside Maralyce, still not used to having to share a bed with anybody.

It wasn't long, however, before other things intruded on Declan's peaceful contemplation. He could feel things now that he'd never felt before; knew things—like exactly what time it was—without knowing how. He could, if he concentrated, feel every single raindrop, sense the tension that held its shape, and its pain as it splattered on the ground. It was as if, along with immortality, he had acquired another sense; one that let him touch things on a hidden level not accessible to mortal men. The ability both fascinated and frightened him because he knew what it was.

He was touching the Tide.

Maralyce had tried to explain it to him, sensing his gift even before he knew about it, although she hedged around acknowledging his ability in so many words. She knew a lot—this immortal who'd turned out to be his great-grandmother—that she wasn't sharing with anybody. She knew things about Declan; things about his mother and things about his grandfather that Shalimar didn't know about himself, and she dribbled the information out like tidbits fed to a puppy one was patiently training to be a loyal and well-behaved companion.

She also knew—Declan was quite certain—the identity of his father, a mystery that had, until now, never bothered him overly much. His grandfather, Shalimar, was a foundling raised in a Lebec brothel, after all. His long dead grandmother was a whore and his mother was born there too. She had grown up in the house and inevitably worked there until she died
of consumption when Declan was still a small child. Given his mother's profession, the number of men who might have fathered him ran into the thousands and Declan had never really felt the need to sift through such a sordid list of names—had such a list existed—to find the culprit.

Until now.

Until the list had shrunk from hundreds of faceless strangers to a handful of immortals he could actually name.

It was, he had decided, the only explanation for his immortality. He had survived the fire in the prison tower because he wasn't
just
half-immortal like his grandfather, who was dying from the effects of being mortal and having the same ability to touch the Tide so recently awakened in Declan. No, he'd survived because in addition to the immortal blood he'd inherited from Shalimar through his mother, he'd inherited even more from his unknown father. That tiny fraction more—that difference between being half-immortal or five-eighths—meant he might have lived and eventually died in ignorance . . . or been exposed to the elemental forces that awakened his potential.

Fire. The essence of the Tide Star itself.

Worse, he could wield the Tide, could touch it on a level he was certain concerned even Maralyce. Assuming he'd inherited
that
ability from his father too, then his father was probably one of the Tide Lords.
That
narrowed down the candidates to just seven men: Tryan, Lukys, Kentravyon, Pellys, Brynden, Jaxyn and Cayal, the Immortal Prince.

Maralyce had told him some of this over the past few weeks. Most of it he'd worked out for himself, because she didn't seem all that inclined to help. There was no sense of family or comradeship among the immortals. You sank or swam on the Tide as you could. You found your own way, just as the others had.

It was common for pupils to turn on their masters, apparently. As far as Declan could tell, no immortal was going to teach another, potentially more powerful immortal, a single thing more than they absolutely had to.

Which left this new immortal with one burning question . . .

What was he going to do with the rest of his life? His endless,
endless
life . . .

Declan sat up abruptly, not yet ready to contemplate the future stretching before him. He would live for today, for now . . .

And let the future take care of itself.

A shadow moving across the yard caught his eye. He tossed the blanket
from his pallet over Desean, who needed protection from the cold far more than Declan did, and rose to his feet. He didn't need to wonder who owned the shadow. Now he was immortal, he could sense any other being in the vicinity linked to the Tide.