Oria's Gambit

by Jeffe Kennedy

  When Oria didn’t speak, instead remaining rigidly silent and caressing her pet’s tail where it looped around her wrist—a nervous gesture, to be sure—it occurred to him that she’d likely glimpsed that potent fantasy in his mind, along with his fury. Overheard how part of him howled to strip her of those shapeless robes and find the luminous slip of a candlelit woman who’d caught his eye in a window and reminded him of the fantastic tales of his boyhood, even amidst the blood, gore, and terror. Too late for her to unsee it, in that case. Teach her to snoop in his brain.

  “You wanted to speak to me?” He prompted.

  “I thought you were finished bathing.” She shifted on her feet, masked face turned away, voice stilted. “I apologize for catching you undressed.”

  “I am finished,” he told her, enjoying her unease far more than he should—though it rankled that she couldn’t even bear to look at him. He was scarred yes, but he’d earned those fairly battling her golems, and if he’d grown overly skinny, that too was her fault. “Does it matter how I’m dressed—can you even see through that thing?”

  “Bero, leave us, please,” she said, instead of answering.

  The boy patted the spiral tail of Lonen’s hair and bowed his way out. Lonen poured more wine and held out the glass to her. “Wine? I’ve only the one glass and I drank from it, but you could sip from the other side, if you’re concerned about catching a disease from me.”

  ~ 2 ~

  “No, but thank you for the offer,” Oria managed to reply with reasonable politeness, proud of her even tone in the face of all the violent emotion whirling off him like sand thrown by a dust devil.

  The Destrye king shrugged his bare shoulders, took a swig of the wine and popped some honey-dipped cheese into his mouth, chewing vigorously. His granite eyes stayed hard, studying her, his dislike of her mixing with sexual desire that carried an unsettling edge of fury.

  As much as she’d come to appreciate the rational, even noble aspects to his character, it wouldn’t pay to forget that Lonen, though king now, was a warrior first, and from a brutal, barbarian people. And his sexual nature affected her in improbable ways. Seeing with sgath wasn’t the same as looking with her eyes. In some ways, it showed more details to her mind’s eye—the physical lines of the man, yes, also layered with his shimmering personal vitality.

  “You could take the mask off, if that’s what’s stopping you,” he said. “It’s good wine. So is the food, if you want some.”

  “Thank you, I’ve eaten.” She sounded stiff, even to herself. Better that, though, than an emotional meltdown. “And my mask is a badge of office. I don’t remove it, except with close family.” Something she’d told him already.

  “We’re going to be family.” Lonen swirled another hunk of cheese in the honey liberally, a gesture somehow suggestive, then ate it. His strong throat, skin newly shaved below his neat beard, moved as he swallowed, drawing her attention. Though she fought that fascination, better to look there than at the rest of him, so liberally displayed to her mind’s eye.

  He sat with his knees wide, the white drying cloth parting over one thigh, revealing shadows beneath. Strangely she longed to touch him, though she knew doing so would only overload her senses, causing devastating mental and even physical pain that could send her into a faint at best. He enticed her anyway, inciting a craving to caress that tanned skin, feel the dark hair sprinkled over his arms and legs, denser on his chest, then arrowing towards the cloth that could be so easily tugged away.

  She blushed at the uncharacteristically prurient impulse, glad of the mask that hid it, though Chuffta would know her thoughts.

  “And wouldn’t judge you for them,” her Familiar said in her mind. “It’s good to want your mate. It’s the natural order of things.”

  There would be nothing natural about this marriage. “We won’t be family like that,” she said aloud, to both of them. “We discussed that already and you agreed to a marriage in name only, King Lonen. I have good reasons for it.”

  Irritation flickered out of him, but he glanced down at the food tray, thick dark lashes hiding his eyes as he picked through the offerings, at last choosing spray of grapes. “But you haven’t explained them. Nor did you answer my question about how well you can see in that mask. Even if we won’t share a bed, we will share hopefully long lives bound together. We shouldn’t have secrets between us.”

  She laced her fingers together, holding herself more rigid than she needed to. Oh, he had no idea of the secrets she kept. Chief and most dangerous among them that she could use male magic, the more active grien, along with sgath. Of course Lonen wouldn’t know the difference as any of her people would, but he might slip up and say the wrong thing. Or use the information to deliberately betray her, if it became useful for him to do so.

  Execution could be a handy way to dispose of an unwanted wife. If her own people did the deed for him, so much more convenient.

  Since she’d gained her mask, she’d gotten much better at handling the emotional energy that she absorbed from other people as passively as she did from all living things and the deep source of magic below Bára. But dealing with it effectively meant venting the accumulated energy as grien—something she needed not only privacy, but quiet and concentration to accomplish. All of which did not come easily around the larger-than-life Destrye with his exuberant masculinity.

  “Let me help.” Chuffta leaned his angled cheek against the patch of skin behind her ear bared by her upswept hair, where the mask did not cover. The derkesthai’s buffering abilities took the jangling energy down several notches.

  “Thank you.” This time she kept her reply to her Familiar private. The way Lonen’s flinty eyes went to Chuffta, however, showed he suspected they conversed. Something he didn’t at all like. She might be more efficient to catalog what he did like and consign the rest to beyond her control.

  “We will have secrets between us,” she corrected the Destrye. “For many reasons. Not all the secrets are mine alone, and the temple guards hers closely. Only those who have taken the mask may know them. Not only by sacred law, but because of a … a need for maturity in ability to absorb the information.”

  A wry, humorless grin cracked his face, teeth white in the dim, golden light and the darkness of his beard. “Did you just say that I’m too stupid to understand the answers to my questions?”

  It sounded bad, put that way. Oria herself had only recently proved herself a master of hwil, a state of such perfect, inviolable peacefulness of mind and spirit that she could be trusted with the dangerous secrets of manipulating magic. Never mind that she’d lied to the priestesses and faked hwil well enough to pass their tests. Something else impossible to explain to an outsider, much less this brusque warrior.

  Lonen could never hope to penetrate the temple’s secrets. In fact, he’d be far safer and likely happier not knowing the dark side of Báran magic.

  She couldn’t tell him as much, however. They might be virtual strangers, but it didn’t take long familiarity with the man to know he wouldn’t take any explanation along those lines at all well.

  She deliberately laced her fingers together again, mimicking a serenity she’d never feel, choosing her words carefully. “Even though you’ll be my husband, you will still be Destrye and I will be Báran. There are worlds of things we’ll never know or understand about each other. We must resign ourselves to that reality now.”

  His intention sharpened, giving her warning, but he still surprised a gasp out of her when he lunged to his feet and closed the distance between them with only a few athletic strides. Chuffta spread his wings and hissed, though he didn’t breathe fire. Oria held her ground—barely—and Lonen flicked a dismissive gaze at her Familiar.

  “Rest easy, dragonlet,” he murmured. “I won’t harm your mistress.”

  “I told you before—his name is Chuffta.”

  Lonen didn’t acknowledge that, sticking up three fingers, his thumb and pinky tucked into his palm. “How many fi
ngers am I holding up?”

  “Lonen—”

  “You’re not telling me any of your precious temple secrets.” He seethed with a dark combination of frustration and desire. Probably he wouldn’t harm her. Not intentionally, but his longing to touch her was as palpable as the scent of warmed oils on his damp hair and skin—and as vivid as those sexual images that burned through his mind like meteors. An outsider like him might never understand what harm he could do her with the intensity of his thoughts alone, intentionally or not.

  “How many fingers, Oria?” he grated out the question, his angry impatience even harsher than the sound. “It’s a simple question. One I’d ask any of my men who got knocked upside the head.”

  It wasn’t simple. None of this was.

  “Three,” she answered, knowing that only satisfied one question among many, but nevertheless hoping he’d let at least this go.

  He nodded, confirming something to himself. Then circled around her, holding up his hand behind her. No such luck that he’d drop the subject so easily. “How many now?”

  Ignorant of Báran magic, perhaps, but a canny man. Another priestess might lie, might keep the temple secrets from a foreigner, but she couldn’t bring herself to deceive him more than she already had. He did deserve to know something of who—and what—he’d agreed to bind himself to.

  “One.”

  “Is the dragonlet telling you that? It’s looking at me. You can talk to it, can’t you?”

  “Chuffta?” She emphasized her Familiar’s name.

  Lonen made an aggravated sound. “Fine. Chuffta.”

  “He’s protective. He doesn’t like you behind my back. And yes, we communicate. Go over to the bench, Chuffta,” she said aloud, for Lonen’s benefit. “And look the other direction.”

  Chuffta grumbled without words, but did as she bid, settling on the bench, folding his wings, and delicately sniffing at the haft of Lonen’s axe propped there. Her Familiar understood that she needed to build trust with her future husband—had, in fact, been lecturing her on the topic.

  “Advising you,” Chuffta corrected. “Which, I might point out, is my job.”

  “Yes, yes—now let me do mine.”

  She had to force herself to hold still as Lonen drew up close behind her, the fine hairs prickling on the back of her neck. “You’re holding up two fingers, one on each hand.”

  The man moved soundlessly, but even without sgath revealing the energies around her, his masculine aura would impact her from even much farther away. This close, it enveloped her as surely as a physical embrace, the complicated interplay of his thoughts and emotions strumming over her nerves. As disastrous as that would be, she found she ached for his touch on her skin, her body heating and throbbing as if he already had. He’d brought that out in her from the beginning, though it made no sense. Only her ideal mate—a priest, masked and trained in grien—could interact with her the right way, without harming her.

  She’d only completed the first stages of testing—meshing auras to evaluate compatibility. None of the priest candidates had affected her like this. Though that could be because none had met the initial requirements either. Perhaps an ideal husband would affect her this way?

  Not that it mattered. These feelings for a foreigner were … unnatural. A perversion born of her adolescent fascination with the gruesome illustrations of the barbaric Destrye warriors carrying off naked women to do vague and illicit things to them. She could never explain why those stories mesmerized her—before the priestesses snatched them away as inappropriate—no more than she could prevent her body from rousing to Lonen’s presence and the potent sexuality that surrounded him.

  However, though she might not have true hwil, she created the appearance of it well enough to fool the High Priestess. She could and would just as easily fool this magicless Destrye and prevent him from ever knowing how he affected her.

  Allowing any glimpse of her weakness would only encourage him to pursue the topic of bedding her, and that could never happen. He’d touched her once—on the wrist—and she’d been unconscious for a week. She couldn’t imagine what sexual intimacy would do to her. No matter how much this newly discovered, recklessly sexual side of her wanted it.

  “What do you want, Oria?” Lonen breathed the question close to her ear, startling her into thinking for a moment that he’d turned the tables and read her mind. “Why did you come here?” he clarified. “I thought it was difficult for you to leave your tower.”

  Grateful to be back to non-sexual and non-magical business, she seized the opportunity to step away and turn to face him. She didn’t need to, of course, but it helped diffuse that heady intimacy, the implicit trust of having him behind her, his body heat warm on her back, his breath on her exposed nape.

  “I can leave my tower more often than when you knew me before. I am … stronger now.”

  “Because of the mask.”

  “It’s more that I have the mask because I’m stronger.”

  He contemplated that, studying her. “Is the hair part of it?”

  She stumbled mentally. “The hair?”

  Lonen waved his hands, indicating her elaborate hairstyle by wiggling his fingers, transmitting a fair amount of Destrye disdain for all things Báran. “The braids and stuff.”

  She put a hand to the intricately woven style, though she hardly needed to confirm its existence to herself. “It’s just easier, with the mask ribbons, to tie it all together. Well, and it’s traditional.”

  “I liked your hair better when you wore it down.”

  Dropping her hand, she straightened. “I’m not a decoration that exists to please you, King Lonen.”

  “Not in bed, nor out of it,” he replied, both musing and taunting.

  “Enough of that.” She was losing patience for this … sparring match. That’s what it was. “It’s not too late to back out of the deal. Don’t marry me. I understand if this one caveat is too much to ask.” She sneered a little though, when she said it. He could have all the women he wanted. She’d be the one committing herself to a life of never knowing the touch of another person besides her mother.

  “And me.”

  “A human person,” she amended with a mental caress of affection. Again she was glad of the mask that hid her smile. Lonen had folded his arms, glaring at her. He would only grow more annoyed if he thought she laughed at him or took their predicament lightly.

  “Hardly one simple caveat. However, as you so succinctly pointed out,” he was saying, biting out the words, “I don’t have a choice in this. You can’t save the Destrye from the Trom unless you’re married to the Destrye king, because that’s how the magic works.” He freed a hand to wave it in the air, much as he had in describing the braids, making the magical rules seem equally fussy.

  That’s what she’d told him, a convenient half-lie. In truth, getting him to marry her had a great deal more to do with becoming Queen of Bára, granting her access to the innermost secrets that would enable her to summon the Trom and wrest control of them from Yar. Guilt chewed at her, though. She’d been thinking on her feet. How much of her conniving Lonen into marriage came from her strange attraction to him?

  It worried her that she’d made the decision, not out of integrity and the resolution to live up to her promises, but out of self-indulgence. A family trait and failing, perhaps. One that had led Bára into taking so much at the cost of others.

  She should face this potential corruption of her moral fiber. She did feel that, when Lonen wasn’t pissed at her, they shared some common ground, besides this impossible attraction. Though they’d admittedly conversed very little—and she’d spent an awful lot of her life alone so she had little to compare—she liked talking with him better than anyone else she’d met.

  “Besides me.”

  “A human person!” But she laughed in her head, no doubt as Chuffta intended.

  “You’re laughing at me.” Lonen flung the accusation at her, granite eyes flat.

&nbs
p; “No!” She retorted, too fast, surprised into being defensive. He knew it, too, narrowing his eyes at her. Worse and worse. She scrambled to explain. He wouldn’t much like the truth, but he’d flustered her too much to think up a good excuse on the spot. “Chuffta and I do more than communicate—he talks to me. And sometimes he’s … he makes jokes. In my head.”

  Chuffta flipped his wings at Lonen’s incredulous stare. “You’re saying the dragonlet is a smartass?”

  She couldn’t help it—maybe it was all the tension—but she laughed in truth. Lonen transferred his bemused stare to her, anger lightening. “I’ve never heard you laugh before.”

  “Surely you have.”

  “Not a real laugh, like that one, instead of those little huffing noises you make when you find something ridiculous.” A mischievous smile tugged at his mouth, one she recalled from when he’d teased her about using that sword she could barely lift.

  “I do not make huffing noises,” she protested, and he pointed a finger.

  “There. Exactly like that one.”

  “How did you even know I was laughing at what Chuffta said? I didn’t make any sound, huffing or otherwise.”

  He cocked his head slightly, his smile fading and his face growing serious again. “You may be wearing a mask and that ugly shapeless robe, but I can still see the lines of your body, how you move and hold yourself.”

  Oh. She didn’t know what to do with that information. His own way of sensing emotion, she supposed. A warrior’s way of reading an opponent. He stood there, relaxed hands on towel-draped hips, and watched her, waiting for her to speak next.

  She should tell him the truth, that she could marry his brother and it should work magically. That she’d misled him because she herself would rather marry a man she knew and felt affinity for. Her feelings weren’t important. She was forsworn and must make recompense. It didn’t matter that it had been Yar who had broken her promise that the Trom, the ancient guardians of Bára, would leave the Destrye in peace. Only a recreant would try to dodge the guilt by claiming it wasn’t her fault. It fell to her to make good on the promise, not to find a path through her penance that pleased herself.