by Kyra Halland
She sat down beside him, still trying to push back the flood of emotion that threatened to reduce her to a quivering, helpless puddle. “Are you feeling better? Can I get you anything? Some food, or a drink of water, or –”
“Lainie.”
She forced a bright smile at him. “What is it?”
“You can stop now. It’s okay.”
“I just –” A lump swelled in her throat and more tears welled up in her eyes. She tried to blink them back. “I’m –”
He pulled her down onto his chest, his arms wrapped tightly around her. “Hush. It’s okay now. My sweet girl’s had to be strong for too long.”
The last of her control crumbled away. She broke down sobbing against his chest while he stroked her hair and told her over and over how strong and brave she was and how glad he was that she had come for him. And she found that she couldn’t cry very much, after all, because he was safe and whole and they were together.
As Lainie fell still, Silas gently took her face between his hands and kissed her, long and hungrily. Months of pent-up desire and need flared to life inside her. Hastily, almost without thought, she pulled her clothes off and straddled him. She wept again, from joy this time, as she made love to him, and he reached up to her, brushing the tears from her face and caressing her hair. The sweet pleasure of their loving grew more intense and then burst inside her, glowing deep rose with the color of her magic.
Spent, she collapsed forward onto Silas’s chest and lay there for a long time, basking in the solid feel of his body and his warmth against her bare skin as his hands trailed slowly up and down her back.
And then she remembered. Better tell him now, she thought, before he got any surprises. “Silas, honey, there’s something I have to tell you.”
“Hm?” His hands paused.
She raised herself up to look at him, her forearms propped on his chest, and took a deep breath. It was all right, she told herself; there was no reason to think he wouldn’t have wanted her to do what she had done. “When I fixed what they did to your mind, I also – I hope you don’t mind, I found the fertility block, and I undid it.”
His eyes widened and he jerked as though to sit up. “But – I told you, only a member of the Mage Council –”
“It’s okay. I was careful. I’m sure it’s impossible for someone to remove it himself, but I could see exactly how to do it. I had the wishcatcher that Kesta, the A’ayimat healer woman, gave me. Remember that?”
His brows drew together in thought. “I – Maybe,” he said doubtfully.
“She made it with a spell to help me find a way to have a baby someday. I used the spell, and it showed me exactly how to undo the block. It was just like taking the stitches out of a seam.”
He looked thoroughly unconvinced. “But –” He hesitated, as though afraid to even say what he was thinking.
“What?”
“It might cause… cause…” His face furrowed in confusion as he struggled to find the word. “It might make it so a fellow can’t get it up any more.”
He looked so deeply unhappy that Lainie bit down hard on her lips to hold back the laugh that tried to escape. Then she kissed him. “I know,” she said. “I saw that spell, and all the others, and I saw exactly how to undo them so they wouldn’t go off. It was no trouble at all. And, anyhow, considering what we just did, that doesn’t seem to be a problem.” She wriggled her hips against his and noted his response. “See?”
He was silent for a long time. She chewed her lip, waiting to hear what he would say, hoping he wasn’t mad after all.
“So,” he finally said, “I’m not firing duds any more.”
“Huh?” she asked, wondering what bullets had to do with anything.
“I’ve got live ammunition now.”
“Live…” His meaning hit her. She snorted out a laugh and buried her face on his chest again as she dissolved into giggles. He started laughing, too, but soon the movements of his chest grew deeper and slower. After a moment, Lainie realized he was crying.
She kept her head down, letting him weep in private as more tears spilled from her own eyes. When he finally fell still again, she pushed herself back up to look him square in the face. A few tears still glimmered in his eyes and on his cheeks. “It means,” she said in the sultriest voice she could manage, “knock me pregnant, Vendine.”
He groaned as though that was the most seductive thing anyone had ever said to him, and rolled both of them over with an effort that wrung another groan from him. The thought passed through Lainie’s mind that the time was all wrong for a baby, when they didn’t even know what was going to happen next or where they were going to go. But it was too late to think of that now, and, anyhow, it seemed unimportant as he took her to him and loved her fiercely and thoroughly and well.
Chapter 7
OVER THE NEXT few days, Silas and Lainie slept, ate, made love, and determined that the Coltors’ fine big bathtub was plenty big enough for two, and Lainie told Silas the whole story, filling in the empty spaces in his jumbled, fragmented memories. His own trip through the Gap, being jolted along slung face-down across a saddle or sitting up slumped over, had been a blur of discomfort, pain, and voices screaming in his mind, so he listened with great interest to her harrowing account of flood and landslide and the Darknight stampede over the summit.
It didn’t surprise him in the least that she had gone straight to the Mage Council, without thought for her own safety, to demand they let him go. That was his Lainie, determined to make the world do what she thought it should do. What did surprise him was that they had let her go so easily and that it wasn’t the Mage Council who had taken him captive. On second thought, though, his blurred memories of being brought in to his captors bore no resemblance what he remembered of the formal and dignified proceedings of the Mage Council. But it still didn’t make sense; if it wasn’t the Mage Council who had captured him, who was it, and why?
The answer came as Lainie told him how she had gone to the Hidden Council for help and what she had found there. The pieces began to come together – Lainie’s mage grandmother, bullets of Sh’kimech ore, his broken memories from when Lainie had come to the place where he was being held. A sick feeling of betrayal started to swell inside him, along with a slow but implacable rage. The Hidden Council, corrupted by a group of people including Lainie’s grandmother, was plotting to take over the Wildings, in opposition to everything the Council had once stood for. And they had taken him to force Lainie to help them.
She told him how it all fit together, Carden and the Sh’kimech ore, Orl Fazar’s assassination orders and the mage breeding project, the inflamed rivalries between the A’ayimat clans of the Bluecloud Mountains, the attempt to take control of the northern herd. Many of the incidents were fuzzy in Silas’s memory, with a number of missing parts. But his anger at the selfish, power-hungry people who had subverted the Hidden Council and rejected its ideals of equal freedom and rights for all people, and who had put Lainie through all eight hells, still burned all the hotter.
“Silas?” Lainie said as he lay silent, trying to come to terms with what he had learned. She was sitting up beside him in bed, her silky hair flowing in waves around her face and down over her bare shoulders. She looked almost as worn down as he felt, pale and thin, the freckles across her nose standing out too clearly in her drawn face, her hazel eyes heavy with weariness. But after the nightmare he’d lived through, she was a sight as beautiful as the glories of all the heavens.
“What, darlin’?” he asked.
“I’m not her. We might be flesh and blood, but I’m not her. I’m ashamed that her blood runs in my veins.”
“Oh, darlin’.” He pulled her down to him and wrapped his arms around her. “I know you’re not her. You’ve taken what she passed down to you and made something good of it. You should only be proud of who you are and what you’ve done.”
“The thing is, though,” she went on, her breath warm against his chest, “I do unders
tand, at least a little, why she wants to do it. She said mages need to take control of the Wildings to keep the foreigners from coming here and killing all the mages, like they did in their own countries a hundred years ago because their scientists didn’t like it that the wizards were better than them.”
More fragments of the confrontation between Lainie and her grandmother came back to Silas, disjointed and incomplete. Was it true? he wondered. Had all the mages in the foreign countries been wiped out a hundred years ago? He remembered the foreign shopkeeper in – he couldn’t remember the name of the town, it was where he and Lainie had lived in the cabin – insisting there was no such thing as magic. Lainie herself had said that maybe that was because the people in those lands didn’t want there to be such a thing as magic.
And how did that square with what that foreign philosopher – Abenar, the one he had named his horse after – had written about freedom and equality for all people? Maybe he’d been a renegade too. Or it could be that people in different countries felt differently on the subject; very little was taught in Granadaia of foreign lands and ways.
“I mean,” Lainie went on as he was thinking this over, “I don’t want that to happen. But there’s got to be a better way to stop it than destroying the Wildings’ freedom. I just couldn’t do what she wanted. And I knew somehow that you wouldn’t want me to. But it was like cutting out my own heart to leave you behind.”
He went back through the tatters of his memories of that day. “I think, down deep inside, I understood what she was asking you to do. My freedom in exchange for the Wildings. I couldn’t have lived with that bargain.” He lifted her face so he could look at her, and smoothed back her hair. “You did the right thing, darlin’.”
He kissed her, and the kiss turned into more, and the story was interrupted for a time.
Later, while they ate ham sandwiches in Coltor’s kitchen, Lainie took up her tale again. She told Silas how she had shot five men in a row while running from the Hidden Council headquarters and how she had caught out the ambush disguised as a rescue attempt, and he just about burst with pride. His clever, skilled Lainie; she had learned well the lessons he had tried to teach her.
And then she told him that she had gone to his mother to ask for help. Silas nearly choked on his sandwich. “My mother?” he asked, appalled and impressed. “And the old bat didn’t eat you for breakfast?”
“You shouldn’t speak that way about your mother,” Lainie said primly. “She isn’t that old. She hardly looks old enough to have you and your sister.”
Silas noticed that she didn’t reprove him for the “bat” part. “It’s all spells, darlin’. I’m the youngest of nine.” He grinned at Lainie’s look of astonishment. “Which probably explains a few things. But the point is, my mother is probably older than your grandmother.”
Lainie laughed. “And she called my grandmother an old bag.”
“‘Jumped-up’ too, I’ll wager.”
“And ‘little slut.’ How did you know?”
“It sounds like my mother hasn’t changed in the last seven years.” Funny how Lainie’s description of his mother had brought the memories of her clearly into his mind. “Anyhow, she probably remembers when your grandmother was brought into mage society. No doubt she hated that, some lowborn half-Plain…” He struggled for the word. Son of a bitch; that wasn’t it. “Some half-Plain was suddenly being treated like a real mage and even taking up with a highborn mage.” Bastard; that was the word.
“I reckon so,” Lainie said. “At first she didn’t care that you were in trouble, she said you brought it on yourself. But when I told her it was Elspetya Lorentius who captured you, she was furious. She finally agreed to help us, but I think it was more to spite my grandmother than anything else. She did tell me flat-out she wouldn’t help us with the Mage Council. But she let slip that my grandmother’s mage lover was Lord Astentias, who’s on the Mage Council.”
“Astentias…” Silas must have met the man the times he had gone before the Mage Council, for his fertility block and his mage hunter’s license, and other times. But, like so many other names and happenings from his past, the specifics slipped away when he tried to grasp at them.
“Astentias was one of the families trying to buy up all the cattle at the market. That must have been part of my grandmother’s plan, too. Your mother told me that Elspetya and Astentias split up several years ago, but I’d lay my last copper bit that they faked the breakup to hide that he was involved with her group.”
Now he remembered. “Astentias. That must be the ‘A’ on Carden’s letters of credit.” There was another mystery explained.
Lainie told him about the raid on the Hidden Council headquarters that she had set up with his mother’s help, and about the rescue and the chase back to the hotel through the streets of Sandostra. Scraps of those events came to his memory, but the battle against the nine mages in front of the hotel was new to him; he’d been safely tucked away inside a shield the whole time. As she described the fight, he listened, enthralled. Not bad for a little Wildings girl who a year and a half ago hadn’t had any magical training at all. He was so proud of her, he thought he would pop the buttons on his shirt.
“You did real good, darlin’,” he said when she finished telling him about the battle. “I’m right proud of you.”
She stared down at the crumbs remaining from her sandwich, frowning, her brow furrowed in a troubled expression. “Those men I killed with the Sh’kimech and your gun. It was a terrible way to die… Am I a monster like her, for doing that?”
He knew what she meant; using that attack was a heavy burden on the soul. “I’ve killed men that way. I designed that attack. Am I a monster?”
She looked sharply up at him, eyes wide and cheeks reddening with chagrin. “No! I didn’t mean –”
He brushed her cheek with his hand. “It’s okay, darlin’. I know what you meant. That attack only works when the need is sufficient. I built it that way. If something less would have worked, that’s what the gun would have done. You did what you had to do, and the gun did what was necessary.”
She let out a heavy sigh. “I guess you’re right. I gave them plenty of chances and they weren’t going to let us go, so I did what I had to do.”
Finished with their sandwiches, they went back to bed; even short spells of being up and around wore Silas out. And, despite their exhaustion, after the long forced abstinence, they couldn’t get enough of each other.
A while later, as Lainie lay curled up in Silas’s arms, she finished her tale with the miserable journey back to the pass, the run up through the Gap with the hunters in hot pursuit, and the avalanche, which did stand out in his memory as a rare bit of clarity.
“You did good, darlin’,” he said again, referring not just to the avalanche but to everything. The words weren’t much compared to what she had done. He caressed her cheek. “I can’t tell you how proud I am of you. And how grateful.”
She let out a sigh. “I just wish I knew if the Mage Council really did break up Elspetya’s gang and stop their schemes.”
“What makes you think they didn’t?”
“They sent an awful lot of men after us, more than it seems like they could spare if they were really serious about busting up the Hidden Council. I don’t know if your mother gave us away or if Lord Astentias found out about the raid, but I’ve got this feeling that Madam Lorentius and her people are still out there and they’re going to make another move sometime.”
A feeling in Silas’s gut and the back of his mind told him she was right. Short-sighted and rule-bound as the Mage Council was, he wouldn’t be surprised if they cared more about catching a pair of renegades than some story one of the renegades told them about a supposed group of traitors. And there was the traitor on the Mage Council itself to consider. Not to mention his mother’s rigid adherence to rules and propriety.
“When they do, we’ll be ready,” he said. His mind went back to when he had thought to find safety
overseas. The plan seemed foolish and unworthy now, though his intentions had only been to protect Lainie. And, he had to admit, to protect himself from the pain of losing her. Lainie had been right; it was far better to stand and fight, for each other, for the Plain settlers of the Wildings, and for a future where mages could also live in peace and safety in the Wildings. That was the only course of action that was worthy of the life and love the two of them shared.
“We’d better not go back to Granadaia after them, though,” he added, and grinned at her. “Between stampedes and avalanches, I think the Gap’s better off if you stay out here.”
She laughed a little. “I reckon you’re right about that. Although,” she said, sounding wistful, “I’d still like to see the ocean sometime, and not just the little bit I saw in Sandostra. Maybe someday we can still go out to Amber Bay, not to stay but just to see the ocean.”
He hugged her close. “We’ve got all the time in the world, darlin’. We can do whatever you want.”
* * *
EARLY ONE EVENING several days later, Silas staggered through the back door into the Coltors’ kitchen carrying a small armload of firewood. Only six logs, but they felt like twice as many. He dumped them into the log holder near the stove.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Murrison, the housekeeper said. “But you shouldn’t be working yourself so hard.”
“I’m okay,” he gasped. He sat down heavily in a chair, sweating and breathing hard from what should have only been a mild effort.
The third day after he woke up, he had decided he was tired of lying around doing nothing. Lainie was already helping out with chores around the house and ranch, so he had decided to pitch in as well. But he found himself so weak and tired that simple tasks such as bringing in firewood or grooming the horses were too much for him. He just wasn’t recovering as quickly as he usually did from being sick or injured. Maybe he was getting old; he was only thirty-three, but he’d done some hard living the last seven years.
