by Sharon Shinn
Darien came slowly to his feet and Leah more reluctantly followed suit. She was so tired she thought she could probably fall asleep right there in the river-rimmed room. “Well, it seems unlikely you ever will be left alone with him,” the regent said. “So there is no need to fear.”
“I feel somewhat the same about all the Karkans I’ve met,” she confessed. “Even Seka Mardis.”
Darien crossed the bridge, Leah at his heels, and they strolled together toward the kierten. “Even your friend the poisoner?” he asked.
She should have expected that swift dagger thrust. “He’s Coziquela. His wife was Karkan,” she said calmly. “So that makes him different.”
He paused with a hand on the door and looked down at her. “That didn’t actually answer the question,” he said softly. “Would you be afraid to be alone with him?”
She stared up at him defiantly. No one else had thought to ask her this question—but then, nobody else knew why Leah might have a reason to fear Chandran. “We were alone in the shop just the other day,” she said. “At night. Upstairs. Not visible from the street. If he’d wanted to harm me, he had ample opportunity.”
“Maybe his harming days are done.”
She noticed Darien didn’t say, Maybe he’d never harm anyone. For the second time tonight, she felt a shiver down her back. “I suppose any of us can hurt someone else if we have enough incentive,” she said.
“That has been my experience,” he said. “The trick is to know those incentives in advance.”
“Your own or the other person’s?” she retorted.
“I know my own,” he said. “I am always interested in other people’s motivations.”
She crossed her arms and leaned against the doorframe, her head tilted up so she could watch him. The leaded glass cupola overhead was spattered with starlight, but there was only pale gaslight to illuminate the kierten, and Darien’s face was almost as hard to see as the prince’s had been. “Now I have to ask,” she said. “What would motivate you to take violent action?”
His faint smile was back. “A serious threat to the people and things I love,” he said. “My wife. My daughters. My country. I don’t think that makes me particularly unusual.”
“It’s probably the way you’d respond that makes you unusual,” she agreed. “You wouldn’t punch a man in the face. If he tried to hurt your family, you’d sell his house out from under him and ruin his credit with the bank. I don’t know how you’d punish a foreign country that tried to harm Welce.”
He pulled the door open. “Let’s hope we never have to find out,” he said, stepping into the night. Leah watched him through the windows just long enough to see two Welchin guards materialize in the street. Then, fighting back a yawn, she headed for the stairwell.
“I believe everyone is in for the night,” she told the footman hovering in the hall. “You can lock up the house.”
She was exhausted and a bit light-headed and she smelled like she’d bathed in incense, but she had to make one quick stop before she readied herself for bed. She tiptoed into Mally’s room and stood for a moment beside the bed, watching her daughter sleep. Her small face looked perfectly smooth, perfectly peaceful, perfectly beautiful, perfect. Mally’s breath was even, her hands lax on the blankets, her dark hair spread in tangles on the pillow. Just looking at her made Leah want to cry.
There is nothing I wouldn’t do to protect you, Leah thought. No action would be too violent, no sacrifice would be too great. The next words to surface in her mind were, oddly, the last ones that Darien Serlast had spoken. Let’s hope we never have to find out.
EIGHTEEN
Chandran wanted to hear the details about her evening at the prince’s house but didn’t seem surprised by anything Leah described. “What did you think of the prince?” he asked.
“He was intelligent and well-spoken and said nothing remotely threatening, and yet I was uneasy the whole time I was talking to him,” she replied. “I can’t explain why.”
“Many people feel that way about him.”
“Have you ever met him?”
“Several times.”
“And did you feel unnerved in his presence?”
“Abundantly.”
She eyed him a moment. They were having dinner together after the rush of business on secondday. She had enjoyed being back in her normal routine and had spent much of the day looking forward to the meal with Chandran. She had been too tired to want to go out, though, and he’d agreed to fetch food and bring it back to the shop. So once again they were sitting together upstairs, amid the welter of exotic goods, in the friendly candlelight. They each had their own water glass but were eating from the same plate, and the table was so small their knees touched whenever one of them moved.
It was the second time they’d broken their own rule against solitude and intimacy. Leah knew she should be more worried than she was. She couldn’t tell, from Chandran’s grave expression, whether he was worried or pleased. Probably a little of both.
“So what crimes is the prince atoning for?” she asked.
“Many, I would presume.”
“You don’t know them? I’m disappointed. I thought they’d be common gossip.”
“One rumor is that when his mother was pregnant with her—fourth? fifth?—child, he mixed an abortifacient into her food to make her miscarry. He was quite young then—eleven or twelve.”
Leah felt her eyes widen in shock. “He didn’t want any more competitors for the throne?”
“That was only part of it. Apparently his father had taken him aside for a stern talk. Telling him that he would have to start showing how much he wanted to be named heir. He couldn’t just assume the crown would be his—he had to prove he was worthy.”
“And that was the kind of action that convinced his father?”
“That and some other things.”
“Which you don’t want to tell me.”
Chandran sipped his water. “These are ugly people who do ugly things,” he said gently. “I would talk of more pleasant topics.”
“I’m still curious about him, though,” she confessed. “Did he ever try to kill off his other brothers and sisters?”
“You might expect that, but no,” Chandran said. “They were all oddly close. Two of them died from other causes when they were older, and by all accounts, everyone in the royal house truly grieved. They say that when the youngest boy died, the oldest princess went down to the mausoleum and slept on his coffin for three days, weeping uncontrollably. Not until she fainted from weakness were they able to carry her up to her room and nurse her back to health.”
“That’s sweet. Sort of,” Leah said. “It’s also excessive.”
Chandran smiled. “They are a people of extremes.”
Once they had finished the meal, Leah pushed the plate to one side and fished around among the boxes at her feet before triumphantly producing the tin of keitzees. “I saved some for us,” she said. She poked at the candies before selecting a purple one, then offered the container to Chandran.
He hesitated. “I should not.”
Leah’s was already in her mouth. “I can’t resist. Probably a good thing there aren’t that many of them. Though I’m hopeful that Captain Demeset will return soon and bring pounds of the stuff.”
With a slight gesture of capitulation, Chandran picked out his own candy, a transparent green. “At that point, perhaps you should sell some instead of hoarding them all for yourself,” he suggested solemnly. But she could tell he was teasing.
As before, the keitzee seemed to tingle in her mouth, down her throat, all the way through her veins. “I will most definitely sell some of them,” she said. “But I’ll keep some, too.” She turned her chair away slightly so she could stretch her legs out without kicking Chandran in the ankle. “I didn’t see you at all yesterday. Tell me how you spent your
time.”
“Mostly touring your city,” he said, “visiting all the spots a foreigner might want to see. The royal palace is lovely.”
“Not as big or as striking as the one in Malinqua,” she said. “But still impressive.”
“Particularly situated next to the waterfall. Quite dramatic.”
“What else?”
As he recounted his activities, Leah listened with pleasure, less to the content of his words than to the even cadence of his voice. He spoke with such measured precision, such easy eloquence; just the rhythm of his sentences was soothing to her, reassuring, like a lullaby or a promise. She would like him to read her a story sometime, a whole book, perhaps a collection of poems. Every stanza would cup her heart in a comforting embrace, every rhyme would find an echo in her pulse. She closed her eyes, still listening to him speak.
“Ah, I have talked too long. You are falling asleep,” Chandran said, self-reproach in his voice.
Leah forced her eyes open. “I’m not! I’m tired, but I love listening to you.”
He came to his feet, gesturing at her to stand up. “Keitzee does not pair well with exhaustion,” he said. “You had better get home. Tomorrow will be another long day.”
She wanted to protest—she was not ready for the evening to end—but it was obvious he was right. She yawned and shook her head to clear it, then they spent ten minutes closing everything up for the night. It was a shock to step outside and find that the temperature had dropped by at least twenty degrees.
“Quinnasweela now and no mistake,” Leah said, shivering a little.
Chandran regarded her with concern. “Are you steady enough to make it home on your own?”
“Of course I am! I’ll just head to the Cinque and catch a transport. Darien’s house isn’t a very far walk from the stop.”
He looked undecided. Leah didn’t think it was on purpose that she produced another yawn. “I believe I should accompany you,” he said. “I do not want you falling asleep on the omnibus and riding endlessly around the Cinque all night.”
“That won’t happen,” she said with a laugh, “but I don’t mind you coming with me if you like. You can see Darien’s house.”
“From the outside, at least,” he said.
It wasn’t as late as Leah’s exhaustion made it seem, and the transport was crowded with people heading home from work or out to appointments. Chandran and Leah found seats on a back bench, but the press of nearby bodies squeezed them together, shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh. Leah didn’t mind; she didn’t think Chandran did, either.
By the time they disembarked at the stop nearest to Darien’s house, she was so overheated from the crowd on the omnibus that she welcomed the cold air outside. She had thought the keitzee would have worn off by now, but she still felt half dizzy with its irresistible mix of euphoria and recklessness.
“I should invite you in,” she said when they paused outside the elegant silhouette of Darien’s house. Lights showed in various windows on every level, but the two of them stood in the street, away from direct illumination. Leah had her hands in her pockets to keep them warm, and she could feel the chill starting to paint color on her cheeks. But she didn’t want to go inside.
“I do not believe I would accept the invitation.”
She peered at him in the dark. “You’ll have to meet them sometime. The people in my life. If you’re going to—if you’ll be—if you decide to stay in Welce.”
“I do not think either of us has made that decision yet,” he said seriously.
“You’re afraid to meet Mally,” she said suddenly. “Or you’re afraid what my face will look like the first time I see you with her.”
“There is some truth to that,” he acknowledged. “I think we have a little ground to cover before either of us will be comfortable with that moment.”
“It doesn’t seem fair,” she said on a sigh. “I’ve had to meet and pretend I like all those odd Karkans. You should have to meet and pretend you like a few Welchins.”
“The difference is that you love these Welchins and I despise those Karkans,” he replied.
“I don’t like the Karkans, either,” she said in a confiding way. “Intense and nasty and much too familiar. Oh! I forgot! The worst part! Do you know what happened last night?”
Amusement was back on his face. “I cannot guess.”
“When I was leaving the party. Seka Mardis kissed me! I wasn’t expecting that at all.”
He didn’t look surprised. “They tend to be far more affectionate physically than the people of Welce or Malinqua, or even Cozique,” Chandran said. “It took me a while to get used to their habits once I relocated there. But there are times such physicality can be—quite nourishing.”
Leah slipped her fists out of her pockets and took hold of Chandran’s hands. His were so much bigger than hers, slightly more calloused, warm even on this chilly night. He pulled free as if to withdraw from her grip, but instead he folded her hands together then wrapped both of his around hers, as if enclosing them in a safe space with his own to stand guard. “You miss it,” she said, “that physical contact.”
“I do,” he said. “The craving for touch can be as strong as the craving for wine or veneben. It can create addicts of any of us. It does not matter if it is palm to palm or breast to breast—skin delights in skin. It is as if there is no membrane between them—each body soaks up the essence of the other and converts it to a kind of narcotic for the senses.”
She drew their entwined hands upward, nursed them under her chin, felt his hands unfold to resettle around her face, his palms against her cheeks. She turned her own hands outward to hook her fingers over his wrists. “You should not have gone so many years without allowing yourself this simple drug,” she said.
“I did not feel like I deserved it,” he said.
“And now you do?”
“No. Now my craving is stronger than my scruples. But I will only transgress so far.”
“Do you know why I slept with those men in Malinqua?” she asked in a low voice.
“No.”
“Not because I cared about them. Either of them. Not because I was lonely or bored—not because I was hungry for someone else’s touch. But because I didn’t want Rhan to be my last lover. Or—how could I know? If I died, my only lover. I took them to bed to make him less important. I didn’t want him to be the last man who had his hands upon my body.”
His face was very grave as he stared down at her in the dark. She could feel his thumbs tracing the line of her cheekbone, down toward her mouth, up toward her hairline. “You think I need a body to intervene between my own and the ghost of my wife.”
She smiled up at him, half flirting, half reassuring. Slipping her hands from his wrists, she slid them all the way up his arms to his shoulders, feeling the wrinkled wool of his jacket against her fingertips and her palms. “Well, I do,” she said, “but I wasn’t even thinking about what you need. I was thinking that Seka Mardis kissed me yesterday, and what if I die in the night? I don’t want her to be the last person whose lips touched mine.”
“That is a most excellent argument,” Chandran said soberly, but she could hear the underscore of laughter. “That is something all of us should review as we prepare ourselves for bed every evening. What were the last words I spoke? Were they cruel or kind? What was the final action I took? Did it help someone or harm someone? Who was the last person I kissed? Is that the memory I want to take with me into eternity?”
“I’m afraid I might have to ask for your cooperation here,” she whispered. Now she curled her fingers around the back of his neck, pushed herself up to the tips of her toes, leaning into him, offering herself up to him. “I want a different memory. I want a different final kiss. And you’re the only one around.”
He resisted but only, she was sure, to prolong the game. “You would ask m
e to sacrifice my long-held principles merely so you could sleep easy tonight?”
Her mouth was only an inch from his. “Well, that’s what you say you want, isn’t it?” she murmured. “To make a great sacrifice to atone for your sins?”
“I did not expect it to be as immense as this one,” he said, bending his head and kissing her.
She flushed with heat, she fizzed with excitement, she tilted into him to keep her balance. His mouth was heavy on hers, hungry, but she could feel him holding back, taking only so much, limiting himself to just a taste. She wanted more—she wanted to fling her arms around his body and draw him so close it almost hurt to breathe—but she held back, too. Just this much. This little bit. This touch. This kiss. Soaking up his essence through the pores of her skin.
Chandran was the one who lifted his head, who pulled back, though he kept his hands against her face. “I would like to say that was the fault of the keitzee, but I have wanted to kiss you for some time now.”
She managed a shaky laugh. “How long, exactly?”
“Since before you left Malinqua, certainly.”
“I know that. But when? Between the time you tried to poison me and the time I sailed for Welce. When did you start thinking about me—that way?”
He considered. He had started that motion again, brushing his thumbs over her cheekbones. The delicate touch made her shiver, or maybe she was finally starting to feel the cold. “When you rescued that girl,” he said at last.
“Who, Alette? That was all Corene’s doing. Not mine.”
“It was Corene’s idea,” he said. “But you arranged everything. You took advantage of your many contacts and put yourself at considerable risk to save her life.”
“Think well of me if you like,” she said. “But I only did it to keep in Corene’s good graces.”
He smiled down at her. “That is untrue. You did it because you knew you could save that girl and without your help she would die.”