Perhaps nothing, said the Voice in his head. Perhaps...everything.
“Dear Koronolan,” Durren breathed. His chest ached, his legs trembled, his hands shook. Black dots swam on the fringes of his vision, obscuring everything but her face, her body, her uncanny resemblance to the woman haunting his dreams.
What did it matter where she’d come from, or who had sent her and why or how? All that mattered as he rode slowly toward her was that she’d promised.
Anything.
****
The Imposter of Nolar withdrew early into his private chambers. He’d passed a vexing day. First, negotiations with the father of his intended bride, always a delicate matter, had suffered a minor setback. He was sure it was nothing an offer of more gold wouldn’t overcome. Second, there had arisen some sort of crisis in the vineyards. He deferred that to the steward, ordering the man not to bother him with such trivialities. The directive earned him looks askance from the steward and attendant vinedressers. No cause for concern, however. While Master Brandelmore evidently was a close and careful manager of his properties, his underlings could hardly blame the man if his impending marriage absorbed an inordinate amount of his energies. Finally, the crystal had hung heavy and restless about his neck all day, but he’d had no chance to examine its multifaceted surface.
Sinking into the chair before his dressing table, he shoved thick fingers through his hair and grimaced at his image in the glass. Not a bad specimen of manhood, but it still disconcerted him to see a stranger’s face looking back. He bared even, white teeth. One in limbo could hardly expect to choose. How fortunate he hadn’t thrust himself into a woman’s body.
He chuckled at the choice of image and considered which of the females among his household servants would be tonight’s recipient of his ‘thrusts.’ Pity he’d been such an ascetic in his previous incarnation. Such activity, which he’d quickly discovered was expected from the Master, always soothed his nerves. Afterward, he would dream of mounting his bloodstone-draped, virginal bride on the table anointed with the Dragon Chant and raising, with the force of their union, the Last Dragon. The thought of all that primal power at his fingertips always brought him to climax again, and he would bask until dawn in the glory of his prowess.
But for now the crystal burned hot against his naked chest. He extracted the pouch from beneath elegant Colanthian lace and finely woven, Bedian linen. He tugged the laces open, and the broken column seemed to leap into his palm. Even though he had ample warning of its heat, the abrupt sear upon contact made him suck in a hiss. He dropped the crystal to the tabletop and licked his stung palm.
A kaleidoscope of colors ran rampant over the table’s polished surface. He breathed a word, and the color shifts slowed. Another word and the crystal’s glow receded, withdrawing into the column itself. It pulsed first red, then amber, then red again, and dimmed entirely before throbbing with renewed fire.
He rubbed a thumb over the singed spot on his palm. The amber puzzled him until, reviewing the sequence, he realized the color wasn’t the honey of true amber but a raw yellow-orange. “Fire.” He sat up straight. “And Krad too.”
What in Beggeth?
He bent again and cupped his hands around the column, taking care not to touch it. Red light illuminated his palms, showing dark as blood in the creases and whorls. Red—this red—could mean only one thing: Rees and his pot-bellied partner had the bloodstone!
Stricken with pleasure, he almost clasped the crystal to his lips, but another flash of yellow-orange reminded him of the folly of touching the stone. Instead, he spread his hands, palm down, on either side of the column and slid them together until thumb met thumb and forefingers touched. Closing his eyes, he inhaled deeply, held the breath, and blew it slowly out. He could think now, although just barely.
Leaning forward, he peered at the column fragment contained within the triangle of his fingers. There was no mistake. Red light oozed over the backs of his hands and glistened on his nails. His heart whipped at his throat. Years, years of waiting and the stones were practically within his grasp.
Enough of this running about in the Wehrland with old gem-cutters and their nubile daughters. Enough of this gaming with Krad and fire. “Bring the stones to me, Rees,” he breathed onto the pulsing crystal column. “Bring them to me now.”
****
Mirianna shivered despite piles of brush still smoldering nearby, despite the fire-flush engorging her cheeks. The Shadow Man’s steady regard tripped wave after wave of gooseflesh, chilling her like a frigid wind that finds its way through the snuggest stone-and-mortar wall. It was foolish to think he’d forgotten her promise, or to hope he put so little store by it that he would demand nothing in return. Foolish, clearly, in the face of his unerring approach.
He halted the gray stallion directly before her, and time itself seemed to pause, as though only she and the shadow before her existed in this moment, this space. Disturbed by the intimacy of that thought, Mirianna ordered her gaze away, down, anywhere else but fixed on the formless cloth that should have been face, but her body refused any command contrary to the summons issued from beneath the black hood.
“You made me a promise. I’ve fulfilled my part. Do you intend to keep yours?”
She forced air into her lungs. “Do I—do I have a choice?”
His scrutiny lay like a weight on her shoulders, pressing her steadily into the ground. “Only that which you allow yourself.”
To fulfill or not fulfill, as her conscience would permit. Could she deny and live with herself? Could she fulfill and survive? He’d agreed to save them from the Krad. He would not now harm her, would he? Shivers cavorted in her stomach, making her words come out raw and faint. “What—what do you wish from me?”
A black gloved hand unclenched from the sapling lying across his lap, the fingers unfurling like petals opening to the sun. The palm, clad in leather as finely creased as the skin it purported to cover, glided toward her. Two fingertips, their ebony second skin radiating the musky scent of long and intimate union, hung suspended a breath from her chin.
Her mind registered the catch and fall of the tunic covering his chest and the minute corresponding ruffle of his face-covering, but it was her body that recognized the cue. Of their own accord, her lips parted and her lids drifted down.
With an imperceptible movement, his fingertips contacted the sensitive underside of her jaw. Her body stilled, breath bated, all nerve endings focused on two small ovals of heat that trailed as delicately as butterfly wings along her skin.
“What do I wish from you?” murmured the voice that spread like dark liquor through her veins. “Only your presence. Your companionship. At Drakkonwehr.”
She responded like one spellbound, her words thick and distant. “M—my companionship?”
The fingertips reached the edge of her chin, and one drifted off. Her body reacted automatically, rising on toes and leaning forward to sustain contact. There was no ground beneath her feet, Mirianna thought vaguely, only this sensation of floating, of suspension by one exquisite, gossamer thread.
“Come,” the voice said.
—Come—
The single word poured into her like warm honey. It flowed outward, spreading a satiny gloss over her reason, her inhibitions, her conscious self. Once before—was it only last night?—a voice had called her thus, summoning her out of fear to tranquility, and she’d gone without hesitation. Nor would she hesitate now, although this voice offered something far from tranquil, something, instead, that wound the fibers of her being into a taut, breathless cord of anticipation.
She raised her head, and of its own accord her hand rose to meet the open black one. How his fingertip departed her chin, she didn’t know. She knew only the sharp, tingling sweetness of its lingering imprint. And then her hand crossed a black leather palm, and her thumb locked with a shadow of itself.
“Stop! Don’t touch him!”
“By all that’s holy!”
“Mirianna
, no!”
She started like a dreamer shaken awake. She would have fallen, but iron fingers banded around her hand and spun her instead in a half circle. Before she could regain her balance, an arm swooped and snagged her about the waist. Breath gushed from her lungs, her feet flew from the ground, and her vision careened past her father’s white look of shock.
By the time she planted her hands and shook the hair from her face, her mind had registered several significant details. She was perched sideways half upon the stallion’s bony withers and half upon a rock-hard thigh, held in place by an inflexible black-clad arm. Pumble lay sprawled on his back, his own sword jammed into the ground inches from his ear. Above him, Rees held an empty bow, fingers beside his cheek poised in the attitude of release. Beside her shoulder quivered an arrow driven to the feathers through the wrist-thick sapling the Shadow Man had raised to meet it.
Mirianna squeaked an exclamation.
Pumble gaped over his belly. “You missed!”
A milk-white Rees stared through the notch of his bow. “That should’ve gone through his heart!”
Tolbert, whose fingertips left bloodless spots on his cheeks, dropped to his knees on the rocky ground. “Dragon’s blood—”
“Fools!” The Shadow Man lowered the impaled sapling-lance and, with a kick of his boot, snapped the arrow shaft like a stick of kindling. “What made you think you could take me on? I’m invulnerable. A phantom.” The hood tilted back and emitted a laugh.
Loud, harsh, and humorless, the sound rippled outward across the smoky clearing and bounced off trees. It rolled back like a hundred reverberant echoes, each one raising the hair on Mirianna’s nape, each one a hammer beat driving home the final significant detail: She was trapped, a prisoner of the very darkness that had threatened to overwhelm her in Ar-Deneth. Instead of fleeing this time, she’d given her hand to it...of her own free will! She pushed wildly against the arm compressing her diaphragm.
Ignoring her struggles, the Shadow Man rolled the make-shift lance to his right and jabbed the point at Pumble’s boot. “Be off, all of you, before I leave your carcasses for the Krad.”
Pumble scrambled to his feet and launched himself at Rees’s stirrup. “Let me up! Let me up!”
Rees rammed an elbow into the fat man’s head. “Quit bleating like a stuck pig and get the old man!”
With a dark look at Rees, Pumble rubbed his cheekbone and turned. “Come on!” He grabbed Tolbert under the arms. “Get your feet under you. We aren’t making an all-day stew, here.”
Tolbert unfolded stiffly. He allowed himself to be lifted, but once upright, he twisted out of Pumble’s hands and spun toward the Shadow Man. His skin stretched like parchment, dry and tight, over the hollows of his face, and his hands trembled, but his voice did not. “No. Not without my daughter.”
“Papa—” Mirianna bit her lip, fending off a little girl’s cry for the father who’d always protected her. She was grown now, and he was old, and it was her turn to save him—no matter what the cost. “Papa, please, don’t—”
Tolbert stumbled toward the gray horse and shook his fist. “You put her down, you black-hearted mage-spawn!”
The stallion snorted and tossed his head. The Shadow Man’s fingers adjusted their grip on the make-shift spear. Mirianna’s heart wedged in her throat. She flung a panicked glance at Pumble. “Stop him, please!”
Sweat poured down the fat man’s face. His gaze skittered from Rees to the Shadow Man’s lance hovering only a lunge away. “Come on!” He grabbed Tolbert’s arms. “Don’t be a fool. Do you want to end up in a Krad pot?”
“No!” Tolbert shoved at the heavier man. “I told you! I’m not—!”
“Take the old bastard,” Rees barked, “before he gets us all killed.”
With another glance from Rees to the Shadow Man, Pumble bent and caught Tolbert by the waist. Heaving the older man over his shoulder with as much ease as he heaved camp supplies, he trotted to Rees’s side.
“Mirianna!” Tolbert raised himself over Pumble’s shoulder and broke into a spasm of coughing. When Pumble levered him onto the horse behind Rees, he collapsed like a rag.
“Papa!” But there was nothing he could do, nothing any of them could do unless—
She turned to Rees, opening her hand, pleading with the Master of Nolar’s man one last time, but the look he returned was stony. Shouldering his bow, he shifted his gaze from Mirianna to the Shadow Man to the lance, the knife-point of which had flowed unerringly in his direction.
With a sinking heart, Mirianna read his thoughts. His duty required him to deliver her father and the bloodstone. Any obligation he felt to defend her, an incidental participant, extended only so far, and this crossed the line. Tight-lipped, Rees turned his heavily laden horse and heeled it toward the trees while Pumble ran to catch his own horse.
Desperate, she flailed out with elbows and feet. “Let me go! You can’t—I won’t—” The effort earned her a grunt and a sharp tightening of the arm around her ribs. Air squeezed from her lungs, precious air she couldn’t reclaim. She threw her head back, gasping, but it was a mistake. The Shadow Man trapped her up-tilted chin with his head, pressing what should have been cheekbone and mouth against the line of her throat.
Mirianna’s heart stopped. Part of her being screamed panic at her utter vulnerability, at his complete and total dominance over her body, her very life. The other, that traitorous part that had been lured by the pleasure offered in her dreams, tripped a maelstrom of involuntary responses. Blood evaporated from her extremities. It condensed in her breasts, where it radiated toward the nipples in a prickling cascade of warmth, and in the hidden depths of her femininity, where it uncoiled in long ribbons of sensation.
The Shadow Man shifted his head, bringing what should have been mouth into direct alignment with the wildly beating pulse below Mirianna’s ear. “No, I won’t let you go.” The words set his coarse face-covering vibrating against her sensitized skin. “Yes, I can take what was offered me. And by Koronolan, you will fulfill your promise.”
He straightened and Mirianna stared up at a featureless black mask, trying to withstand his regard. He was nothing but darkness and nightmare in the semblance of a man’s shadow. There was no substance under that fabric skin, nothing physical that could harm her, only a voice and a presence.
But the torso jammed tight against her shoulder, hip and thigh belied her hopes. It and the cloth sleeve into which she dug her fingers were filled to capacity with something every bit as solid as a tree trunk. And what flexed under those fingers and alongside her left breast was unmistakably hot, blood-fed flesh.
The fine hairs of Mirianna’s body stood up. Her breath sucked in on a hiss.
The Shadow Man leaned down and his face-covering fluttered against the pulse at her temple. “Yes, my beauty,” he murmured, “I am everything you fear, both shadow and substance.”
And then, as abruptly as he’d seized her, he let go. With a squeak of surprise, she slid to the ground. Her knees buckled, and she pitched forward into hummocks and blue aster.
“Before you consider doing anything foolish,” the Shadow Man said while the gray stallion danced around her prone form, “remember that it’s not my intention to harm you.” He laid the make-shift lance across the horse’s withers. “Now, go help Gareth pack while I fetch the other horses.”
He wheeled away and, like the fabled horseman Kiros, dangled one-handed from the stallion’s mane to scoop up the sword embedded where Pumble had fallen. Thus armed, he galloped toward the woods.
Mirianna stared after him until her eyes burned, then dropped her head onto her arms. Her limbs quivered like new pudding and she could muster no resistance to the shivers wracking her torso. A sob hiccupped from her lips. She sank her teeth into her sleeve to prevent another, but it bubbled through the gag. Others followed, accompanied by the hot sting of tears. She lay, utterly bereft as the full import of her situation sank in. By the Dragon, she’d traded her life to a fiend! He c
ould do with her as he pleased, and no one could prevent it. No one!
Something ghosted across her hair. Mirianna froze, stifling a sob. The contact returned, the touch hesitant, like the flutter of a bird’s wing. Terrified, she jerked upright, and the blind boy’s hand grazed her wet cheek.
He squatted beside her, a look of consternation on his face. “Please don’t cry.”
She dragged the backs of her hands across her cheeks. “Why shouldn’t I?”
He rotated his thumb across his fingertips, seemingly mesmerized by the texture of her tears. “Well, because I wouldn’t mind a bit of help...finding everything, I mean. I can pack. I’m good at that, but—well—I’m not sure where everything is...anymore.” He wiped his hand on his tunic and offered it.
Mirianna looked at the hand extended toward her left ear. She inhaled a shaky breath. At least she wouldn’t be alone with the Shadow Man. And the boy seemed kind-hearted. Besides, she’d made her choice, however foolish. She might as well begin living with the consequences. Drying her cheeks on her sleeve, she accepted the offer of a hand up.
****
Durren slowed Ghost just inside the shelter of the trees. He forced deep breaths into his lungs, willing his heartbeat to moderate, to cease its rampage against the walls of his chest. By Kiros, those fools never should have tried him while the battle blood still ran hot in his veins. After dispatching an army of Krad, fending off two poor excuses for soldiers and one doddering old man served only to fire in him a raging sense of indignation.
You have every right to be angry, said the Voice in his head. After all, those pathetic fools thought they could take away your prize of battle, your plunder.
“Be still! The woman’s not a prize.” He’d fought the Krad in exchange for her promise. It was a contract, pure and simple, and their clasped hands had sealed it. Those fools should never have tried to interfere. He would have been perfectly within his rights to kill them.
And he almost had. He stared at the sword he’d yanked from the ground, remembering how he’d nearly turned it into the fat man’s belly. For one blind moment, his body—this damned body—had ruled, and he’d almost broken his oath to her.
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