Cursed by Fire

by Jacquelyn Frank

  “DETHAN!”

  And by some miracle, he heard her, looking up toward the wall, shielding his eyes from the bright afternoon sun. She waved to him with fierce strength, then rushed to the other side of the wall and shouted down.

  “Open the city gates! Your granda commands you!”

  News of the grand’s death had not even begun to circulate, so they hesitated several moments, moments in which she held her breath. Then one of the men echoed the command, and the powerful winches and chains began to move and the massive gates were opened. Selinda was already running down the tower steps again and hurrying through the crowd of pushing and cheering people. People were just beginning to understand that the Redoe had been captured and their city was free of the grip of danger.

  Selinda ran out of the city, through a field littered with dead and dying men, and straight into Dethan’s surprised arms.

  And then … then she began to cry.

  “But how? How were you able to get all those men behind the Redoe?” Selinda asked him later.

  They were lying on a pile of soft fur rugs, in front of a crackling fire. She was in his arms and wearing nothing but her shift. He was as naked as the day he’d been born. As they lay there her hand drifted over the dips and swells of his warm, muscular body. It seemed that through the last weeks of training he had grown more and more defined, sculpted into a fine male beauty full of power and strength, and every night he had healed into that definition. Lying naked she could see it all at once, a landscape of energy and muscle.

  “Ah. Would you have me give away all my secrets?” he asked teasingly.

  “Yes! Tell me,” she insisted.

  “I smuggled them out … one by one, over the past few weeks. I picked them from the strongest and most skillful of men and had them camp out in the woods beyond the rise, behind the Redoe. It was risky. They could have been discovered at any time, but they managed to succeed and came in just when they were needed. And I think, after all those weeks of waiting, of being away from their homes, they were ready for it. They were ready to go home and go through the Redoe to get there.”

  “Well, it was brilliant,” she told him, sliding her body onto his, pushing him down onto the rugs. She straddled his hips, rising up like a beautiful goddess of fire with the backdrop of the fireplace behind her.

  “What, this again?” he asked with a humorous glint in his eyes and a grin on her lips. “You’ve used me twice already, woman.”

  “And I’ll use you at least twice more. No, wait … I will not put limits on us. I think we will spend all the day tomorrow making love. I am granda and I command it to be so.”

  “Is that so? Well, I have troops to see to and prisoners to manage. We have to decide what to do with the Redoe left living. There are many women and children, and what men are left are either wounded or strong bucks in need of taming. I have them chained together sitting in the fairgrounds under guard at the moment, but that cannot stand.”

  “Well, I was thinking we ought to make them work to repair all the damage they have done to the city and the farms. Then, with so many of their men dead or wounded, we should simply banish them back to their desert territories, warning them never to return again or they will face much harsher retributions. If we threaten them with a more severe punishment in the future … say slavery … I would think that would be enough to keep them where they belong. It is very unlikely they will pose any kind of trouble in the future.”

  “This is true.” He looked at her in surprise. “I would have thought you would seek a more bloodthirsty or punitive approach after so many years of being abused by them. I’m certain such a course will not be popular with many.”

  “I am not out to make the popular choice … only the right one. Do not act so surprised that I would come up with a good solution,” she said with a pout as she ran her hands over the hard planes of his chest.

  “I am not. Not at all. You were made to be granda,” he told her. “Unlike your father, you will be a ruler in touch with her people, in touch with the workings of her government. I know you will not let it slide into the hands of others. Your only flaw will be the gentle kindness of your heart.”

  “I will make one exception as far as letting others rule for me, Dethan, and that is you. Oh,” she breathed, “I will need your help these coming months. My father was right. I do not know how the city is run on a daily basis. And with Grannish gone … Who knows what damage he has left behind?”

  “I will be here,” he told her, his hand coming up, his fingers burrowing into her hair, and his palm cradling her cheek. She closed her eyes and pressed her lips to his palm with intensity. “But only for as long as it takes you to learn,” he felt the need to remind her. The words felt cold and harsh even to him, so he was not surprised when she jerked a little and her eyes flew open. She drew a breath and opened her mouth, fear racing across her features. “I will come back,” he told her hastily, hating to see her so wounded by his words. Hating the fact that she would be alone without him for months, maybe even years at a time. “But I have a promise to keep. A destiny to uphold. Weysa would never allow me the peace of a life in one city, safe here in your arms. And I must win her approval … so perhaps one day she might help me to free my brothers.”

  “I know! I know the reasons why! I … I cannot bear it. I simply cannot bear the idea of … Dethan … I cannot do this without you.”

  “Of course you can,” he soothed her. “You must and you will. You are stronger than you think you are. And after the way you handled Grannish … there is no one who would dare touch this city now. Already the city is abuzz with news of their ‘fire queen.’ It will spread even farther. Soon the entire continent will know that the mouth to the hells is guarded by a fierce queen of fire.”

  He pulled her down to him, his mouth touching hers in the gentlest of kisses. He took a breath and touched his forehead to hers. Oh, how he wished he could tell her of all the emotions for her that had driven him in battle today. How he wished he had the right to tell her …

  But he did not have that right. It would be unfair to give her emotions only to take them away again.

  So instead he gave her this. Physical love. He put his hands on her thighs, sliding them under the shift, running them over her skin. His fingertips brushed her belly, tickled against her navel, then drifted upward.

  “But for now you are my fire queen,” he said softly against her lips. “A fire you fill me with every time I touch you.”

  She drew away slightly before he could claim her mouth in a kiss again. “And … you are not afraid of me? I … You burn and suffer every night … To be so close to fire … fire I cannot always control …”

  “I am not afraid of you,” he assured her, drawing her to the heated kiss of his lips before breaking away and saying, “I have been burned by far worse than you. In fact, had I been given your fire as my curse, I would never have learned my lesson.”

  That made her smile in spite of herself. Her hands moved over him again, her fingertips coasting over the flat coins of his nipples, her nails scraping over them until he hissed in a breath and began to grow hard between the press of their bodies.

  “I don’t know why you insist on seeing me as strong. I do not see it,” she said, shaking her head and looking away from him.

  “That is a lie,” he admonished her. “You have been nothing but strong today and you know it.”

  “Today … but all the days before … when Grannish was beating me … I was—”

  Selinda gasped as she was whipped hard around, suddenly beneath him, her back against the furs and her body trapped by his.

  “When Grannish was what?” he said, his tone very dark and very dangerous. His green eyes were shadowed with a storm of emotions. Emotions she couldn’t begin to guess at, so she assumed he was angry with her.

  “I-I-I didn’t want you to worry … That is, you needed to focus on other things and I was afraid—”

  “So you let him beat y
ou? Rather than tell me and let me deal with it, you suffered in silence? What if he had maimed you?” He gave her a fierce shake. “What if he had killed you? You knew he was capable of anything.”

  “He would not have killed me. He needed me,” she reminded him. “However much he hated the idea of me, he knew the only path to the throne was through me.”

  “So … all those times you did not come to me … were they because of these beatings?”

  She didn’t dare lie to him, so she simply nodded. He cursed baldly, then cursed again and shook her once more. “You little fool. Brave, brave little fool. And you dare lay there and tell me you are not strong?”

  His mouth came down on hers with a searing, volatile heat. He pressed into her, his emotions coloring his kisses from top to bottom. He was unhappy with her, but knowing he could have lost her at any moment all along, it completely undid him. He devoured her, his body tense and taut and growing harder for her by the second. Her hands were on him in earnest by then and he returned the favor. Their kisses became torrid, the energy between them nearly violent as he yanked her shift up and over her head, flinging it almost angrily away.

  Now her delicate body was laid out before him. She had bruises on her skin from Grannish’s rough handling of her, and it only fueled his emotions of the moment. To think she had suffered even worse than this again and again … It was too much to bear.

  He told her so with fierce kisses and ferocious caresses. He then left her mouth and made his way down her body with scraping teeth and a laving tongue. He bit at her nipples, each in turn, but not enough to hurt. If it were in his power, he would never see her hurt again.

  He stroked his hands down the pale length of her thighs, rising up on his knees enough to see her but never leaving his perch between her legs. His erect staff lay intimately against her, the tip rubbing through her curls again and again until she grew so impassioned that she lifted her hips, seeking the hot feel of him. He found himself sliding through wet folds, his eagerness to have her multiplying exponentially at the feel of her.

  He grunted softly, gritted his teeth behind the lips still tasting her fine, soft skin. If ever she knew how strongly she pulled at him, then maybe he would be lost. She would have total control over him. But as much as he wanted her, he could not let that happen.

  He slid down her body, drawing his erection away from her, making her rumble out a sound of frustration. A frustration he would not allow to live for very long. He put his mouth on her in a fierce, fast swirling of his tongue. She moaned, her thighs clenching against his shoulders, her heels pressing into his back. She squirmed beneath him, her hips lifting rhythmically against his mouth until she was wet and panting and hot with the need to find release. But every time she came close he changed on her, either pulling back for a moment or drifting his kisses away from her clitoris and down closer to her vaginal opening. He thrust his tongue inside her and she cried out, writhed beneath him, begged him to give her release.

  He did not. Not with his mouth. Instead he lurched up over her body and kissed her mouth as her drove himself deeply—oh so deeply—inside her. He ejected a sound of pleasure, a sound she echoed as her fingers and nails dug into his shoulders. He could come right then, just like that, within only an instant of feeling her around him.

  He did not.

  What he did do was move in and out of her with slow, long, aching thrusts. Feeling her wetness all over him, feeling the heat of her body and the muscles within clenching around him, it was more than a sane man could bear.

  Selinda had made love with him more times than she could count, but there was something different this time. A quiet desperation … one that outshone even the hasty, desperate way they had made love before he had gone into battle. It compelled her to soften her hands against him, to stroke them through his hair as if she were comforting a child. All the while, she was swept up in a maelstrom of passion. The dichotomy of it was breathtaking. It left her overwhelmed with sensation and emotion.

  She orgasmed forcefully, the pleasure thundering through her like a violent storm.

  “Ah gods!” he cried out as she clenched around him with power and heat. He couldn’t restrain himself a moment longer. With a flurry of fierce thrusts inside her, he drove himself to his own release, his entire being ejaculating into her in a way that blinded him. Crippled him. Made him want to cry out for all that he could not have with her.

  When he collapsed atop her he had wetness in his eyes and no breath left in his body. He gasped and burrowed his face against the furs until the telltale emotions were wiped away from his visage.

  He could not love her. He would not. He had never loved a woman in all his life. Not either one of his wives … though he had become great friends with each of them. But never had he felt like this. This … this loss of control. This insane rush of emotions, which had no place in his life. Oh, he wished he were free to love her, but it just was not to be … so he must grit his teeth and move on with his tasks. He would see her safely ensconced in her rule within the city and then he would leave.

  There was no other choice.

  “Dethan,” she whispered breathlessly in his ear. “I am carrying your child.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  Selinda watched out the glass window as the first snow of the winter fell. It was a soft snow, full of fat, lazy flakes that had only just now begun to stick to the ground and frost it over in a thin, white blanket. But the skies were heavy and dark and the temperature was dropping and the mems of Jikaro’s temple were predicting the god was sending one of his fiercest storms ever against them.

  Good, she thought. It made her feel safer. Contented her that Dethan couldn’t possibly leave her if there was a storm stopping him. And with the winter setting in there was no sane reason to go campaigning around the world looking for cities to defeat. Surely Weysa could understand that.

  She turned away from the glass and went to kneel before the beautifully crafted statue of Weysa, the marble smooth and cool, the goddess dressed in full armor with a sword in one hand and a wey flower in the other. The wey flower, named for Weysa, was the flower of peace. Weysa, Dethan had schooled her, was not just the goddess of conflict. She was also the reverse side of that coin, willing to extend peace as readily as she extended her sword. It was that wisdom that powered her husband’s belief, that had shaped the man Dethan was.

  He’d had this temple and others like it erected in Weysa’s name, so that the temples of Weysa outnumbered those of any other god. The city had willingly begun to pay homage to the goddess who had sent a great soldier to free them from the tyranny of Grannish and the blight of the Redoe. And even though they lived at the mouth of the hells, they bravely turned their backs on Xaxis at the urging of their grand and granda.

  She was granda in her own right upon her father’s death and had not been required to wed Dethan … in the eyes of her people. But she had made a deal with him, had made him a promise, and so she had bound them together, with Mem Josepha presiding, and had given him the power to rule beside her.

  Not that she had needed a promise to compel her. For it had become quite clear to her by then that she was very much in love with her husband. She cursed herself for a fool one minute, then reveled in it the next. She knew she was risking her heart as she made love to him, every time trying to silently convey how she felt, but knowing that to speak it aloud would only make it harder for them both when it came time for him to leave.

  So every day since this temple had been erected she had come to pray to Weysa. She prayed to her not to take him.

  “I am selfish,” she admitted breathily. “I know that I am. He is a magnificent soldier and you need him by your side … but I need him by my side as well. Is it not enough that he suffers the flames every night? Must you deprive him of the small comfort I can give him as well? Are you not satisfied that he has learned his lesson? How can you be so cruel to so good a man? I know he has wronged the gods, but he must
be forgiven eventually. Or is there no forgiveness in the hearts of the gods?”

  She sighed with frustration, her hand going to her belly as their child turned over aggressively. A son, she thought. A fighter just like his father. At least now she could give birth and he could be there for the first weeks of their child’s life.

  And then he would be gone.

  She would go to Jikaro’s temple and pray for a long winter. Even though it would be hard on her people … she selfishly could not help herself.

  “Please … Can we not find another way? A way to win your cities and yet keep him here with me?” But she knew that was not possible. Unless … “He has brothers,” she said quickly … heatedly. “Each is a warrior in his own right. They could fight for you. Two … three times as fast if you but rescue them. They would take on his burden. I know it. Dethan has told me they meant everything to one another, and I know that in his heart he is driven to obey you in hopes you will somehow free them. Can’t you please … oh sweet merciful goddess …”

  Overcome with emotion and a wave of dizziness, she sat back on her heels. She had been praying to Weysa all day, with only short breaks in between. She was fasting, for the mems said it would bring her closer to the goddess. Her husband was at the site where he wished to rebuild the fortress, deep into the protective mountain. He knew that once the snow flew there would be no work done, so he was pushing until the very last moment for as much progress as possible. But like her prayers to Weysa, it would prove to be futile in the face of things.