by Susan Grant
Elsabeth’s shame and distrust of her Tassagon blood was obvious and, perhaps, in some ways understandable. But, she was in need of a little education on his kind. He cleaned his plate and downed the glass of water she’d left for him then he pushed to his feet, ignoring her dismay as he limped into the kitchen with his dirty plate.
“Shush,” he said softly as he dipped the plate in soapy water, sparking her protest. He washed it and added it to the stack. “You will get to know this Uhr-warrior,” he assured her. “In the name of understanding between our peoples.”
He limped back to the table to retrieve his crutches, while feeling the tutor’s startled, curious and even intrigued eyes on him all the way to his bed. A beast from the forest in her home? He cracked a private smile. Perhaps.
But not for her first time.
ELSABETH PRETENDED TO be busy within the protection of the kitchen while Tao got ready for bed. A splash of water from his washbasin, heavy masculine footsteps, sounds long absent from this home. She’d tried to insert a wedge between them, thinking she was so superior with her Kurel blood. But the more she was with the general, the more she saw she had more to learn about honor and sacrifice than he did. And graciousness.
If not table manners. How he’d wolfed down the eggs, throwing all etiquette to the winds, consumed with pleasure, not holding anything back…until he reeled himself in. Was that how he was with a woman?
If she wasn’t careful, her curiosity about the matter would get the better of her.
And prove Marina right.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ELSABETH TURNED DOWN the light, leaving only enough illumination to let her cross the room without tripping over the newly arranged furniture. The long, trying day was almost over. She felt as if she could sleep for a week straight. But first, putting the injured general to bed was on order, making sure he had all the meds necessary for a comfortable night’s sleep. She’d nearly starved the man by accident, almost lost him to a tassagator before that. If she wasn’t careful, he wouldn’t survive to see her goal realized—taking the reins of rule from Xim and thus fulfilling her vow to her parents. As to what would happen after that, she didn’t know.
For so long, she’d been single-minded, so focused on her goal that thoughts of her own future faded away. Ironic that in contrast, this warrior who hadn’t expected to live to see his thirtieth year had his entire future mapped out in every way, including what kind of wife he’d acquire. She remembered when she, too, would ponder what kind of man she hoped to find and fall for: a kind, like-minded bookkeeper or pharmacist, she’d assumed. She’d hoped to spend her days snug and safe in their tidy home, wiling away the hours by reading about the adventures she’d never have. If not for Tao’s rescue, she’d be reading at this very moment, in fact, curled up in her tiny loft bedroom, her nose buried in a book.
“Elsabeth, you’d be better off getting out and experiencing what the world has to offer than burying your nose in paper,” Tao had told her.
She crossed the room, took Tao’s crutches to stack against the wall as he eased himself onto the bed and stretched his arms over his head. His shirt had been unbuttoned for comfort. It gaped open as he slipped his hands behind his head. Around his neck, the pendant glinted in the dim light.
“Where did you find that? That piece of metal you wear around your neck?”
“This?” He touched his fingers to the piece nestled in the hollow below his throat. “I found it in a place we called the Glass Sea, far in the north.”
“The Glass Sea…” Savoring the sound of it, she scrunched down on the footstool. “Tell me.”
His mouth edged up, smiling at her eagerness. “First the Gorr, now my talisman. I may have to start trading for the telling of my tales.”
“All right.” She agreed without hesitation.
“All right?” Tao asked, lifting his head to look at her in the lantern light. “You’ll give me whatever I ask in payment for another tale?”
“I don’t have anything worth bartering. Some ill-mannered pigeons. Leftover sumsala…”
“I would disagree, Miss Elsabeth.” He smiled slyly.
The heat in his eyes made her heart pound. “Just tell your tale and remember who broke you out of prison. That’s quite a debt you’ve racked up, General Tao.”
“I saved Navi. Doesn’t that account for something?”
“That debt’s his. With me, you’ve got quite a few more stories to tell before we break even.”
She waited with hushed impatience for him to begin.
Chuckling, Tao tried to find a comfortable position. As all wounds tended to do, the pain from the gator bites had worsened with the coming of night, although that mattered little now that he was the center of the tutor’s attention, this little fireball of a rebel who’d won him asylum in K-Town. “We were out on patrol,” he began, “farther afield than we’d ever been…”
“The Glass Sea,” she filled in for him.
“Yes. But it was an illusion.”
Perched at his side, her lips parted, she was unashamed to show she was hungry for more, a reaction he’d like to see for another reason. Pulling back from a kiss, hungry for more…of him.
“Keep going,” she demanded.
“We were up in the north, a region of high desert, where no one lives. I didn’t know to what extent the Furs had established dens. Scouts had returned from the area with tales of having walked on water, a vast plain as slick and shiny as liquid, but as hard as the ground, a place they called the Glass Sea. I decided I wanted to see it with my own eyes.”
“I would have wanted to, too. I envy you those sights,” Elsabeth all but whispered.
The girl, he decided, was crazy. Here she was protected. But out in the Hinterlands… He cut off the accompanying grim thoughts. “It was a sea only at first sight. As soon as you put the weight of your boot on it, the surface crackled like ice. I walked out on it, a great gash of glass across the land.” He still remembered the loud crack of fissures shooting out from his footsteps, where the glass was a mere crust suspended over the dirt in the few places not yet shattered from years of being exposed to the elements. “We had never seen anything like it. Halfway across or so, I noticed something that looked like a frozen soap bubble, about this size…” He formed a curve with his hands shoulder width apart. “The top had long since shattered. It was open to the elements, filled partially with grit. The suns shone though the walls, like the underside of a great wave…” He stopped himself. “Elsabeth, you have never seen an ocean.” And the sight of sunlight piercing through the top of a cresting wave.
“I have in books,” Elsabeth said.
“You have books with drawings of the ocean?”
“And much more.”
“I’d like to read books like those.” With pictures in them. Things a man could appreciate, as opposed to a mash of marks.
“The glass bubble,” she prompted.
“Ah, yes. I saw something shining inside, and reached in. And found this.” He unfastened it and placed it in the palm of her hand. “It was such a curious thing, Elsabeth. I’d never seen metal that well crafted. See the line, near the bottom. That isn’t a crack; it’s etched into the surface in a way that can’t be duplicated. I tell you, for months after I had my smithies and armorers try to continue the design, but to no avail. The metal was too hard.”
“Was there more of it?”
He nodded. “At the end of an enormous furrow, a great silver wing thrusts out of the sand. It’s taller than ten of these buildings, stacked one upon the other. For all our trying, we couldn’t cut off a piece. We scoured the Glass Sea and the area all around it, far and wide, looking for more metal like it, smaller pieces we could carry back with us. The weapons we could have made, Elsabeth, the armor… We didn’t want the Furs getting hold of any for that same reason.” He watched her turning it over in her hands, her look one of wonder.
“We must tell the elders,” she said. “This could be wreckage fr
om the Discovery. The mothership, the great ark, that brought our people here from Uhrth.”
He pushed himself higher in the bed to listen as she shared a tale of her own, in her mind a true story. The Discovery was presumed lost, sacrificed in a last-ditch effort to repel the Gorr invasion. “Something so important to humans to be lost without a trace, it was tragic,” she said. The crash caused intense heat that flash-melted the sand, forever erasing the existence of the Discovery, which had carried 3,032 colonists to this world. “She was never meant for battle,” Elsabeth finished somberly.
Then she spun her own ending to the tale. From far, far away came an Uhr-warrior with a fragment of the Discovery hung around his neck as a souvenir from his travels. Something that caught his eye, and his imagination. It seemed meant to be that it was returned to the people who could appreciate its true significance. Except it was already back in his callused, warrior hands, returned by none other than the fiery-haired tutor who had no love for the Tassagons.
Tao reacted with a quiet, slightly skeptical snort. He couldn’t verify that any of what she’d told him was true, that it was anything more than a much-loved sorcerer’s fable. He knew only what he could confirm with his hands and his eyes. “I knew it was a special find, Elsabeth. I’ve kept it with me ever since. For luck.”
He refastened the charm around his neck. An amulet from an ark, an ark of the gods, no less. Good luck indeed. No wonder he was protected.
He’d had doubts about its effectiveness since, however. In less than three days he’d plunged from the top of the world to utter hell. But with the elders agreeing to let him hunker down in K-Town to wait out Xim’s tantrum, maybe the piece’s good luck was returning.
“Our relic,” she said. “Your talisman. What makes you believe it protects you?” Her eyes were luminous as they searched his face. The room was so quiet he could hear the rustle of her clothing, her quick, quiet breaths as she awaited his tales with such appealing anticipation.
I promise you, before I leave your care, you’ll be anticipating more than my tales. Like the taste of his lips on hers, the stroke of his hands on her body.
The faintest hint of pink colored her cheeks. Had she guessed his thoughts? That she didn’t jump up and flee gave him hope he had a chance with her.
“I have to save something for later,” he said.
“Something?” She sounded a little hoarse.
“More tales of the Hinterlands. Dramatic escapes. Adventure.”
“Oh. Yes.” She gave an embarrassed little laugh. “Of course.” Yawning, she stood, drawing the fabric of her skirt into her hands. Her hair hung over her shoulders in long coppery ringlets. “Is there anything else you need before I go to sleep?”
Well, there were a few things he’d like—her slipping under the quilt to lie with him. His legs ached so badly that the thought of falling asleep with her warm next to him would be enough. Perhaps, naked and warm next to him…
“You’re smiling,” she observed.
“Imagine that,” he said, keeping his thoughts to himself. “Get some rest, Elsabeth. Uhrth knows we have not had much.”
She extinguished the oddly glowing lantern. He sensed her standing there awkwardly for a moment in the dark. She really didn’t know what to do with a man, did she? How to react, what to say? “Good night,” she said.
Then he heard her hurry away. What exactly was she fleeing? The attraction they couldn’t explain? He didn’t know quite what to do with it, either, except how he always would have handled it in the past with a woman. Into bed, first thing, and be done with it.
Like a beast? Feeding her clichéd opinion of an Uhr-warrior? Hell, no. This woman would require a different approach. He was up to the challenge. “Good night, sweet Kurel girl,” he murmured under his breath. Sweet…and smart. Focused. She needed him for a greater purpose than bed sport. She needed him for revenge.
He needed her, too, in order to survive to save his sister, his officers and his kingdom. Their goals ran along parallel courses. They may have come from far different beginnings, but for now they were fated to travel this road together, not knowing where it would end.
“UHR-TAO, DEAD? ARE you sure?” Xim clutched the scraps of fabric in his fist, pounding it once against the armrest of his throne. He’d hoped to see Tao twitching on the end of a hangman’s noose by now. Instead, that pleasure had been stolen by a creature with the intelligence of a kernel of corn.
Markam replied, “Being that it is from the general’s uniform, dredged up from the moat in the search, I would say, yes, it indicates the general died in his escape attempt. But, we have no body to show as proof.”
“You found a body, did you not?”
“Pieces of a body, Your Highness. Several bodies, actually. The moat cleaners collected bones from what appear to be numerous skeletons of various ages, picked clean.”
Beck’s chuckle was raspy. “Apparently the gators dine better than we knew.”
Xim scowled at the colonel, whose chuckles died quickly. “I don’t see the humor in this. The general has been missing more than an Uhrth week—a week—and now pieces of his clothing turn up in my moat.” He threw the scrap aside. “Priest! Could any of those body parts be Uhr-Tao’s?”
The Tassagon healer-priest glanced nervously at the others gathered in the throne room. “I will have the bones cleaned and burned immediately, and the cracks interpreted for clues.”
“I want the results the moment you are done, day or night.” Xim turned to Markam. “Do you really think he died in the moat?”
“The probability is high. He hasn’t shown up anywhere.”
“Anywhere we have looked, Markam. There’s still the ghetto.”
Markam clicked his heels together. “I’ll dispatch a regiment to K-Town.”
“That’s a Home Guard mission,” Beck broke in.
“It’s all yours, Uhr-Beck,” Markam said with a mocking dip of his chin. “I don’t care to go in there. But don’t forget the last time your Home Guard tried to help, they shot two of them. That week there was an outbreak of fever in our city that killed a family of six. That’s two Kurel for six Tassagons. Now you want your Home Guard to go marching in, looking for a fugitive who’s more than likely sitting half-digested in a gator belly. Do we want to spur an epidemic here?”
“Absolutely not,” Xim said sharply, breaking out into a sweat. “Hold off on searching the ghetto. We’ll see what comes of the interpretation of the bones.”
“Speaking of the Kurel, Your Highness,” Markam continued, “complaints are coming in from all over the city. Administrative work is piling up. Everyone wants the Kurel back.”
“I didn’t ban them from the city. They did it to themselves.”
“In response to banning them from the palace.”
“I don’t like being blackmailed, Markam. Especially by Kurel.”
“I’ll go round up a few magicians,” Beck rasped. “To keep in the dungeon for sport.”
“The fever comes on quickly I hear,” Markam murmured to the one-eyed warrior. “A slight headache, achy joints. Within hours the lungs fill with fluid as the fever climbs. Your innards bloat and cramp. You can’t hold down food, or water. The hallucinations are said to be so terrifying, you’re happy when the angels finally arrive to take you away on the ark.”
Beck’s throat bobbed and, although his expression was unrepentant, he said nothing.
“So go on, Colonel,” Markam coaxed quietly. “Make your arrests. Incur the Kurel’s wrath.”
“Enough!” Xim glowered at them, his dismay even more pronounced than Beck’s. “I hereby rescind the order to bar Kurel workers from the palace. They can come back, all of them. Better to keep the charlatans happy and busy than to have them bored and concocting curses and spells. Markam, send out messengers. This will take effect at suns-up.” The king dismissed his men with a careless wave of his hand.
THE DAY DAWNED COLDER and overcast, the strongest hint yet to the waning of summer.
Elsabeth had donned a dress of soft, well-worn wool the color of rust, pinning back only her bangs to allow the rest of her hair to flow freely, an informal style she’d never worn to the palace. She double-checked her appearance in the mirror before climbing down to the living room, giving her cheeks a pinch for color, biting her lower lip to add more plumpness, tucking away a stray curl only to release it to soften her look. She frowned at her reflection. For a girl who’d given nary a thought to primping her entire life, she’d certainly become preoccupied with it.
Downstairs Tao was getting ready for the day. His shirt stretched taut across his back as he leaned over a basin. His belt dangled, unfastened. His charcoal trousers ended in bare feet. To her the floor was too cold to prance around with no stockings. The general was made of stronger stuff when it came to discomfort, having become accustomed in his years living in the wilds.
“Good morning, Elsabeth.” His smile flashed in the mirror. No shame filled her at being caught watching him. It had happened too many times already.
She smiled back, smoothing her dress as she saw him sweep his admiring gaze over it. “Good morning.” She set a kettle to heating on the stove and pulled out plates for their morning meal.
“Will we have another day with no news?” Tao grumbled, using a towel to blot moisture from his freshly shaved jaw. “Surely Markam realizes he’s our only source of information.”
The chief of the palace guards was alive and well—there had been several sightings of him on horseback, patrolling the streets of the capital, as reported by lookouts in the spy nest on the ghetto’s tallest windmill—yet Markam had sent them nothing since the red flag. Stay away.
That information was not enough for Tao, apparently. “It’s been more than a week,” he said, his impatience obvious. “What kind of game is he playing? Have you checked for messages yet?”