Dragon Blood

The monster under my left shoulder grunted. "If you think this place holds the mad, you haven't been paying attention, boy."

There was fresh water waiting, and after the monsters left I picked it up in shaking hands,

"Drink," urged my little voice, already growing fainter. I pressed the clay rim against my lips and drank it until the pitcher was dry.

6—TISALA

My aunt says that if common goals make good friends, common enemies make better ones.

Tisala sat in the private room of the tavern and watched the door. She'd sent out a message over an hour ago, but there was no telling when Rosem would get it. She sipped at her drink and then leaned her head against the wall. The hood of her cloak shielded her eyes from the candlelight and she fell asleep.

"I thought you were dead," said a quiet voice, waking her. "Let me see your face."

Tisala blinked at the man standing beside her table. He was shorter than she, but broad through the shoulders. A scruffy, bright red beard hid the features of his face except for the wide nose that had been broken more than once. She pulled the hood away from her face. "Hello, Rosem."

"Gods, girl," he said, sitting across from her. "When the house you were rooming in burned down, I waited for you to turn up for a full week. Then I wrote to your father."

"The house burned?" she said. "Did everyone get out?"

Tight-mouthed, he shook his head. Tisala swallowed and rubbed her face, as if that would wipe away the faces of the people she'd lived with for the past few years. Jakoven must have had the house burned to cover her disappearance.

Rosem reached out and caught her hand, pulling it into the dim light of the tallow candle.

"Who took you?" he said.

She pulled her hand back. "Jakoven." She explained how she escaped and where. "So you see that I owe the Hurogmeten. Can you get me into the Asylum?"

The Asylum was a beautiful building about a mile from Jakoven's castle. The pyrite-flecked marble of the facade made it look more like a temple than a holding pen for society's embarrassments. There was even a pond just big enough for the two swans in the small but meticulously groomed lawn.

Tisala's flesh crawled as she shuffled in beside Rosem. It had taken him a healthy bribe to the woman whose place she took to get Tisala in again. No one would notice the switch because the cleaners were practically interchangeable. The woolen robes they wore were designed to let them fade into the background as they went about their work. They talked only to one another, never to the inmates or the guards. It was a system designed to keep the cleaners ignorant of what went on in the Asylum, but it kept the guards ignorant of the cleaners' world, too.

They crossed the marble entrance hall quietly, keeping to the left-hand side near the velvet wall hangings. Doubtless had there been another entrance to the Asylum, they, as lowly cleaners, would have taken it; but there was only one way into or out of the building.

Past the entrance hall they walked through the model cells. Six largish apartments, three on one side, three on the other, were displayed for perusal. Each cell was carpeted, with a padded chair and a brocade-covered bed. Furnished with nothing an inmate could hurt himself with, but with subtle luxury nonetheless. Four of the cells held actors paid to pretend to be mad, but mildly so—nothing that might disturb the family who came to see if the Asylum was safe for their old uncle or mother who had become difficult. Two were left empty in case a family wanted to visit a patient. He or she would be cleaned up and drugged or magicked into some semblance of happiness and settled into one or the other cell an hour or so before their visitors arrived. Unscheduled visits were not allowed.

Tisala wondered how many of the people who'd incarcerated their problems in the Asylum really believed in the fiction they were presented with. How many of them, when Alizon shut the place down, would exclaim in horror, knowing that as long as they plead ignorance, no one could blame them?

Silently, Tisala stepped shoulder to shoulder with her guide through the wooden door into the real Asylum. As always, the first thing to assail her was the smell: feces, urine, and covering it all the strong, spicy scent of the brew the cleaners were given to scrub the cells with.

Without speaking to her confederate, Tisala turned left and entered a small room filled with buckets and mops, and grabbed one of each. Then she moved back into the hall to stand in the silent line that waited to fill their buckets.

Not that the hall itself was silent. Shrieks and groans echoed wildly from behind the barred doors. Eventually, Tisala knew, she would even get used to that. But always, the first few minutes of it were difficult. She wanted to plug her ears, but that would draw attention. At last she filled her bucket at the stone font that was full of something Jakoven's wizards had brewed up. There was nothing magic about it, herbs and alcohol mostly, or so she'd been told.

The guard who was in charge of the cleaners gave her the cell numbers she'd expected as he always did. She didn't know if he was one of the rebels or if it was some little trick of Rosem's, and she didn't ask.

She trudged through the next set of doors with her bucket and mop and shuffled through the maze of halls. She'd memorized a map before the very first time she'd come here, and now she didn't even have to count hallways. She didn't pause when she passed the dead-bolted doors leading into the mage's wing where Ward must be, though she wanted to. That wasn't her assignment today.

At long last she stopped in front of the solid door of a cell that looked just like the one next to it, except for the number over the door. Setting her bucket down, she pushed the bar up out of its cups. Several doors from her, a guard watched. As long as she didn't scream, or the patient didn't barrel out of the door, he wouldn't interfere.

She left her mop beside the bucket and got a flimsy wooden hay rake down from the wall in the hallway and entered the cell. The little room had nothing a patient could hurt himself on, but that was the only resemblance between it and the «show» cells near the entrance. The floor was strewn with straw rather than carpets. A hard wooden bench was attached to the wall. It was, barely, wide enough to sleep on if the patient were careful. There was no discreet chamber pot under the bed here.

Tisala, her nose already hardened to the smell of the Asylum, raked out the foul hay. She found little difference between this and mucking out stalls—though she knew that the man who lay on the bench with his back to her didn't feel the same way. Rosem made certain that everyone who came to visit this cell knew how this inmate felt, and behaved accordingly.

She did a good job, piling the soiled hay in the center of the hallway, where she or another cleaner would collect it later. That done, she took her mop and bucket and shut the door behind her while she wiped down the floors. She heard the dull thud as the guard barred the door, sealing her in.

The man didn't stir, so she started to scrub the floor, ridding the room of the smell of human waste. Finally he sat up, but she didn't stop cleaning until he spoke.

"Tisala, I was glad to hear that you weren't dead."

She put the mop down and dropped to her knees before the bedraggled, rag-clothed, painfully thin man who sat cross-legged on the bench.

"Your majesty." This man was the truth of the rebellion. It was Jakoven's younger brother, Kellen, whom Alizon worked to put on the throne.

Though he was sitting, she knew from previous visits that he was half a head shorter than she, and in better times his build would have been stocky. Her father would have said "built like a wall." His hair was curly and dark with a light frosting of gray. He was barely twenty-six. He'd been fifteen when his much older brother had incarcerated him in the Asylum.