Pashkah struggled to wrest the sword from her hand. Her grip was surprisingly unforgiving. She snarled and fought—a genuine warrior now, with rage to compensate for a lack of skill. She used her left hand to stab upward with the seax. Pashkah was forced to relinquish his fight for the Dragon-forged sword. Instead he defended himself with the only shield he had—the bare palm of his right hand. The seax cut through skin, bone, and tendon with such strength that the blade slammed into his collarbone. Kavya abandoned that weapon, scrambling away, unable to catch her balance and stand.
A scream of rage shot through the clearing. Rocks rumbled. Loose gravel and even a few smaller boulders toppled down from the Mother. It was Pashkah. A rage born of madness and a gift that literally shook the world.
Kavya matched his scream, but she didn’t do so to destroy. She cried out in pain. The sword dropped from her hand as she buckled. She clutched her skull. Her whole body shook, twitching, kicking out in all directions.
More screams, as the Guardsmen again turned their telepathy on Tallis’s family—with the intent to cripple. Tallis bounded over bodies and past pairs of growling Pendray who fought on, despite what must be agony daring them to give in.
Tallis knew they wouldn’t.
Another boulder shook loose from the Mother, right above Chandrani’s bound, helpless body. Tallis was nearest her. By instinct he grabbed the large woman and hauled hard under her arms. The huge sandstone rock crashed down where her chest would’ve been. A crushing blow. The kind a Dragon King would never recover from.
He pushed the hilt of his seax into Chandrani’s hand. She’d fight free.
He turned to find Pashkah straddling Kavya. The point of the Indranan’s Dragon-forged sword was aimed directly at the hollow at the base of her throat. “Is this collar some Pendray bauble? How long will it withstand just how angry you’ve made me?”
“Don’t do this,” she whispered.
Pashkah shook his head. “Even now you can’t use the gift you were given. Are you afraid of talking to me on my turf? Because that’s what this mind is, Kavya. Mine. Just as yours will be.”
“What happened to wanting my body instead of yours?”
“Doesn’t matter now. She’ll control us both, no matter the physical form.” Pashkah’s rigid hold on the sword slipped. A resigned sadness infused his voice—that of a regular man. A man who was so very tired. “Kavya, sister, you have no idea . . .”
“And she never will.” Tallis swung with all his might. The sideways arc of his blade parted Pashkah’s head from his body in a bloody gush.
In the next instant, Tallis heard Kavya’s voice in his mind for the first time.
Thank you, my love.
—
Kavya stared up at Tallis. They were both grim creatures, as if they’d spent the last two hours butchering cows.
His eyes were wide, his mouth slack. Smiling a little crooked.
“What was that?” he asked.
“I said, ‘Thank you, my love.’ ”
“No, you didn’t say it.”
Frowning, Kavya tested gently, so gently, all the while watching Tallis for clues. I love you.
“I love you, too.”
With a joyful cry, she heaved herself off the ground and into his arms. They collided in body as they had in life. Unexpected souls brought together, bound together.
“You can hear me now?” She used a swatch of fabric from her ceremonial sari to wipe blood from his mouth. He returned the favor, although the attempt was makeshift at best. “You heard what I said to you?”
“Yes.” He hesitated, hiding it behind the act of tucking her wickedly ruined hair behind her ears. “And you? Can you . . . Can you read my mind?”
She hesitated, too. After a quick, hard kiss, she said, “Now isn’t the time.”
She grabbed her family’s Dragon-forged sword and strode toward where Serre still clashed with one of the Guardsmen. “Stop. Now.”
Both men seemed startled by her authoritative tone. Their eyes went wide—Serre’s bright blue, and the Indranan’s dark brown.
“The fight is over. Pashkah is dead.” Turning her words on the Guardsman, she pointed the sword toward his neck. “If you want to continue breathing, consider returning to your family in the Punjab. Take the rest with you. When I see you next—and I will—you’ll be happily married in a peaceful pod, or we’ll conclude this moment in a much messier fashion.”
The man dropped his sword and held up his hands. Serre lunged, but Tallis was there to stop him. “Peace, brother. Believe it or not, there is a time for it. No matter what he’s done, he’s laid down arms. This is for the Indranan to decide now.”
“Pashkah was not the Indranan,” Kavya called to the other Guardsmen. “Neither am I. We have a long way to go before we learn who we are as a clan. But this . . .” She gestured to those who lay dead and mangled. “This isn’t it. We’re better than this. We’ll fix this chasm and become stronger for it.”
The Chasm isn’t fixed.
She whirled on Tallis. She’d heard those words as clearly as if he’d shouted them across the clearing.
“What did you just . . . ?”
“The Chasm isn’t fixed.” He shook his head. “I thought she was gone. Your . . . Dragon-damned sister.”
“That wasn’t Baile’s voice,” Kavya said. “That’s been part of you forever, not from some outside place.”
Anger shook out from Tallis’s limbs. He sheathed his weapons and grabbed Kavya’s upper arms. His dear, dark blue eyes were clouded by confusion and fury. “I wanted this done. That I saved you, too—I had no idea. It was the revenge I didn’t know I’d find here. But I wanted the past to stay in the past, without pieces left to echo through me forever.”
“I’ve heard it, too,” came a soft voice.
Kavya found Olla, Honnas’s wife, standing beside them. She was as battle-tousled as anyone else in the clearing, despite her fey, ethereal appearance. Fey and beautiful. Her banshee screams must’ve been effective, because she was unscathed after having fought with a Guardsman twice her size.
“I’ve heard it, too. The Chasm isn’t fixed. It’s not just you. What that . . .” Olla glanced toward Pashkah’s fallen, headless body. “Whatever that person did to you, Tallis, had nothing to do with those words. As familiar as my name, ever since childhood.”
“As familiar as your name,” Tallis said, his voice oddly relieved. “Yes. Exactly that.”
“Do you dream of the Dragon? I dream he’s coming back to us.” She shook her head and smiled, appearing embarrassed. “But what’s in a dream?”
Tallis frowned deeply. “Too much. Sometimes far too much.”
My love?
Kavya reached up to remove his hands from her upper arms, to hold them in hers. “So Pashkah—or, Dragon help me, Baile—was responsible for the block the entire time. Keeping you off-balance. Extending your belief in her and your determination to exact her commands.”
“All the while fostering the idea that you were the one to blame,” he said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have acted as I had that afternoon in the valley. I wouldn’t have done a lot of things.”
Needing his warmth, his body, Kavya wrapped herself in Tallis’s vital embrace. He fed her heart with his strength. “They never wanted to kill me at all. They wanted to use me. She would’ve sacrificed him as just another body to get what she wanted.”
“Your influence,” Tallis said against her temple. “She would’ve poisoned it, changing you, maybe even convincing the Indranan to unite through a civil war of mass murder.”
Rill sheathed her weapon and slapped Tallis on the back. “No longer. Not by this lunatic’s hand, anyway.”
Chandrani joined them. She had a limp and cuts up and down her forearms, some so deep they’d scar. Her face was a mass of bruises.
Kavya hugged her dear friend. “I’m so sorry. So sorry. Please, forgive me.”
“Nothing to forgive,” Chandrani said with her assurance that s
ank into Kavya’s soul. “I owed you a debt. Long ago.”
“I never asked you to repay it, but I’m forever grateful that you did. Thank you, my friend.”
Chandrani grinned. “Maybe now I’ll get to go home.”
“Unless . . .” Kavya looked from Chandrani to her husband. “Unless you want to come back with me. Our people need a lot of reassuring, and new hope. I’d like to think I won’t be alone in that.”
Shaking hands with Tallis, who nodded respectfully, Chandrani said, “I’ll go back with you, Kavya, but not because you’ll be alone. I’ll do it for the same reason I always have. I believe in what you stand for. Never more so than now.”
“But first, back to the castle?” Honnas called. He was already halfway across the clearing, hands cupped around his mouth and his wife at his side. “I stink and would dearly like breakfast.”
“You go on,” Tallis replied with a strong voice. “We’ll be right along. Chandrani, you, too. My sisters will tend your wounds.”
Kavya watched her tall, imposing friend walk with the Pendray as if they’d been comrades all her life. That idea warmed her heart and gave her another shot of hope. Maybe this could be done. Maybe she could start again.
So much depended on Tallis.
“India again, eh?”
She blinked. He held her hands between them, their knuckles lined up like the mountains where she’d grown into a woman. “But you’ve only just returned to Scotland. What about your family?”
“I didn’t mean right away. A month’s sleep and a lot of lovemaking have an appeal not even you can deny, goddess. And I’d like to make my peace here. Repair Clannarah. Stand before the Leadership of the Pendray to clear my name. No loose ends before we go.” He kissed the backs of her hands. “Then the real work begins. The Indranan deserve peace, and . . . the Chasm isn’t fixed. It’s bigger than me. What Olla said is a relief beyond description.”
“You really want to come with me?”
“We committed last night.” He offered a crooked smile. “Unless you’re bored of me already.”
“Bored? That word will never make sense when applied to you.”
He kissed her lips. Kavya tasted blood, but it didn’t matter. They were both alive. She would never need to look over her shoulder again.
But she did need something.
“Tallis, the Indranan way . . .” She swallowed. “Of bonding.”
He looked away briefly. “I know. You gave yourself over to my desires, completely and passionately. I—I’ll submit to the Indranan way, if you ask it of me. Because I love you.”
Kavya gently held his cheeks beneath her palms. The old means of reading him. She could’ve slipped inside his mind and taken what she wanted, but that had never been them. “You have secrets you never want brought to light. Manipulated by my sister. Driven to murder and exile. That’s done and gone. I know all I need to know about you. Right here. Right at this moment.”
“What if I insist?” He knelt before the Mother—that place so sacred to the Pendray—and touched the back of his neck. “You promised me a kiss. Give it to me, and I’ll show you something beautiful.”
Legs shaking, she knelt and draped her body across his broad back. He pulled her arms down over his shoulder and held her hands.
“Kavya,” he said softly. “Make me yours.”
With surprising greed, she bared her teeth against his nape and nipped, scraped, bit. Nothing so harsh as what Tallis had claimed, but the significance of it shuddered into her soul. All the while, in the deep center of her mind, she gloried in the images he shared. The sea through his eyes. The salt-laden air as he smelled it. The feel of her touch and how it warmed his coldest, darkest corners. Then he revealed glimpses of Kavya from his perspective. Eyes, lower lip, breast, teasing smile, toes, and then back to her eyes.
In doing so, he did more than share impressions. He proved his trust that she would never take more than he offered. It was just the show of faith Kavya had longed for.
They were Pendray and Indranan, well and truly bonded.
“I’ve traveled this world, aching to be home again,” he said, aligning their knuckles over his heart. “I thought it was Castle Clannarah. My family. Or after my revenge, I’d find a place of my own. But I got it all wrong.”
“Where is home, Tallis?” She nipped and kissed again, where his silver-tipped hair met the silky skin at the top of his neck.
“Where else would it be, my Kavya? It’s with you. Wherever we go, you are my home.”
Continue reading
for an exclusive excerpt from
HUNTED
WARRIOR
The Dragon Kings
Book Three
by
LINDSEY PIPER
Coming from Pocket Books in 2014
CHAPTER
ONE
She was called the Pet, but she didn’t think of herself as a creature in need of protection, care, or condescension. She’d left that life behind. Neither was she a captive, as she picked her away through the ruins of a crumbling rock labyrinth on the island of Crete. How she’d come to be there was a story she didn’t dare contemplate for fear of madness. There was no rhyme, no reason, no guide other than the future she saw in bits and patches.
The sun was fierce and gorgeously freeing on the back of her neck. She was a Dragon King, and Dragon Kings loved fire. Most wouldn’t admit how much the cold sank under their skin and sapped their sense of godlike invincibility. Maybe that was for the best. Too many of the would-be gods romancing the planet believed themselves immortal, no matter the press of extinction. They didn’t realize that all empires ended, even those blessed with access to what humans would consider the supernatural.
Turning to stare into the blinding white-yellow glare, she didn’t bother to shade her eyes. Her second sight—the gift from the Dragon that gave her the ability to see the future—was always with her, no matter its unpredictability. A man sought her. A violent man who hid his violence behind titles and lineage.
Time was slippery like moss on a riverbank or slime on the carcass of a dead fish. Time was viscous on her fingertips. Time was running out.
With no further hesitation, she continued her cautious journey through the abandoned ruins of ancient kings. The walls had been reduced by countless rains and droughts, days and nights, until all that remained were bleached waist-high spikes and jagged edges. The stubborn ground was strewn with pieces of the crumbled labyrinth. There was nothing to grab should she fall—not without impaling her hand. Dragon Kings healed rapidly, but some damage was too much for even their extraordinary physiology to repair.
Archaeologists had dubbed the site of little historic worth, with its condition so degenerated that they could gather scant new information about the Minoans of long-ago Crete. How wrong. How blinded by the hubris of a society that believed itself the most advanced of its animal counterparts. Any thought as to the Dragon Kings’ existence was disregarded. Fairy tales of Valkyries and Olympians and messiahs. The woman called the Pet knew differently. All the myths were true. What was once would be again.
And the Chasm wasn’t fixed.
The Dragon Kings were dying. Why her predictions of the future had led her to Crete as a means of stopping that slow extinction was beyond her. She had to trust. She’d always needed to trust, when little in her life stood as examples of why that must be so. Maybe her real gift from the Great Dragon wasn’t the ability to see the future, but to have faith in what she couldn’t explain.
The labyrinth was waist-high, yes, but it was still a tangle of dead ends, wrong turns, and twenty-foot-deep pits that barred any attempt to pass. When she realized she’d made a mistake, she couldn’t simply climb over the wall and continue on. Her hands would be shredded. So, as with all mazes, she doubled back and kept the details firmly in mind. The conventional wisdom was that if one picked a direction and stuck with it—all left turns, always, no matter what—the heart of the geometric puzzle would be reveale
d.
Those occasional pits were too deep to escape. And time . . . Yes, time was slippery.
She needed to hurry, because the man was coming for her. Yet she couldn’t even describe what she sought.
A gift for Cadmin. That’s all she knew. She drew on powers as both soothsayer and true believer to remind herself of her journey’s importance. Cadmin, the closest she’d ever known to having a baby of her own, although the fetal child had developed in another woman’s womb—that of Cadmin’s true mother.
“It took some time to find you,” came a voice at her back. “But you couldn’t expect that I’d give up trying.”
The Pet turned and met the steady glare of Malnefoley of Tigony, the Honorable Giva. With that title, he should’ve been the unquestioned leader of their people. With the derisive nickname of the Usurper, however, his leadership was a listing ship, barely righting itself in time to escape the swallowing swell of a wave.
“I escaped,” she said. “I didn’t attempt to hide.”
“I’m taking you back to Greece.” He flicked dark blue eyes across the irregular half walls. Although he couldn’t climb across three lanes to apprehend her physically, he had a gift far more crippling and violent than hers. Electricity was his plaything.
“I don’t want to go back to Greece.” She rolled up one sleeve of her thin purple blouse, which contrasted with her militaristic cargo pants and heavy boots. She was a lover of contrast. In revealing bare skin, she also revealed five parallel incisions across her left biceps that had healed to papery scars. “There’s work to be done. For all five clans.”
“You were Dr. Aster’s companion for countless years. You commit blasphemy when speaking of the five clans.”
“Was his companion. Now I’m not. These are the reminders I gave myself as proof of my freedom and my loyalty to our kind.”
The intensity of Malnefoley’s expression increased a hundredfold when he narrowed his eyes. His lips tightened. He looked like an emperor whose displeasure would result in countless deaths. Did others see him as she did? Were they so awed or angry that they missed the signs?
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