by Melanie Rawn
“So are you going to ask Cai about it?” he said, picking up the thread of the conversation.
“I don’t know if she even notices things like that. Marra and Aidan were a total surprise to her, and so were Elin and Granon Mikleine.”
“I see what you mean. Anybody else would’ve tripped right over either couple. We could always ask Mikel for the whole story.”
“Mmm . . . I doubt it. His letter tells on Taigan as far as he’s willing to go. They stick together, Col. They always did.”
“But they sound different now. Which you’d expect—they’ve been with Cailet for a whole autumn and winter. But that part where Taigan was describing her lessons didn’t match at all with Mikel’s.”
“They’re learning at different rates, I guess. But that’s not going to affect their solidarity.” She chuckled. “Remember the time—”
And they were happily occupied with reminiscences about their errant offspring, and the trouble they’d caused—always together. But Sarra was aware that Collan was right: the twins’ paths were diverging now, and she hoped their closeness did not suffer too much for it.
Her own closeness to her husband was becoming insufferable with all these clothes on.
“Why, First Daughter,” he murmured as she got to work on the closings of his longvest—not buttons, but concealed hooks-and-eyes that would, as usual, shortly be the latest fashion. “This is a surprise. To what do I owe the honor of—”
“Oh, shut up and help,” she muttered.
Being a good, dutiful, obedient husband, he shut up and helped.
Surely no other man kissed the way he did—his lips both cool and burning, yielding and demanding. She could have gone on kissing him all day and half the night, but he had other ideas. One moment she was still in his lap, struggling to push the longvest and shirt from his shoulders, and the next she was on the carpet, watching as he stood and stretched and let his clothes fall where they would. He grinned at her upturned face, perfectly aware of her rapt gaze, luxuriating in it. Saints, he was beautiful—as lean and muscular as he’d been twenty years ago, the lines of his body long and clean and hard. This man would never grow old. He stood framed by the garden window, knowing he was fine to look at, deliberately giving her time to think about how much finer he was to touch.
Conceited pig. She grabbed an ankle and yanked.
His arms windmilled wildly as his rear end struck the seat of the chair. He slid off and landed on the floor with a thud and a grunt. “Sarra!”
“Collan!” she mimicked.
He grumbled for a few minutes while she arranged things to her own satisfaction (and, not incidentally, his), then sighed and subsided with, “You’re lucky I’ve got a soft spot for rich First Daughters.”
“I’m not interested in your soft spots right now, Minstrel.”
Except his skin—ridiculously smoothly silky, much darker than a redhead’s should be, without a single freckle to mar its perfection. Incredible, how a body so hard could be sheathed in such softness beneath her fingertips. How a man so tough could melt with her caresses. How a throat so eloquent in song could produce no sound more coherent than low whimpers at the touch of her lips. Oh, yes—such lovely, loving softness when she made love to him. She laughed, and he woke slightly from his haze of sensation and frowned up at her.
“I know what it is you do to me,” he growled, “but I’ve never figured out how the hell you do it so fast!”
“Did I tell you to shut up?” she asked, and before he could answer made sure that his only answer was a moan.
Much later, as they lazed love-spent and drowsy on the carpet, what was bound to happen did happen. The Slegin Web’s chief factor and two representatives of the Shipmasters Guild entered after a perfunctory knock on the door—for who would suspect that Lady Sarra and Lord Collan would be doing such a thing in her office in the middle of the afternoon?
“Uh—excuse us—we didn’t mean—so sorry—” babbled the factor, turning white.
“Beg pardon, Lady,” blurted one of the shipmasters, blushing furiously.
The other one grinned and bowed her homage to Collan’s nakedness—which her brown eyes swiftly, comprehensively, and expertly assessed—then snagged her male companions by the elbows and hauled them backward from the office.
As they left, Sarra heard the factor say, “In the middle of the day!”
“On the rug!” exclaimed the first shipmaster. “In her office!”
“And with her husband!” the woman laughed, mocking their outrage. “Put your eyes back in your heads—and if I ever hear that either of you have described Lady Sarra in detail, I’ll call you the liars you are. All that hair—you couldn’t’ve seen anything. Fortunately, all that hair was not covering her husband!”
The door slammed shut, propelled by a well-aimed bootheel. Sarra laid her forehead to Collan’s shoulder and groaned. It would be all over Roseguard by dinnertime, and all over Lenfell by next week.
Collan, of course, was laughing. “What a scandal!”
“I don’t see how,” she said grumpily.
“You could be forgiven only if you’d been caught with a lover.”
“A lover would be more discreet about it, truly told.” She raised her head to glare down at him. “Why didn’t you just stand up and take a bow?”
“They weren’t here long enough.”
“You might as well have—lying there flaunting everything you’ve got—”
“Getting a little possessive, aren’t we?”
“You’re my husband and my lover and what I do with you in my own house is my business—and you’re not to be leered at by—”
“—by anyone except you?” he finished, laughing harder as he hugged her to his chest.
Annoyed, she pulled away with some difficulty and sat up. “I do not ‘leer’ at you. And you seem very happy to see me so possessive for a man who once yelled in my face that he couldn’t be bought!”
“Not with money, First Daughter.” He trailed a finger down the center of her chest to the birthmark over her heart. “Smooth your ruffled feathers, Sarra. Who cares if the whole world knows we make love on the rug in the afternoon? I’d do it on the floor of the Malachite Hall—”
Despite herself, she giggled. “No you wouldn’t. The stone’s too damned cold.”
“I’d make sure I was on top.” He propped himself on his elbows and grinned again. “Just think if they’d come in and found us in that position! Not just scandal, but perversion!”
“I’d blame it all on you,” she replied serenely. “Besides, you’re bigger than me.”
“From the glint in our guest’s eye, I’m bigger than every other man she’s ever seen.”
She could have accused him of being a conceited pig, a braggart, an egotistical son of a Fifth, and several other less polite characterizations. Instead, she closed one hand around the relevant portion of his anatomy, smiled sweetly, and said, “Oh, she only saw you like this.” As he responded—with a start and a catching of breath and the inevitable—she purred, “I am the only one who sees you like that.”
He rallied enough to manage, “With all privileges and—and rights p–pertaining thereto—Sarra, either stop doing that or do something with it!”
Precisely what she did with it would not only have shocked and scandalized the general populace, but cemented the certainty that Lady Sarra and Lord Collan were indeed hopelessly perverted.
11
“TAIGAN, Mikel—grab some mugs and come join us.” Dessa Garvedian lifted one hand and the twins walked the length of the frescoed refectory hall to the window tables in the back, where a small group of Prentices sat up late over hot drinks.
“We’re taking bets on how long the rain will last,” said Akin Penteon as the pair took seats, and poured their mugs full of hot coffee laced with cinnamon and orange.
“No fair,” Josselin accused
with a smile. “Genetic conflict. The Rosvenir side gambles, but the Liwellan doesn’t.”
“Our virtuous natures were corrupted by Fa at a very early age,” Mikel said solemnly, then grinned.
Taigan sipped coffee, then wrapped her hands around the mug to warm them. “Jored told me yesterday that winter rains last for weeks around here. The first few hours were nice, but—weeks of this downpour?”
“If you’d spent any time in The Waste,” said Josselin, “you’d appreciate it more. Being able to walk outside in the rain is a rare treat.”
“Ah, but having somebody to walk in the rain with is even better,” sighed Jioret Canzallis, whose relationship with Eira Agrenir had fallen on its face a few days ago. Mikel, who had watched couples form and break up before, judged the wound painful but not fatal. Mage Hall was replete with pretty girls. He cast a sidelong glance at one of them. Lirenza Mettyn, great-granddaughter of the late Councillor Tirri Mettyn, was the first Mageborn of her Name in nearly two hundred years; magic ran in her father’s line, but of all her siblings she alone had inherited it. She was eighteen this year, fun, fascinatingly dark, and besides that, she knew her way around every wind instrument in the orchestra. So far she and Mikel had played duets only in music, but. . . .
“I didn’t know you’d lived in The Waste, Joss,” Taigan said, interrupting Mikel’s covert admiration of Lirenza’s amber-flecked brown eyes.
Josselin shrugged broad shoulders. “I’ve been there, is all. When I was little.”
“I thought you’d spent all your life in Sheve,” she went on. But before he could frame a reply, she spotted a new arrival at the main doors and got to her feet with a mumbled excuse.
Mikel caught Akin and Dessa exchange knowing glances, and bit his lip. If the two senior Prentices—who didn’t even spend much time around juniors like him and Taigan and Jored—had heard rumors, then everybody must know. He wondered what they expected to happen, and hoped it wasn’t what he had tried harder and harder not to mention in his letters to Mother. Mikel wasn’t sure she or Fa would approve of Jored; truly told, Mikel wasn’t sure he approved of him. The young man was good-looking, no doubt of that, but there was something odd about him.
And about Joss, too, if it came to it. Taigan’s remarks about The Waste had obviously made him uncomfortable, which struck Mikel as being a little weird.
Taigan returned with Jored at her side. Room was made on the benches, another mug was filled, and Jored gulped gratefully at the hot coffee. “Saints, that’s good! My room is like an ice cave. Can somebody please teach me the Warming spell?” he asked, holding the mug near his face to inhale the steam. “I never did get the knack of it.”
“Frugal of the Captal,” Taigan observed, “not to provide fireplaces or even braziers in any of the rooms.”
“Motivational,” Akin corrected.
Lightning flashed outside, and Jored flinched, spilling coffee. “I’m sorry—I—”
“No damage done,” Dessa said, plying a napkin.
“It’s so stupid,” he confessed. “My foster parents always said I must’ve been in the Rising, with Mage Globes exploding all over the place, to be so skittish in a storm.” Thunder rolled through the refectory, and he stiffened for an instant before consciously relaxing. “It sounds like the sky’s at war with itself.”
“Were you caught up in the Rising?” Lirenza Mettyn asked.
“Who can tell?” He sighed and smiled. “I could’ve been born at about the right time, but . . . truly told, I know about as much about my background as Joss knows about his. For all either of us knows, we could be twins!”
Mikel snorted. “Separated at birth, lost to each other until your magic showed up and you were reunited at Mage Hall? Somebody hand me a hankie, I’m going to weep with the poignancy of it all!”
Taigan kicked him under the table, but she was laughing just the same. “It sounds like one of those sentimental ballads Tarise is always asking Fa to sing.”
“Only to annoy him,” Mikel explained to the others. “Tarise is about as sentimental as a hungry kyyo on the hunt!”
“And Fa wouldn’t touch a story like that with a barge pole,” Taigan went on.
“Pot’s empty,” Akin announced, holding up the pitcher. “Whose turn, Dessa?”
She pondered a moment. “Homeshirs, Names, or Name Saints?”
Mikel traded a puzzled look with his sister. Jored smiled and explained, “Ollia Bekke started us on a silly game—we delegate who has to make the coffee, but nobody can ever remember which letter we’re on in all the categories.”
“Joss and Jored are the worst,” Akin complained. “No Homeshir, no idea of their real Names—the only way we can get either of ’em is on the Name Saints.”
“And every time that category comes up,” Josselin shot back, “you claim ‘Akin’ comes from ‘Viranka’ instead of ‘Deiket’!”
Dessa folded her arms on the table, smiling serenely. “Name Saints it is.”
Mikel made a face at her. “You don’t have one!”
“Of course I do. It’s implicitly understood that Gorynel is my Name Saint, for my grandfather. But I’m pretty sure we’re on M tonight,” she added wickedly.
“For Family Names,” he retorted.
Lirenza Mettyn glared; Josselin Mikleine shook his head. “Not a chance.”
“Nice try,” Dessa added. “But M and Name Saint is the consensus, right?” She glanced around the table.
Taigan came to Mikel’s rescue—and about time, too, he grumped to himself. “I don’t think you want to do that,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Well, Fa isn’t exactly the most domesticated male on Lenfell.”
“Meaning?”
“He couldn’t teach Mikel the things he never learned himself.”
Akin sighed. “Such as how to make decent coffee?”
“Such as how to make coffee, period.”
“All right, all right!” Josselin said, climbing to his feet. “I give up. Family Names, adopted or not, I’ll make the damned coffee!”
“Thank you,” Lirenza said sweetly, and Mikel grinned at her—rewarded by a wink from one of those lovely, long-lashed eyes.
“He’s not quite domesticated either,” Akin commented. “But at least he was taught how to boil water in that fancy bower of his.”
Although Mikel had grown up in a household where everyone spoke her mind, Akin’s total lack of tact astonished him. But Joss only turned, giving Akin a slight smile and a long look from moonstone-lucent eyes. “And wouldn’t you love to find out what else they taught me there!” Then he sauntered off to the kitchen, coffee pitcher in hand.
Mikel was even more astonished to see that Akin was blushing.
“Don’t be so nasty,” Dessa advised the young man in sharp tones. “He turned you down. So what? Joss turns everybody down.”
“I was nasty—?”
“You deserved worse than what he said. Now shut up about it—and go lose your grudge somewhere, will you? It’s boring.”
“I’ll go,” Akin said with a shrug. “He makes lousy coffee anyway.”
He left. Nobody said anything for a moment. Mikel was busy trying to picture Joss and Akin as a couple, and couldn’t do it. Granted, he didn’t know either of them well, and it wasn’t as if they’d look ridiculous together (though somebody as dark as Joss paired with somebody as ashen-blond as Akin would certainly make for an interesting physical contrast), but he really couldn’t see Joss with anybody. He was friendly enough, likable enough—yet he was close to no one. He held himself aloof somehow, maybe because of his spectacular beauty. Mikel was graced with looks enough of his own to know that a lot of people thought that looks were all he had. That there could be a brain behind a handsome face was not a thing some people wanted to acknowledge; it made them envious, angry that one man had received so many gifts, and anger could make people crue
l.
Look at what Akin had said tonight. Joss’s reply indicated that he knew how to defend himself—he’d been remarkably polite, to Mikel’s way of thinking. But it also indicated that Akin wasn’t the first to want something Josselin would not give. He’d been burned by other people’s wants and expectations and prejudices, and he stood back a pace or two as a result. That was how Mikel read it, anyway.
All at once Josselin could be heard cursing in the kitchen at the recalcitrant coffee maker. Dessa drawled into the silence: “Jored, if you offer to teach Joss a few swear-words that don’t involve anatomical impossibilities, he might tutor you in the Warming spell.”
Jored made wide, innocent eyes at her. “I was hoping he’d teach me to swear! You’ve got to admit it’s creative.”
“It’s disgusting. He’ll corrupt young and innocent ears.”
Mikel grinned at Taigan across the table. They’d heard worse from their mother—and much worse from their father.
Suddenly Jioret perked up from glum contemplation of his empty mug. “Captal!”
They all looked around; sure enough, the Captal had appeared in the doorway. The Prentices all got to their feet. She gestured for them to sit back down.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that. It makes me think you’re preparing to help some doddering old woman find a chair before she collapses.” Seating herself next to Mikel, she went on, “What are all of you doing up so late?”
“I guess none of us could sleep,” Taigan offered with a shrug. “The rain’s loud on a slate roof.”
Josselin returned and the cups were refilled—and the coffee was excellent, Mikel noted, flavored this time with hazelnuts. There was another brief silence as everybody tried to think up something to say, but the Captal spared them the effort.
“You were missed in Tamosin Wolvar’s class this morning, Josselin. I assume the roses will survive, and you’ll attend tomorrow?”