He laughed. “I wouldn’t know how to keep secrets from you.”
She caught sight of Daimon, then, ahead of them in the line. Wherever he had
come from, he hadn’t yet had time to change into the formal black leathers
and quilted jacket with the golden wyvern opening its wings across his
shoulders, and depicted on the crest over his heart. He balanced on his bike
with one boot on the ground, listening to the giant Sir Bayley Reeve, who
stood athwart his own motorcycle five times the size of Daimon’s.
“Gareth,” Perdita said, coming to an abrupt decision, “can you drive this?
”
He looked pained, as though she had asked him to pedal a tricycle to the
Assembly. “Must I?”
“I’m going to be so late . . .” She leaned over to kiss him before she
opened the door. “Just leave it anywhere near the garages, with the keys in
it. Thank you, Sweet.”
She jogged down the drive and slid onto the bike behind Daimon, interrupting
Bayley Reeve’s move-by-move rendition of a wrestling match he’d won.
“Sorry,” Perdita told him. “I’m desperate. Daimon, can you cut through the
garden to the back courtyard?”
She felt his silent grunt of amusement. “You reek of beer,” he commented.
“Please?”
“Well. Possibly the guards will recognize us and we won’t get shot. But I
will be viewed askance for days from every conceivable direction.”
“Just hurry, and maybe no one will notice.”
He was already veering out of line. As they sped on the verge along the drive
to the nearest paved path through the immense garden, Perdita took a firmer
hold on him and aimed for his ear.
“Do I know her? This woman you’re in love with?”
The bike careened abruptly, nearly sending them into a fishpond. Daimon
righted them, curved around the water, then made his own path between the
hedgerow and the herbaceous border, to the consternation of the gardeners
deadheading the roses between them.
“Sorry!” Perdita called to them. “Daimon—”
“I’m not in love.” The bike sped from grass to gravel as it met the drive
again, this time edging between taxis that had already deposited their
passengers at the king’s front door, and were moving more quickly. Half a
dozen palace guards spilled down the marble steps after the racing bike.
Perdita turned quickly to call to them.
“Sorry! I’m late! So you are seeing someone.”
“I didn’t say that.” He churned up gravel turning along the side of the
west wing of the palace, then veered again, heading for an arch in a walled
courtyard. Perdita, clinging tightly, wondered if he was trying to throw her
off the bike.
“Do I know her?”
She felt him draw breath, let it go. “No.”
“Why not?” He didn’t answer. “We’ve always told each other who our latest
passions are. Why is this one such a secret?”
At the arch, guards raised their weapons and shouted, then recognized the pair
as they skidded through into the broad, quiet yard behind the palace. Daimon
brought the bike to a halt at the stairway to the goddess’s sanctum.
He said, as Perdita got off the bike, “Because I’m obsessed. Because I don’
t know, in a clearer light, exactly what I’d see.”
She stood still, gazing at him with sudden, rabid curiosity. The expression in
his eyes, above an implacable smile, warned her away.
“Thanks for the ride,” she said, and ran for the stairs.
The stairway curled up the inner walls of a lovely white-marble tower inlaid
with a winding filigree of blue and green marble. A briny wind off the bay
whistled through the filigree. Perdita pushed open the upper door and stepped
into another world, this one entirely Calluna’s.
It was the antechamber to the sanctum, where water piped from Calluna’s cave
filled richly decorated pools for giving birth, for meditation, for healing.
The antechamber had no windows, only blue and green walls down which Calluna’
s water slid endlessly, silently, reflecting fire from candles of every size
and shape lined along the walls on river-smoothed stones brought up from the
goddess’s cave. A carved replica of Calluna’s earliest face hung above the
closed doors of the Inner Sanctum, watching her waters fall.
As Perdita hurried across the wide antechamber toward the line of private
rooms where the mystes and the acolytes kept their robes and effects of
office, a door opened softly and closed. Perdita slowed, blinking. The man
turned swiftly down the inner stairway nearby without noticing her. But in
that brief glimpse she recognized him, as well as whose chamber he had slipped
out of.