Under a Winter Sky

by Jeffe Kennedy

  “I’m sorry I missed it,” Jak said warmly, winking at Stella.

  She rolled her eyes. “I was a child.”

  “One who hated having to return to human form dressed,” Rhyian said. “It’s natural—nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  “I’m not embarrassed,” Stella replied, lifting her chin.

  “Good for you,” Rhyian murmured with a smile.

  Astar, once again more or less perfectly attired, cleared his throat. “Let’s try this again. If everyone would fill their glasses and gather around the table, please.”

  Lena moved to get a glass, but Rhyian intercepted her with smooth grace and shapeshifter speed. She managed not to gasp at the sight of him suddenly in front of her, so lethally gorgeous, his hair no longer sleeked back, but tumbling wildly around his face. He held out one of the glasses. “This one is for you, Salena.” When she hesitated—more out of sheer surprise than anything—his lips quirked in a half smile. “Unless you refuse to accept even this much from me.”

  Stung, she plucked the glass from his fingers, being careful not to touch him. “That’s unfair. I never refused you. Anything,” she added with a hiss, which she immediately regretted.

  He didn’t take the easy opening, however, instead regarding her seriously. Surely that wasn’t regret in his deep blue eyes. “You refused to talk to me.”

  Her stomach dropped and her head swam. Oh no. This was exactly the confrontation she hadn’t wanted. She’d begun to relax, believing that he didn’t want to revisit the bad old days either. “I did not. You weren’t exactly available for conversation,” she replied coolly, congratulating herself for her poise. “Besides, there was nothing to discuss. You made yourself very clear through your actions.”

  “I know,” he admitted. “But you left before we could sort it out.”

  “You didn’t exactly chase after me,” she bit out, then kicked herself. Gah. Why was she still talking?

  Rhyian was searching her face. “Was I supposed to chase after you? I didn’t know I’d made that mistake.”

  “You made a lot of mistakes, Rhyian.” The bitter heartbreak of that time felt excruciatingly fresh and raw. “We both did.”

  “Salena, I…” He trailed off, pressing his lips together. Those lips that had caressed her skin with such intimate delight. She’d once thought she’d give anything to have those lips on her—and then she’d given too much.

  “We were young,” she said, gentling the old bitterness. She didn’t—couldn’t—forgive him, but it had been a long time ago. “We didn’t know what we were doing.”

  He dipped his chin ruefully, his gaze catching on her bosom, then rising to meet hers, the blue fulgent with desire she remembered all too well, lips curved in a sensual smile. “We did some things right.”

  She couldn’t help an answering smile. That summer had been the best of her life, regardless of how painfully it had ended. “We did,” she conceded.

  Rhyian gave her a more serious look. “Could we—”

  “Are you two joining us or what?” Astar called out, then grunted as if in pain.

  “Shut up,” Zeph chastised the hunched Astar, who’d apparently taken a sharp elbow to the gut. “Are you completely oblivious, you oaf?”

  Gendra and Stella gave Lena rueful smiles, while Jak tossed off a little salute from where he leaned against the fireplace. Lena’s face heated with embarrassment. She’d been so intent on Rhyian that she’d forgotten about their audience. “Don’t be silly,” she said brightly. “We were being rude.” She moved to join their waiting friends, but Rhyian caught her hand.

  His fingers lightly tangled with hers, his touch scalding, bringing back so many memories. Rhyian holding her hand as they walked on the beach at Annfwn. The first time he kissed her sensitive fingertips, his eyes heated as he savored her shivering response. When he laced their fingers together on either side of her head as he lay against her… She couldn’t breathe. “Rhyian…” she said helplessly.

  “Dance with me later,” he said with dark intensity. “Please.”

  Rhyian never said please or thank you. At least, the Rhyian she’d known hadn’t. He’d disdained mossback manners, along with rules of all kinds, and she’d once found that exciting about him. She’d also suffered because of it. Extracting her fingers, she folded them into her palm, where they burned with longing. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “I don’t get why you’re all so upset with me,” Astar’s voice rose in the background, Stella and Zeph hushing him.

  Rhyian’s gaze didn’t even flicker in their direction. They held hers fast, the blue drowning deep in his wildly beautiful face. “One dance. Isn’t it a night for letting go of the past, for new beginnings?”

  “So I’ve been informed,” she answered drily. “Repeatedly.” Her little sister, Bethany, had babbled on at length on how the crystalline moon made it the perfect night for falling in love. Well, Lena had fallen in love once and still had the bruises to show for that brutal fall. Never again. Certainly not with Rhyian, who’d been the one to shove her off the cliff.

  “One chance is all I ask,” he said with hushed intensity. “Just for tonight. Can we pretend to be friends again?”

  “It would still be a pretense,” she warned, absurdly tempted to say yes. But then Rhyian had always been able to tempt her into going against her better judgment.

  He smiled, slight and more than a little wicked, as if he knew the effect he had on her. “I’ll take whatever I can get.”

  “One dance,” she breathed. It didn’t have to be about love or the past. Just friends. And in the morning she’d be gone, back to her desert and her work, where he’d never follow.

  “One dance—with potential for more,” he qualified, smile widening.

  And there he was, the old Rhyian in fine style, teasing and pushing for just a little bit more than she wanted to give. Well, she’d learned her lesson. She hoped. “We’ll see,” she replied loftily, and turned her back on him.

  ~ 5 ~

  Rhy watched Salena glide away, her caramel hair falling down her back like an inverted flame, emphasizing her narrow waist and the graceful curve of her hips. His mouth had gone dry, and he didn’t have any idea what had possessed him to say any of that to her. Except that he felt like a lust-filled and awkward lad again, which had come as quite a shock. Tossing back the mjed, he sent an earnest prayer to Moranu—something he was normally careful never to do, as he didn’t care to awaken the goddess’s interest in him—to keep him from making the biggest mistake of his life.

  Or at least, not one to knock all the others out of the top ten.

  “Rhy,” Astar complained, “you were supposed to wait to drink until we all toasted, to seal the good luck and the goddess’s blessing.”

  “A pointless superstition, Willy, my boy,” he replied easily. “Especially when, thanks to Jak’s delusions of grandeur, we have a cask big enough to fill the glasses of everyone in Ordnung for a week. Anyone else need a refill?” he asked as he went to the cask.

  “I do,” Jak and Zeph chimed together, coming to join him.

  Zeph kissed him on the cheek while she waited. “Well done,” she whispered. “We have your back.”

  “Don’t meddle, Zephyr,” he muttered under his breath, sliding a look to Salena, who watched them with that serious, pensive look she got when she was thinking about rules instead of fun.

  “What meddling?” Zeph widened her eyes in shocked innocence. “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Jak handed Zeph her refilled glass. “It’s not delusions of grandeur when you deliver,” he pointed out.

  “Seems to me like Astar and I delivered, while you acted as our valet,” Rhy taunted him.

  “Please come do Astar’s ceremony,” Gendra called, “or we’ll never get out of this room.”

  “It’s tradition,” Astar protested, “not my ceremony.”

  The three of them returned to the group at the
table, making a loose ring around it and setting their full glasses down.

  Astar, happy that they were all finally going along with his plan, beamed at them. “I wanted us all to have a private ceremony before the main one at midnight. You each have two pieces of paper, one for the past and one for the future. Once you’ve all written down your own regrets and wishes, we’ll have a toast to each other, to ask Moranu to set Her hand on our friendships to endure.”

  An uneasy feeling crept down Rhy’s spine, one that came of invoking the goddess. Across the table from him, Salena watched him with a speculative expression, as if she could read his apprehension. She was one of the few people who knew how heavily Moranu’s hand sat on him. When the heroic Queen Andromeda had eliminated the scourge of Deyrr from the world, his mother had done it partly by making a bargain with the goddess, pledging her unborn child to Moranu’s service in exchange for Her help. That unborn child being him. A hell of an onus to be born under. Moranu hadn’t called him to Her service yet, but it was only a matter of time.

  “What, exactly, are we writing down?” Rhy asked, trying not to sound as tense as he felt.

  They all looked at him. “Haven’t you ever done this ritual?” Gendra asked.

  “Nope.” He shrugged in the extravagant Tala style to remind them. “This is my first Feast of Moranu outside Annfwn, and the Tala don’t do this.” He wiggled a dubious finger at the quills and paper.

  “True,” Salena said drily. “We’re lucky if the Tala write anything down at all.”

  He eyed her. “Not everyone worships libraries, Princess.”

  She narrowed her eyes and opened her mouth, but Astar put a hand on her arm. “It’s good to remind us all,” he said, looking around the table. “For the past, we write down a regret we’d like to leave behind. For the future, we write down a promise, wish, or hope for ourselves or for someone else.”

  “Isn’t the past already behind us?” Rhy asked.

  Salena’s gorgeous lips quirked in an appreciative smile. “That is the definition of the past, after all.”

  Gendra groaned and thunked her forehead on the table. “Why did we want them to start talking to each other again? I’m never going to make it to the dancing. Never.”

  “The past,” Stella said, not raising her voice, but silencing everyone immediately with her gravity and the resonance of magic, “is only behind us if we make an effort to leave it behind.” She leveled her storm-gray gaze on Rhy, then on Salena. “Past mistakes and regrets can be like stones we tied around our necks of our own free will. They weigh us down, chains to the past that prevent us from moving into the future. If we are forever dragging those weights, they stunt our growth. This is an opportunity to break those chains and drop those stones of remorse, leaving them here to burn cleanly in the fire, so that we can move into the new year unfettered by past mistakes, free to grow into better people.”

  A hush settled, and they all looked at each other. Rhy started to drink his mjed, but Gendra, beside him, put a hand on his forearm to lock it in place, giving him a pleading look. Right. No more delays.

  Astar cleared his throat. “On that note, you all should have an idea of what to write down. Past first.”

  They all bent over the task, quiet filling the room, the fire crackling and the wind roaring distantly among the high towers. A few of them were already scratching words down. Show-offs. Rhy stared at the blank paper, about a hundred possibilities flying through his mind of mistakes and regrets he’d love to never think about again.

  “What if my paper isn’t big enough?” he said into the quiet. Five heads snapped up to level unamused glares on him, while Jak tossed him a jaunty salute.

  “Pick one,” Salena suggested in a lethal tone. “If you like, I can make a list for you.”

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it?” he replied. “The list is so long. How to choose?”

  “Rhy,” Stella said, not without sympathy, “no one but you and Moranu will know what you write down. It can be anything at all.”

  “Yes, well, Moranu is not that fond of me,” he retorted. “I try not to let Her into my head.”

  Stella cocked her head, looking through him in that sorcerous way his mother did, and nodded to herself.

  “It doesn’t even have to be real,” Gendra snapped at him, folding her paper several times into a tiny square. “Write down the color blue for all I care, just write something and burn it.”

  He followed as she strode to the fireplace and pitched in her note. “But then I wouldn’t have your pretty blue eyes in my life,” he teased, stepping back in surprise when she whirled on him.

  “Fine,” she hissed. “Don’t take this seriously. But do try not to ruin it for the rest of us.”

  “Why are you pissed at me?” he asked, genuinely taken aback. Gendra never got mad at him—unlike everyone else—and was always staunchly on his team.

  “I’m not.” She sighed, relenting and putting a hand on his arm. “You know I love you like a brother, Rhy, but it would be nice if, for once in your life, you thought about how someone else feels.” She walked away, leaving him gaping after her.

  “Burrrrnnn,” Zeph whispered in his ear as she leaned past him to toss her paper in the fire.

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “What did you tell Gendra?”

  “Me?” Zeph patted his cheek. “Not a thing. Go write something down so Astar will let us leave the Room of Doom, all right?”

  Beyond irritated, he stalked back to the table and dashed off one word—using a Tala rune just in case any of them peeked—crumpled it in his fist, and threw it in the fire. The flames caught it, burning slowly as the pungent smoke coiled up. The runes seemed to glow, taunting him.

  “Put a lot of thought into that, did you?” Salena teased as she tossed her crumpled paper into the fire.

  “What is this, everyone yell at Rhyian night?” he grumbled, and Salena paused, giving him a considering look. He’d forgotten about that, how she couldn’t let a question go unanswered. She took every one seriously, and he’d used to love to tease her by asking questions she couldn’t possibly know the answer to, just to wind her up.

  But this time she did. She really had changed. “Just play along for a bit longer, and then you can be free,” she suggested.

  “Not hardly,” he replied in a sour tone. “I’m trapped in mossbackland until dawn. On the longest night of the year.”

  “I’m sure you’ll find a way to cope,” she replied, walking with him back toward the table. “You can drown your sorrows in one—or several—of the hundreds of women out there waiting to enjoy the longest night with you.”

  He caught her hand again, partly to stop her harsh words—all the harsher because he knew he deserved them—and partly because he needed to touch her again. The glide of her clever fingers against his skin reminded him of so much. Why should he want to forget the past? It had been far better than his recent present. Salena raised an inquiring brow at him, and he released her hand before he made some declaration in the impulse of the moment that his future self would never be able to live up to.

  “Do we get to drink now?” he asked Astar somewhat desperately, gazing at his temptingly full glass of mjed.

  “Not yet.” Astar gave him a stern look. “Now we write down a wish, hope, or promise for the future, to keep or to give to someone else.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Rhy sighed. “I remember that part.” Catching the edge of Gendra’s glare, he pasted on a happy smile. “This is so fun and meaningful!”

  “Oh, for Moranu’s sake,” Gendra muttered, writing rapidly.

  “You could wish for me to be a better person,” he murmured to her, hoping to make her smile.

  “I’m not wasting any more of my wishes on you, Rhy,” she replied crisply.

  “I’m done,” Zeph declared, folding her paper and making a show of tucking it in Astar’s breast pocket, giving him a sultry look as she did it. Salena and Gendra exchanged looks, and Rhy wondered if he’d missed
this development. Stella looked on calmly, her mind possibly somewhere else, as it often was.

  Astar, always well-mannered, took Zeph’s hand and bent over it. “Thank you, my lady. Should I read it now?”

  Gendra groaned under her breath, and Salena closed her eyes as if in pain. Zeph smiled, bringing Astar’s hand close enough to brush it with her breast. “Later,” she said as Astar jerked and turned bright red, “when we’re alone.”

  “Shall we toast?” Gendra said, much too loudly, and everyone seized on the moment.

  “Rhyian isn’t done with his,” Salena said, giving him a lethal smile.

  “Yes, I am,” he told her, writing down another single rune, then folding the paper and putting it in his pocket. He picked up his glass and looked to Astar. “What is the toast, Your Highness, Crown Prince Astar?”

  As Rhy had hoped, the words shook Astar out of his flustered embarrassment. Salena flashed him a grateful look, and Gendra squeezed his forearm. There. A hero to his favorite women in the world. Who said he was a total shit?

  Astar lifted his glass, holding it up, once again secure as leader of their small cadre. “I offer this toast, in the name of Moranu, on this, Her most blessed night, to the people I love best in all the world.” His summer-blue eyes lit on each of them in turn. “We’ve grown up together, traveled apart, and come together again.” With his other hand, he turned over his piece of paper and slid it to the center of the table. “This is my hope, my wish, and my promise to all of you: that we shall be friends all our lives. May Moranu make it so.”

  They all lifted their glasses, repeating “May Moranu make it so,” though the words threatened to stick in Rhy’s throat. Hopefully far too many people were appealing to Moranu tonight for Her to pick out his insincere voice. Salena’s gaze lingered on him, her thoughts dark behind them, and it occurred to him that she might not feel enthusiastic about Astar’s vow either. At least not where he was concerned.