by Grace Draven
“You’ve promised to send me home. I know now you are an honorable man, and I believe you. I’d ask one more boon of you.”
“Anything.”
“Invading armies don’t reserve their violence for their main target. The nearby villages and towns suffer it as well, their only offense their proximity to the city the army wants to destroy. If the Savatar succeed in reaching the capital, I ask that you remember Beroe and spare it. For my sake, and if not that, then to satisfy the wishes of an agacin.”
Was that all? he wondered. Nothing for herself or material goods for her family? Azarion brushed a kiss across her forehead. “I should have known you wouldn’t ask for silver or silk.”
“Those won’t do me much good when I stand in the Pit once more.”
The harsh reminder of what awaited her in a few months’ time made Azarion’s stomach twist. He hated the idea of her going through such an ordeal again, but she wasn’t his to keep, and her choice to return was hers alone. He could at least give her this one reassurance.
“I’ll see to it the Savatar leave Beroe in peace.” Her eyes closed in obvious relief. “Is that all, Gilene? Nothing more? I owe you much.” He’d give her all of the Krael Empire if she asked him, if it meant she might live her days among the Savatar.
“One more thing,” she said, and her smile was a sensual beckoning that drew him like a lodestone and set his heart to racing. “Show me what it is to truly be the concubine of Azarion Ataman.”
She drew his head down to hers, and Azarion was lost.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The last time Gilene had lain with a man was during the Rites of Spring the year before Azarion revealed his knowledge of her illusion. Then, it had been a quick rutting against a cell wall. She had counted the number of thrusts—four in total—before the gladiator finished with her and stumbled to his pallet to pass out from exhaustion or drink or both. Gilene spent the remainder of the night sitting in a corner, keeping an eye on the snoring heap.
Her cellmate never woke when the guards retrieved her the next morning. She didn’t remember his face, nor did she care about his fate.
Once more she lay with a Pit gladiator, but this time under the stars of the Stara Dragana instead of in a filthy cell, and she did so of her own free will. This man, once her adversary, would become her lover tonight, not her rapist. His face she’d remember, his fate she’d wonder about long after this interlude faded with time.
She kissed him, savoring the shape and feel of his lips as they slanted across hers. He rested heavy on her body, all lean muscle and wool tunic that tangled with her own garb as they shifted in their efforts to press closer to each other.
Gilene’s hands slid into his loose hair, fingers tightening against his scalp as she swept her tongue over his lower lip in a wordless command that he open to her. With a soft groan, Azarion acquiesced and welcomed her, returning her deep caress with one of his own. He tasted of the berries the servants had passed around after dinner and the imported wine purchased from the trade caravans on the Golden Serpent.
Her blood sizzled through her veins as strong as the fire she sometimes summoned to her fingertips at the feel of his erection pushing against her, the shallow thrusts of his hips matching the deeper penetration of his tongue in her mouth.
They ended the kiss on a mutual gasp, and Gilene smiled at the desire glittering in his eyes; surely a reflection of her own wanting. Her legs parted wider, settling him even harder between her spread thighs. She caressed the outside of his leg with her ankle and calf, bending a knee so that her foot rode the back of his thigh. “Is the Gladius Prime as good at pleasing a woman as he is at fighting a man?”
The wind caught her question and spun it away, but not before Azarion heard. His answering laughter was part chortle, part snort. “That depends on whom you ask, Agacin. The best way to know is to find out for yourself.” He punctuated his remark by nuzzling the underside of her jaw, planting a soft kiss there that made gooseflesh rise along her shoulders and arms.
She tilted her head, exposing more of her neck and the hollow of her throat to his caresses. Her hands busied themselves with shoving aside bits of his clothing, pushing his tunic up to expose his sides and back. His skin was hot beneath her palms, his muscular back flexing at her touch, skin twitching when her fingers glided over a ticklish spot along his ribs.
They exchanged numerous kisses, each one longer, deeper, more intense than the last until Gilene thought her heart would beat out of her chest. She stroked Azarion’s arms, mapping a path over his back and shoulders, past the stitched wound inflicted by Karsas’s horse, down the dip of his spine to his buttocks. His hips thrust forward in reaction to her grip, and he gasped in her ear.
She echoed the sound when his hand burrowed under her skirts to stroke every expanse of skin he could reach. “Too many clothes,” he muttered.
Gilene heartily agreed and set to untying the laces that held his tunic closed at the neck. Azarion helped her, rising to shrug out of the garment before tossing it to the side. Bared to the waist, he knelt before her, bathed in moonlight. “Your turn,” he said softly.
She sat up and pulled off her own tunic, along with her trousers. Her shoes joined the growing heap of clothing. He had seen her nude before, once as she bathed, another while she changed clothes. The burn scars she wore as souvenirs from her fire summoning weren’t secrets to him. Even if they were, Gilene refused to hide behind her hands or her braids. Those scars were earned through tribulation and testaments to her will to survive, to offer mercy, and, in some small way, to throw the Empire’s cruelty back in its face. She wasn’t proud of the scars so much as she wasn’t ashamed of them. They were simply part of who she was.
Azarion’s eyes gleamed in the shadows, a dichotomy of bright and dark that obscured any emotion revealed there, but she heard it in his voice. “Agna blessed you with more than fire. I’ve never beheld a more beautiful woman.”
The way he looked at her now only validated that assertion, for Gilene of Beroe was neither beautiful nor ugly, only an ordinary woman with an extraordinary power that had been her bane since the day it manifested. Azarion gazed at her as if she were the sun.
If anyone was Agna-blessed with physical beauty, it was him. Even when she thought of him as her enemy and wished down a gruesome fate on his head, a small part of her still recognized his allure even if her hatred of him made her immune to it.
She opened her arms. “I’m cold.”
He moved with startling speed, wrapping her in his arms and tumbling them both to the pallet. Gilene laughed and kissed him. In no time he was as naked as she, huddled under the blankets, skin to skin. She touched him everywhere she could reach, stroking every plane and angle, bulge of muscle, and the stiff length of his cock where it pressed the inside of her thigh. He thrust into her hand, her name a drawn-out groan on his lips.
He, in turn, coaxed out gentle gasps and pleas for more of his touch as he caressed her breasts, suckled their tips into his mouth, and tracked a path with his lips that followed his hands from her throat and across her belly, pausing at every sensitive spot that made her shiver in his arms. He lingered at her thighs, and Gilene held her breath, both curious and apprehensive at this unfamiliar manner of lovemaking.
Azarion raised his head to meet her eyes. “Are you afraid? I’ll stop.”
She was anxious, but only because no lover had done this to her before. She wasn’t afraid, not of this man’s attentions or the exquisite way he played her body until every nerve thrummed and sizzled under her skin.
“I’m not afraid,” she said. “Just unversed in this.”
He smiled, his irises as dark as his pupils. “What I’m about to do doesn’t require your skill, Gilene, only mine. This is for you to enjoy and for me to enjoy with you.”
With that, he set to proving his words, his mouth and tongue a sweet torture that h
ad Gilene lifting her hips and gripping Azarion’s head as she panted his name on shallow breaths while she begged him to stop and then begged him to continue. The knot of pleasure fanning hot and bright in her belly spooled out with each caress like a thread from a ball of string, growing ever more taut until it snapped. Gilene’s back arched under the force of her climax, and the guttural noises she made didn’t sound human in her ears. Her knees clapped hard against Azarion’s shoulders as she rode him through a tide of sensation that turned the stars blurry.
Azarion rose above her, a long, broad shadow that blocked out the sky. “Gilene.”
Her name, only that, uttered in the tones of a temple worshipper. Gilene curved her legs over his back and twined her arms around his neck. “You are mine,” she said in a ragged voice. “I am yours.”
He sank into her with a sigh, his thrust deep. She gasped at the feel of him slowly filling her, his body heavy as hers stretched to accommodate his girth. Every muscle, inside and out, clenched against his partial withdrawal, and he shuddered in her arms.
Gilene didn’t count the number of thrusts this time or turn her mind away from the moment. Instead, she reveled in it and willingly gave up her body and her heart to the man who made love to her under the open sky of the Stara Dragana.
He came inside her with a harsh moan and a shiver that racked him from head to foot. Gilene held him close, savoring the heat of his orgasm, the way his muscles flexed and his back went rigid before he settled on her, skin slippery with sweat, breath hard and uneven in her ear.
They lay entwined, with the blankets twisted around them, binding them close. Azarion hooked an arm under Gilene’s hip and rolled them both to their sides. His mouth looked lush in the moonlight, swollen from her enthusiastic kisses and his pleasuring of her body. Satisfaction warred with anticipation in his gaze. “Unless you say otherwise, there’ll be no sleep for either of us tonight,” he said.
She grinned and traced a meandering line across his collarbones, stopping for a moment to paint an invisible swirl in the hollow of his throat. “Is that a promise or a threat?” she teased.
“What do you want it to be?”
Gilene pretended to consider the options for a moment. “You always keep your promises, so a promise then.”
A shadow passed through the depths of his eyes. “There are promises I wish I’d never made.” His voice was as grim as his expression had suddenly grown.
She knew to what he alluded. He had promised he’d return her to Beroe, and her belief in him, slow to grow, didn’t waver now. Her own sense of loyalty, however, did, and that scared her. He had offered his heart to her, and Gilene knew Azarion well enough by now to understand he didn’t make such a momentous declaration as a platitude. It was a gift beyond price, one she would hold close when she returned to the capital in the spring. One that tested her resolve to return at all.
His cheek was warm under her hand, the unwelcome tears heavy in her throat. “I can’t say it,” she said. “No matter that I want to. If I do, I will falter, and I can’t falter.”
He captured her hand to plant a quick kiss on her palm and pressed his own hand to her chest. “It’s all right, Gilene. You say it here.”
Grateful that he didn’t try to further persuade her from her chosen course, Gilene hugged him, allowing a few tears to trickle down her face before she blinked the rest away. In little time, her sadness was forgotten as Azarion made good on his promise and showed her that not all Pit gladiators were simply butchers or rutting beasts.
He made love to her through the remainder of the night, pausing for short stretches of time to rest but never sleep. They talked or simply caressed each other in silence while the moon above them made its slow descent. When the sun crested the horizon in a blade of fiery light, and the sky slowly lightened from black to indigo to lavender, Gilene sighed and gazed at Azarion’s peaceful features, hoping to memorize each line.
“Do you trust Masad to accompany me home to Beroe?” It was a question she’d considered when Azarion had first outlined his plan for returning her to her village.
He nodded. “Yes. He might not agree with a decision or a plan, but he serves the ataman faithfully. He’ll do as I instruct, even if it means taking an agacin away from the Sky Below.”
Azarion had surprised her with the details. Masad would cross the steppe and Nunari territory at its narrowest passage to deliver her to Beroe. Once Azarion and his subchiefs completed negotiations with Clan Eagle, he’d return home to the Clan Kestrel encampment. His trusted captain, however, would sneak away in the small hours with the outlander agacin and guide her back to Kraelian lands. She spun a lock of his hair around her finger. “Part of me wishes it were you who will take me back to Beroe. The other part is glad it won’t be.”
The rising sun gilded the lower half of his body, turning the blankets and pelts that covered him a deep shade of gold. In that moment, he seemed both man and statue. He sighed, a hollow sound. “It’s better that Masad deliver you instead of me. I might well break my promise. He won’t.”
It was one of the many things Gilene respected about Azarion, the self-awareness of his nature and his willingness to accept it and act according to those traits both weak and strong. She watched the sunlight creep up the blankets, a relentless timekeeper that showed no mercy to those who tried to capture moments and hold them still. “We have to meet with Erakes soon, don’t we?”
“Yes.” Azarion stroked her back. “There’s no guarantee he’ll agree to my plan, especially when it’s one in which the Savatar start a war with the Empire.” His gaze turned piercing. “If he does agree to it, I will do all in my power to see that Beroe is spared any attack from the Savatar who may pass it by on their way to Kraelag.”
The sun had topped the horizon by the time they rose, dressed, and rolled up their belongings to return to their borrowed qara. Someone had entered earlier, leaving behind a tray of food and a basin of still-warm wash water.
Azarion gathered the subchiefs who accompanied him outside the entrance to Erakes’s qara. He acknowledged each man with a quick nod.
The ataman’s qara was nearly full once again when they entered. Erakes sat on an elevated pallet, a tall backrest draped in white fur behind him, reminding Gilene of a monarch’s throne. A coterie of subchiefs and a pair of agacins stood in clutches close by. Gilene nodded to her sisters of the Flame, who nodded back but didn’t invite her to stand with them.
Azarion stood before Erakes, his subchiefs in a half circle behind him. Gilene took up a place at its periphery, close enough to hear the exchange between the two atamans but far enough away to remain out of the discussion itself.
Erakes sat at ease, one arm draped across a bent knee. The fragrant smoke of incense scented the air, along with the steam of freshly brewed tea. Two servants passed tea to the meeting’s attendees before fading into the qara’s shadows.
“You’ve called a confederation council, Azarion Ataman.” Erakes took a swallow of tea from his cup before continuing. “Karsas was a lazy ataman, content to grow fat on the tributes of his clan and sire children. You, I think, are like your father. Iruadis was never content to grow old behind the Fire Veil.”
Azarion bowed. “As his friend, you knew him better and longer than I did, Erakes Ataman. He was a man of ambitions and dreams. I am like him in the first, but I prefer practicality over dreams, and the Savatar have sat too long behind the Veil, dreaming of their greatness on the Sky Below.”
Gilene caught the murmurs and shifting of the chieftains as they whispered among themselves over Azarion’s remark.
One of Erakes’s eyebrows rose. “I’m listening,” he said.
It was the opening Azarion wanted, and Gilene hoped he was as good an orator as he was a fighter, that his natural charisma and sound pragmatism would appeal to Erakes.
“I was a slave of the Empire for ten years,” he said, addr
essing the entire group. “A gladiator of the Pit, the Gladius Prime.” More murmurs swirled throughout the qara, along with a few approving whistles. If there was one thing the Savatar admired, it was a skilled warrior. Azarion had proven himself to be such, not only in Kraelag’s arena but on the steppes as well.
“While I was a slave, I heard the truths and rumors of the Empire, how it wants to expand its reach, how it uses the Nunari to test the strength of the Veil, to find its weakness so that one day they might collapse it and bring their armies onto our lands.”
“The Veil will never fall!” one ataman declared. “Our agacins won’t let it happen.”
Azarion’s gaze settled briefly on the pair of agacins standing near Erakes before he turned to give a short nod to Gilene. “Agna’s handmaidens are indeed powerful, and the Veil is strong, but it protects the Sky Below on one side only. There is no Veil to the east.”
“No, but there are the Gamir Mountains,” Erakes said. “They’re almost as good at protecting us in the east as the Veil does in the west.”
“That may have been the way of it in the past, Erakes Ataman, but no longer.” Azarion paused to pin each ataman with a piercing look. Gilene held back a smile. He was good at this, very good. Every eye was riveted on him, every man leaning forward to hear his next words. Even Erakes had straightened against his backrest, his body no longer half slumped in casual repose. “Raiders from the Gamirs descend into Goban farmlands, destroy the crops, kill or steal the livestock, and burn the homesteads. They’ve collapsed some of the iron mines and cut off access to others.”
Erakes shrugged. “We all know this. I’ve sent my men, as have the other atamans, to aid the Goban and drive back the raiders. It’s the risk of living where they do.”
“Did you know it is Kraelian weapons and Kraelian horses the raiders are using to attack the Goban? Or that the raiders themselves are often Kraelian soldiers disguised to look like Gamir tribesmen?”
