Drink of Me

by Jacquelyn Frank

  “I think it would be wise for you to recall that we’re guests in this keep. That our men are separated in the city. That we’re here strictly by the good graces of the man who stands holding the woman you’re insulting! Look in their eyes, Knar,” he said through gritted teeth, “and tell me how long you think we’ll live if you keep up this tactic.”

  Knar did as instructed and swallowed visibly in apprehension as he took in the united front of the Sánge warriors, who had increased by two once again. One was the guard from the gate, a hard, callused man with eyes dark enough to be pure ebony; the other a sleek, streamlined fellow who had the glint of a killer in his eyes and hid deceptive power in a lanky frame. Lothas shoved Knar back hard, letting the other bewildered men catch him and keep him on his feet. The warrior was barely shy of committing an act of treason and beating the Middle King idiot to a pulp. He couldn’t care less if the man fell on his ass.

  Lothas quickly turned to his hosts and their contingent of protectors, holding his hands palms out well above his waist and the dagger situated there. “It seems, Prime Reule, that we have either a misunderstanding or a terrible coincidence. I’m not inclined to solve the issue with violence, and pray you’re not either.”

  “You, I believe,” Reule noted, his voice barely outside of a growl as he contained his anger impressively well. Had their roles been reversed, Lothas didn’t think he’d be so fair to a group entering his home and calling his wife a whore and killer. “This one, however”—Reule pointed back to Knar as rudely as he’d pointed to the Prima—“I’d sooner serve up to the asylum for midmeal than trust.”

  Lothas frowned. He’d heard the Sánge were literally a bloodthirsty species, but hearing these words from the ruler himself gave him a chill. “I can see how you’d feel that way. Knar has acted rashly, with insult and lack of finesse, but in all fairness I must ask the Prima if she is indeed the woman we search for. She has the coloring of my people and it seems odd…”

  “What is her name?”

  The men fell silent as the lone woman in the room finally spoke up. She held herself with proud posture and sophistication, chin level to the floor, head high and confident, and she spoke with a soft, modulated tone.

  And with the accent of the Yesu.

  She was addressing her accuser, stepping a little farther forward before her mate stopped her with a hard hand clamped on her waist. She was a brave little thing, but it was wise for the Prime to restrain her protectively, although he was fairly certain Knar would do nothing to harm her when they were so obviously surrounded by her allies.

  “What’s the name of this girl you seek?” she demanded again.

  Knar looked as if he wanted to lunge at her, at the very least spit in her face, rather than respond to her request.

  “Sylva,” he hissed at last, “and you well know it!”

  “Sylva,” she whispered, her hand reaching down to her waist where her husband’s hand lay. She clutched his fingers tellingly. She was afraid, but Lothas couldn’t tell whether her fear came from guilt or the accusation itself.

  “Gentlemen,” the Prime of Jeth said, stepping in front of his wife in an aggressive stance. “I’ve arranged for a banquet to welcome you. I believe this is a matter best discussed over bread and wine. With civility and decorum,” Reule stressed harshly. It was clear he would tolerate no more slander against his mate. Especially not at his table as he hosted them.

  “You’re a fair and generous man, Prime Reule,” Lothas said graciously, inclining his head. “I’m certain this is a matter easily cleared up with intelligent conversation and deduction.”

  “Very good. My attendant Drago will see you to your rooms on the topmost floor of the keep. You’ll understand if I restrict you to that floor until we’ve had a chance to settle this matter at dinner.” It wasn’t a question, merely a notification. Again, Lothas didn’t blame him. The Prime gestured to the dignified man who had admitted them earlier. “Drago, see their every comfort is attended. Come, my beloved,” Prime Reule said in a significantly softened tone as he lifted her hand to his lips in affection. The kiss was warm, lasting a heartbeat longer than necessary, and it was so intimate that the Second Commander knew without a doubt this was no act. The woman was the Prime’s in every sense of the word. That cherished kiss told it all, both carnal and heartbound, and Lothas knew he was going to have a fight on his hands.

  Unfortunately, he suspected Reule was going to be more reasonable than Knar would ever be, so it wasn’t the Sánge Prime he was worried about.

  Chapter 16

  Mystique remained completely composed until she had reached the landing. Then, abruptly, she began to tremble and shake until her knees gave out beneath her. Reule swept her up against himself in a rush of resplendent gold fabric. Her arms wound around his neck, her face hiding against his throat as the Shadows looked on with worry and a protective anger. They said nothing, knowing Reule would care for his woman with all haste and capability, but he felt their banked hostility toward those who had upset her. He was proud of her. She’d earned their loyalty on her own merit, rather than his say-so.

  Reule turned from them and carried Mystique into his bedroom, laying her on his bed and quickly climbing in behind her so he could draw her into the warm, safe armor of his body. He withdrew the length of golden wire from her hair, tossing the circlet aside somewhere. He rapidly undid what had no doubt been Para’s best work on her hair to date, but now that they were alone he preferred her hair loose and long and spread wide for his pleasure. She smelled clean and warm, all the uniqueness of herself, but deeply blended with his own scent. She bathed in his bath, slept in his bed, reveled in his body. Of course she would reflect him. And he was fiercely glad of it. She was his, and no one would or could change that.

  When he’d undressed her hair to his satisfaction, he stroked gentle knuckles down her temple and cheek, pausing to brush a thumb over her petal-soft lips. She turned her gaze to his, looking up at him as he hovered on an elbow above her.

  “Sylva,” she said. “It seems so simple a name for so complex a life.”

  “To that end, I prefer Mystique. You’re as much a mystery as ever. You remember nothing of these people? Only Knar seems to recognize you.”

  “Knar was the only one who knew the woman they’re looking for. He’s a Middle King. The Yesu have one High King, but many lesser Middle Kings who all answer to the court of the High King. The Middle Kings lead individual tribes in the mountains. And King Derrik rules those Middle Kings in turn.”

  “I wonder how they live,” he mused, making no commotion over the information she was recalling. She’d known a lot about the Sánge as well. Apparently the Yesu had had detailed information on Jeth for some time. This was likely to be where she’d earned some of her knowledge.

  “There are villages and communities buried in ice and snow, and wonderful caves tiered against mountains like nature-made buildings. Places like the Crystal City, the home of the High King, are vast and beautiful. A tall, vertical metropolis in stone honeycombs; ice slides and wooden ladders access the different tiers, and the higher you go, the more of the mountain range you see. I’ve only been there once. We stayed on the uppermost tiers and it was like looking toward the end of the world. That high up, all you see are caps and clouds.”

  “It sounds like you were young,” he said in a soft, neutral tone, giving nothing away of the reality that she was without a doubt Yesu. He didn’t think she realized what she was revealing, and he didn’t want to disturb the chain of memories. But he wanted to try to direct the conversation at least a little.

  “I was twelve. Since I’d been born in Sapra, a very small village, I felt like I had entered the Edge of the World. We moved into the Atham tribe after that. That’s the tribe Knar is Middle King of now. Not so big as Crystal City, but not so small either.”

  Reule monitored her emotions as she spoke. Whenever she said “we,” there was affection and love, but it churned up that sorrow within her
as well. If he asked for elaboration, it might trigger emotions that would get in the way of her steady remembering. Knar fell into the same category. When she said his name, the disdain and fear she felt had little to do with what had transpired in the parlor.

  “So you’ve lived there ever since?”

  “Yes. The Yesu don’t switch tribes often, but my mother married a man from Atham. After they died, I had too many people who depended on me, so I didn’t move away even when—”

  She broke off, and like a steel gate, everything slammed shut inside her. He wouldn’t let her off so easily, though. He cupped her chin and cheek in his hand and looked down hard into her eyes. “Even when trouble began?”

  “I…I don’t…”

  “You do, you just don’t want to,” he corrected her firmly. “Kébé, it’s important that you remember this. These details can make all the difference in what will happen tonight.”

  “Why? Will you protect me more if I’m not a murderess and less if I am?”

  She was being nasty and hurtful on purpose, pushing him away as she went from receptive, warm, and soft to hard, stubborn, and afraid.

  “Rather the opposite, I’d think,” he said just as harshly. “I’ll need to protect you more if you’re guilty of that crime than if you aren’t. Tell me what you remember, kébé. Your parents died? How?” She looked at him with surprise, expecting him to cut to the meat of the issue rather than peripheral memories. He gave her a small smile and stroked his thumb over her forehead. “Tell me,” he encouraged her.

  “My father—natural father—I don’t know. I don’t think I knew him. Or I just don’t remember. But I remember Mama and my stepfather. Strangely, Rye reminds me of my stepfather. Rye before, I mean. Easy, charming, and an incorrigible flirt. A merchant. Very successful. I…I think Knar and he were friendly. I remember…” She shuddered and burrowed against him, her small hands actively clasping him around his back. It broke their eye contact, and he let it happen for the moment. She might better manage her memories if she pretended to speak only to herself, eyes closed as tight as they now were. “Things are confusing. I start talking about one thing and then my mind is flashing onto something else, and I don’t know…I don’t know where it all belongs.”

  It was the flashes that held her trauma, he knew. He felt them, read them, seeing them in his mind like a chaotic indulgence in hallucinogens. The flashes sometimes ran backward, like when Darcio sorted through a body memory. She strained to push him out, but she was too emotionally overwrought. She stopped speaking, somehow knowing the minute he slipped into her mind and read directly from her. There was much of it in Yesu, a language he didn’t have a hope of understanding. That seemed to be mostly from her youth. The Common language, or the “trade” language, one more easily exchanged between tribes, came as she grew older. It had been the same with his own experience. They’d learned the Common language during their journey to the wilderness.

  The Yesu, he realized, were a far vaster civilization than he’d comprehended. His idea of the area bounded by the mountains behind them was sorely mistaken. Most of her memories surrounded a gracious woman with a noble bearing and a way of seeming constantly amused by her surroundings. She smiled and teased as she corrected and guided and disciplined. This had been the woman who had taught Mystique tolerance and the sweet, elegant facets of her personality. Her shrewd stepfather, whom she saw as her only father and had loved devotedly, had been similar to Rye in ways she hadn’t come to know yet. A scrapper, a survivor, and one who negotiated with everyone on all subjects except his right to live his life.

  This was the man who had taught her patience, charm, and her diplomatic ways of defusing anger and violence before the rift became irreparable. He’d taught her, to her mother’s dismay, that wearing breeches and learning to hunt, ride, and survive would serve her just as much as good manners and ladylike elegance. He was the reason she couldn’t bear the idea of Reule laying a hand on Rye. There was a flash of jealousy in Reule as he recognized the connection Rye would forever share with her because he was so much like her father.

  “He was a good man. They are both good men,” she murmured against the cloth of his shirt. “When he realized I was different, Kisto could have been horrified and might have shunned me and my mother both, but instead, he embraced me.”

  “You were his daughter, and he loved you,” Reule whispered soothingly.

  “Most Yesu have the Intuition. But a very few of us are born special. Some tribes fear and reject these types, others tolerate, and still others accept them wholeheartedly. Atham tolerated me. Because I could heal. It was in their best interest to do so, and I had Kisto’s reputation and nobility to protect me.” Her laugh was bitter. “While he was alive. When he died, everything was calm at first, no better no worse, and then one day…it all changed.”

  The day, or rather the incident, screamed at him in snatches of violent, thrashing imagery. Since he saw it from her perspective, the event was wrought with emotion and fear, pain and the crush of betrayal.

  A small home, two rooms deep, full of Mystique’s beauty and touches, hung end to end with dried herbs and things he knew through her but had never seen before. The surroundings were familiar. She was safe and content. She tended familiar faces, curing and healing, some just needing loneliness eased and a few kind words. Some urgently begging her to help find lost children, pets, and others by pressing things into her small hands for her to use telemetrically.

  But one day home became hell.

  A man, young and bull strong catching her alone and making advances that her usual humor and diplomacy couldn’t dissuade. Reule closed his eyes as she began to tremble against him with the memory.

  “Sylva, you’re so pretty…”

  “I’m busy,” she said, slapping his hand away from her hair. The hand returned and touched the back of her neck. “Do you need healing or not?”

  “Oh, yes. I have an ache for you to cure.”

  He grabbed her hand and shoved it against his bulging crotch. She jerked back with all her might, and his hold released so she came free and spilled back onto the floor while male laughter echoed around her. She glared with icy fury at Harrell and his two attendants as she hastily picked herself up.

  “Never touch me again!” she spat to the wealthy, spoiled whelp. “I don’t care who your father is, I’ll cut your balls off and use the tiny little things for doll’s eyes!”

  Harrell went purple with fury when his men stifled snickers at the insult. “Why, you little bitch whore!”

  He lunged for her and she, being the lighter and smarter, dodged him easily and shoved him ass over teakettle onto the floor. She stood over him, hands on her hips, grinning.

  “Come now, Harrell. Let me cure your toothache and then you can be on your way. Stop behaving like an ass. We grew up together! I know all your tricks! Now give over and let me go back to work.”

  But they weren’t children anymore. He’d grown into a boorish man used to getting his way in everything. She saw that the minute his small slate eyes narrowed on her and his teeth bared. He lurched off the floor, grabbed her, and shoved her into his men. Apparently the maneuver was well rehearsed. Her Intuition told her, as they caught her under an arm each, that they’d done this to women Harrell had wanted before. They wouldn’t lose their jobs so long as they went along, and they often were given the leftovers as a bonus.

  She hadn’t taken the instinctive warnings seriously enough and now she was trapped, held up taut and tight as Harrell came up swinging. The brutal impact of a fist the size of half her head sent her braid whipping and blood spraying. Her brain shifted, her perception fogged, and bright painful lights burned bright behind her lids.

  As she reeled between levels of consciousness, thick fists closed around the front of her dress and tore the fabric apart. Her breasts spilled free, baring her to leers and laughter, goading and crude appreciation. It all blended badly in her spinning brain. A brutal, sickly wet mouth clampe
d onto one of her exposed nipples, and a rough hand squeezed her with bruising force on the opposite side.

  Reule jerked himself free of the memory with a ragged gasp, his arms locking around her in an iron embrace. He’d been right. She never should have remembered this. She would have been better to live free of it forever. She was panting in short, panicky spurts and he knew that the memory went on without him. He couldn’t bear to watch what was coming, to be inside her mind as she was raped and violated, but neither could he let her remember it alone. He couldn’t spare her, so he’d learn what it meant to be a woman in a moment like that. What it meant to be the woman he loved in a moment like that. He swallowed back all of his emotions, his rage most of all, and reopened himself to being in her mind, in her memory, in her moment.

  Finally her mind righted itself to impress upon her the real danger she was in, that she’d already lost a part of herself she’d never be able to regain. Her body stung with bruises, welts, and the bite of dirty nails into her delicate skin. She was wet on both breasts from saliva and she’d been bitten more than once. At the moment, her assailant was fondling her bottom and simultaneously trying to rip away the rest of her dress. She was grateful that she had, as was her habit, worn breeches under her skirts. Besides the added warmth, she enjoyed the option of dropping her skirts to get them out of her way when she worked on busy, strenuous days.

  She waited, bearing the assault on her body with gritted teeth and closed eyes, until Harrell succeeded and sent her entire dress into a puddle on the floor around her legs. He stepped back to see his handiwork, his surprise at her unexpected trousers barely registering before she dropped all of her weight onto the hands supporting her. They instantly tightened to hold her up and her feet flew up from the floor. She struck hard and fast, once in Harrell’s crotch, and then again in his face as he doubled over in pain and shock. Then she pushed off from his bulky body, sending the surprised attendants sprawling into a table full of glass and ceramic flasks and tubs. They let go, spilling her to the floor as they landed in the minefield of shards they were creating.