He kept his stony gaze focused forward. “The palace belongs to all. No one can be forbidden entrance.”
That explained a great deal. Would he have banned the Dasnarians, even Jepp and Zynda, if that weren’t the case? I suspected so.
“Not even someone who so blatantly challenges you?”
“He is a chief, with a people to be responsible for. He annoys but is within his rights.”
“I’m surprised he seeks to insult me.” It seemed the smart course of action would be to cozen and court me, if he sought to make me his queen instead of Nakoa’s. Of course, I had none of the dragon-capturing witchcraft they ascribed to me, but they believed so.
“It is not you he wishes to offend.” Always taciturn in the best of moods, Nakoa seethed under the skin with volcanic fury, so tightly contained I hadn’t sensed the full scope of it until that terse statement.
“Ah. He hopes you will challenge him, as you did General Kral.”
He flicked a glance at me. “Yes. Or to distract me with such fear that I will not bed you.”
“You cannot believe that I have teeth . . . there. I mean—you already know better.” Impossibly, I blushed, recalling how he’d touched me.
Some of the polished implacability of his expression softened and he pressed a kiss to my temple. “Do I? It has puzzled me, what you guard in there so fiercely.”
Not really the place to have this conversation, but with his rapid pace down the path giving us privacy, celebratory songs fading behind, the palace now rising above us, along with the looming prospect of what would happen once we gained our rooms, I’d better speak up. “I never have. Bedded anyone.”
He gave me a quizzical look. “I know.”
“You do?” How? Could he have felt it in my body? Perhaps my lack of experience showed.
“Yes. You waited for me as I waited for you.”
Maybe I hadn’t heard that right. Or the combination of heat, pain, excitement, and the impending crash of exhaustion from fighting through the last few hours had my brain muddled. I couldn’t seem to do more than gape at him like an idiot.
“Understand?” He frowned, searching for words I knew. “I never have bedded anyone. You are for me. I am for you.”
My turn to struggle for words. They’d all escaped my grasp, even the ones I thought I’d known well. “How—how can that . . .” I floundered utterly.
He misinterpreted my concern because he gave me another kiss, this time under my ear, and murmured, “Don’t worry. I know what to do.”
That did it. I covered my face with my hands in utter consternation. It had been easy to agree to—no, to insist on—this step, up on the mountain, his life and throne hanging in the balance. Now there would be no backing out.
The welcome cool shadows of the palace enveloped us, the sweetly scented breezes from the gardens wafting over my heated skin, along with the oiled-wood aroma of the inlaid floors and ceilings. Familiar.
And entwined with the warmth and scent of this so-foreign man who claimed to have waited for me as I’d always felt I’d waited for someone. Impossible, and yet . . .
“Open, mlai,” Nakoa said, and I dropped my hands, startled by his use of that intimate instruction in public. His eyes sparkled with humor at my reaction, however, and he dipped his chin at the doors to his rooms. “The latch,” he added, pitching it with urgency.
At least my face couldn’t get redder at this point. Oh, wait, yes it could.
Chief Tane caught up to us, along with several of his guard and others who seemed to be various nobility and elders. “We will witness!” he proclaimed, a nasty kind of lust in his gaze.
Oh, Danu. Please don’t let it come to that. I directed the prayer to Danu, as Her bright blade seemed the most likely to cut through the twisted lies Tane spun. And Nakoa would belong to her, he being my support both figuratively and literally.
My dragon king, of course, came through for me, aided by Danu or not. “No. The outcome will not be in doubt. Go. Enjoy the fruits of our harvest.” Nakoa’s guard materialized around us, easing out of the crowd in the hallway with silent grace and grim purpose. They’d been with him all along, attending his signal. Not something to forget.
Tane surveyed them, clearly weighing his options, and Inoa appeared at his elbow, amazingly composed, regal and only slightly out of breath from catching up. She’d smoothed over her insulted fury and, very politely and with elaborate descriptions, invited him and everyone to a feast. Nakoa nudged me as she spoke, so I slipped a hand down to free the latch. We were inside, Nakoa’s bulk against the door, so fast that Tane barely got out a protest.
“Lock it, mlai,” Nakoa urged, and I was glad I’d had occasion to learn the mechanism that morning. He sighed with relief as the bolt slid into place, and moved away from the doors. “I shall owe my sister for this.”
“Me too,” I agreed fervently. Some shouts echoed outside the doors and someone pounded; then all went abruptly silent. Hopefully they wouldn’t be listening. My gaze went to the open balcony windows, allowing in the blessed cross-ventilation—and, as Jepp had noted, anyone with the ability to climb.
“No worries,” Nakoa said, following the direction of my thoughts. “We will remain alone. You are safe with me.” He said something else that might have been about his guard.
“All right.” I nodded, attempting a sanguinity I did not feel. “I suppose we’d best get this over with.”
Nakoa studied my face and I realized I’d slipped into Common Tongue, likely using a tone that communicated a task to be completed, an unpleasant chore most easily dispensed with if done immediately, not allowing time for dread to build up. Which probably accurately conveyed how I felt. After all, if I’d lost my cursed virginity ages ago, I wouldn’t have built up so much expectation and emotion around this act. All those years I simply hadn’t been interested, that sense of waiting for the right moment that never arrived—had I been waiting for this?
You waited for me as I waited for you.
I’d learned a great deal more about magic in these last years than I’d ever expected to. I should have known the texts hadn’t lied, no matter how extraordinary some of the tales. If people could change shape and Andi, someone I knew well, could forecast the future and wall off an entire realm with a thought, then I could be connected to a man I’d never met. Someone so impossibly far away that I would never have encountered him if events hadn’t aligned exactly as they had. Some of which I’d influenced myself. Perhaps my plans had operated to bring me to this place, to Nakoa, when all along I’d thought I’d been working toward something else.
Hlyti, indeed.
21
Instead of taking me to the bed as I expected, Nakoa took me to the chair where I’d sat to play kiauo, just inside the balcony He went to get a bowl and filled it with water. As was his wont, he knelt on the floor, bringing us eye to eye. He maybe did it for that reason, aware of how his height and bulk intimidated me. With care he undid the ribbons holding up my stockings and slid them off, then picked up my feet one by one, examining the soles and gently washing them in the basin.
I hissed at the sting, then again when he slathered on the salve. They’d just been getting better, too. The protection of the stockings had helped, but only so much. I reached to pick one up off the floor. They’d burned through, great ragged holes in the knit. Nakoa pinched a few of the straggling yarns together, shaking his head at the destruction, then looked up at me.
“Sorry for your stockings.”
It made me smile, his concern for something he knew I valued that did not belong in his world. Moved, I sat up more, tossed the ruined bits away, and leaned to brush a finger over his cheek, as he liked to do to me. “No sorry, Nakoa.”
He shared the smile, but it carried a sorrowful edge. “Yes sorry. This.” He touched my shredded stockings, then over my heart, and to the bed. “All this. I do not wish you unhappily defeated.”
The term he used came from playing kiauo, meaning to lose
the game. He meant that he had not wanted to force me—though he’d made that abundantly clear—and had concern that I’d been cornered into this. Which, in truth, I had. But the stakes were hardly worth it. My virginity, even if it meant being sealed forever into this marriage, didn’t compare to a man’s life and the well-being of an entire people. A lot of people, judging by the size and spread of Nakoa’s island kingdom.
“It’s not important,” I told him. “A small thing.”
He didn’t like that and frowned at me. “It’s not small. This is a big, most important thing.”
For some reason a joke that Jepp liked to tell ran through my head, one where lovers argued about two different issues, the man believing she insulted the size of his member and he insisting it was a big thing. I couldn’t help it—I giggled. Then, at the incredulous consternation on Nakoa’s face, broke out into a full laugh. His puzzlement only made me laugh harder, until I was pressing my hands to my belly, a few tears of laughter squeezing from the corners of my eyes. A release, I supposed, of the tension and fears of the day.
By the time I composed myself, out of breath and far more relaxed, Nakoa wore a full smile, along with his bafflement. “I do not understand,” he said.
“I know.” I shook my head at myself. “I’m full of emotions these days.” I put my hand over my heart. “I feel so much, so strongly, that I . . . I do not understand.”
He sobered, nodding wisely, laying his hand over mine. “You are full of fire and fury, like a dragon trapped in her cave. This is to be expected.”
Not how anyone had ever described me. And uncannily close to my childhood entombment. Enough to make me catch my breath at the dank, unsettling memory of blackness and trickling water.
“What troubles you?” he asked, searching my face as if he could read the memory in it. This was what he’d asked me after I struck him in my anger and panic. “Is it me?”
“No.” Well, not really “no,” exactly, and it wasn’t fair to him to lie. “Yes. I mean . . . Ergh! I don’t have the words.” I’d curled my fingers in frustration and he took my hand in both of his, carefully uncurling them as he’d done when he laid my little dagger in my palm, then sealed it between his. Not trapped, but held.
“Try,” he suggested.
“Shouldn’t we be—” I gestured at the bed with my free hand.
He shook his head. “We have until morning. Find your words.”
And it was only late afternoon. All right, then. Find your words. It sounded so simple, but I lacked the knowledge I needed to explain the enormity of how I felt. Perhaps even to myself, to be honest. If only I had my list of Nahanaun words. But I’d left my journal in the library and there would be no risking facing Tane and his cronies to get it now. I acutely felt the lack of it, my best fence against the world.
What lurked in the dark corners of my soul—and why did that place feel like the hole where I’d been trapped? Maybe I’d left a piece of myself behind in it, as if the girl I’d been had actually died there, entombed with the rest of her family, and I was . . . some sort of shape-shifted alternate form. Like in Zynda’s metaphor, my real self stayed in some other realm, living on a trickle of rainwater, while I used her shape to move about the world, a part of me forever trapped and under siege.
Ursula had been speaking to this, when she tried to explain that it took courage to let another person in, to open up enough to allow for the possibility of loving in return. Though this challenge wasn’t about love. I was much too old and cynical to believe in that fairy tale; my fence of knowledge worked far too well for that. This was about opening. Odd to recall that had been one of the first words of Nakoa’s I’d understood.
He watched me as I read a book in a language I only partially understood, as if he could divine my thoughts from my expression, which maybe he could.
“When I was a girl, the palace, my family home, was . . . attacked.” It wasn’t exactly the right word, but I shaded it with the disaster and storm tonalities and Nakoa nodded thoughtfully. I kept going, using Nahanaun where I could, resorting to Common Tongue where I had to, so I wouldn’t lose courage. “I don’t remember very much except the awfulness of the siege, how afraid and angry everyone was. Boredom and moments of stark terror. Being hungry.” Other, darker things that I didn’t care to examine.
Nakoa squeezed my hand, dark eyes full of sympathy.
“I remember weeping and the shouts. People disappearing, never to return. The wounded, screaming in the night and the silence after somehow worse. Everybody died except me. The story is that a healer dug me out of a hidey-hole buried under rubble. Four days after the siege ended. I nearly died, they said, but it rained, so they think I lived on the rainwater that leaked through a crack. I don’t remember it.”
“You lived in a cave,” Nakoa said, “and I sent you rain.”
“You—what?” I reran his words in my head, checking my comprehension. How could he have known that? My practical-minded self insisted on the impossibility of such a thing. And yet . . .
“I saw you. Afraid. Death all around. Trapped and thirsty. I gave you rain.” He explained it slowly, as if the simple words would make the extraordinary sound more sane.
“How?” I settled on the one word to express all of my incredulity.
“I am king.” He shrugged at my scowl. “It is . . . within my power, even when I was only Inoa’s little brother.”
“You will always be Inoa’s little brother,” I retorted, making him laugh softly.
“Yes.” He sobered. “And always mlai for Dafne.”
I still didn’t know how to assimilate that. “Show me the rain.”
With a raised brow for my command, he gave me a slight smile. “Yes, my queen.” He stood and went to the window, raising his hands to the sky. Thunder rumbled in the distance, then closer. The sunny afternoon dimmed, clouds gathering with unsettling alacrity. The air grew dense and thick with moisture, pressing against my ears until they popped. Rain began to fall, pattering down gently, growing stronger until the skies seemed to pour water.
The Nahanauns treat him like a god.
For the first time, I wondered if I’d completely misinterpreted and Nakoa could have swum in the lava and escaped unscathed. A sense of intense awe swept over me, my skin prickling with goose pimples. Though that could have been the coolness of the storm. Or the presence of magic, as with Andi or Zynda and their skin-crawling power. Regardless, the intimidated part of me fluttered, light wings of the beginning of panic.
Then Nakoa turned and grinned with boyish mischief. “Rain.”
A smile broke out of me, wobbly from my uncertainty, but still elicited by his unabashed pleasure in showing off for me. “So I understand.”
His expression shifted, perhaps observing my timidity. “See to understand.” In three strides he had swept me up in his arms and carried me out into the rain. I shrieked as I never had in my life, half laughing, half in protest, as the rain immediately drenched me. I pushed at him, but Nakoa held me, laughing also in earnest delight, the rain running in rivulets over his dark skin, soaking his hair so the white streaks stood out in even greater contrast.
I found myself grinning like an idiot in return. “Rain,” I agreed.
“For my queen,” he replied, sobering, gaze going fiercely intent.
My heart skipped a beat, clenched, desire flaring deep inside at that look. “Did—did you make it rain last night, too, to keep us inside?” All the better to seduce me.
He didn’t hesitate. “Yes. I needed to. Needed you. Understand? Open, Dafne mlai.” He kissed me, the rain slicking between us, conducting the desire that seemed to grow with every touch, each intimacy.
For a moment longer I quailed behind my walls, the near hysteria of the moments before tearing at me.
It takes courage to let another person in.
I’d learned fortitude, how to hunker down and survive the onslaught. But never how to open the gates again once the war had ended. A small thing, perha
ps, for another woman. Huge for me. Feeling as if I laid my heart stripped bare, I dropped my walls, letting in the light. Freeing, perhaps, that other self, long trapped in that dank hole, fenced in as much as I’d fenced the world out. Releasing a dark and passionate flame I’d never known lived there.
Nakoa had given me rain. I would give him fire.
With a cry of longing, I gave into the kiss, into him, taking his hair in fistfuls, kissing him with all my might. For once I felt like the dragon he’d called me, ferocious, my wrath transmuted to passion. He inhaled me, mouth meeting mine with a long-starved hunger that managed to feed my own, groaning in a way that articulated my own need. I’d been wandering the world in search of this. Physically, in my circumscribed way. Mentally . . . I’d scoured all the universe of knowledge seeking this moment, this vital connection to another human being.
Maybe I had been looking for him after all.
I didn’t know and, more, I’d lost the ability to think. Impatient to be even closer, I pressed to him, as if we could merge the margins of our bodies and become one being. He felt it, too, tearing at my clothes to bare my breasts. The sound of fabric ripping echoed the fraying of my boundaries and I embraced it, shrugging out of the torn cloth and melding my rain-drenched skin to his. We burned together, tongues tangled, hearts pounding in that now-familiar synchronicity.
Needing to touch him more, I turned in his arms, wrapping my legs around his waist, my core, as wet as the rain but burning hotter than liquid rock through thin silk, pressed against his ridged abdomen. It felt glorious.
It wasn’t enough.
I tore my mouth away, gasping for air I hadn’t noticed I lacked till that moment. “Nakoa mlai.”
This time, he didn’t question it. “Yes, Dafne mlai.”
He carried me inside, to the great bed, and dropped us both upon it, uncaring of how we dampened the soft sheets. Or how they tangled between us as we rolled, over and around each other, kissing with the desperation of long-separated lovers. My garland broke, the petals shredding a pale fragrant cascade over the white sheets, gleaming with florid luminescence where they stuck to his dark skin. I picked one off his shoulder, following with my tongue, licking Nakoa’s skin as his mouth fastened on my throat. Salt and sweet combined, flagrantly masculine flavors simmering with the fragility of the crushed blossoms.
The Pages of the Mind Page 24
