*I bet they have.
"Is that the mirror over there? The one you saw me in?" I asked with a flick of my head toward the oval of glass hanging near the bed.
He nodded. "I tried to break it but it seems made out of some kind of metal. I didn’t even leave a dent."
*Strange. I stared at the mirror. It looked like ordinary glass to me, but they’d hardly be such fools to put a glass mirror, anything glass, in the same cell with Merius. He could make just about anything into a weapon. And why have a mirror, glass or otherwise, in a prisoner‘s cell at all?
Shrugging, he slid his hands down my body. "I’m quite the dishonored guest apparently--they poison me, hang a mirror so I can see how wretched I look, then bring me fine tobacco and wine, hot baths, the best books. And now a beautiful woman." He clasped my hips with easy familiarity, but I could feel the thrumming excitement under the skin of his taut fingers, the hot sap of desire for me rising in his veins, an urge as natural and inescapable as leaves turning to the sun for warmth. I found myself responding to his touch with a familiar tingling at the base of my spine even as I gaped at him, trembling. So this was what it felt like to be him inside, a constant hornet’s nest of nerves and energy and strong will all warring with each other, barely kept contained by the calm mask he wore to appease his father and society. I might have ascertained as much, just from what I knew of him, but it was a far different thing to feel it from inside his own skin. I felt how often his own tumultuous nature stung itself, like an out-of-control hornet with too much energy and sensitivity forced to behave against his true disposition. What had this wicked nightmare poison done to us?
“I thought she used the poison to break our mind bond, not strengthen it,” I gasped as I broke away from him, stumbling towards the mirror.
“Safire?” he asked.
“Dear heart, your mind is full of hornets--it‘s overwhelming,” I muttered inanely as I stopped in front of the mirror. I saw myself there, wild-eyed, and Merius hovering behind me, aching to touch me again but not certain if he should, his need a palpable crimson in the air, and the chamber, fine chairs and tables and books strewn about from his rampage. But there was more than what could merely be seen. I sensed all the rooms of the palace. It seemed anywhere else there was a mirror was a portal to me. I saw children fighting over a hobbyhorse in a nursery, a lady’s maid grunting as she tightened her plump mistress’s stays, a man in a black robe climbing the spiral staircase in the library, a sweaty man and a powdered lady entwined on satin sheets, the servants racing around the ballroom to clean it for tonight’s festivities, the queen kissing Toscar behind the curtain to her private reception chamber . . . there were so many images, sounds that I began to feel faint. How could I hear sound through a mirror? Yet I was, conversation layered upon conversation, the screams of the children when their nurse reprimanded them, the cries of the powdered lady as she melted in her lover’s arms, the queen and Toscar whispering to each other . . . There was something wrong with this mirror.
“What is it?” Merius stepped closer, gazing over my shoulder.
I didn't dare answer him out loud, in case someone could see us through the mirror the way I could see others. I opened my mind to him for a moment and showed him what I saw in the mirror. Then I turned away, my head exploding with all the sights and sounds. I grabbed a blanket from the bed. Merius, realizing what I wanted, took the blanket and used his longer reach to anchor the edge over the top of the mirror so that the evil glass was covered. Instantly all the conversations ceased. Thank God there had been no mirrors in the convent and only that tiny sliver of mirror on the back of the wardrobe door in our rooms, if the queen used mirrors for spying.
In the sudden quiet, I noticed the distant echo of a baby’s cry, realized that it was in my head. Sewell would be hungry about now. I reminded myself, my body, that I had made certain a wet nurse was secured before I left the convent. I hadn’t actually met the wet nurse--the abbess and I had thought it best if the woman believed that Sewell was orphaned--so the abbess had spoken with her. Orphaned. My baby, orphaned, hungry, in some strange woman’s arms at this very moment . . . no, no, I couldn’t think about this right now. If I let myself think about it, I would go mad. Best to forget. My stubborn body was not so easy to convince. Milk flooded my breasts in response to the imagined baby’s cry, and I swore.
“Safire?” Merius put his hands on my shoulders.
I flushed. “Nothing.” I turned away from him and fumbled with my bodice laces--the abbess had said to loosen my clothes as much as possible when this happened. “Merius, could you let me go for a moment, maybe go to the other side of the chamber? I--”
He stopped me with a kiss on my ear. “There’s no reason for you to be embarrassed, not about this.”
Biting my lip, I eased the fullness in my breasts just enough so the pain went away. My grief at leaving Sewell squeezed my heart into a fist. Merius took a deep breath, rested his chin on my head as I washed and dried my trembling hands, then pulled a cloth pouch from my skirt pocket. “What’s that?” he asked.
"Sage," I said. The abbess had given it to me to help dry my milk. I found a glass, shook a little sage in the bottom, then poured water in it. Shutting my eyes, I wrapped my fingers around the glass, drew warmth from my body, from Merius, and focused all the heat through my fingers into the glass. When I opened my eyes several moments later, the water in the glass was steaming, just enough for the sweetness of the sage, like the scent of sun-warmed grass, to waft through the air.
"I didn’t know you could do that."
I shrugged. "It’s like healing wounds or cooling fevers. I can draw the heat away, inside me, or I can pull it from myself and focus it where I need it." I drank the sage water in a long gulp, then set the glass down.
An image of me raising my hand toward the door, lightning sparks coming out the ends of my fingers as I blasted the door off its hinges flashed across his mind.
I giggled as I wiped my mouth and chin with the towel. "It’s not that kind of heat--it’s the heat from living things, their auras. I can make an object hot with it, like a glass of water or your father's dagger when I healed him, so I suppose I could set a fire with it, but it doesn’t really seem to work that way. It’s heat to heal, not consume."
“How do you know these things?” he asked in soft wonderment.
"I just do." I answered shortly--his question rattled me, as if he had asked me to tell him my name and I suddenly realized I didn’t know it. I felt I should know how I was a witch, but I didn’t. I just knew how to heal, how to sense auras, how to read other’s intentions. Someone asking me how I knew these things was ridiculous, like asking a bird how it knew to fly.
“So you’ve always known these things?” he persisted.
“I suppose--I can’t remember a time I didn’t. It’s an instinct, Merius, like any other--like sleeping. How do you know how to sleep? You don‘t--you just do it. This is the same thing.”
“But everyone sleeps. Very few people know how to do what you do. Few people know how to use a blade. I know, because my father trained me. Who trained you to be a witch?”
I sighed. "Mother told me a few things, but she was so scared of the stake that she only trained me to hide what I could do, not use it."
"So why do you use it?"
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.” I turned and buried my face against his chest, inhaled the comfort of his sandalwood scent. “Why all the questions, dear heart?”
"The mind bond--I can't figure it out, how to control it or break it . . ."
I backed away until I could look into his eyes. "You want to break it?"
His eyes gleamed, intent as his gaze bored into mine, already daring me to buck him. “When I fight Toscar, the bond needs to be broken.”
“You’re not fighting Toscar, Merius.”
“I issued a challenge, Safire--there’s no going back now.”
“Oh, damn you and your honor.” I tore myself from his
arms. “I forbid you to fight him.”
It was as if I hadn’t spoken. Merius’s face remained an implacable mask as he spoke in a clipped stranger‘s voice. “In a month, I’ll be in the salon, facing him, sword in hand. I’ll not have you in my head if something happens. What if I‘m killed, and we’re bound like this? Will you die too? I’ll not risk that.”
“Well, then you shouldn’t fight him.”
“You shouldn’t have come here,” he retorted, beginning to pace. His aura swirled, a silvery whirlwind that darkened to a stormy pewter. “Damn it, Safire, you’re my wife, my responsibility, and you’ve defied every order I’ve given you. How do you expect me to protect you if you don’t listen to me?”
“You’d lock me away like some treasure in a box, if you could have your way.”
“Here we go again--every time I make a reasonable request for you to protect yourself, you do the exact opposite of what I ask and tell me I‘m demanding. Contrary witch. Father was right. I’ve allowed you far too much liberty, I can see that now.”
“Allowed? Did you say allowed?”
“Yes, Safire, allowed.” He glared at me.
“Allowed?” I repeated, my voice rising. “Who are you? My jailer?”
“No, I’m your husband, and you promised to obey me when we married.”
“We had to speak those words. It was part of the ceremony.”
“So you didn’t mean it?”
“Not that part, no.”
“Did you mean any of it?”
“You really are being an ass--do you hear yourself?”
“If I have to be an ass to save your life, then so be it.” His pace quickened, so quick that he tripped over one of the chairs he‘d upturned during his earlier rampage. Something snapped in my chest, the pain sudden and sharp like a stitch after running. I clutched my side before I realized the pain wasn’t mine, that I felt what he felt. I stepped forward, but before I could reach him, he staggered up from the floor, gave the chair a hard glare, and kicked the seat cushion. After a tense instant during which all the air in the chamber seemed in invisible knots, he started to kick the cushion again, then stopped, his mouth working as if he were trying to articulate something beyond both of us. His gaze met mine, and all the invisible knots around us dissolved into silver sparks as he burst into laughter.
Chapter Twenty-Six - Merius
My ribs ached after my fall, but I still laughed, each gasp a dagger in my side. I felt the invisible blade, but it no longer mattered. I couldn’t stop laughing. I gripped the bedpost, my body racked with pain, my mind stunned silent. I would be that Landers who went insane and laughed himself to death.
“Merius, for God’s sake . . .” Safire touched my shoulder, energy crackling between us. The sparks tingled over my skin and joined together in a writhing ball of lightning that jolted me all over inside before it settled in my loins, so intense that my mad laughter finally ceased. The dagger in my ribs vanished, replaced with a familiar fire in my veins that needed quenching, not healing. I drew a ragged breath and wondered if Safire could sense what I felt.
"Yes, and it hurts. Now lie down so I can help you.”
“Hurts?”
“I can feel what you feel, Merius.”
“Sweet, the only pain I feel at the moment is the pain of being too long parted from you. We can remedy that easily--let me show you.” I caught her in my arms and lifted her, whirled her around, up and over all the topsy-turvy furniture.
“No.” She struggled against my grip. “Your ribs . . .”
“Silence, wench. My ribs are fine.” I waltzed her past the window and around the bed.
“What’s wrong with you? This mind bond has made you mad with lust. Stop it.” Her well-trained feet began to move in the steps of dance even as she protested. The air around us turned burgundy, purple and silver sparks lighting the depths. I didn’t know air could have a color. Or a taste. This air did--it was like floating in a sunlit sea of honeyed wine, sweet and warm and intoxicating. I wanted to drown in it, feel the fire of the wine in my lungs as I died in ecstasy.
“What new spell is this?” I muttered, so bemused I stopped dancing and pulled Safire closer. She stiffened.
“Merius . . .”
“Shh.” I pressed my lips to hers. When she had first entered the chamber and we had kissed, that light she called an aura had surrounded me, soft and inviting as a velvet cloak. Now her aura hissed and crackled at my touch, flashes like violet lightning in a midnight thunderstorm. The burgundy air darkened around us as I coaxed open her mouth with mine. Finally she relented with a little sigh, her hands tight against my shoulder blades. The lightning was all around now, grazing the surface of my skin so that all my hair stood on end. I groaned and nudged her toward the bed. She followed my lead at first, then stiffened again when she felt the bedpost behind her.
She broke off our kiss so abruptly it felt like a slap. “What are you doing?” she spat.
“You kissed me back--don‘t deny it, Safire.” I grinned. “I envisioned a bed of rose petals for us, but I’ll make do with a thistle patch.”
“You dare make a jest out of this? Who do you think I am? Some spineless ninny you can hypnotize out of her good intentions and seduce . . .” she abruptly stopped, her mouth open as if she waited for more insults to roll out.
She stared at me. I stared back. My eyes traced the tantalizing line of her parted lips. She closed her mouth then and swallowed rapidly, her gaze still intent on mine. Then she stepped forward and placed her hand on my shoulder. She raised herself on tiptoe to kiss me. Her hand clasped the back of my neck as I drew her close. Ribbons of burgundy twined around us until all I could sense was the soft sweetness of her mouth, her fingers taut against my skin, and sparks rising like bubbles through the wine air. When I guided her to the bed, she pulled me down with her and then straddled me. Her lips teased mine, feather light kisses that drew an impatient groan from my throat. I gripped her thighs and tried to roll over so that she was underneath, but my tired muscles refused to move. After a week of being held down and poisoned, my body sank into the softness of the feather bed and lazily accepted the assault of pleasure Safire offered with her mere touch.
She broke off our kiss and raised herself up, her hands on my chest as she stared into my eyes. I glanced down and noticed purple and amber tendrils had started growing from the bedclothes, so fast they soon covered the bed, magical ivy gone mad. Before I could remark on this oddity, the vines grew over me, binding my body to the bed like ropes. I struggled against the grasping tendrils, told myself they weren’t real, and that I could make them vanish simply by willing it. But they didn’t vanish, and soon I couldn’t move at all.
Safire brushed my lips with her finger. Vines covered the bed and me, but somehow she was free and able to move. “It’s all right, dear heart. Just be still for a moment,” she whispered.
"You did this?" I demanded.
She shrugged. “You went drunk on my aura and tried to bed me even though you’re in terrible pain. You’re not in your right mind. What else am I supposed to do with you?”
"You evil little witch. Have you always been able to do this?"
"Now that we’re mind-bonded, apparently I can. I never thought to try it before you said that thing about the thistle patch." She smiled, pleased with herself.
"Damn it, Safire, let me loose right now."
Her smile widened. “No. It’s nice to see you still for a change.” Her hands moved freely under the vines and then under my shirt. It was as if the vines didn’t exist for her, just me. That witch. I realized then why I didn’t want her touching my ribs. My side hurt like hell--why hadn’t I felt it before, except when I was laughing?
"Because my aura distracted you. I think when you tripped and fell just now, you cracked a rib," she said.
I sucked breath through my clenched teeth, trying not to swear out loud. Safire closed her eyes, her hands over the tender bruise that covered the side of my chest.
<
br /> “You haven’t been resting like you should, have you?” she muttered. “No wonder you cracked a rib just now--you’ve strained this bruised area to the breaking point with your antics.”
"Being out of bed during the day kept me from getting a lung infection," I said through gritted teeth.
“When you have an injury like this, you shouldn't get out of bed. You want to break all your ribs and end up in bed for six months?”
"Safire, I know my limits."
Her hands were two flames against my side, so hot I expected my skin to start sizzling like bacon over a fire. I wanted to flinch, to yell, to push her away, but the vines held firm. So I continued to grit my teeth.
“Shh, shh,” she soothed. “I promise it’ll be over soon, my love.” The burning slowly became itching. The itch started in my bones, so intense that I could have scratched myself raw and not rid myself of it. It felt as if the ivy covering the bed had somehow seeded the muscles over my ribs and now new tendrils shot up through my bruised skin. The itch slowly faded to a faint nibble of pain deep in my chest as my rib finished knitting itself back together. She had just healed a fracture that should have taken weeks to mend.
Her lips curved in an impudent smile even as a teardrop ran down her cheek. “You know, ever since we stumbled on this mind bond, your aura has overwhelmed me. I realized today that my aura overwhelms you just as much as yours overwhelms me.”
"But I can’t make vines shackle you."
“Who’s the witch here, love?” She leaned forward and teased my lips apart with hers. I tasted a pinch of salt from her tears, then lost myself in that sea of honeyed wine. We floated together for awhile, pleasantly adrift until the provocative feel of her body over my hips reminded me of the months that had passed since we had been able to fully consummate our marriage. Like Safire’s creatively laced smallclothes, these vines had possibilities but would soon get in the way.
"Now that you’ve healed me, let me loose."
"Are you certain that’s what you want?" She straightened. Her hand slid lightly down the length of my side and came to rest on my belly. She caressed the narrow trail of dark hair from my navel to where it broadened out before disappearing under the waist of my trousers. Her fingers slipped under my belt buckle, a light touch that raised gooseflesh all over my skin.
Tapestry Lion (The Landers Saga Book 2) Page 48