Embracing Midnight
Page 29
“Look behind me,” Shahrazad whispered. “Who is it?”
Ignoring the glowering klerin, her mother-in-law-to-be looked quickly where directed. With a tight expression, she shook her head. “There is no one,” she hissed. “How could there be? What in God’s eyes is wrong with you?”
“But—”
The woman hardened her features and pointedly looked away, and the klerin continued his chant.
She heard a shifting of robes behind her. “You’ll be mine,” the stranger said. “And you’ll enjoy every heartbeat of it.”
She froze absolutely, like a mouse hypnotized by a cobra’s gaze.
And then he touched her. He actually ran his fingertips over the small of her back. He stroked her flesh. “I can grant your heart’s desire,” the stranger whispered in her ear, his breath heating her skin.
Before she could move, before she could draw in one more breath, shame enveloped her. She was spoilt—and she’d ruined her family’s chance to survive the shitani invasion.
She could not bear this.
“Leave me alone!” she said, turning toward her assailant, her bells jangling even after her voice died. Below her the klerin stopped speaking, but more chilling, Shahrazad saw no man, only an empty spot where the man should be standing.
“I will take you from here,” her mother-in-law-to-be hissed. “My son will wed a more stable woman.”
Was she insane? Shahrazad’s eyes fell on the Pike Wall and her cousin’s dead eye seemed to wink at her. You’ll join me here, she seemed to say. But Shahrazad couldn’t let that happen. The shitani would lick up her land with their demonic tongues, tear it up with their demonic claws.
“I am sorry, mother-in-law-to-be,” she said, keeping her eyes down. “I don’t know what’s come over me.”
“I’ll come all over you,” the man breathed in her ear.
Channeling her rage, Shahrazad realized she needed to do something drastic. She was not crazy.
The heat of the man’s body told her exactly where he stood, even if her eyes hadn’t seen him. She knew where to strike. Lifting her foot so gracefully that not one of her bells rang, she kicked back with all her might, aiming for his groin.
Her face hit the woman standing in front of her, bruising her lip. Her mother-in-law-to-be fell into her neighbor as Shahrazad’s elbow slammed into her chest. A masculine yelp started to come from the throat of her assailant, and then—silence.
She stumbled again as the body behind her unexpectedly vanished.
Duha sent her a worried glance, the wattles on her old neck shaking as she clutched Shahrazad’s arm and refused to release it. Her aunts and cousins stared too, but her mother-in-law-to-be tightly shook her head, refusing to dignify the fiasco.
The invisible stranger hadn’t doubled over in pain as she’d expected—he’d simply vanished.
And Shahrazad thought she might faint. The touch from this disappearing man could mean only one thing: a magician had cursed her, cursed her marriage.
And no one defeated a magician.
His sister, the coruler of House Kulwanti, had vanished—and Prince Tahir took full responsibility. He’d run her off.
“The other Houses are beginning to suspect,” Queen Kulwanti said. “Queen Kalila must be found—now.”
“Who suspects what?” he asked, hating the guilt. He’d never meant for Kalila to flee. He’d just suggested she refuse the Impregnation. He would have—if he’d been permitted.
“Queen Balqis expressed overly enthusiastic admiration for my ability to rule without my coruler…and then she asked how you were faring. She hadn’t seen you hawking lately, she said.”
“By the Sun Goddess’s eye,” Tahir said, anger tightening his muscles. “How can I hawk when I’m fulfilling Kalila’s duties?”
“I believe that was her point.”
“Perhaps if we Impregnated her daughter instead of one from House Casmiri—”
Imperious as ever, his mother held her hand to silence him. “Political machinations won’t save us now. We have a bigger problem looming on our horizon.”
“And what is that?”
Queen Kulwanti relaxed her gnarled fingers on the table. All vestiges of bitchy mightiness dropped away. “The augury was here this morning.”
“What did she foretell?”
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