The Fireblade Array: 4-Book Bundle

by H. O. Charles

  shattered as he landed on it, posters were scraped from the walls as he drew Artemi across them and the slats of the bed were snapped when he thrust her onto it. Books were torn, glass was crushed and more blood was spilt.

  At last, exhausted, he had Artemi pinned to the floor and there was no denying that she was defeated. “It seems that I have won.”

  “No.” Her eyes flicked down to his side, where he could feel something pointed pressing against his skin.

  “You said no blades.”

  “I said no swords.” She smiled as she drew the knife upwards and cut

  through his clothing. Strangely, she didn’t cut through him.

  Morghiad was beyond irritated now. He would have to make his way back in tattered clothing, clothing he had rather liked. Well, Artemi could suffer this game just as much as he had. He extracted a dagger from his boot in the midst of another of Artemi’s wild, fist-throwing and kneehitting attacks, and he managed to skim it along the side of one thigh before she noticed what was happening. He tore the rest off as they scrambled through the detritus, not really caring whether she retaliated with the same tactic.

  At first she seemed rather surprised at her own state of undress, even pausing for a moment between blows, but that surprise soon faded back to anger. She ripped apart his shirt with a single haul on one tattered sleeve, and then leapt to her feet to throw it out of the window. It floated gently down upon the weak updrafts, and then came to rest upon a small patch of wiry grass. Damn. An unwelcome clue to his presence in a women-only building.

  Morghiad grabbed her by the throat and pushed her against the wall. He used his free hand to close the

  window while she wriggled and squirmed in his grip. Though the sound barrier stretched across the mullions and stopped any noise from leaving through the frame, the last things he needed were extra opportunities for sightings of him. Open windows in the heat of the day were always very obvious indicators that something was not right. “That was a stupid thing to do, Fevtari.”

  Her eyes were fierce and unforgiving. She spat at him.

  Morghiad pressed himself closer to hold her in place, but it unleashed a torrent of fiery Blaze that poured from

  her bare skin through his. It was too much; he had no idea of how to react to it. For a moment, he was quite paralysed. And then... and then, a new awareness took him. All conscious thoughts and plans were gone; all emotions were dispensed with. It was an awareness of his place within a nothingness, where no heat or light or energy existed. Taking breath no longer mattered, but desire... desire was everything. He was consumed by it. He wanted it, and it was only when he felt a surge of unexpected and intense pleasure that the illusion shattered.

  He was lying on his back and

  Artemi was above, but... she was...

  How had this happened?

  As he met eyes with her he recognised the same look of apprehension that he felt. He tried to push her away, and she did the same. But it was too late. Every struggle produced bursts of fire and ecstasy he could not comprehend nor battle against. It burned him and caressed him all at once. This was not what he had intended; it was not what he had wanted from her. It had never been about this!

  But the longer it went on, the more beautiful it felt to him. And

  beautiful was the only word he could think of to describe it. It was dangerous and pitiless and harsh, but it had a strange sort of perfection. Artemi continued to wrestle with him and claw at him when she was not breathless with their shared sensations, but even her protests began to weaken. There was too much to be gained from this. He could see the prize that loomed ahead, and the sheer, burning bliss that he could find at the end of it. In spite of her protests, he pulled her closer and tried to take as much of her power through their contact as he could. He was sure that his entire soul was being

  burned from within, and that his veins would soon rupture from the force of the heat.

  And then the ending came. He felt his heart shatter into a thousand pieces, cast apart by the inferno that raged inside him; every muscle shook with the feeling of it; every part of him was as smoke: hot, weightless and aware of nothing but his own mortality. Living faded, mixed and swirled into death, and then there was blackness.

  He was still breathing hard when he awoke, and was not quite sure if he had been unconscious for a number of

  hours or a matter of seconds. Time would not make itself clear to him, and his vision was so fogged with greyness that he could not trust his assessment of the light that came through the window. Artemi was there, of course. Her dark eyes seemed intent only upon boring holes right through him. He considered pushing her away, but with the mating bond still active that would be entirely futile. Not what he had planned. But Morghiad had a game to play. “Now you have no choice but to admit that I possess you.”

  “Don’t pretend you planned this. I called you to my room. You are my

  pet, high lord.”

  He rolled her onto her back. She did not fight this time. “You are a poor liar.”

  “You are worse.”

  There was a moment of silence while they regarded each other, hot and filled with the veiled panic that came from their rabid contemplations.

  It was then that Morghiad came to realise the consequences. Artemi was bonded to him; neither of them could guarantee that they were old enough to undergo nalka. He certainly had no desire to experience that with the risks involved. Who would wish to

  die such a shameful, painful and honourless death? She would have to visit him.

  “You will come to me every eight days.” Artemi spoke the very words he had thought of.

  “No. You have it the wrong way around,” he said.

  “Really? Then let’s consider the options. Either you will die if you don’t visit me, or you will die when my powers outgrow yours. The second is an inevitability. Either way you choose to end your life, I will be glad to have had a part in it.”

  Glad? Did she really want him

  dead? He had never properly considered it. “You cannot kill me, property. I would rather leave you to die of nalka first, and when I had watched it, I would die a content man.”

  “I don’t see how a bond to a man as pathetic as you could ever kill me.”

  “Then why did you ask me to come to you afterwards?”

  “You are a play-thing. And if you continue to ask stupid questions, you will have to grow a new one of these.”

  Artemi already had one hand upon the hilt of a dagger, and Morghiad did not have to think long on what she was intending to sever. He didn’t particularly appreciate the threat.

  But kill him, surely she could not have planned this? Throughout their games he had never entertained the possibility that she had wanted him genuinely and utterly dead. Injured, downtrodden and defeated maybe, but not dead. What was the use of an object of entertainment if it was no longer capable of providing any entertainment? Or had she come to despise him that much? His mind was darkened as a new boulder of doubt rolled into it.

  Dead.

  Would this kill him? He had been the one to predict the true potential of her abilities, little as he liked it. But she would not outstrip him for a few more months at least. There was a good reason why girls weren’t normally as powerful as she would become; they needed to be responsible and level-headed and not born of the dirt. By the hottest of Blazes, he needed to get into a proper battle soon and die a decent death instead of this one!

  Somehow, she was not quite sure how, she managed to lie with him for another hour without any further violence. There was not much conversation that passed between them, and Artemi was careful not to break her stare at any point. Morghiad did his best to ignore it by finding interests elsewhere, or at least, that was the story his green eyes told. Her room

  was a scene of utter destruction. Artemi did not want to think too much on it or how much of value to her had been destroyed. Perhaps that damned necklace had been a casualty; that would not be such a
terrible thing.

  She realised with some unease that she would have her room inspected by the house mistress this week. Perhaps it would be better if Artemi visited him rather than the other way around. Fire of the deserts! She had never intended for this to happen!

  It was dark when Morghiad finally left, and he was probably glad for it given the state of his clothing. It

  would have taken her only moments to alert the entire block to his presence, shame him publicly and then deny any association. But that would have done her no favours when the remains of his shirt still lay beyond the window. She wanted to keep this a secret as much as he did, at least until she had enough time to consider the consequences in greater depth.

  A while passed before Artemi moved from her position on the floor. A shattered piece of terracotta had been prodding her back for the best part of an hour, but she had hardly noticed it until she rose. It had

  belonged to a very simple and unremarkable wash bowl given to her by her father. She briefly lamented its loss and then crawled, bruised and chilled, onto the twisted remains of her bed.

  The room assumed a sudden and pitch silence that she was not used to. The air seemed not to move. Evidently Morghiad’s form to block sound worked in both directions. It made the place feel especially dark and oppressive, and that effect was enhanced by the lightless, smashed carcasses of her two oil lamps. Artemi curled into a tighter knot as she pulled

  one of the woollen blankets across herself. Whom could she tell about this? Whom could she trust and confide in? The more she thought about it, the more she realised the true weight of what she had just done. Morghiad was vile and heartless, but she had never wanted to kill him.

  This was no longer a game.

  She decided to roll onto her other side and stare at a different wall. The eastern one was not quite as battered or dented as the western. She had felt some considerable satisfaction in throwing Morghiad against it, even with the damage that had resulted; he

  had deserved it utterly. Yes, the evening had not been without its pleasures, but why did it have to be with him? Of all the men she had met here, why him? There were far kinder, gentler ones with broad smiles and life in their eyes. Morghiad only ever seemed to bring darkness, foul moods and irritation with his presence.

  But, as little as she wanted to admit it, he was a good fighter. His opinions of the poor may not have been enlightened, and he did become enraged by the strangest things, but he would defend his country, and Sunidara, better than anyone else she

  had known at the school. Assuming he learned how to properly communicate with people, his existence could even unite them. And that was her primary source of guilt: to know that her actions would deprive her country of someone who could truly aid it.

  It took her a very long time to sleep that night. In truth, she barely slept at all, and in the morning she made her best attempt to tidy the broken contents of her room. When she had finished, she had an empty, battered-looking space with a bag full of shards in one corner. Most of the books appeared neat once they had

  been replaced on the shelves, though closer inspection would reveal that whole chunks were missing from within them. As Artemi surveyed the things she could not hide or fix, she had some very enjoyable thoughts on how to repay her friend in kind for the destruction. Morghiad was always keen to demonstrate that he could steal her power straight out of her, but Artemi had not yet revealed how she could use him as her very own conduit. She knew she could do it to Linfar, but with Morghiad it was an advantage she had been saving for a very special occasion. Her thoughts paused in her mind

  for only a moment as she remembered how wrong these games had become. Her consciousness had always been active with plans and schemes and reprisals, and it seemed that they wanted to remain in spite of a lesson she felt she ought to have learned. Was it worth trying a different tactic now? Perhaps they could work together. But that thought conjured an image of a smirking Morghiad, and an immediate rebuttal from the man who took so much joy from upsetting her. He simply could not be trusted.

  He found himself smiling as Linfar departed his room. The man had quite an amusing wit, once he decided to speak of things other than women. Not that Master Holvinn had much opportunity to speak of women these days. His reputation had spread quite rapidly through the girls’ quarters, and most had subsequently decided to avoid him. But Morghiad had struck up something of an unexpected friendship with the man while he recovered from his injuries. Linfar had an encyclopaedia of Sunidaran jokes inside his head. Most of them were terrible, but one or two were worth retelling.

  A hot breeze blew upon his neck as he shut the door. He hadn’t left the window open –

  “I’ve come for my service, lordling.” Artemi was one of the few people he knew who could make a term of respect sound like an insult. She dropped lightly onto the floor through the open window, and smiled

  broadly.

  “Someone could have seen you.” He shut the casement behind her, and peered through for any watching eyes.

  “I think you will find that they did not.” She smelled very good at this distance, and already he could feel his anticipation rousing from its slumber. He resisted the urge to grab hold of her, and instead began undoing the clasps that ran down the front of her bodice. Predictably, she pushed him away. “I am not that easily accessed.”

  “I think you will find that you

  are.”

  “No.” Artemi placed a hand on his arm, and before he had time to register the heat of it, he felt an unseen force knock his senses. What - ? Artemi had taken control of him; she was using him to wield! That was not possible! He tried to wrestle back command, but was met by nothing but a blank wall. She smiled at his surprise, and finished her form construction with impressive speed.

  “You should not have done that.”

  She shrugged. “It’s time someone sensible took control.”

  “You are the last person I would describe as sensible, Artemi.”

  “You are in a poor position to judge.” She grimaced. “And you stink.”

  “Your hair is ridiculous.”

  “Mine is? Look at yours!”

  Their argument dissolved into a fight which, in turn, dissolved into a rather angry version of love-making. It served their purposes, however, and again left Morghiad breathless and awed by the intensity of it. Artemi fitted, with room to spare, under one of his arms. How was it that so much destruction resided in that one shell? He could not make sense of it. Nothing about her made any sense.

  “Artemi?”

  “What?”

  “I need you to leave me with some Blaze so that I can cut through space to visit you. Crawling about the walls will get one of us seen.”

  “You shouldn’t do that again. It’s wrong.”

  “Your opinions are unimportant. I demand it. You will wield for me.” He tried to steal control of her powers again, but she wrestled it back from him. “You’ll regret that.” She would.

  Artemi did eventually give him the packets of Blaze that he required, and he found that he was free to travel the city without taking more than a few short steps. But it left him feeling chilled afterward, like he had been left buried beneath a glacier for weeks at a time. As the months passed, he started to wonder if Artemi had been correct about the negative nature of travelling in that manner. It did seem... unsympathetic to his body somehow.

  Artemi was pleased to awaken in her own room on this occasion, and content to sense that Morghiad still lay beneath her. His breathing was steady, like the sound of waves rolling slowly onto the beach. It was irritating, but he probably would survive nalka when the time came. There was something innately solid about him, like an immovable lump of rock. An arrogant lump of rock.

  “Tem?”

  Burn it, he was awake! Couldn’t a girl gather some sleep while there was time? “Don’t call me that.”

  “I lie with you, and yet I cannot call you Tem?”

  “No.” She kept
her head firmly on his chest, and tried her best to look at the sky beyond the window.

  “Artemi, then. I must go to Hirrah next week.”

  So, it was that time already, the time when cadets would return to their parents. Such things no long applied to her, of course. “You can stay here and serve me.”

  “No, I cannot. It is expected that I go. They will send for me ifI don’t.”

  “Then you cannot be gone for

  too long.”

  He took a deep breath. “I cannot just turn up for a few days and then leave. You should come to Hirrah.”

  His usual approach would have been to state that he was going, and not give her a choice in the matter. And yet he had decided not to use the word ‘must’; it did make the option easier to consider. What else was she to do in that time? Toryn had written to her with news that he would not be able to visit for another month, and all of the other cadets would be away too. Artemi certainly did not wish to spend those weeks alone here with Gilkore.

  And she had to admit she had a certain amount of curiosity about Morghiad’s home country. It would be good to see something other than Sunidara before nalka took her for good. “I will come to your... estate. But I will travel there after you. I do not want to spend several days’ journey in your company. This is bad enough. You can make me an accessway.”