“Nobody else is permitted to touch you, especially in the silver bond.”
Why did he call it that? Corinne Carson had never given it a special name in the Torhtremer Saga.
EIGHT
TORHTREMER, M.R. 13
Igoryok struck a flint and lit his torch, careful to shield it from the biting wind. It roared into full life with the sweet sound of old pine knot and the smell of rich tar, which had long been stored in the village’s armory. Priests had blessed it years ago, consecrating it to the service of the Realm.
A few men flung up their arms to protect themselves from being dazzled, their white sleeves ghostly against the midsummer snowfall. But they and their northern fellows stared stolidly back at him, their axes and spears as steady as their gaze.
“How many have come to aid the Rock of Tajzyk?” he demanded of the next village’s headwoman. Zhenechka was a good woman, even if far too inclined to value her clan’s horses over anyone else’s.
“Friends, both men and women. They have traveled from here to the Gold River, and from the Plains of Dawn to Tajzyk’s Gorge.” She paused, her scarred hand steady on her katana’s lethally businesslike hilt.
So far? The gods be praised that any had listened to his dream.
“You said to come quietly and prepared for a long journey,” she prompted.
“There is trouble in the Realm and all must do what they can. The High King will protect Bhaikhal and the young princes at all costs. But my dream says General Alekhsiy will fight in the north. We cannot reach Bhaikhal in time to help the king but we might be able to aid our former general.”
“The king will not like losing so many fighters,” she countered fiercely.
“We asked for only those who are free from obligation to family, village, or king. I and my friends will travel north, in hopes of aiding the man who saved my son’s life.” Into the worst weather since the Dark Warrior was slain. “We are grateful for any who choose to accompany us. Many may not return from this quest.”
Igoryok spread his hands in the most courtly bow he could manage. He preferred to let his horses perform the fine tricks, not his bones.
The wind whistled around them, taunting him with the prospect of failure. Zhenechka studied him, her thoughts unreadable behind the many scarves wrapped around her face. Their audience was silent and immovable, almost invisible in their white hunting tunics.
May the Hunter bring them onto the trail leading north . . .
“Then let us make haste and begone, Cousin Igoryok.” Zhenechka seized one of the torches from the basket at his feet. “I have a mighty hunger to raise my sword once again beside General Alekhsiy.”
She touched her torch’s tip to his. It lit immediately with a flash of green and gold, the High King’s colors.
The great sign of favor from the Red God of War made Igoryok’s jaw drop. But he quickly recovered to join in the cheer. “Torhtremer! Torhtremer! Torhtremer!”
He vaulted onto his horse’s back with a young man’s fervor, still holding his torch high. His favorite gelding sidled but steadied quickly and soon settled into its smooth, league-eating walk. Zhenechka rode beside him, also carrying her torch aloft.
The others each picked up a torch and lit it from another, one by one, in the ancient tradition of a rescue expedition. The armory’s enchanted baskets would ensure a sufficient supply, no matter how many came, and thus the clan’s sacred fire would accompany them.
Igoryok swung around in his saddle at the first rise to count their number. A river of fire followed him, brilliant against the snow and darkness, rippling through the river valley as far as the eye could see. Their travel song awoke echoes from the night and warmed the heart.
No doubt they would travel more quietly very soon since the battle ahead would be perilous.
But for now? The hot red lust of the bloodshed to come stirred once against in his belly. He would fulfill his debt and protect a friend, no matter what the cost.
GRIFFINCON SATURDAY EVENING
Backstage was all shadows and dark corners, waiting to give birth to light. A few bright red LEDs flickered, marking time and readiness. Stage ninjas moved smoothly past, with purpose and joy, careful to stay out of the white lines. The stage was friendly tonight, humming with the crowd’s enthusiasm. Tonight’s masquerade was for historical and children’s costumes, during which Danae and Alekhsiy would provide a brief intermission.
She flexed her shoulders and hands and allowed herself to sink deeper into her inner tigress. She wore a flesh-colored tube top and thong bikini, plus a cap to protect her hair. Her ring nested underneath a patch of white at almost the center of her heart. She had a long, tufted tail that perfectly matched her body. Even her fingernails were black.
But all that mattered now was her performance. She was an Asian tigress, looking like something straight from an ancient Chinese scroll painting—all slender, swirling exotic golden stripes that were only barely outlined in black. While she’d blown those whirling lines onto her body, fire had flickered and leaped hotter and brighter into Alekhsiy’s eyes.
She gazed up at him now, ghostly in the faint light from the stage manager’s desk. His armor had remade itself into a foot soldier’s uniform from an earlier age, with more leather than silk to protect his skin from the mail’s heavy iron. His pendant lurked underneath, all gold and brown like a tiger’s eyes watching from the forest.
“Me-row,” she purred as softly as possible and mimed dragging her claws down his shoulder.
His eyes lit, blazingly blue. “Kitty, kitty,” he drawled, a promise and a threat in the same erotic phrase.
Her knees went weak.
“This should be easy,” she stammered. She’d planned a very martial bit of choreography, built around some strutting and karate katas, or formal exercises, which Sasha the cop should have been able to do without thinking. He and Larissa were watching from out front. They’d arrived in a flurry of excuses and blushes, just in time to catch the end of tech rehearsal.
Alekhsiy twined his fingers through her leash, the silvery metallic fabric oddly delicate against his callused hand, and gave her the lightest of tugs.
Heat floated into her, from his wrist into her throat.
She came eagerly and leaned up to him, totally forgetting they were the next entry to go on. “Purr?”
Her heart was thumping in her chest.
He delicately stroked her under the chin and she arched closer like a blissful cat.
Ah, warmth, such warmth was filling her. She’d had a good warm-up, but this was better than anything she’d ever experienced.
The stage manager tapped him on the shoulder, a reminder which somehow she felt. Drat.
Her eyes slitted shut and she did her best to ignore the previous entry’s exit under the few bits of lukewarm applause. Time for the entr’acte to bring the audience back to life.
The theater’s lights dimmed again. She and Alekhsiy hit their mark on the stage.
A single flute played a call, hauntingly sweet.
Danae flipped on her collar and leash, answered an instant later by Alekhsiy’s matching cuff. Brilliant white light gleamed between them, symbolic of the legendary life bond between a Torhtremer soldier and the White Sorceress who’d fought the Imperial Terrapin centuries ago.
And she was suddenly, completely the tigress, teasing her warrior lover and being pulled back to him.
Alekhsiy growled something, not in English, and she laughed. Her pulse was pounding and it was hard to remember the precisely timed choreography.
She ran a paw down his back and whirled away but was caught by a single glance from his eyes.
She tiptoed back, flirting her whiskers. He ran his tongue over his lips.
Fire sparkled through her skin, into her lungs, and down to her toes. She was lighter than air.
The music grew stronger and bolder, echoing their magnetism and the light pulsing between them. The audience began to clap their hands, echoing the primit
ive drumbeat.
Alekhsiy’s eyes were intent and dazzlingly blue. He captured her and held her, poised for display with one hand in the small of her back—more perfectly than any tango dancer.
Danae stretched her head back against his shoulder and laughed up at him, completely confident in her ability to escape or to remain and enjoy him and the heat melting into her bones.
How many thousands of years ago had men and women danced like this? Could they have had any more fun?
Alekhsiy lowered his mouth to kiss her and she spun away—but not too far, not with this pulse pounding through her veins.
The crowd roared, clearly enjoying every detail. The stage was brilliantly lit, yet Andrew hadn’t brought up any of the overhead or side lights.
Alekhsiy tugged on the leash. His eyes were brilliant blue pools that she could drown in. The summons resonated in her bones, all the way down through her shoulders and ribs to her spine, far beyond her delicate collar’s and leash’s limits.
Something deep, deep inside answered him, where breath began. She came up onto her toes and crept toward him.
He tugged harder. She ran, the music racing through her blood, and leaped into his arms.
He clicked off her collar and his cuffs just as the curtain fell, and kissed her. She answered him, desperately trying to equal his claim on her with one on him.
The stage lights snapped on with a loud, electronic clank and the crowd outside let loose with a storm of applause.
Alekhsiy’s head snapped up.
Danae blinked at her lover’s face and closed her eyes.
That was one of the best dances she’d ever done. Pity she didn’t know where its choreography or the lighting effects had come from.
Danae struck another pose, all arched back and angular limbs that amazingly resembled a white tigress. Clicking burst into life, like the arrival of a thousand cockroaches, inside the brilliant golden room.
“Look over here please, Danae!” called one photographer amid the horde clambering over chairs and crawling on the floor.
“Could you give us that last pose again?” cried another.
Alekhsiy glared at one who’d dared approach the dais a little too closely. He might no longer be of sufficient interest to warrant recording but that didn’t mean he should be elbowed aside like a foreign king’s despised courtier.
The lanky young fool with the very small box blanched and faded back, soothing Alekhsiy’s twitching fingers somewhat.
The bards had sung of the silver bond for centuries but he’d never thought to see one, let alone experience it. It existed between a White Sorceress—or Sorcerer—and the Torhtremer warrior he or she fought alongside, a link that was both mental and sexual. But the Dark Warrior had massacred the last White Sorcerers and they’d become more myth than sword brother.
If he could call Danae a sword brother.
A reminiscent smile quirked Alekhsiy’s mouth and blood stirred happily in his rod. Perhaps he could persuade her not to attend tonight’s movie—whatever that was—if he told her a few details about that legendary order of sorcerers.
“Ready?” She gave him her hand.
“Always.” He kissed her fingers and those scions of Chaos erupted into another storm of clacking.
He tucked her hand into the crook of his arm and headed for the door.
“Miss Livingston? May I speak to you for a moment, please?”
By Zemlaya’s sandblasted Seven Hells, what was Turner doing here? He was dressed very simply by GriffinCon standards, in something called a polo shirt and jeans. His blazon was an offense to all mortal men, since it proclaimed his allegiance to Azherbhai.
Alekhsiy’s skin crawled. He could locate every detail of Turner’s armament and that of the three highly competent fighters with him. They hungered to kill him
His fingers barely twitched. He could have destroyed them before they grasped their weapons, but he couldn’t touch them or their master, not with Turner watching Danae like a hungry wolf at a sheeps’ fold.
“Turner.” Her voice cut like a whip and a couple of the photographers turned to watch. Her eyes, ever those of the professional performer, flickered slightly. “What do you want?” she asked, a hair more graciously.
Alekhsiy maintained his exact knowledge of those bodyguards’ weapons. Protect her first and hunt Turner later—after he’d found the sorcerer who could open the gate for that maggoty bastard back into Torhtremer.
“Can we talk in private?” Turner looked around openly.
“Sorry but I’m in a hurry. I’ve got barely enough time to change for the trailer’s preview.” She shot a dazzlingly false smile at everyone present, drawing in more onlookers.
“It will only take a minute.” He truly sounded unaccustomed to being polite. “Or perhaps later?”
“You can call my agent. My schedule’s pretty full at GriffinCon.”
Somebody snickered and Turner all but snarled.
Alekhsiy shifted slightly, giving himself more room for movement.
“I’ve been considering the sad state of dance education in America nowadays.”
Danae frowned, a reaction Alekhsiy shared. This was the last topic he’d expected to hear from Turner. “Really?”
“I’ve been interested in professional dance for a long time and I’d like to combine that with education. What would you think if I endowed a combination school and dance troupe?”
“What?” She blinked at him. Cameras erupted like a volley of Baluchistan slingshots.
“Where students attended both regular school and dance school to begin with.” Turner advanced toward her, a ridiculously large smile on his face. “The better dancers would advance to the professional dance troupe, whose more experienced dancers would tutor the younger students. The more intellectual students would receive college scholarships.”
“That could be very exciting.” Her expression was completely abstracted, like a dreamer finally seeing her promised future.
By Chaos’s great whirlpool, what was Turner’s advantage in all this?
“I would need somebody to help me arrange all of this. A great dancer, who’s widely respected, somebody like you.” He tilted his head to observe her more closely.
“And I can guarantee you’d have plenty of time to write,” he crooned. “Say, an additional ten million to finish the Torhtremer Saga?”
Her eyes widened. Crystalline terror shot down Alekhsiy’s spine
“You could ensure that the underdogs come out on top, give Azherbhai and the Dark Warrior the victory.”
“No . . .”
“Put all the money into an endowment for the school’s students. Think about it, Miss Livingston. Chances to build a school like this don’t come along very often.”
He reached out to her, just as Alekhsiy pulled her away from him.
The silver tiger ring burst into glowing life, hidden from the public by the curve of her arm.
Danae could open the gate? His stomach knotted in his throat, worse than when he’d leaped through the void. But he was sworn to destroy the sorcerer who could do so.
His lady, his heart—the little dancer who’d given him joy and life time and again during the darkest of days—could make it possible for evil to destroy his world and everything he loved in life? Everything he adored except her?
The cameras exploded into volley after volley, like an army of accusations against Turner. The brute yanked his hand away, hot words frothing on his lips.
Alekhsiy instinctively tucked his lady protectively against him, ferocious as a Baluchistan wolf guarding its mate during breeding season.
“No, thank you, Mr. Turner.” Danae’s gaze was level and her spine straight. “I don’t write that kind of fiction.”
Turner’s livid gaze measured their avid audience before returning to her. “A pity. Perhaps we can continue this at another time.”
“Perhaps.” Her tone offered him no encouragement. He left like an ill-tempered alligator, snappin
g and snarling, with his guards staying well away from his bite.
ConComm staff tactfully guided her and Alekhsiy out through a private door a moment later, before the media could ask any questions. Alekhsiy’s head was spinning like an armorer’s sharpening wheel, too quickly to form questions or thanks.
By the Mother of All Life, he was bonded to her, the only person who could destroy his family.
The music swelled to an ecstatic flourish, underscoring the larger-than-life king gazing desperately into the distance from the movie screen. A beautiful young couple faded out of sight, accompanied by saccharine prose, while two swordsmen fought for their lives against overwhelming odds in the background.
None of them could disappear too soon for Boris Turner.
The music ended, the room fell black, and the lights came up. The audience, packed into every nook and cranny of the immense ballroom in absolute defiance of fire department regulations, was completely silent.
The tall, thin, easily fit movie director bounded onto the stage. “Well? What do you think?” he asked with mock humility.
Anger raced through Boris, hot and enervating, flooding every cell. What the hell did the fool expect after the world’s biggest ad campaign and a one hour preview? A chorus of boos?
The crowd released its tension into an explosion of whoops and screams of joy. Half of them stood on their chairs to make more noise. Many threw more confetti than they’d tossed during the film itself. They even began that disgusting cheer, “Torhtremer, Torhtremer, Torhtremer!”
Idiots. Didn’t they understand they were being setup for the seventh book when Azherbhai, the Imperial Terrapin, and the Dark Warrior would come back from near defeat to win everything?
Boris roared his disbelief, unheard by the ecstatic crowd, and slammed out of the old-fashioned box, high above the ballroom floor. Dammit, he might have been stupid enough to watch the movie preview, but he didn’t have to stay for the stupid cows’ celebration.
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