by Kyra Halland
Sister, they said, sounding more distant, We must obey. But you are kin to us, and our power is yours whenever you desire it.
The voices fell silent. The sensation of cold and heaviness drained from Lainie’s body and spirit back into the ground, and the shield over her and Mr. Vendine faded, the dark power turning to mist and drifting away. The unseen world fell as still as the physical world.
With a great shuddering sigh, Mr. Vendine sat back, a barely-visible blue glow coming from his ring. A huge circle of fallen rock surrounded them where it had piled up around the shield. One of Carden’s feet was all that showed from beneath the rubble burying him. Above them, the black interior of the mountain stretched higher than they could see. After a long moment, Mr. Vendine stood and gave Lainie a hand up. They stood looking around in the faint glow from his ring, trying to spot a way out. From somewhere high above to Lainie’s left came a slight brush of moving air. “That way,” she said as Mr. Vendine looked in the direction the air had come from. He nodded.
They crawled and climbed and pushed and pulled each other over what seemed like half a mountain of fallen rock, and followed the breath of fresh air to a crack high up in the cavern wall. As they edged into the fissure, Mr. Vendine’s mage light died. Holding hands to keep from losing each other in the dark, they squeezed through a narrow tunnel that bent back and forth.
After thirty measures or so, a soft glow of starlight appeared ahead of them. Soon they stepped out the other end of the tunnel into a cool, pine-scented, starry mountain night. They stood there, leaning against the sheer rock face next to the tunnel opening, still tightly gripping each other’s hands, breathing hard, their bodies trembling from exhaustion and from a new tension that descended over them.
Lainie became aware of a great, aching emptiness inside of her, a longing that demanded to be filled, a need like that for food or water or sleep centered in her belly and between her legs. She knew what she was feeling; she had read about it in the penny-thrillers, had heard it whispered about among the cowhands or women in town when they didn’t know she was listening, had even experienced it herself a few times though never this intensely. She didn’t know if it was because of the danger she and Mr. Vendine had faced together, or because of the kiss, or because he was the nicest, handsomest, most interesting man she had ever known and he had come for her. Whatever the reason, it was taking everything she had to keep from throwing herself at him in the most wanton and disgraceful way. She didn’t even dare look at him, because surely if he saw her face he would know what she wanted, and what would he think of her then?
The silence between them stretched on. Mr. Vendine’s grip on her hand didn’t loosen; his breathing was as harsh and ragged as her own. Lainie couldn’t bear the tension any longer. She had to do something to make everything normal and comfortable between them again. Still without looking at him, she said, her voice sounding awfully high and breathless, “Thank you for coming to rescue me, Mr. Vendine.”
The stalemate broke. He pulled her into his arms. “Thank you?” he growled into her hair. Then he covered her mouth with his in a ravenous kiss.
She was lost. Her self-control, stretched to the breaking point, gave way beneath the flood of desire that swept over her. She pushed his long coat back from his shoulders; he shrugged it the rest of the way off and tossed it onto the ground. Her hands inexperienced and awkward but eager, his hands deft and sure, they wrestled off the rest of their clothing. Every touch of his fingers against her body, every brush of her hands against his skin, every word and sound of desire, was like a drop of rain on drought-dry earth, a measure of vibrant life going to fill up the vast emptiness within her.
They dropped down onto his coat and stretched out full length together, skin against skin, mouths working hungrily together. After the cold of the cavern and the Sh’kimech, his mouth, his skin, felt so warm against hers. His hair had come loose from its tieback and she wound her fingers through it, holding him to her as his hand moved over her breasts, her belly, between her legs. She wasn’t even surprised that she didn’t feel the least bit shy or embarrassed; it was as if he was the one man in the world who was made to see and touch her this way, and she was made to be seen and touched by him.
The yawning hunger inside of her demanded more. She shifted her body against his, trying to communicate her need. He moved over her, pressing her thighs apart, and she wound her legs around him, pulling him closer than she had ever dared dream he could be. The slight pain when he drove through her maidenhead – less than she had always thought it would be – only helped to feed the warmth that was growing inside her.
It was fast and frantic, and though she didn’t see stars like in the penny-thriller novels, as their bodies moved together the deep, rich rose-colored glow of her power swelled within her, filling the emptiness inside of her with warmth and life, until a delicious spasm of pleasure overtook her and left her floating in rose-colored light from within the safety of his arms.
Chapter 15
SILAS SHIFTED ONTO his back and pulled Lainie over to lie with her head on his chest. She snuggled up against him like she belonged there. Slowly, gently, he trailed his fingers along her hip and side. Back in Granadaia he had liked women with lush, full curves that overflowed his hands, but in the Wildings, life was hard and it was mostly only house ladies who attained that kind of voluptuousness. Lainie felt so fragile beneath his touch, her bones as delicate as a bird’s, but her skin was warm and velvety soft, and the sweet curve of her hip and bottom fit perfectly in his hand. Her wavy hair, freed from its braid, flowed across his chest and arm like silk.
He couldn’t remember ever feeling so deeply content. He was no stranger to magical hunger, but it was rare that he found himself in the company of an incredible, amazing, extraordinary – and equally hungry – woman when it came on, and even rarer that they were in a starlit, fragrant mountain meadow when it happened. More than rare; this had been a once in a lifetime experience.
They lay in silence for a long time before she spoke, her voice uncertain though she had shown no signs of shyness earlier. “I don’t know what happened. I’m really not that kind of girl.”
“It’s usually just called the hunger,” Silas answered drowsily. “When you’ve depleted your power, you need to regenerate it. Lots of food and sleep will do the trick, but sex is faster and more effective. And more fun, if there’s an agreeable partner close to hand. There’s also drugs that will replenish power, but any mage who uses them is a fool.”
“Oh,” she said. She fell silent again, while he went on stroking her slender curves and feeling her breath, warm and soft, ruffling the hair on his chest. Then she said, “What happens now?”
In his state of exhaustion and contentment, the question didn’t trouble him as it had before. “I can’t let you stay here untrained, so I’m going to send you to one of the schools of magic in Granadaia.”
She fell absolutely still. Even her breathing seemed suspended. Then she sat up abruptly, her back to him, her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. Her hair rippled down her slender, shapely back, shining in the light from the moon and stars. She was very quiet, until she took in a long, ragged breath and he realized she was crying silently. “Darlin’…?”
“My Pa was right,” she wept. “No soul, no heart… He said you would take what you wanted and one way or another you’d ruin me.”
It took him a moment, thinking back over what he’d said and done, before it hit him. His heart sank cold and heavy like a stone. Taking her the way he had, without a thought for her needs – by the time it occurred to him that of course she was a virgin, she wasn’t any more – and then talking about what had happened as if it was merely the satisfying of a physical urge, followed by telling her he was going to send her away to become something she didn’t want to be – send her, not take her with him –
Beef-brained son of a bitch. He couldn’t have made a worse mess of this if he’d tried. “Laini
e…”
“Just like my grandmother.” The vehemence in her voice shocked him. “When she found out she had power, she abandoned her family and took a mage lover and threw her family off their land so she could give it to her lover’s son. She destroyed her own family, and she didn’t even care. All she cared about was power. And now you’re telling me I have to go away and learn to be like her, and you don’t even care.”
The last words stabbed cold in his heart. He couldn’t even be curious about her grandmother; that wasn’t important right now. He sat up and touched her shoulder; she jerked away from him. “I’m sorry, Lainie,” he said, feeling helpless. “It’s the law. People with power have to either be trained or Stripped of their power. It’s too dangerous to leave someone with power untrained and free to use it. You could do a lot of damage, or even kill yourself or someone else.”
“Then I’ll be Stripped – whatever that is.”
“Don’t ask me to do that to you, darlin’. Stripping leaves a person mindless and helpless. An empty shell. Would you want your Pa to have to take care of you the rest of your life like that?”
“Why do I have to choose?” she cried out. “What if I promise to never use my power again? I hardly ever use it anyway.”
“It’s the law,” he said again, trying to convince himself as much as her. “If I don’t make you choose, some other mage will find you sooner or later, and they might not give you a choice. And if the Mage Council finds out that I found you first and left you alone, it’ll be even worse for you, and for me. Prison at the very least, or even execution or Stripping.”
Her only answer to that was an angry, unconvinced sound.
“Besides,” he went on, “even if you did promise never to use your power again, do you really think you could keep that promise?”
She was silent. Even without being able to see her face, Silas knew the answer was no. Having magical power and being unable to use it would be like cutting off a piece of yourself. “And anyway, even if you never do magic again, the people in the valley know about you now. It isn’t safe for you there any more.”
“But we stopped Carden! We saved them from the Sh’kimech! If we tell them –”
“Do you really think that’ll make any difference?” he asked in exasperation. “To most Plains, a wizard is a wizard, no matter what we do. I don’t blame them for hating us, not with how things are in Granadaia, and I hope things will be different one day, that Plains and mages can come to terms with each other and learn to live together peacefully. But right now the fact is that your life will be in danger if you stay in Bitterbush Springs.”
She didn’t answer. Her stubborn, angry, hurt silence dragged on, and her words, You don’t even care, echoed in his mind. Silas tried to think of something he could say that would undo the damage he had done, and came up empty. He sighed, then started pulling on his pants. “Lay down and get some sleep, darlin’. I’ll keep watch.”
* * *
THE NIGHT WAS quiet. The only danger was likely to be from groviks; too exhausted to stay awake any longer, Silas built a small campfire to keep the animals at a distance, then finally let himself go to sleep.
He awoke to a chilly sunrise. Lainie was still asleep, rolled up in his coat. As morning light filled the small, grassy vale, lined with pines and golden-barked trembleleaf trees, he caught a couple of fish in a nearby stream and skewered them on twigs, then set them to cook on rocks beside the fire. While they cooked, he climbed up onto a ridge above the meadow and looked around. By the position of the sun and the lay of the mountains before him, he guessed that they were some distance west-northwest of the A’ayimat camp. There was no telling how far; it was impossible to translate the tunnels they had run through in pursuit of Carden into distance in the mountains. But, assuming they didn’t run into any impassable canyons or cliffs, they couldn’t be more than a day’s journey or so away from the camp.
Lainie stirred. Silas busied himself with the fish, his back turned to her, giving her privacy while she dressed. When she came to the fire, he picked up one of the fish on its skewer and handed it to her. “Hope you like fish,” he said.
She shrugged, then set about eating the fish in a fastidious manner that suggested she didn’t really like it. When she was done, she knelt by the stream, drank from her cupped hands, and splashed water on her bruised, filthy face. Her tears the night before had smudged the dirt and left tracks in it, but she seemed dry-eyed enough this morning. Whether that was a good or a bad thing, Silas couldn’t tell, but going by her silence, it was probably bad. He finished his own breakfast, then joined Lainie at the stream to drink and fill the water bottle she had carried out from the caverns as well as his own.
“If you’re ready, we should head on out,” he said.
“Where’re we going?”
Silas gestured towards the east-southeast. “We’re heading for an A’ayimat camp that way. It’s a long story; I’ll explain while we walk.”
She nodded. He kicked dirt over the campfire to smother it, and put his duster and hat on. They climbed out of the vale and paused up on the ridge so he could sight out their way. In the morning light, it looked like an easy hike over a series of fairly gentle ridges and valleys descending the eastern face of the mountain range. With Lainie following him in silence, he started down the other side of the ridge.
While they walked, he told her how he, her father, and Dobay had taken out the ten miners who were carrying ore out of the mountain, and that Banfrey and Dobay had been injured in the shootout.
“Is my Pa okay?” she demanded anxiously, the first thing she had said since they left the meadow.
“I think he will be.” He went on, telling her about the A’ayimat who had joined the fight and then had taken Banfrey, Dobay, and the injured miners back to their camp. “Our deal was that if I stopped the man who had invaded their territory and settled the beings – the Sh’kimech – down again, they would care for your Pa and Dobay and let them go when I came back for them. I took a couple more miners up to the camp later on, and your Pa looked a lot better then.”
“Good,” was all she said.
The silence dragged on as they walked, crossing forested mountainsides and making their way through the valleys between them. Silas tried to think of something else to talk about, but the longer the silence went on, the more it seemed to him that any subject he brought up would only look like an obvious attempt to avoid what was lying so heavily between them. Lainie plodded along, hands jammed in her pants pockets, looking everywhere but at him. She stumbled over a rock, and picked it up and threw it into the forest with more vehemence than the rock deserved.
Nothing to do for it but face it and try to clear the air, Silas decided. He took a deep breath, gathering his resolve. “I’m sorry about last night. I shouldn’t have let it happen, not when you didn’t understand what was happening.”
“I’m not stupid, Mr. Vendine.” She still didn’t look at him. “I know what’s what.”
“No, I mean the hunger. I should have told you that was what you were feeling, and that there were other ways –”
“Look, we both know that I wanted it as much as you did. So stop acting like – like you raped me, or something.”
That wasn’t the right thing to say, then. He waited for her to speak again, hoping she would give him something to go on.
“So, it was just the hunger, was all,” she said after a while. “And I know you can’t stick around…”
That was what she wanted, to know that it hadn’t only been physical need, that it had meant something more to him, and that he wouldn’t leave her without a second thought.
Had it been the hunger and nothing else? He didn’t think so. True, if it hadn’t been for the driving, ravenous, all-consuming need, he would have thought twice about taking the virtue from a lovesick young woman when he could offer her nothing in return. But he also couldn’t deny that her courage, her spirit, and her honesty attracted him more than any other woma
n he had ever known. And her beauty – by the standards of Granadaian mage society she might be considered almost plain, but, even bruised and dirty as she was now, she reminded him of the small flowers that grew in so many of the harsh areas of the Wildings: small, almost invisible, not bright or showy, but, on close examination, simple, delicate, pure and perfect in their beauty, and stronger than any of the hardships they faced – more than that, made stronger by those hardships.
It had meant something. By all the gods, it had meant something. But saying so would imply promises he wasn’t in a position to make. So he didn’t say anything.
“It’s just…” she finally went on, still without looking at him. Her face reddened. “What if I’m pregnant? My Pa will go right through the roof.”
At least he had an easy answer for that. “You aren’t.”
“How do you know?”
“When mage children begin to mature, a block is placed on their fertility. It can only be removed by a member of the Mage Council when they enter into an approved marriage. I’m not married, so my block is still in place.”
“Oh.” Her shoulders drooped, almost as if she were disappointed instead of relieved. “Why do they do that?”
“It’s to manage the bloodlines, since magic is passed down in families. The Council tries to strengthen weak bloodlines through carefully-arranged marriages, and maintain the strong ones without letting them become inbred. Adultery between married mages is illegal, and if a mage becomes widowed or divorced the block is put back on them.”
“What about my Pa’s mother? He told me she was the bastard child of a mage and a Plain servant girl.”
“Adultery with Plains – or with unmarried mages – isn’t illegal. It’s frowned on, but it does happen. If a half-mage Plain child with power is found, they’re taken and trained, and the block is put on them until an appropriate match is made for them. The Mage Council considers them the lowest of the low as far as bloodlines go, depending on who the mage parent was, but it does bring some fresh blood into the mix.”