The Shift of the Tide

by Jeffe Kennedy

  He stretched my wrists higher, leaning over me and firmly cupping my breast through my silk gown, then tweaking the turgid nipple so I gasped. Already so primed with wanting him. “I think I’m the one who’s caught the tiger by the tail.”

  “That sounds unwise to me,” I warned, but it came out breathless.

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” His gaze raked over me. “I believe you owe me this one.” Hooking his hand in the neckline of my silk gown, he tore it down the middle—making me gasp—and baring me to the waist. “Oh yeah,” he growled. “I see why you like that. Works for me, too.”

  With that he fastened his mouth on my breast, sliding his free hand between us to cup my sex in a grip so fierce my eyes rolled back in my head. I cried out, impossibly climaxing immediately. All the frustrations, anger, grief, and sorrowful rage of the day welled up and out of me. He drove his fingers into me, teeth and tongue savaging each breast in turn, and I writhed under him screaming out my physical pleasure and emotional pain.

  When he let go of my wrists to use both hands to finish ripping my gown off me, I followed him up, kissing him with all the blocked savagery in me. He got his pants open without breaking the kiss, pulling my hips to the edge of the table to open me for him. Breaking our connection only to position his cock at my opening, he slid into me without resistance, I’d gone so slick and needy. His turn to groan, losing all of his practiced wariness in the sheer pleasure of being inside me. I could feel the echoes of it in him, reveling in the face he wore only for me.

  He opened his eyes, gazing steadily into mine, hands gripping my hips, my arms draped around his neck. My hair and silk gown flowed behind me like a cloak, the room shadowed in the twilight, all but one of the spilled candles having guttered out. Our mood shifted in harmony, the fierce need of moments ago transforming into something achingly sweet.

  Moving in me, he gazed at me with a kind of wonder, brown eyes lustrous with it. “Zynda,” he murmured my name, his love and exquisite pleasure all singing through the way he voiced it.

  I kissed him, taking that in, feeding on it. Maybe no longer so worried about the way he sustained me. In turn, he seemed to drink me in, the lazy strokes turning urgent. Hands fisting into my hair, he gripped me tight, pouring himself into me as I dissolved. As he went over the edge, he whispered my name and declaring his love, over and over.

  I sent my staymach bird to fetch Zyr in the early morning. He arrived, sleepy-eyed, hair tousled, and decidedly grumpy. He glared at us balefully. “What? I have a tasty female in my bed and I don’t want her to wander off.”

  “You seduced Karyn?” I asked with some surprise. Zyr had worked a miracle in that case. Impressive, even for him.

  He gave a dry laugh of disgust. “That one? No—I’m leaving her to her search for true love and the perfect husband.”

  “Ah, too bad,” I said, not believing him for a moment. “I like Karyn. She might be good enough for you.”

  Zyr squinted at me. “You can’t be serious.”

  “One thing I’ve learned is that I haven’t always valued the things that came easily to me.” I shrugged, making it extra elaborate because Marskal had that glint of humor in his eye. “Anyway, I want you to have this.”

  Zyr took the wooden box from me, weighing its heft in his hands dubiously. “Now I know you are mossbacked beyond retrieval, to give me a big, heavy thing.”

  I punched his shoulder. “It’s a shapeshifter thing. Open it.”

  He opened the lid and extracted a map-stick, holding it up to the growing light and eyeing it. Then he fastened a deep blue eye on me, sharp with perception. “Quite the feel to this.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, beyond pleased that he felt it, too. “It’s a map. You can carry it in talons and compare it to the coastline below. The ancients made them.”

  He whistled long and low. “Clever. We should have thought of this. Do we know where they’re maps to?”

  “One is Nahanau. I know because I tested it. The others… maybe N’andana.”

  Carefully, he put the map-stick away, closing the lid and tucking the box under his arm. He acted nonchalant, but his eyes burned bright with fascinated curiosity. “I’ll bite. Why do I get this gift?”

  “Because you can shapeshift.” I held up a hand when he opened his mouth. “And Dafne is hoping we can find N’andana. She has her reasons, ferreted out of her many texts in the library at Nahanau. She’ll be in touch with instructions.”

  “Will she?” Zyr licked his lips. “Is her husband one of the understanding types, or—”

  “Not.” Better cut that off right now. “Don’t cause a political incident or Cousin Ursula would have your head.”

  Zyr scoffed. “I could take her.”

  “But not both of us together,” Marskal inserted meaningfully.

  Zyr grinned. “Could be fun, though.”

  “Be kind to Karyn,” I told him. “It’s not easy, you know, to be among people who aren’t your kind, where you don’t understand the customs. It can be lonely.”

  Zyr cupped the back of my head, leaning his forehead against mine. “You can always come home.”

  “I know. I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you, too.” Zyr tossed back his hair. “Have fun releasing the dragon. Try not to get immolated again.”

  I laughed. “I’ll do my best.”

  We rode out on our staymach horses, a staymach bird on each of our shoulders. Marskal glanced at me with some concern. “I’m glad you got to say goodbye to Zyr, but sorry that you didn’t get to see your sister, Anya.”

  “That wouldn’t have happened regardless. She sent her love, but she wasn’t available.”

  “What does that mean? In plain words, not Tala euphemisms, please.”

  I slid him a sideways look. My mossback could certainly entrench on odd issues. “That she’s gone upcoast to finish carrying to term and have her baby.” It felt odd to put it so baldly to him, but he’d demanded clarity and Queen Andromeda’s words about the Tala being superstitious on the topic lingered with me.

  “What?” He started to rein up, his horse resisting and sticking with mine. “Don’t you want to go see her? We’re not in that much of a hurry.”

  I shrugged. “Even if I did, it would take too long to find her, as she won’t want to be found. She wouldn’t want to see me, given that I didn’t bring good luck last time.”

  He pondered that, a deep line between his brows. Finally he shook it off. “Maybe I’m thinking of things differently. I’d be worried about my sister dying in childbirth and that I’d regret not seeing her before that. But that must not be a concern—only that the baby might not make it.”

  “Oh, Anya could die, too. That’s how we lost our mother, so that’s always a strong possibility. Childbirth is particularly dangerous for a shapeshifter woman if a healer isn’t close enough. After labor, a woman might not have enough energy to shift and heal, particularly because she’ll have been out of practice.”

  He gave me a queer look. “And that doesn’t bother you?”

  I shrugged. “Whether I see her first or not won’t change the outcome.”

  “Sometimes I don’t understand you,” he said under his breath, but I had no trouble hearing it. Oddly, it pained me. Though of course he didn’t. We might have found common ground, but our different cultures and races created a gulf between us. Something I shouldn’t allow myself to forget again, no matter how much pleasure and respite he gave me. Love doesn’t guarantee compatibility.

  To cover it, I gave him an easy smile. “That’s because I am not like—”

  “Stop staying that! Being Tala has nothing to do with it.” He waved a frustrated hand at the dwellings around us. “I’ve seen your people—they live in big families, just like we do. This is about you. Don’t you care about anyone—need anyone?”

  I fumed over that a few moments, annoyed that he’d gotten under my skin. I’d never pretended to be anyone other than who I was. “I warned you that lo
ving me wasn’t a good idea.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “What answer do you want from me? I don’t have one. I am who I am. And when you said you loved me, you also promised that you wouldn’t bother me with it.”

  He set his jaw, staring ahead. “I said that a long time ago, before we became lovers. Before I thought there was any chance we would. I’d been awake for three days and nights, nursing you back to health and could maybe be given a little room for exhaustion and delirium. Besides.” He cut me a sharp look. “You were a hummingbird at the time. I didn’t expect to be held to the letter of it later.”

  “Is that meant to be an excuse? Because I know perfectly well that you’ve always talked to me as myself, no matter what form I wore.”

  He considered that, losing some of his frustration with me in the surprise. “Of course I do. Is that unusual?”

  I snorted. “For a mossback, definitely. It was one of the first things I noticed about you. You always talked to me as a person, even when I was an animal.”

  “I didn’t think you noticed me at all.”

  I waved that away. “When I did.”

  “Uh-huh.” He had a particular smile on his face, no longer annoyed at all, but actually looking terribly pleased. Smug, even.

  “What has you looking like the winner of I Eat You?”

  He burst out laughing, the staymach bird on his shoulder spreading its wings in a flutter. It had grown larger since picking Marskal as its perch, and browner. He reached up and stroked its head with a finger, smiling slightly when it leaned into the caress and cooed. He’d better not be thinking he could manage me as easily. “What in the three is ‘I Eat You’?”

  “A game. I forgot you wouldn’t know.” Blurting old things out in my irritation. Being with Zyr stirring up childhood memories. “Two or more shapeshifters shift simultaneously, and whoever has the form that could eat the others wins.”

  “Wouldn’t everyone just become the dragon or the tiger?”

  I smiled archly. “Well, not everyone can.”

  “Ah.” He nodded knowingly. “And the canny shifter doesn’t tell anyone all the forms she is able to take.”

  “Now you’re catching on.”

  He gave me a slow, intimate smile, one that reminded me of how he’d looked holding me the night before when we were fused together, him so deep inside me he’d felt like he’d always been a part of me. A flutter ran through me and I didn’t know how he could do that with a single look.

  “I’d like to think so,” he said.

  A long time later I realized that he’d successfully ducked answering my question. Too much time around the Tala. He’d begun to pick up my tricks.

  We traveled quickly, the staymach horses much faster than regular ones. Which meant the weather chilled considerably over a short space of time. I shivered as we ascended through the forested foothills that rose above the flat cliff tops, and Marskal called a halt. He dismounted and rummaged in the packs he’d put behind my saddle. To my surprise, he pulled out the cloak I’d worn when I first left Ordnung with Jepp and Dafne. It had been winter then.

  I’d been so long in lands of summer warmth that I’d forgotten about cold weather. Before the barrier expanded, it would have stayed Annfwn-warm all the way to Odfell’s pass. Since then, the circle of warmth retreated before the colder air of the mountains. Slipping from the saddle, I let Marskal wrap me in the warm cloak and pull up the furred hood, though I didn’t need that much yet. He buckled the clasp, adjusting the fur around my face, and smiled at me, something wistful in it. “You look particularly beautiful in this—the white fur frames your black hair and blue eyes.” He kissed me, lingering over it. “And lips as red as freshly spilled blood.”

  “Marskal!” I thumped his shoulder, laughing. “That’s hardly romantic.”

  The corners of his eyes crinkled with mirth, but he kept a sober expression. “That’s mossback romance.”

  “I’m certain it’s not.”

  “Oh yes. You’ll learn to love it. Here, might as well put your boots on now. We’ll hit snow soon.”

  Bemused, I let him slip the fur-lined boots onto my feet and lace them up. Running my fingers through his short hair, I commented, “I forgot that it would be winter. And you, ever prepared—I can’t believe you packed all of my stuff.”

  “You don’t have much of it, and I’m accustomed to preparing quickly for long journeys. It’s second nature. But I’m surprised you forgot about the seasons—not long ago you traveled to Ordnung in the dead of winter there to bring Her Majesty the news of Dafne.”

  “Yes, but in animal form. It doesn’t feel the same. Human form doesn’t adjust nearly as well. Or maybe it’s because I can’t adjust to it like I can—could—choose the animal to suit the climate.”

  He glanced up at me thoughtfully. “Seems like if you could choose an animal form, you could change the human form.”

  I laughed. “You and Jepp are so much alike. I don’t think it works that way. Like, my animal forms are—were—always the same. If I shifted to the pony, I would have the same coloring.”

  “You don’t have to keep reframing to past tense.” He laced his hands for me leg up to the back of my horse again and, because I liked the courtesy, I took the assistance.

  “I think I do,” I replied. “Accepting and coming to terms with who I am now.”

  “It’s an interesting conundrum,” he said, after he’d mounted and we’d moved on. “That implies that you’re not really creating the form but sort of slipping yourself into one that’s already there.”

  I nodded. “There are some who think that way.” So odd, to be discussing this with him, but I’d begun to relax into it. “That’s part of why no one really agrees on whether a pregnant woman should shapeshift. If she’s simply moving her mind, her consciousness into a new form, what does it matter?”

  “But you said once that a shapeshifter trapped in animal form could have a child in that shape.”

  I raised my brows. Of course he’d remember everything people said. Such a good scout and spy. “Yes, but was she pregnant before she shifted or impregnated in that form?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “How could we? If she’s in animal form, no one can ask.”

  He thought about that. “Queen Andromeda clearly believes it’s better not to risk it.”

  “She has a great deal to risk, including King Rayfe. If she were to die, we’d lose both our king and queen.”

  Marskal glanced at me. “Because he loves her that much?”

  I sighed. Mentally said a prayer to Moranu that she wouldn’t mind yet another secret revealed to the mossbacks. “Remember how I said their bond was different?”

  “Of course.”

  Of course. “It’s literally different—their lives are magically wedded together. King Rayfe asked a shaman to seal their marriage with a blood bond. Their life forces are tied to each other.”

  He scanned the trees, turning that over. “Since the wedding itself?”

  “The ritual was invoked during the ceremony and completed on their wedding night. It’s partly sexual.” I smiled when he shook his head sharply.

  “I don’t need that image in my head,” he said. “So, even if we had caught up with them, it would have been too late.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Does Her Majesty know that?”

  I laughed. “No. Not many Tala even know. You can imagine the strategic value of that information.”

  He quirked a smile. “A fascinating people, the Tala. You either have virtually no bond with your lovers or one unto death.”

  I started to object, then shrugged. “I suppose that’s a fair enough assessment.”

  “So, High Queen Salena…”

  “Married Uorsin according to your ways, not ours. Her own vow—and vision of the future—kept her sealed to him. Nothing more.”

  He pondered that and we rode quietly for a while.

  ~ 25 ~


  By the time we reached the pass and the demarcation where the barrier had once been, the horses forged through knee- and even chest-deep snow, slowing us considerably. Belatedly realizing I could be useful, I summoned some of the staymachs who lived as shadow guardians in the canopy and gorges to clear the trail ahead of us. Marskal startled at seeing them converge, angling his horse to shield mine and drawing his sword.

  I laughed and he shot me a glare. “Quiet! Something’s here.”

  Explaining what I’d done, he somewhat sheepishly resheathed his sword, muttering that I might have told him. “You looked terribly gallant, though,” I replied.

  He raised a brow at me. “Now you don’t mind me guarding you?”

  And I realized I didn’t, though I didn’t tell him so.

  With the paths cleared all the way through to the fort above Castle Ordnung, we made excellent time, though the late winter sky darkened early.

  “I don’t see how we can avoid stopping at the fort,” he noted with a frown. “Which will mean soldier’s gossip and they’ll no doubt invite us to share the evening meal, and then want us to stay the night.”

  “We have to sleep somewhere,” I pointed out. Even my preference for sleeping outdoors failed in the face of the freezing temperatures.

  “True, but I was hoping to make it down to Ordnung tonight.”

  “I thought you wanted to avoid time-wasting embroilments at the castle, too.”

  He gave me a sideways look, oddly hesitant for my steadfastly confident soldier. “I do. I meant the township.”

  “The township?” It would be easier than answering questions at the castle, I supposed. “That could work. We could stay at an inn.”

  He scrubbed a hand over his face, then squared his shoulders, giving me a steady look. “What I mean is, I’d like to visit my family. Just to stop in for the night. I haven’t seen them in some time and… well, you might not understand, but—”

  “I understand,” I interrupted in a gentle tone. “Just because my ways are strange doesn’t mean I don’t understand the desire to see the people you love. It’s clear even to me that you love your family.”