“You’re not broken,” she whispered against me. “You’re loving and kind. You embody patience, with me and the bratlings. You love me even when I’m being impossible and emotional.”
“I like that you rage and weep. It’s who you are—a vivid and passionate person who’s fully alive. Your way is better. You so freely express what I can’t. Sometimes…” I took a breath, focused on the sky. “Sometimes I think I’m like the volcano, with a cork in it. All this feeling inside me, it’s the lava that will explode out and burn everything around me to ash.”
“That’s not you.” Ami kissed me, heating it, stirring the passion between us until I groaned. “You do express it—during sex.”
“I… what?”
“During sex. You show me everything then. It’s the one time you’re not all guarded. That’s part of why I like everything you do to me, no matter what. Because it’s really you, showing me what’s really inside.”
I didn’t know what to think of that. Those seemed to be the times I lost control, when I lost sight of the man I’d tried so hard to craft from the shards left of that imprisoned boy. “I don’t like that idea, that who I truly am is someone who hurts you.”
“You never hurt me, not really. That’s the thing. Not during sex, anyway. You only hurt me when you pull away.”
“I pull away because I think I’m not good for you.”
“Because you think loving someone means destroying them.”
I nearly protested, but… “Maybe,” I finally said.
“But we already love each other, and we’re not destroyed. We’re better. I love you. Astar and Stella love you. You’d only destroy us by taking that away. We’d be lost without you.”
“You asked me to go.”
“No. And you claim I don’t listen.” She shook her head and sat up a little, making me look at her. “I never wanted you to go. I was trying not to be selfish and keep you with me against your wanting to go.”
I searched her face, bemused. “I never wanted to go. I thought you wanted me to.”
She sighed, raking back her hair. “What a pair we are. Flinging words back and forth and never getting the right message across. Will you explain to me why you think I wanted you to leave me, when you are the one person who keeps me whole in my heart?”
“Do I do that?”
“Yes. You alone have never been dazzled by my face, my body. You tell me the truth—when you talk to me.”
“Ami.” Reverently, I reached up and touched her face, then slid my fingers through the enticing silk of her hair. “I’m eternally dazzled by you. I can’t think straight when you smile at me. You know this.”
“Maybe—but I don’t agree on the thinking straight. You don’t let me sway you, even when I try my best.”
I laughed, a scrape of sound. “You sway me all the time.”
“Do I? Then let me sway you now.” She kissed me. “Stay with me. Don’t ever leave me. Be with me always.”
“Ami…” I tried, but she drank in the sound, making a hmm of pleasure. Reinforcing my grip on her shoulder, I set her away from me and sat up. “I can’t do that.”
“Aha.” She sat up, too, folding her arms over her naked bosom. “So much for my power over you. Why not? You said you don’t want to leave me.”
“I don’t want to.” I scrubbed a hand over my face. “But we can’t be together forever. You know this.”
“I don’t know it. By Glorianna, you’re going to explain this to me.”
“You are the Queen of Avonlidgh.”
“I’m well aware.”
I shook my head in frustration. “You have obligations! To the throne of Avonlidgh, and to the High Throne, should it come to that. You have to marry a man of equal—or better—rank.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“You have to care—you’re a queen, not some dairy maid.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m empty-headed.” She said it quietly, warning in her tone.
“I know perfectly well you’re not empty-headed,” I snapped. “You’re the smartest woman I’ve ever met, you’re just foolish when it comes to me.”
“You were doing well until that last bit. Ash—I am not a fool about you. I’m smart enough to know that I’m my best self with you. Glorianna laid Her hand on you and sent you to me. Now that I know you don’t really want to leave me, I’m not letting you go. Ever. Chew on that.”
Her decisive nod was mitigated somewhat by the luscious bounce of her breasts, but I managed not to smile. Or reach for her. No turning to sex to blunt the raw edges. Talk. Talk this out. “If you marry, your husband will not want me around.”
“Easily solved: I won’t marry anyone but you.”
“You can’t marry me!”
She shrugged a little. “Only because you haven’t asked.”
“What are you talking about?”
“At Ordnung, we discussed this. I said then I wouldn’t marry anyone but you and you said that you hadn’t asked me.” Now she looked away, blinking rapidly.
I felt as if I’d been kicked by a horse: stunned, momentarily dizzy. We hadn’t discussed it. She’d been in a strategy meeting with her sisters and I’d only attended because Ami insisted. At least that way I could keep an eye on her. “That wasn’t about us.” I felt my way through the words. “You were just saying that, to support Her Majesty, and I returned the joke in kind.”
“No,” she replied with exaggerated patience. “I said that because I want you to be my husband. Then I waited for you to ask me, like you seemed to want to. And then you never did. You wouldn’t even dance with me—not at the coronation ball, not at Castle Avonlidgh.”
“Ami…” I felt wrecked. So much I’d done wrong. “I wouldn’t dance with you because I can’t dance.”
Her mouth fell open slightly. “Oh, Ash… This is your answer?”
“And I can’t ask you to marry me,” I continued doggedly. “You’re a queen and I’m an ex-convict.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“It’s a pretty fucking big reason.”
She glared, no longer so watery. “If I’m queen, I make the law. I can marry who I like.”
“You’re still subject to the High Queen’s law.”
“You think Essla wouldn’t back me on this? Harlan is her consort and maybe there are good political reasons for him to stay that way, but she won’t marry anyone else, either. I’ll get her to make you into a duke or something, if that’s what you need.”
I shook my head, trying to clear it. “The Duchess of Lianore offered to dub me Lord Sousbois.”
Ami smiled. “It’s a pretty place. You’d like it.”
“It’s not so easy as that.”
“It is that easy, Ash.” She framed my face with her hands. “Just let me love you. Let yourself love me and everything else will fall into place.”
“Love doesn’t solve everything.”
“No.” She kissed me. “But it makes everything worthwhile.”
I sank into her, into the kiss and into the silken sweetness of her embrace. In the soft light of morning, I let myself love her as she’d asked, showing her with caresses and all the rawness in me, how very worthwhile that could be.
~ 16 ~
We gathered, the four of us, to exchange gifts in the last of the light of that day. Astar and Stella, of course, had been going mad with anticipation for theirs. And they wouldn’t last through the vigil until midnight. Ami declared that tradition could wait on them growing up more, and for now we’d share opening presents as a family, in the late hours of afternoon of the shortest day of the year.
That worked fine for me, though it shortened my preparation time. Next year, I’d be ready. Next year at Windroven. Since I knew where I’d be, for the first time since I escaped that prison.
And for the first time, I realized that maybe part of me had never escaped, and it was past time to let him out. I’d found continuity, my own home, in Ami and at Windroven. I could
be safe here. And it was time to embrace the new, letting the past fall away.
Astar loved the sword I’d carved for him. It would do until I could get him a better one. Because my parents had always given me intangible gifts instead of material things they couldn’t afford, I also gave Astar a scroll, explaining that it was the gift of sword lessons.
Ami gave both Astar and Stella pretty toys, and—to my surprise—she also gave promises—scrolls tied with ribbons. This one her love. This one hugs for the asking. More to call in favors of games to play or a willing ear to listen to their troubles.
I’d cut up my White Monk’s robes, to make a cape for Stella. A cloak of invisibility, I told her, so she could wrap up in it, be quiet, and not have to feel what everyone else felt. With it I gave her a scroll promising lessons in that too, and in healing. She accepted it gravely, stretching up to kiss my cheek, while Astar whooped around the room, swinging the wooden sword in wild circles.
Making those had left me little time, so I gave Ami the scroll I’d made for her with an apology.
“Why apologize?” she asked. “The kids like toys to play with, but Moranu is the goddess of the intangible. It’s traditional to give the gift of a promise, or something else that isn’t a material item.”
I gazed back at her, bemused. “I thought my parents only did that because they were poor.”
She leaned in and kissed me. “Maybe sometime you can tell me stories about them. Anything you feel you can, I want to hear.”
“About that—this is one of those stories,” I told her, handing over the scroll. It had been terrible to write out, leaving a pall of illness behind. Just the pus, oozing out. Curiously, after I finished, I felt lighter, as if the act of telling the story had cleansed that infection. I’d made two copies: one for her, and one to burn at midnight.
Ami clutched it so tightly she dented the scroll, her eyes full of emotion. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“There’s more. It might take time to tell you all of it, but I want you to know. So here is this gift.” I unrolled it and showed her. I written one word on it. Trust. And she smiled to see it.
“One more.” I glanced wryly at the kids, Stella now the lion cub batting at the thrusts of Astar’s practice sword. “Not exactly a romantic setting, but…” I went down on one knee.
“Oh, Ash.”
I had to calm the frantic battering of my heart, speaking slowly to get the words past the scarring. “Amelia, my love, my sun in the best of all possible ways. Will you be my wife?”
“Yes.” She caught her breath on a sob. “Yes. We’ll have a big wedding.”
“I don’t care about the formalities. I’m already yours, if you’ll have me.”
I stood to kiss her, but she reached for the remaining scroll she’d brought, holding it against her breasts with a sly smile.
“Oh, I’ll have you, all right, but we’re going to do it right, for all the world to see. And this is a start.” She handed it to me and rang a bell.
I laughed as I read it—then resigned myself as the quartet of musicians came in and set up. Ami held out her hands and I took them.
“Put one hand here, and the other here,” she instructed. “Listen for the music. One, two, three. One, two, three.”
Just before the clock struck midnight, Ami and I threw our dark secrets into the fire. She’d never done that part of the tradition, but enthusiastically embraced it. She and I spent the last dark hours of that year writing down all the things we wanted to leave behind. Holding hands, we burned them, consigning them to ash.
Then we collected the sleepy twins and took our votives to the big landing, where everyone had assembled. Graves and Skunk were there, and many other people I’d never seen before. All in their best finery. Even the lowest servants joined us, dousing the last of the castle lights as they did, standing on the ascending stairways if they couldn’t crowd onto the landing. At the chime, we blew out the last of our candles, standing together in the dark. Beyond the great glass windows, the sparkling dark night resolved.
The second chime rang, and people began to relight their candles. I lit Stella’s, her luminous eyes catlike and solemn, while Ami lit Astar’s. Outside the windows, torches lit at the castle walls, then ran in a rapidly expanding circuit around all the turrets, then pouring down the winding road down the peak. Ami laughed with pure joy and the kids squealed, nearly forgetting their own candles.
“I so hoped the wind would stop long enough for this,” Ami told me. “I really wanted to see it. For all of us.”
“I understand why,” I told her, cupping her cheek. In the brilliance of the moment, I didn’t care who watched us. I kissed her, something rekindling inside me also, the light spreading throughout.
With Willy and Nilly safely back abed, we joined the party already well underway in the great hall. But they cleared the space for us, and so I led my love onto the dance floor, setting the pace and the tone for the coming year. I wore the clothes Ami had made for me herself, the deep greens of my calling as a healer, embroidered with leaves in ivory, pink, purple and bloodred. All of my allegiances in one.
Though the dance was far from perfect, I did my best. Looking down into Ami’s radiant face, I realized that sometimes that’s all right.
And that love, like fire, might burn and rage, but it also lit the dark night with hope. Which made it all worthwhile.
Titles by Jeffe Kennedy
OTHER FANTASY ROMANCES
A COVENANT OF THORNS
Rogue’s Pawn
Rogue’s Possession
Rogue’s Paradise
THE TWELVE KINGDOMS
Negotiation
The Mark of the Tala
The Tears of the Rose
The Talon of the Hawk
Heart’s Blood
For Crown and Kingdom
THE UNCHARTED REALMS
The Pages of the Mind
The Edge of the Blade
The Snows of Windroven
The Shift of the Tide
The Arrows of the Heart (Coming 2018)
SORCEROUS MOONS
Lonen’s War
Oria’s Gambit
The Tides of Bára
The Forests of Dru
CONTEMPORARY ROMANCES
MISSED CONNECTIONS
Last Dance
With a Prince
Since Last Christmas
CONTEMPORARY EROTIC ROMANCES
Exact Warm Unholy
The Devil’s Doorbell
FACETS OF PASSION
Sapphire
Platinum
Ruby
Five Golden Rings
FALLING UNDER
Going Under
Under His Touch
Under Contract
EROTIC PARANORMAL
MASTER OF THE OPERA E-SERIAL
Master of the Opera, Act 1: Passionate Overture
Master of the Opera, Act 2: Ghost Aria
Master of the Opera, Act 3: Phantom Serenade
Master of the Opera, Act 4: Dark Interlude
Master of the Opera, Act 5: A Haunting Duet
Master of the Opera, Act 6: Crescendo
Master of the Opera
BLOOD CURRENCY
Blood Currency
BDSM FAIRYTALE ROMANCE
Petals and Thorns
OTHER WORKS
Birdwoman
Hopeful Monsters
Teeth, Long and Sharp
Thank you for reading!
About Jeffe Kennedy
Jeffe Kennedy is an award-winning author whose works include novels, non-fiction, poetry, and short fiction. She has been a Ucross Foundation Fellow, received the Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship for Poetry, and was awarded a Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award, and recently received the Rita® Award for paranormal romance.
Her award-winning fantasy romance trilogy The Twelve Kingdoms hit the shelves starting in May 2014. Book 1, The Mark of the Tala, received a starred Library Journal rev
iew and was nominated for the RT Book of the Year while the sequel, The Tears of the Rose received a Top Pick Gold and was nominated for the RT Reviewers’ Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2014. The third book, The Talon of the Hawk, won the RT Reviewers’ Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2015. Two more books followed in this world, beginning the spin-off series The Uncharted Realms. Book one in that series, The Pages of the Mind, was also nominated for the RT Reviewer’s Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2016 and won RWA’s 2017 RITA® Award. The second book, The Edge of the Blade, released December 27, 2016, and was a PRISM finalist, along with The Pages of the Mind. The next in the series, The Shift of the Tide, released in August, 2017.
She also introduced a new fantasy romance series, Sorcerous Moons, which includes Lonen’s War, Oria’s Gambit, The Tides of Bàra, and The Forests of Dru. She’s begun releasing a new contemporary erotic romance series, Missed Connections, which started with Last Dance, continued in With a Prince and will have another installment in December 2017, Since Last Christmas.
A high fantasy trilogy taking place in The Twelve Kingdoms world, The Lost Princess Chronicles, is forthcoming from Rebel Base books in 2018. In 2019, St. Martins Press will release the first book, The Orchid Throne, in a new fantasy romance series, The Forgotten Empires.
Her other works include a number of fiction series: the fantasy romance novels of A Covenant of Thorns; the contemporary BDSM novellas of the Facets of Passion; an erotic contemporary serial novel, Master of the Opera; and the erotic romance trilogy, Falling Under, which includes Going Under, Under His Touch and Under Contract.
She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with two Maine coon cats, plentiful free-range lizards and a very handsome Doctor of Oriental Medicine.
Jeffe can be found online at her website: JeffeKennedy.com, every Sunday at the popular SFF Seven blog, on Facebook, on Goodreads and pretty much constantly on Twitter @jeffekennedy. She is represented by Sarah Younger of Nancy Yost Literary Agency.
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