by Gwynn White
“Where’s she bleeding from?” She grabbed Keahr’s hand, wet, sticky, and rough—
Ribbons of slashed flesh cut from Keahr’s palm. She yelped.
Jorah dropped down next to her. “Looks like someone attacked her with a blade, but she fought them off.”
She agreed. The question was who had done it? This wasn’t Artemis’s style.
Or was it? Had he paid an assassin to hurt Keahr? But why? Keahr was no threat to him or the Intelligentsia. None of this made sense.
There had to be another reason—and another person—who had targeted Keahr.
She was about to yell for the musketeers when it struck her that the two men who should have guarded Keahr’s door were not at their post. If they had been, no one could have gotten in to attack Keahr.
Raith brushed her side as he knelt to join them. He seemed unusually pale. “She took a blow to the head,” he said, stating the obvious.
Desperate not to lose herself in the never-ending depths of Raith’s unfathomable dark eyes, she focused on Jorah. “You said someone wanted to harm her. Who? I can’t see Artemis doing this. And there should be guards at the door. Where are they?”
Zandor shot to his feet. “I’ll go and find them.” He glared at Jorah. “Guard my princess and friend like your life depends on it.” His glower deepened. “Because it does.”
Jorah nodded. “That goes without saying.”
Niing shuffled into the room as Zandor loped out. When his gaze landed on Keahr, an almost animalistic moan escaped him. He immediately stoked his pipe.
Jorah broke eye contact with Aurora. “Not in here, Niing. The smoke isn’t what we need now.” His eyes trailed suggestively to Raith.
Niing slipped his pipe into his pocket, an act so foreign it almost shocked her more than Keahr’s attack had.
Supremely tired of all the secrets between these two, she slapped her hands on her hips. “Okay. I’ve had enough. What’s going on? And I want the truth. No more diversions, riddles, or nonsense.”
Raith brushed her face with a cool finger. “Perhaps we should be worrying about getting a doctor for your friend. I will accompany you, if you like.”
Jorah grabbed her hand and pulled her roughly to his side. “She doesn’t go anywhere.” Before she could protest, he added, “Niing, find a physician.”
She wanted Keahr attended to, but it also seemed like another convenient ploy to avoid answering her questions. She pulled away from Jorah, leaped to her feet, and bolted to the open window. One of the drapes fluttered in the breeze, while the other hung from the railing. Had it been yanked in a tussle? Perhaps Keahr’s attacker had hidden behind there?
That was a thought for later.
She poked her head out and yelled to a group of courtiers seated at the fountain. “Send for a physician. And be quick. Lady Keahr has been attacked.”
One of the courtiers jumped up to obey.
She faced Niing and Jorah. Niing was tearing up bits of the silk sheets to bandage Keahr’s hands. Satisfied that she could do no more for her friend, she snapped at Jorah, “Now. Answers.”
Jorah stood to face her. But he angled his body between her and Raith. “I will answer every question you have,” he said, his voice strangely tender. “All I ask is that we go somewhere private to do it.”
Raith stepped between them. “Forget it. If there is anything being said, you say it in front of me.”
She threw up her hands. “I get that you two don’t like each other, but this constant squabbling is getting on my nerves. My friend has been attacked, and I want to punish the bastard who did it. To do that, I need the facts—all of them.”
Raith’s beautiful eyes enveloped her. “You think it was one of us?” His silky voice sounded distant as it swept her away. “How is that possible? I was with you. And Jorah”—he waved his hand—“was with Niing, I presume.”
Jorah grabbed her arm and wrenched her out of Raith’s line of sight.
She wasn’t a doll to be tugged around! She opened her mouth to—
Zandor strode back into the room. “I found the guards. Their throats have been slit. Whoever did it dragged them behind the drapes.”
Her heart sank. Two of her people, cut down for no reason. More families grieving. But something was clear: Artemis would never target the musketeers.
Bow drawn and arrow nocked, Zandor wedged himself next to her. Jorah stood on her other side.
“Did you call the captain?” she asked in a strained voice.
Zandor nodded. “Unfortunately, these are not the only deaths he’s dealing with. Half a dozen mutilated corpses have been found in the city.” His face hardened. “All Infirm.”
She clutched her face as if that would stop the blood draining from it. “Why? I changed the trials because I wanted to stop the bloodshed. Who would do this?”
Raith’s shrug was cut short by Jorah’s fist crashing into his jaw.
She—and Raith—yelped as he slammed against the wall. Too stunned to react, she stood helpless as Jorah strode over, picked Raith up with one hand as if he weighed no more than a kitten, and then punched him a second time.
Raith’s eyes spun, and his head lolled. Jorah dropped him with utter disdain.
She found her voice. “What are you doing?” she screamed.
A voice from the door. “Seems I have arrived just in time.” Aurora’s physician held his portmanteau to his chest. “Who do I start with? The unconscious suitor”—a glare at Jorah—“or the unconscious Lady Keahr?”
“Keahr, of course,” Aurora snapped. She rounded on Jorah, still dumbfounded by his unprovoked act of violence. “You better have a very good explanation for all this.”
“I do.” Jorah grabbed her hand.
Despite her protest, he dragged her from the room.
THIRTY-ONE
Aurora
Aurora dug her heels into the carpet outside Keahr’s bedchamber. Either that, or the swarm of musketeers in the hallway, brought Jorah to a halt.
He looked pointedly at the captain glowering across the hall—she was sure it was only the presence of Zandor and Niing that stopped the musketeer from challenging Jorah.
“I promised you answers,” Jorah said softly to her, “but what I have to tell you should not go beyond the ears of the Infirm.”
Could the day get any weirder?
Jorah pressed on. “Is there somewhere private where we can talk?”
“After you knocked the lights out of Raith?” But she flung open her apartment door. “In here. And regardless of what you say, Niing and Zandor are invited.”
Jorah stood aside to let her enter the room first. “I would not have it any other way.”
The others followed. Peckle slunk into the room moments before she slammed the door shut. He positioned himself on a cushion next to the hearth and wrapped his tail around his paws. Calculating green eyes watched them all like they were his minions.
Aurora decided to follow his lead, except she didn’t bother sitting. She intended to own this meeting.
With an imperious hand, she waved Jorah to a chair. He sat without a murmur, even though it placed him at an obvious disadvantage. Niing shuffled onto the seat next to him. He stoked his pipe. As reliable as the sunrise, Zandor stood at her side.
The only person missing was Keahr. Aurora clenched her skirt in her fist with worry—and fury—for her friend. Whatever happened, by the end of this talk, she would have all her answers—answers she hoped would reveal who had hurt Keahr.
She owed Keahr that and much more.
Hand on her hips, she snapped, “Speak.”
Jorah smiled at her, a slightly crooked one. Why, in all the creation of cats, did it make her stomach swirl?
She ground her feet into the carpet. “This isn’t a smiling matter. Wipe that smirk off your face right now.”
Jorah’s eyes flared, and for a second she thought he’d challenge her. Then he laughed; a low, delicious bubbling sound, it sent an unexpected thr
ill of pleasure through her. “You certainly have fire, princess. But be careful whom you spar with. You might find that my fire burns longer, fiercer, and brighter than yours.”
“More riddles, Lord Thalyn?”
Jorah tilted his head. “Tell me how it feels when you are working in your garden.”
She blinked. “What has that got to do with who attacked Keahr? Or where you and Niing know each other from?”
“Everything. Indulge me.” Without waiting for a reply, Jorah turned to Niing. “Blow some of that smoke my way, and let’s see if I can work a little magic.”
Magic. What a strange choice of word.
Aurora shifted her weight from foot to foot while Niing billowed out clouds of pipeweed smoke.
Jorah’s eyes closed as he inhaled.
It gave her an opportunity to study him. Not classically handsome as Raith was, his rugged face, peppered with sexy blond stubble, made her blood bubble. As for the rest of him . . . she swallowed as she took in his broad shoulders, narrow waist, and long legs; waking up next to Jorah Thalyn would not be the worst thing that could happen to her.
Eyes tight shut, Jorah lifted his hand and held it out. He had beautiful fingers—
Her breath hitched. If her eyes didn’t deceive her, Jorah’s middle fingernail had narrowed, curled, and grown.
And then the illusion vanished.
Jorah groaned. “More smoke, Niing,” he mumbled.
Niing puffed.
Transfixed, she watched that hand.
And then it happened.
No doubt about it.
Jorah’s fingernail—no, his whole finger, buckled. The tan flesh vanished, replaced by a black blade that glinted in the light . . .
She rasped in a breath. “A talon . . . like a bird.” She shook her head. “Only—”
Only no bird she had ever seen had talons like steel.
So much for controlling this meeting.
She staggered back until she bumped into the wall. Her hands clawed at Mamma’s silk tapestry. “W-what are you?”
But as she looked at Jorah, slumped in his chair with sweat beading his face, her fear vanished.
Whatever he was, whatever he’d done, producing that talon had cost him deeply. He opened those azure eyes to look at her, but all she could see was his hand—a perfectly normal one—resting on his lap.
Niing hopped off the chair and waddled over to her. He bowed low. “I owe you an apology, my princess, and I hope you will forgive me.”
She stared first at him and then at Jorah.
More color infused Jorah’s face, but he had clearly decided to leave it to Niing to speak while he regained his strength.
“I should have told you a long time ago, but I feared for all our lives if you knew the truth.” Niing wrung his hands. “That temper of yours. You say things without thinking—”
She brushed his comments away with a sharp hand flick. She didn’t want to listen to Niing ramble when Jorah had just done something so incredible. So impossible.
Still Niing continued, “The Infirmities we suffer are nothing more than suppressed magic. An effect of the foul Guardians. My pipeweed smoke has a minor neutralizing effect. Because Jorah hasn’t lived his whole life under the power of the Guardians, it allowed him to tap into his magic to show you his true form—the man he would be beyond the constructs.”
Her mouth sagged, but her shock was short lived. “Magic! You mean . . .” She stamped her foot. “I knew those Guardians were trouble!”
Then the full force of Niing’s words hit her and, with it, a storm of rage that threatened to drown her.
Gasping for air, she shrieked, “You knew this! And you never told me! You knew how much I wanted to go beyond the Guardians—I would have risked my life to do it. Yet, you let me live in darkness when I could have . . .”
She didn’t know what she could have done, but it wasn’t important: Niing—Niing—had betrayed her.
It didn’t matter that his face paled or that his shoulders slumped or that his crumpled features could have belonged to a man so very much older than he was. He had kept something so vital, so important—so obvious—from her.
“Who else knew?” she demanded.
Zandor shifted at her side, and even Peckle looked away.
The cat’s many idiosyncrasies suddenly sharpened into focus. Magical cats and dogs had apparently been common before the Guardians.
The pain of betrayal almost leveled her. “All of you? Keahr, too?”
Niing sighed, then threw up his hands. “All of us. Me—I’m a true dwarf. Before the Guardians came, I controlled the earth. Keahr—she’s a fae, and she controls the air.” He waved at Zandor.
Her bodyguard’s face twisted with contrition. “Despite my allergies to animals, I’m a centaur. But in fairness, Keahr and I only discovered this recently when Niing took us beyond the Guardians to meet Jorah.”
Aurora backed away, not wanting to hear or believe that all three of the people—creatures—closest to her had kept something so life-changing from her. But with the wall behind her, there was nowhere to go—and she didn’t run away from a fight.
She was about to launch a stream of fury at them when Jorah jumped up and grabbed her hands. He looked intently in her eyes. “You don’t ask what you are?”
His words flushed her outrage like a bucket of iced water.
“W-what am I?”
Jorah smiled tenderly at her, as if she were incredibly special. “Undoubtedly a dryad—probably the most powerful one I have ever met.”
She stared at him blankly.
Dryads controlled plants. Or that is what she had read in the palazzo library in the few books that remained from before the Guardians. There were even dryad Guardians around Ryferia. One on the edge of the forest surrounding the capital.
A strangled laugh choked up at the notion of a mechanical dryad protecting her from the plants she connected with so deeply, so utterly.
But then she shook her head in disbelief. Could she really be such a creature? Did that mean she wasn’t human?
Jorah squeezed her hands. “I know you’re angry, and you have every right to that anger, but please, when we restore your powers to you, don’t set any of the nastier plants in that poison garden on me.”
She pulled away from him—his calloused hands against her skin weren’t helping her concentration. “You knew, too?”
Why was it so important that he say no?
Jorah opened his mouth, but Niing burst out, “He’s been wanting to tell you the truth from the second he arrived here. Please, don’t blame him. This was my decision and mine alone. I take full responsibility for it.”
She fixed Jorah with beseeching eyes. “Is this true?”
Jorah’s eyes in turn narrowed to mere slits—almost reptilian in their keenness. “Dragons live by a code of honor. I will never lie willingly to you. It is against my nature.”
Dragon shape-shifter. That talon suddenly made sense.
She gulped. If he was, in reality, a dragon shape-shifter, no wonder he spoke about his fire burning brighter and fiercer than hers.
She longed to ask him how that worked; instead, she roved her eyes up and down his body, seeing the truth of his claim in the planes, ridges, and bulges of his muscles beneath his very mundane clothing.
He showed no emotion as she plundered him.
Only when her focus shifted back to his face—and those beautiful blue eyes—did he speak. “My honor rebelled against keeping something so critical from you.” A glare at Niing. “You’re a woman of courage and strength, even if you are too quick to lose your temper. Your friends feared you would betray them in a tirade. I bowed to their superior knowledge of you. I will not be doing that again. To that, I pledge my word.”
He didn’t see her as a reckless child, like everyone else in the palazzo—her friends included—seemed to. She could have flung her arms around his neck.
She didn’t act on the impulse.
Struggling to keep her trembles of rage under control, she asked, “Raith? Does he know we are Magical? Is that why you knocked him out? So you didn’t have to say this in front of him?”
We are Magical. As she admitted to her own nature, the enormity of it struck her. Her hands flew to her mouth. If Artemis and the Intelligentsia suspected that magic lay behind the Infirmities, they would never allow the Infirm to live. There would be carnage.
Genocide.
And she would be helpless to stop it; no Magical queen would be permitted on the Ryferian throne. Mamma’s murder suddenly made sense. As Infirm as Aurora, Mamma had to have been Magical, and that had to have contributed to her death. It also suggested why her killer had never been found. With Lazard also dead, her shaft of suspicion fell squarely on Artemis.
She sank to the floor and clasped her knees to stop them quivering.
Jorah knelt to eye level with her. “Raith is also Magical.” His voice was surprisingly gentle. “He’s an incubus—one of the foulest manifestations magic can take.”
“I—I don’t know what an incubus is.”
“A creature that uses fangs to suck blood from the Magical. As he kills his prey, he absorbs their power, making it his own.”
She blanched as bile rose in her mouth.
Jorah covered her hands with one of his. It was warm, comforting. “An incubus is an enemy of all the Magical. Our only natural predator, he uses his beauty to beguile so he can sink his fangs into us. You have experienced some of that when he looks at you.”
Jorah had noticed her silly infatuation with Raith? She blushed. But at least it explained her crazy giddiness when Raith was around.
Jorah half-smiled. “Imagine what it would be like if the Guardians were gone.”
A shudder rocked her.
And then everything came together in her head. “Lila . . . Was Trojean one of these things, too?”
The shutters crashed down over Jorah’s face. “She was,” he said, voice distant. “I killed her in Warrendyte. Too late to help Lila.”
So Warrendyte existed? It wasn’t just a fabled place in people’s wild imaginings?
