Best not to think of that and cloud the day. She slid out of the covers, drowsily tugging on her pants. Grau wore a long belted coat, boots and hat, quite similar to her own outfit, and was entirely dressed before she’d placed a foot on the floor. He fetched some food from the kitchens and soon they were stepping outside, to the chill mist and beautiful rosy light of morning.
The sky today was mostly blue, and she had a better look at the stone house and barn, which stood alone with fields of grasses in every direction. Here and there rose forests of bushes, with long-necked water birds perched on the branches. Occasionally a lone tree stood, and farther in the distance still, soft hills swathed in low clouds. Out here, it seemed hard to believe the city even existed. Surely the grasses must go on forever.
Wind whipped gently at their clothing. Grau led the way down a path cut through the grass.
“I can’t believe the Marnow land is sold,” he said. “And there’s nothing I can do.”
“How much does land cost out here?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but certainly more than I have, and what does it matter if Kalan’s army is willing to use any means necessary?” He thrust his hands in his pockets. “Reading the pamphlets last night, I saw that Kalan Jherin is also looking for sorcerers. It’s awfully tempting to try and go there, when my patrol stint is over. They say Kalan Jherin rewards his magic users very well.”
“Would you want to work for him? Considering all this?”
“I don’t really know if Lord Jherin is aware of what goes on all the way out here,” Grau said. “This must be a pretty unfavorable posting. I hear it’s very different in Nalim Ima. Even more cosmopolitan than Atlantis. I’d have the chance to work with some of the best sorcerers in the world, without paying for schooling, and if I manage to impress some higher-ups, perhaps I could assure the safety of this land.”
“In that case, why wouldn’t you do it?”
“Because any spells I develop would belong to him. I couldn’t take credit for them, and I couldn’t sell the instructions. Of course, spells are always pirated, so it isn’t as if I’d lose much money there, but…I do want credit.” He scuffed his boot through the dirt. “I suppose if I was a good citizen, I wouldn’t care.”
“Why wouldn’t he allow you to take credit for your work?” As she spoke, her eyes scanned the path. The grass all looked the same at a glance, but up close she noticed the monotone sea of brush was actually comprised of many different plants. Mixed in with the light brown grass were shrubs with tiny red leaves, and thorny plants with little black berries. She gathered a few different seed pods into her hands as they passed.
“I’m sure they’d say it undermines the unity of Kalan’s followers. Promotes jealousy. But I can’t like it. In business, you have to be a little bit competitive.”
She smiled a little. “I’m learning a lot about you here.”
“Oh? What did Preya tell you?”
“She said you get bored easily.”
“Well—”
“But you won’t get bored of me. That’s what she claimed.” She had never teased him before. It might’ve been a risk, but honest words slipped out so easily here.
“As Preya goes, I suppose that was pretty restrained. But I’m sure I won’t get bored of you. I knew from the first moment, something about you would suit me, that you’d like the marshes…” He stopped and took her hand, the one that clasped the seed pods.
For a moment she thought he might kiss her.
She wasn’t sure why she would think that. Men didn’t usually want to kiss the dry mouths of their Fanarlem concubines.
He was just looking at the seed pods. “You can use these for protection spells,” he said. “I like to brew them with the bark of the eagle trees, like that one in the distance. They make your skin more resistant.”
She half-smiled. She was thinking of kisses and he was thinking of brewing spells out of bark. She realized she was constantly preparing herself for the moment when he would drop this preamble and transform into the man she had always expected to have as her master, the one who saw her as a strictly sexual being.
Would he wait for weeks, months? Years? Until she made the first move?
She wondered what he would do if she kissed him. But no one had trained her for that.
“What would you think about going to Nalim Ima?” he asked.
“I don’t know much about it. I don’t think we had any customers from there. It’s pretty far away, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It’s a large island across the sea.”
“What do they…think of Fanarlem concubines there?”
“I really don’t know. It would be an adventure, and if it was really terrible I guess we could come home. I can always sell fish if I have to.”
He came to a spot where the path curved and sloped downward. It was really less of a path and more of a puddle by now, after the rains.
“We’re almost there,” he said, pointing ahead to a canoe that was parked in the muddy ground up the bank of a stream.
Grau paced around the canoe for a moment, like he was looking for something. Then he stepped back. He jerked his hands up and the standing water in the body of the canoe flooded out, down the sides. She jumped with surprise.
“How far do your powers extend, anyway?” she asked. “You did that without even needing the crystal!”
“This is home. I know all the energies of the land. It looks easy, but it took months of practice as a kid.” He wiped the seats of the canoe with the edge of his coat and motioned for her to climb in.
“This is the fun part.” He grinned and lifted his hands. The mud began to slide, and the canoe with it, dropping them in the water with a jolt and a splash.
She laughed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d really laughed, with abandon.
He smiled back at her, his eyes squinted against the sun, as he lifted up the paddle and pushed off into the stream.
The canoe slid past the brown grasses, down the gently winding waters. She heard rustling in the grass, and saw ripples from small creatures. It was so tranquil here that she really could see forgetting her past before long.
“Do you want to try a little sorcery?” he asked. “Chances are, you won’t be able to do it on your first try, but one must start somewhere.” He put the warm crystal in her hand. “See if you can feel the threads of magic around us.”
She eagerly cupped the crystal between her hands, now hearing the whispering of the grass in the wind almost as if it were a language. The water had a healing glow, an aura of shimmering green. She felt the slithering of a nearby water snake before she saw it, and turned to see the black curve of its tail disappear out of sight. And she felt it within her own body, too. She was made of forest and field. Just as it was clear when a tree or a meadow was alive even though it didn’t breathe, she understood now how Grau felt her own life, even as she slept. All her senses were heightened, and undiscovered senses threatened to emerge.
“Do you feel that?” he asked.
“Yes. Everything is so much more…more.”
“Someday, I’ll have to get you a crystal of your own,” he said. “You take to it well.”
“I haven’t done any magic yet.”
“You feel things right away. I didn’t have that luck trying to teach Preya. She can’t still her mind long enough to listen.”
“Why is it that sorcery is all right, but telepathy is so frightening?”
“Daramons are dependent on the resources around them. I can do elemental magic when there are elements around, but if not, I have to create or buy spells and carry them with me. Miralem can do telepathy anywhere, and from great distances. And besides, talented telepaths can read minds, manipulate minds, even rip the soul from the body. The only reason Daramons have gained any ground at all is because of the Ten Thousand Man Sacrifice.”
“Why do I have telepathy, then?”
“You must have been a Miralem, in your past existence.” He
grinned. “The enemy.”
“Will the time ever come…when you could take off my band?”
He shoved the canoe away from the grasses where it was drifting to a stop, and kept it paddling toward the autumn-bare branches of the bushes that hung over the water. “Sometimes untrained telepaths don’t have the best control, and if you used your power in a fit of emotion—it could be very bad.”
“My emotions are pretty controlled.”
He poked the paddle through the water. Pretending to paddle, more so than paddling.
“If the time comes that I deem it safe, I will certainly take off the band,” he said, a firm edge entering his tone. “But it doesn’t feel safe now.”
She nodded faintly.
He put a hand on her knee. “I trust you, the time just isn’t right. I certainly wouldn’t mind having a telepath on my side. A telepath and a sorcerer together can accomplish nearly anything. It’s how you were made, after all, with both kinds of magic.”
“Was I?” He was right. She didn’t know much about the world, not even exactly how Fanarlem were created.
“Each little piece of you needs its own spell. A spell so your skin can feel, a spell so your bones will move, a spell that gives strength to your stuffing so you can lift and clench things. At the end, the sorcerer will weave you with illusions so you look just the right amount of real. But that’s just your body, and the body is nothing without a soul. At the end, a telepath must call your soul into your eyes and give them life.”
“It sounds very complicated,” she said.
“It is. Often, several different sorcerers must make the spells. I’ll bet their initials are carved onto you somewhere.”
She supposed to a sorcerer, a Fanarlem was an apex demonstration of magic.
“Did they give you different bodies to grow into?” he asked.
“Yes. They give us three before the final one, which we get at fourteen.”A Fanarlem’s soul rested in their eyes, so when her body was changed as she grew, only the eyes had to be moved. The child bodies were then reused on other girls, but their faces were always individual.
“It must be jarring.”
“I’m always very clumsy for a few weeks. But I like getting taller.”
“I like getting taller too. Lots of pressure on Daramon men to be tall.”
“You’re quite tall.”
“But I don’t know what boy doesn’t worry about it, growing up. If you end up short, the teasing is merciless. You can go to a Halnari shape-shifter in the city and get them to add a couple inches if you can afford it. One of my friends did and it made him clumsy at first, too. And achy, for days. It’s hard to shape-shift well.”
“There are a lot of expectations on all of you, aren’t there?” Velsa asked.
“Did Preya tell you about her situation?”
“Yes.”
“I think maybe she should go work for Kalan Jherin,” he said. “My parents might despair, but that marriage will bring her despair tenfold.”
“Could we all go together?”
“Maybe. But I have to finish my time on patrol. I’d be back just in time to save Preya from her wedding.”
Chapter 6
Slowly, hour by hour and day by day, Velsa began to enjoy the moments of her life. Preya gossiped about her friends in town and taught Velsa a dance. Sometimes Velsa was left alone to read their books, which held much more variety than the educational volumes in the House library. Grau took her riding to the top of a hill for a picnic, and on another day they went on a quest for a blue-footed Atlantis marsh toad. He said they mostly lived on the island in the middle of the lake. They rode in the canoe to the lake where his family raised the fish that had secured their fortunes, and then spent the day roaming the island.
When he triumphantly placed in her palm a small, fat toad with eyes that squinted calmly, she thought it was the most beautiful gift anyone could give her.
“What makes it the smartest member of the toad family?” she asked.
“Oh—I read that in a book, but I’m not sure. I haven’t, personally, been able to coax any great displays of intelligence from a toad. But it’s cute, isn’t it?”
“Not a bad first girlfriend,” she said. “I’m not sure what your mother was complaining about.”
Of course, they let the toad go. It surely would not be as happy held captive.
Grau’s father was gone most of the day working in town, so she only saw him in the evening. He was the only thing she feared. If someone needed wine at the dinner table, he would ask her to pour. When he noticed Grau rubbing his shoulder as if it ached he said, “Why don’t you have your girl do that?” It was plain that Grau’s father didn’t think Velsa should be treated as a member of the family.
One night, she had come to bed a little before Grau once again, when she heard his father stop him in the hall.
“Why did I pay two hundred and twenty ilan for that girl?” he asked bluntly.
“What do you mean?”
“She isn’t doing her duty.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, come on, Grau. You are not having her for her intended purpose.”
“I’ll decide what her purpose is.”
“You’re besotted with her, aren’t you? It happens, I suppose, but remember, she’s a Fanarlem. It benefits her to be kept in her place. Every time you bed her, you’re helping her learn humility and submission.”
“I would hope she doesn’t feel humility when I bed her.”
“But she should. When she dies, the fates will look kindly on her. You don’t have to feel guilty about enjoying her. Don’t forget what she is and that she belongs to you.”
“She’ll hear you,” Grau hissed.
“I hope she does. But in the end, you’re the one who needs to draw the line.”
A moment later, Grau opened the door. He looked at her, his eyes like storms.
She sat up in bed, her tiredness brushed aside. One strap of her chemise fell off her shoulder and she didn’t bother to lift it.
“I heard him,” she said.
He shook his head. “My father doesn’t understand. It’s not his place to tell us when we should…”
“But I…I’m scared he might send me away.” She tried to scramble out from under the covers, but her movements were jerky. She was scared—and yet, not just scared.
She did like him. Something in his eyes had compelled her from the first moment they met, the same as he had clearly felt toward her. And some part of her wanted to surrender fully to that feeling. “I think…I might not mind,” she said. “I think I might like it.”
He crossed the room to sit on the bed beside her. “For weeks I have slept so close to you. Dreaming of the day you would be fully mine…but…I don’t want it to be because my father said so.”
“Maybe the time is right.” She had already been so close to him, but this still seemed very different. She wondered how it would feel, if it would hurt—or maybe it would be the best feeling of her life, to have his hands and body engage her as deeply as his eyes already did.
He reached for her face. His fingers stroked her cheek, briefly. “Velsa…I don’t want to take you. I want to bring you happiness. I want to make love to you.”
She shivered.
He pushed the covers fully off of her and crawled toward the corner where the bed met the wall, where she always slept. He kissed her forehead, and then her cheekbone, and then her mouth.
She blinked at him. He was kissing her, and it was such a tender gesture, just like she imagined. His eyes regarded her softly in the candlelight, golden light flickering on his left cheek, while the other half of his face lay in shadow.
“It’s true,” he said. “I’m falling in love with you. I think maybe I was in love with you from the start, or at least from the minute I saw that your only possession was a box of rocks…but I want you too. I don’t know, sometimes, if I’m a brute lusting for your beauty and the strange
magic you’re made of, or if I’m…your friend. Your friend who loves to talk to you and to know what you’re thinking.”
Your friend… Why did that bring a lump of pain to her throat, of all the words?
She stroked his hair. He had bathed earlier; his hair was still a little wet at the ends, soft and black.
Her innards felt like they were buzzing.
She moved her hand down, to his cheek, to stroke the edge of his chin. He had shaved, but still, his skin was a little rough, while hers was soft as velvet.
What if she loved him back? Truly loved him?
She stood on a precipice. If she dared to fall, then— That was when he really would have the power to hurt her.
But I already like him.
Maybe she had fallen without knowing it, almost from the start. She crushed her lower lip beneath her teeth, causing brief jabs of pain.
“What are you thinking, Velsa? I never really know.”
She couldn’t find the words to explain the depth of her fear. It was no use. Right now he believed he would love her forever, and he never seemed to understand what it was like to be her, to have her life in his hands at every moment.
But she wanted him. She couldn’t really be sure if she wanted him because she wanted him, or if she just couldn’t bear the tension of his desire anymore.
Maybe it was both.
Yes. Certainly, it was both, and they tangled together. She wanted him to desire her. He was the only man she had ever met who made her feel that way.
Her actions would speak louder than words. She put her hands to the button just below his collar and unfastened it, revealing a triangle of his skin. Her hands worked their way down until his shirt was open. She trailed her fingertips along the lean muscle of his chest, feeling the slow rise and fall of his breath. He was so solid, so complicated with his real flesh and bone and blood flowing through veins. She felt like a breath of air, hardly real at all, just skin and bones and fluff.
And a damaged soul inside.
She remembered him saying, What if it wasn’t true, and you felt bad for no reason?
He shrugged his shirt off, with the faintest smile like he feared this might scare her. Then he pushed the other strap of her chemise off her shoulder, and peeled the bodice down to reveal her small breasts. Her torso was stitched at the sides with thread the same color as her skin, so her chest and stomach were unmarred by any seams, just the indent of a navel like any real girl. In the candlelight her skin looked golden.
The Sorcerer's Concubine (The Telepath and the Sorcerer Book 1) Page 8