“What makes you think that Scott won’t simply hand Maray over to the queen?” Jemin asked again. Maray had stopped counting after the tenth time he’d asked. “I trust Langley, but am not sure I can trust anyone else. With Unterly and Feris on the queen’s side—”
“We have the best weapon anyone can imagine,” Gerwin stopped him. “We have a Yutu shifter nobody even knows exists. But I, too, can’t agree with Langley. I don’t want to sacrifice my daughter as bait.”
Jemin nodded, not seeming convinced. “Also, if Maray even gets near Feris or Unterly, they will make sure she’ll be chained up in the dungeons and become a living blood bank.” He gritted his teeth. “She is not going.”
“Not going,” Gerwin agreed. “And you are staying to protect her.”
Ironically, Heck had mentioned the dungeons at their first encounter even if just as a joke.
“Can you stop talking about me as if I wasn’t here?” The two men looked at her as if just realizing they had been excluding her again. “Even if I have found out only five minutes ago—” It had been longer, but compared to the years of lies, it felt like only five seconds. “This is still my life. And I am coming.”
While her father sighed a familiar sigh—the one he had sighed when she had asked questions about her mother after she had left—Jemin turned toward her so rigidly that the chair turned with him. His eyes locked on hers, and a crack ran through his composure, letting exasperation shine through.
“You may think you want to be there—” he lifted his hand and moved it toward her an inch, then stopped himself and laid it on the table instead, “—but you are not ready for this. You have no idea what the palace is like.” Unexpected wisdom crossed his features, and Maray felt oddly small under his stare.
“I won’t be in the way… or get myself in trouble.” She tried a compromise. “Just, let me be there, please.”
Under different circumstances, her father might have been proud of her attempt to find a solution that suits everyone. The one problem here was that she was the only one it seemed to suit. Langley, who would have supported her, she thought, was out of reach. His opinion was that Maray’s presence would activate more of the dormant revolutionaries and distract Rhia while the guerrilla force snuck into the palace. “You said we’d go back together.” She looked at her father, confronting him with the same determination she used when fighting the will of the dagger.
“That was before I knew what I know now.” Gerwin eyed her with pity. Maray didn’t like that look. It meant she was weak, and she didn’t like to be seen or treated as so. “Had it been Rhia fearing you because you might take the throne one day, then I would have taken you with me. It would have meant she had a weakness we could work with. We could have fought her together. But now that she is immortal…” He gestured at her, features twisting with conflict. “It would mean that we can never win a fight even if we get to her.”
Maray felt bad for insisting. Her father had been all she’d had these past years since her mother had left—for reasons she now understood but didn’t make her absence any less painful.
“Please, stay,” Jemin whispered. He didn’t reason or try to convince her. All he did was bore with his gaze into hers, all wisdom wiped from his face, leaving a blank page she knew she would be writing on with whatever she decided to do.
She forgot that there was a third person in the room. For a moment, there were only those bright eyes piercing into hers with an almost childlike hope.
Maray nodded, unthinking, and both Jemin and her father released a gust of held breath. She pushed away from the table, knowing she would only be able to look away if she didn’t see Jemin at all, and made her way to the kitchen.
Out of Jemin’s presence, thinking was much easier. She knew she had agreed to something she wasn’t really comfortable with. Her father was going to risk his life, and she was going to sit by and wait until she got bad news from Allinan that he had disappeared like her mother? She grabbed the grass green water boiler and filled it up to the top, setting it down so hard she felt she should apologize to the machine before she switched it on. The sound of the boiling water drowned out the discussion in the dining area, and when Maray bent forward to peek around the wide columns, her view was on Jemin’s broad, Thaotine covered shoulders. They moved slightly as he spoke, making the collar of his armor-shirt fold down and expose his neckline.
As if he sensed her eyes, Jemin turned his head, caramel strands bouncing, and caught her staring.
Maray’s heart stopped for a brief second as his eyes met hers. “Tea, anyone?” she asked in an attempt to hide her embarrassment, and leaned forward more so she could see her dad.
Jemin nodded while Gerwin got to his feet. “I am heading out.” He looked less worried than a couple of minutes earlier.
Before Maray got the chance to flee behind the column and focus on the color of the water boiler, Jemin got up, too, and stood back while Gerwin hugged her goodbye.
“Promise me you’ll be careful, Dad.” She knew it was unavoidable. Running wouldn’t solve the problem, and the best she could do was let her father take care of the world she had no experience with and make sure she survived the time with Jemin alone without making a fool of herself—for some reason, she really cared about that last part.
“I love you,” Gerwin kissed the top of her head and released her before he walked over to Jemin and shook his hand. “Take good care of my daughter.”
Jemin straightened the way he had with Commander Scott. Maray was surprised he didn’t salute. “I promise.”
Gerwin picked up his weapons and a jacket before he headed out the door like any other day when he left for work.
“Good luck! Come home soon!” Maray called after him, but the door was already closing.
“He won’t come back any faster even if you continue staring at the door.”
Maray felt like sticking her tongue out at Jemin, an impulse she usually never had.
“Easy for you to say. Your father didn’t just walk out through that door to his likely death,” she scolded him without giving him the satisfaction of turning around and facing him.
“You’re right,” he said in the same cold tone. “My father is dead.”
Maray choked on her breath and looked at him. “I am sorry…” There was nothing more she could think of to say.
His face was set, jaw a bit tight, as if he was clenching his teeth. There was nothing about him that would allow for her to know if he was sad or upset. It could be any emotion in-between or none of them at all; that’s how unreadable his expression was.
As she stepped closer to read in the depths of his eyes, she noticed that she had folded her arms across her chest, mirroring him. In the afternoon light, his long, blond lashes were a frame of honey and gold around blue oceans.
He blinked. “How about that tea?”
Maray unfroze, and the rush of blood in her cheeks made her self-conscious. With a couple of strides, she was back at the kitchen counter and grabbed the water boiler with one hand while pulling two tea mugs from the cupboard with the other. Jemin followed suit, breathing down her neck as she poured the water.
“I know Dad said you should protect me, but I doubt I am in danger while making tea.” Maray shot him a glance over her shoulder and felt her heart stutter as she noticed how closely he was standing behind her.
“I am not so sure.” He chuckled as the water ran over the overly-full mug but leaned against the counter beside her, arms crossed. His upper arm was in her field of vision as she fetched a kitchen towel to mop up the spilled fluid, and she couldn’t help but notice the hard edge of his biceps under the soft shirt.
With burning cheeks, she looked away, hoping he hadn’t been watching her face.
Maray thought of herself as a calm and balanced person, but Jemin’s presence pushed her out of that rare equilibrium of a teenage mind. She reached onto the shelf to her left and extracted two teabags from a box.
“Bengal
Spice,” Jemin commented as she let the teabags drop into the water. “Sounds like a book title.”
“I don’t read spice,” Maray replied and hung the wet kitchen towel before she pushed one of the steaming mugs toward him.
He picked it up with a grin. “Do you read tea-leaves?”
“Like fortune-telling?” Maray turned around and leaned against the counter beside him.
“Yeah.” Something in the way he said it made her wonder if he was superstitious.
“Not really.” She picked up her mug and pulled the teabag from side to side by its string. “You?”
Jemin shook his head. “Heck does… read tea-leaves.”
Maray involuntarily laughed at the mention of Heck’s name.
“Does he know you’re here?”
Jemin turned to the side, hip still resting against the counter, one arm still folded across his chest, teacup in the other. The only thing indicating he wasn’t angry with her was the tiny smile curving his lips. “It took me a while to convince him it should be I who is coming to get you.”
“Why is that?” Mary asked and focused on her tea just to distract herself from that soft curve of his mouth. When Jemin didn’t respond, she glanced up and was surprised to find his face a couple of inches from hers, bright eyes piercing into hers. She had subconsciously turned to her side, too, her body facing his, an electric current running through her as his lips curved a little more.
“He thinks he’s the better soldier.” Jemin spoke as if he found this thought amusing.
“Is he?”
“Heck is a great fighter.”
“But you’re better?”
“It offends me you even ask.” He slowly set down the teacup, and just a second after she heard it meet the counter, his hand was at his belt, drawing his sword at mind-racking speed. “Did you see me take that Yutu down?” He held the blade up to her chest, but this time his expression was smug.
Maray held his gaze. “I do. And I remember me picking you up from the ground before you got the chance to fight the beast.” She remembered that first moment she had noticed the fight in the tunnel and then Jemin’s motionless body on the cold gravel. Back then, he had been a stranger who needed help. Had she found him like that today, her heart would break. She realized just now how much the bright-eyed boy was affecting her.
“It wasn’t that bad,” he objected and lowered the sword. “I was recovering.”
“Yeah, how does that work exactly?” Maray remembered how his wounds had sealed, leaving nothing but a trace of blood behind. That wasn’t normal. “Are you even human? Is everyone in Allinan like that?” What a stupid question? Of course not, or Rhia wouldn’t need treatment when she was sick.
“That’s a courtesy extended by the queen to the most dangerous professions. We get an item that exudes magic. It can heal us, and we can use it to activate certain magical devices.
“The sink.” Maray thought of the unexplained water stream trickling into the basin in Jemin’s room and later at Corey’s.
Maray followed the movement of Jemin’s arm as he took a step back and rested his hand, including sword, on the counter. The silver bracelet lay elegantly on his wrist, emphasizing the tendons and hard lines under his skin. His knuckles were resting less than an inch from her hip. Her heart picked up pace.
She wasn’t sure if he’d noticed, but he didn’t answer her question—not that she remembered she had asked—but simply stared at her, lips slightly parted. A strand of caramel was caught on one of his eyebrows, making her fingers itch to free it. As she was convincing her hand it was best to keep holding on to the tea mug, Jemin’s gaze locked on hers.
For a while, there was nothing but his eyes, deep enough to lose herself in. She couldn’t even focus enough to be embarrassed for staring.
“Things would be much easier if you didn’t look like her,” said Jemin out of the blue.
Maray shrank, reminded that this was probably the one reason he looked at her at all—she looked like Rhia in her youth. Jemin had grown up with a picture of the queen under his pillow.
She stepped back and set down her mug without having even taken a sip.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he apologized, his face attempting to return to the composed expression he’d worn before but not quite making it there. What lingered was a look of longing in his eyes and a hint of awkwardness in the twist of his mouth. The rest was empty as if he didn’t even have emotions.
“No offense taken.” Disappointment, not offense.
He remained silent for a moment, and Maray thought that that topic was closed for him. But he surprised her with a deep breath, almost a sigh of frustration.
“You know, I used to adore her.” He leaned back against the counter, shoulders parallel to the cabinets, sword behind him. “And then I learned she was the one responsible for my father’s death—”
Maray studied the patterns of the oak floor, unable to face him as he spilled his thoughts. She was anxious to keep him talking and scared that he might stop if she as much as moved a finger.
“She must be an old woman by now—the version of her I saw was in her forties maximum and still beautiful.”
He didn’t seem embarrassed but immersed in something he was seeing inside his mind, something she was hoping he’d share with her.
“That picture of her…” he continued, searching for words, “… I always thought there would never be a girl as beautiful as her, and then—”
He turned his head, and Maray glanced up at him, unable to keep herself from it.
“Then I met you, and I thought you were a trap… the queen coming for me as she did for my father…” His eyes burned with an ocean-blue fire. “… but you are real.”
There was nothing Maray’s normally sharp mind could think of to say. It got blanker by the second as Jemin kept gazing at her with expectant eyes.
For a short minute that felt like a long hour, he waited, until he folded his arms again, and the fire in his eyes faded. “I understand,” was all he said.
Maray wasn’t sure what it was he thought he understood. She felt like there was nothing she could ever understand again. Something had clicked in her as those eyes had burned into hers, and now that he had locked that fire away, it was as if someone had suddenly pulled a rug from under her feet.
“Maybe I should leave you alone here for a little bit and go to another room,” he offered, avoiding looking into her questioning eyes.
“Why?” Maray didn’t want to be alone. She wanted to keep staring into his eyes like an idiot and forget the world—worlds—around her.
“Because he doesn’t deserve to stand in the presence of Your Royal Highness.” Heck’s voice came from the back of the room, sounding a lot as if he was having the greatest of times watching both of them shuffle apart.
“Can you go back to where you came from?” Jemin complained, face serious, a mixture of irritation and humor shining through in his voice.
“And miss all the awkwardness?” Heck grinned widely as he joined them in the kitchen.
“Where did you just come from?” Maray asked, ignoring his gloating. “Are we expecting anyone else? Is Corey coming?”
Heck’s grin faded. “Hasn’t Jem told you?”
Jemin shook his head in a way that told he hadn’t but also that Heck shouldn’t.
“Told me what?” Maray looked back and forth between the two boys as they were staring at each other.
Eventually, Heck shrugged and lifted himself onto the counter. “The Corey who led you into the woods was a fake.” He let his feet dangle and leaned forward, shoulders at his ears. His black locks bounced as he moved.
Maray watched him with a sense of confusion.
“She doesn’t need to know,” Jemin interfered, “she has enough on her mind.”
But Heck had other ideas. “She should know everything. Any detail could be important when she returns to Allinan.”
“She won’t return,” Jemin interrupte
d, irritated. He glanced at Maray, gathering his composure, and his face returned to the expression he’d had when Maray had brought up his father.
“Says who?” Heck’s grin was gone for once.
“I said.” Maray stepped forward, putting herself between the two boys. She looked Heck deep in the eyes. “What about Corey? Is she hurt?” Maray thought of all the things that could have happened to Corey. The Yutu could have gotten her … or the guards. “I lost her in the woods—”
“You didn’t lose her,” Jemin cut her off and stepped to her side, shoving his sword into his belt. Concern flickered over his features. “That wasn’t Corey.”
Maray blinked at him but didn’t understand. “What do you mean, wasn’t Corey?”
“That was an impostor. Someone pretended to be Corey in order to lure you out.”
Maray’s heart hammered against her ribs. An impostor. That very same person had pretended to be Heck before they had turned into Corey. She had witnessed it. The impostor had told her about it.
“Maray?” Jemin’s voice broke through the forming haze in her head. “Are you all right?” The coldness and irritation had vanished from his voice.
Maray didn’t feel all right. Her reaction to the impostor was just a placeholder to all the other revelations of the past days. “I need to sit down.” Jemin’s arm wrapped around her waist just in time as her legs sagged.
“I’ve got you,” he whispered, mouth too close by her ear. She could feel his breath on her cheek, warm, almost hot, and tried to stand on her own and slide out of his arm.
“Thank you.” Eager to get some distance between his chest and her shoulder, Maray took a careful step away from him. She had difficulties breathing enough as it was.
“You’re pathetic, man.” Heck jumped off the counter and landed in front of them. “Help the lady to her chair.” And with a carefree motion, he scooped her up in his arms. “Can’t you see she can hardly stand on her own? Seriously, Jem, what kind of gentleman are you?”
Maray saw Jemin roll his eyes behind Heck’s shoulder as he carried her to the dining table and set her down on a chair.
Two Worlds of Provenance Page 13