A Heart of Blood and Ashes

by Milla Vane

  “He does,” Maddek said, tearing his portion from the loaf and sending the young warrior quickly away again with a hard stare. “You must have noticed how rough his gait is. It makes an unpleasant ride—and risks injury to him. With his unsound legs, he’s more likely to fall lame. A limping horse is of no use. Better to leave him in a farming village where little is required of him.”

  Her mouth full, a nod was her only response. Her gaze drifted beyond the ruins again. Even at this distance, the sound of the great river was a rushing roar.

  Swallowing, she asked, “Are all Parsathean horses so big and so well-formed?”

  Maddek grunted an assent.

  “Is it true they are Hanan’s descendants?”

  “They are not Hanani.” An animal with a god’s blood running through its veins, a body of great power, and as intelligent as any person. His gaze slipped over his mare’s fine lines. “But it is said that a herd of Hanani horses live north of the Flaming Mountains. Perhaps in ancient times, another herd ran the Burning Plains, and the Parsathean horses are their descendants. They are not only bigger and hardier, but also cleverer than other mounts.”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed softly, then fell quiet.

  Maddek looked to her.

  Briskly she brushed her hand down the front of her robe, though not a single crumb had escaped her mouth. “I had wondered if the Parsatheans themselves were also Hanan’s descendants,” she said. “Since you all seem so big and hardy. But . . .”

  She trailed off, nibbling the hard white cheese, yet with such a playful arch in her eyebrows that he could not mistake her.

  He grinned. “Do you think my warriors are not clever?”

  Her pale gaze narrowed pointedly.

  “You think I am not?”

  A laugh shook through her, but she did not confirm or deny.

  Nor would Maddek. If his cleverness was compared to his warriors’, he would fare well. Compared to Yvenne’s, he was not so certain.

  But he cared not. A clever wife was not something to lament—and a clever queen was something to celebrate. “Come,” he said when her gaze was once more drawn to the rushing waters beyond the ruins. “I will carry you close enough to better see the river.”

  This time, Yvenne did not protest and insist she cared not if her toes became muddied. Expression eager, she stuffed the remaining cheese into her mouth and leaned forward to wind her linen-wrapped arms around his neck. Maddek swept her from the ledge, letting her form press full-length against his before swinging her legs up to brace his arm beneath her knees. She stiffened, pulling in a quick sharp breath.

  Maddek had yet to hear her make a pained noise. But her breath often told him as much as a whimper or a sob.

  He gestured ahead. An arrow’s flight away, cobblestones formed a path through the surrounding mud and disappeared beneath the mist-shrouded ruins. “We should not go any nearer to the river than that remnant of the old road. You can walk and ease your soreness there without wading through mud.”

  Tautly she nodded.

  All around them, the ground steamed like fresh horse dung on a cold morn. The dank, earthy odor filled his every breath—as did the hint of anise perfume that lingered in her sun-warmed hair.

  “The river looked not so wide when we saw it from the Toheli ridge,” she said in awe. “I failed to realize it was so broad.”

  Because when she had crossed the Ageras before, she was in a curtained carriage—and her brother must have forbidden her to look outside. “It is a mighty river,” he agreed.

  “Is the Lave so wide?”

  The river upon whose bloodstained banks Maddek had spent these past years commanding the alliance army. “At its mouth,” he said. “But narrower as it passes through the Farians’ territory. An archer could find a target on the opposite side.”

  Her gaze seemed to measure the distance across the Ageras. “Yet the Boiling Sea is much wider? As is Temra’s Heart.”

  The ocean at the center of the world. “Yes.”

  “How far would the Boiling Sea stretch?” She looked beyond the Ageras. “To those hills in the far distance?”

  “No. It would cover those hills. It would cover everything.” Perhaps he could describe the sheer expanse better had she ever seen the Burning Plains. “If we were upon the ridge again, looking out—you would see nothing but water stretching to the horizon. It is like a clear sky, but upon the ground.”

  Her gaze rose to the white clouds drifting across the blue heavens. After a few long breaths, she said softly, “That is as my mother said. I did not truly believe her.”

  At the naked wonder in her voice, a strange ache filled his chest. “You will see for yourself when we reach Drahm.”

  “Yes.” A brief smile touched her mouth. All at once her gaze returned to the Ageras, and her tone was somber as she said, “Hanan must have been very lonely.”

  “Lonely?” The roar of laughter that burst from Maddek couldn’t have been drowned by all the water in the river. He halted in his muddied tracks, and felt her arms cling suddenly tighter around his neck as the force of his laughter nearly bent him double.

  For she referred to the legend of the Ageras’s creation—when the face of the earth had been bare and barren. Then Mother Temra had broken through the vault of the sky and begun reshaping the world with the pounding of her fists.

  Other gods had come with her. One of them was her brother Hanan, who arrived after her pounding fists forced the Fallen Mountains to rise from the plains. Hanan had stood atop the jagged peaks, surveying the lifeless land, and had wept with loneliness. In his misery and longing for companionship he had stroked his colossal cock, until his godly seed spurted forth and mixed with his tears, creating the mighty Ageras and overfilling the basin of the Boiling Sea. When Temra’s fists struck the earth a final time, life sprouted from the now-fertile ground, watered by his tears and planted by his seed.

  Then Hanan, enamored of the new life that had sprung from the earth, had fucked every one of them. Nothing escaped his attentions: not men or women, not reptiles, not insects.

  The god had not been lonely then.

  Yvenne’s arms squeezed tighter as another bout of laughter quaked through him. Maddek struggled for control and slowly found it, yet his steps were not all that steady as he straightened and started forward again.

  His bride regarded him with a slight frown. “Do you think his loneliness so amusing?”

  Maddek could not even answer for laughing again. Perhaps that was answer.

  Though with this woman in his arms, he’d never had more sympathy for Hanan’s plight. Before her moon night, by his hand Maddek would spill a small river of his own seed.

  She studied him a breath longer. “I suppose you have not known loneliness or felt how deeply it can wound.”

  That was true enough. He had been raised among warriors. Yvenne had shared a tower chamber with her mother . . . a queen who had died three years past.

  That realization sobered him enough to say, “I admit that I have never been so lonely that I would fuck my horse—or a fish.”

  Her lips parted as she stared at him with widened eyes. Slowly her mouth curved. “Or a trap jaw.”

  Another laugh shook him. “Or a bee.”

  “I see,” she said softly. “When I heard that legend, his loneliness resonated deepest within me. Perhaps because I do not often think of fucking.”

  Yet she thought of it now, Maddek saw. They finally reached the cobblestones but he did not immediately set her down, for her eyes were afire and burning into his.

  Abruptly a new frown pleated her brows. “Why have you not demanded that I ease your need again? I told you that I would willingly take your seed.”

  That she would take it with her hands or mouth. Gaze dropping to her lips, Maddek stopped his tortured groan behind clenched teeth. For he want
ed nothing more now.

  But she had also told him something else. “You want me to demand it where my warriors can watch?”

  They stood a long distance from his Dragon guard but not so far the warriors couldn’t see them.

  “No, but—” Her gaze flicked over his shoulder as if to see whether the warriors watched now. “They would turn their backs. So I wonder that you don’t.”

  “Because they are sworn to protect me, but if they are forced to turn their backs, they cannot perform their duty.” And Maddek would not ask them to compromise their vows. “So my duty to my warriors is not to interfere with theirs.”

  Approval softened her tone. “Why do you not demand it of me in the privacy of our furs?”

  Which were not truly private, but the courtesy of any camp was to turn away eyes and close ears to the sounds that came from another’s furs.

  Dryly he said, “You are always asleep.”

  “You cannot wake me?” Those moonstone eyes dared him to, and a familiar note of challenge rang in her voice.

  “This night I will,” he said gruffly—and reluctantly set her down, before duty could flee his mind. If he held her much longer, Maddek would not wait until this night. Instead he’d have her on her knees in the mud, her mouth wrapped around his aching shaft.

  Feet firmly on the cobblestones, she looked up at him for an endless time before her gaze was drawn to the river again. “It is said that any woman who bathes in the Ageras’s waters will be as fertile as Hanan himself, and her children as strong.”

  “It is also said that any man who bathes in the river will be as virile as that god,” Maddek said. “But the only certainty is that the man will be dead.”

  As if the river itself agreed, the bloated and half-eaten corpse of a mammoth floated past. Nothing was safe upon the riverbanks. The creatures that lurked within the waters could drag even that giant beast to a certain death. Whether swimming or on a boat, anything that ventured into the Ageras never emerged again.

  When she had no reply, Maddek told her, “If you fear you will not quickly get with child, do not. After your moon night, I will spend my seed inside you so often that your belly will be swelling before we reach the Burning Plains. I will have my vengeance.”

  “As will I,” she said before directing a wry smile at him. “In truth, I was not doubting my fertility. I was thinking of strong children. Though with the mingling of our bloodlines, I ought not worry.”

  “No.” Maddek did not. Even if their children did not possess their foremothers’ strength—as she did not—it mattered little. They would be as strong as they needed to be.

  Their children.

  His heart seemed to still. Not only one. Not just an instrument of vengeance. But a child who would live long after Zhalen was dead and they had taken Syssia’s throne—and would be sibling to any others he and Yvenne had. For she was the only woman Maddek would ever lie with again.

  Watching her face, he asked, “Will you care for a child?”

  “Very much.” Her smile softened and her gaze upon the river became unfocused. “I loved my mother, and she loved hers. I also loved your—”

  She stopped herself, but it mattered not. She might as well have spoken his mother’s name and claimed to have loved her, too. For there was nothing else that could have followed.

  A sly tongue. Speaking that which he had forbidden her to, without actually saying the words.

  But perhaps it was just as well that she had done it slyly, because Maddek would take no pleasure in ripping that tongue from her mouth.

  After a breath, she continued, “When my younger brother was born, my father took no interest in him, so Tyzen remained with us in our tower for many years. My mother was too weak to properly care for him, so I did.” Another quiet moment passed before she said, “I should like very much to be a mother.”

  To his children. And Maddek would be a father.

  For days he had thought of nothing but getting a child within her, but had not looked any further ahead. Even though she would be his child’s mother.

  Abruptly he asked, “Are you treacherous?”

  A startled blink erased the gentle longing from her expression. Her moonstone gaze rose to his face and she studied him quietly.

  Weighing her response carefully.

  “Do not lie,” he reminded her. “I will not forgive it.”

  Her mouth flattened into a thin line. “That I know. But it is not a simple answer. If you ask whether I am so treacherous that I would stab my brother in the back—then I am indeed quite treacherous. But if you wonder whether I will betray my people or anyone else to whom I have promised my loyalty, then I am not.”

  “That is also what you would say if you were treacherous, so that I would not anticipate your betrayal.”

  She laughed suddenly. “Yes, I would.” Tilting her head, she studied his face again, her expression a curious mixture of amusement and gravity. “Why ask me questions if you always doubt my answers?”

  Maddek knew not. Better not to speak with her at all, if she was as calculating as he suspected. Only a fool would make the same mistake her brother had—believing that because she was weak, she posed no danger to him. Believing that he could trust her at his back. Yet with every breath he took, Maddek became more and more a fool.

  Because he was not thinking only of how he should distrust her, or even of fucking her—he was also enjoying her company and her smiles. These past days, he’d bitten his tongue as his warriors had enjoyed them, because they were not fools, either. Yet none of them looked at her with suspicion. He’d seen her easy conversations with Banek, and frequently heard the old man’s rusty laugh join her throaty one. With treats and pettings, she’d befriended Fassad’s dogs and, in doing so, befriended the warrior. This morn, after Yvenne asked whether bandits were as common in Goge as in Toleh, Ardyl had returned the jeweled dagger Yvenne used to kill her brother, claiming that on an open road, even warriors were not enough protection. Then Danoh—who usually only opened her mouth to put food into it—had shown her how to strap the weapon to her lower leg, and how best to wield it while mounted. Young Toric could still barely meet her moonstone eyes without blushing, yet seemed to pass each day thinking of new questions to ask of her while they broke their morning fast. Even Kelir had praised her, remarking upon her fortitude, and now was completely caught in her spell, as if she’d known that she could win over Maddek’s closest friend by poking fun at Maddek’s scowl and his smile.

  Did Maddek forget who she was, she might win over him, too.

  For despite sharing furs, since the night after she’d taken the half-moon milk, he’d spent almost no time talking with Yvenne—and now he envied every word that had passed between his warriors and her. He wished that her every laugh and smile had been aimed at him, that he’d ridden beside her, that he’d strapped that jeweled dagger to her leg. It was madness.

  Yet perhaps . . . not so mad. Or unexpected. He had seen her cold and shrewd. Likely Yvenne knew exactly what she did.

  “Do you deliberately befriend my warriors?”

  Sudden bemusement curved her lips, as if she thought his question absurd. “Of course I do.”

  “You manipulate them? What of the gratitude you spoke of when they rescued you from your marriage to Toleh? Is this how you repay them?”

  A soft sigh escaped her and she looked to the river. “Even if I purposely cultivate their friendship and loyalty, it does not mean the loyalty and friendship I offer in return is not genuine.”

  “Yet you wonder why I doubt?”

  She slanted him an irritated glance. “You speak from your lofty height, warrior. For I have not had the luxury of a lifetime spent in their company and forging the same bonds you have. But as my very life depends upon their protection and goodwill—”

  “No,” he stopped her. “Your life depends on my p
rotection and goodwill.”

  “Then I shall make certain to ease your need very well indeed!” she snapped.

  Maddek grinned.

  Her burning glare did not cool for a long breath, and then her lips twitched. Brows arching, she ran her gaze the length of his body, lingering upon the ridged muscles of his stomach, which hardened ever more under her perusal. “When you come to the furs tonight and wake me, do you think my purpose will be pleasure or manipulation?”

  “I care not what your purpose is,” he said honestly. “So long as your mouth is hot upon my cock.”

  Her gaze dropped lower, teeth pinching her soft bottom lip as she took in the enormity of the erection beneath his linens. Heat and amusement lit her eyes in equal measure when they met Maddek’s again. “My body is small, but my heart is still a warrior-queen’s. So I shall make a valiant effort to wield your mighty sword.”

  Maddek could neither stop his laugh nor resist the impulse to touch her again. Palm cupping the side of her slim neck, long fingers wrapping around her nape, he pressed his thumb beneath her jaw and tilted her head back. Her breath stopped, her entire body suddenly frozen, her gaze searching his. Her pulse throbbed frantically in the vulnerable column of her throat. Arousal or fear, he knew not. The last time he had touched her in this way, Maddek had worn silver claws and had intended to spill her blood onto the ground.

  Her hot breath shuddered when he swept his thumb across her trembling lips.

  “Open,” he commanded, and she did.

  Without prompting, her wet velvet tongue slicked over the pad of his thumb, tasting his skin. Need clenched upon his body so hard that Maddek thought he might spend there, with nothing but a lick. His heart thundered as if he were in the midst of battle—yet he stood motionless upon the cobblestones.

  But perhaps this was a battle. Though it could not be properly waged here.

  Nor could it be waged now. A familiar chirp reached his ears—Danoh’s signal that someone was approaching. Not a warning, simply an alert.