“I didn’t know. Tell me.”
She was smoothing out my blankets as she spoke, and I lay silent, watching the movements of her slender, capable hands. Just then I felt more than I’d ever felt before that I would give my whole soul to have her slim arms about me and her lips on mine. However, I choked that down, and told her something about our last battle on the hill, she listening steady-eyed.
“So you think that the debt is repaid now, do you?” she said when I had finished. “That because Paulos’s mail saved you from a chance blow in a fight fought for us that we are quits? You’re wrong, Harilek.” She bent over me. “For what you did for me in the gate—man with the wiggly marks—a whole lifetime’s service would be all too short repayment.”
Then she straightened up, ignoring my effort to catch her hands. “I must go and change into more suitable clothes now. And after dinner we’ll all come and see you.” And she went, leaving me with my mind all in a chaotic whirl, trying to reconcile her tone and her words with Andros’s feathers.
Followed ten days in bed, no longer boresome, since it was lightened by Aryenis’s continual visits. But for some days she seemed on the defensive, always selecting her times when Paulos was with me. Then she would sit for hours with her work listening to us talking, or telling us bits and scraps of homely news she had gathered in her morning rides round the estate. She seemed to have annexed Payindah, for that worthy was hardly ever to be seen of a morning, and, when I asked him where he went to, he answered, as though a matter of course, “Riding with the Shahzadi round your lands. She always rides your horse now.”
At other times she would bring Ziné with her to help her in the lessons, as she said, for she and Paulos were making me learn Sakae, saying I would need it when I got about again. I like Ziné very much: she is an ever-cheerful, chatty, friendly damsel, and very much more than very pretty, but Aryenis alone was ample company for me, and I’m sure Ziné would far rather have been wandering the woods with Forsyth. But I suppose Aryenis dominated her as she did every one else.
It was the tenth day after Aryenis’s arrival—a very red-letter day when Alec had promoted me to a couch by the fire on condition that I kept my leg still, and further promised me that, if all went well, in two days’ time I should be allowed to try a crutch and an arm in the garden—that the Ziné-Forsyth worm turned. At his morning visit, Paulos announced, with an enigmatical smile, that Forsyth and Ziné had ridden into Miletis, and would not be back till late: probably they would stay the night with Milos and Annais. Aryenis was out riding. “But I have told her that she must be back before lunch, for I have work this afternoon, and I cannot have my guest left lonely.”
He had lunch served in my room that day, and Aryenis returned in a very talkative mood, with lots to say about all she had seen and done in the morning. Soon after lunch, Paulos went off, saying he had headmen to interview, so that for the first time for a week I got my lady all to myself, albeit I was propped up on a couch, and she had established herself on a low stool with an embroidery-frame on the other side of the hearth. We talked of many things, and then relapsed into silence, as one does with those one knows well. I considered her for a long time, her face partly hidden behind her stretched silk, while her busy fingers fluttered backward and forward over the pattern.
“That embroidery is rather like you, Shahzadi,” said I at last.
“Like me?” she said, biting off a thread and looking up. “Why?”