It hurt just thinking of those moments now.
But not enough to stop them from scrolling through her dreaming mind, as if to force their imprint upon her sleeping consciousness and reshape the dream.
Alshiba looked back to him. “You must be holding me in a very deep sleep for me to dream of this place.”
“It’s not easy.” He came over and leaned his shoulder against the bedpost, hands still in his pockets, and regarded her with one of those come-hither smiles that always made her embarrassingly flustered. “You’re fighting me every step of the way.”
“That sounds about right.”
He turned his gaze off towards the darkened windows, which wore winter’s frost without and the fog of warmth within. “Since we’re going to be here for a while, what would you like to do?”
“What do you mean?”
He turned a smile back to her. “Shouldn’t we make the most of it?”
Alshiba narrowed her gaze at him. Then she checked beneath the covers to make sure she was actually dressed—she couldn’t trust her younger self to know discretion or modesty if they were two suitors carrying on a fistfight right in front of her—but finding herself clothed, she climbed out of bed.
“You know I love this place,” she angled him a pointed look as she headed for the dressing screen, “and you well know how libertine I was before I met you.”
Björn followed her with his very blue eyes, his smile more forthcoming than his thoughts. “Alshiba, this is your dream.”
She harrumphed dubiously.
While she dressed, the hundreds of phrases Seth had used to upbraid her for loving Björn sounded a clamorous protest in her skull. Yet in three hundred years of Seth’s raging and her own willful denial, she hadn’t managed to alter the course of her heart by a single degree; its compass always pointed to Björn.
Part of her consciousness kept straying to the now, to all that had happened and all he’d done, but her younger dream-self resisted these efforts, insistently recalling her from what was real, encouraging a lover to return to bed.
Björn eyed her appreciatively when she reemerged. She knew what he saw—her younger self dressed in form-fitting hunting leathers, shamelessly self-possessed, as equally confident of her talent as of the effect she had on men. Alshiba stared down at her younger self and wondered if any part of that girl remained.
He was wearing his winter cloak when she looked back to him. Björn extended his hand invitingly. “What shall we hunt today?”
Alshiba looked to the windows. Daylight was glaring against the frost. Just below, bathed in the early morning light, her King’s board waited on a table between a pair of chairs. Two empty wine glasses stood beside it. She went and stared down at the game.
Now she remembered that he’d moved his piece. After three hundred years…he’d made his next play.
Alshiba stared down at the chequered tiles and their marble pieces. “In all of the hours I spent studying that board, in any of the scenarios I explored, I never envisioned putting that piece there.”
“And that is why you fail.”
She lifted her gaze to him. “Because I can’t predict you?”
“Because you won’t let your imagination take you beyond the boundaries of what is logical into the improbable, the impossible…” he took her chin in his hand and looked into her eyes with passionate insinuation in his, “the great expanse of the uncharted unknown.”
“A wielder is limited by what he can envision.” The First Law sounded a curse crossing her tongue; his hand felt an iron branding her heart. In Illume Belliel he was repairing her life pattern. In her dreams, he was scoring it forever with the imprint of his own—
“Good shot!”
Alshiba spun a triumphant smile at him and swung out of her saddle. She landed in the snow and ran through the bracing air, feeling his equally bracing gaze admiring her as she moved.
She had a sense of things having come before, of nights spent together, of the hunting they’d been at since dawn; but in the way of dreams, she couldn’t recall the experience of any of this.
Alshiba held up the winter hare with a brow arched in triumph. Her arrow, fletched red, had taken the creature through the heart. His, fletched in blue, fell just shy of the mark.
“Now I know I’m dreaming.” She came back towards where he sat his horse. “Only in my dreams would I best you in any contest.” She pulled both arrows from the hare and tossed the limp animal up to him.
He put it into his saddlebag along with the others. “That’s what dreams are for, love.”
“What,” she angled him a skeptical look as she remounted, “revealing our elevated opinions of ourselves?”
He undressed her with his eyes. “Envisioning new realities.”
She laughed—
Björn caught her hand before she could escape him and dragged her back down on the fur rug, trapping her long, bare legs beneath one of his own. They’d been days in that room together, seeking no other pleasure than the other’s shape, thriving on each other’s breath.
The fire felt hot against her back, the rest of her satiny beneath a silk dressing gown. Björn ran his hand along her hip, letting admiration flow from his touch, his cobalt eyes dark with visualization…
How mortifying, these moments, recalled from their lives together, bits of memories she was holding up for his inspection, her treasured mementos, tokens from before his remorseless abandonment.
Alshiba wished the dream would stop, but he was holding her in that deep sleep state where she had no control over the unfolding images.
His gaze grew quieter, if such a thing could be said of a man’s eyes alone; yet Björn spoke volumes in a glance. His quiet meant only apology. He ran his thumb across the back of her hand. “There was no other way, Alshiba.”
Her older self and younger self pushed to be the first through the door to reply. Her younger self won.
Alshiba rolled onto her back, letting the silk robe fall as it willed, inviting his gaze. “You read too much into my dreams.”
His eyes explored the shadows of her body beneath the silk, and his breath came faster for it. He returned hot eyes to hers. “What would you have me read into this?”
She gave a languorous sigh and turned her head to smile at him. “A foray into missed opportunities.” She slipped out of his reach before he could catch her back again.
He rolled onto his stomach and watched her as she walked to a cabinet and poured more wine. She could feel his eyes exploring her curves; she knew the desirous places his mind was dwelling. Her younger self had been so certain of her power, so sure she held his heart in her hand.
Oh, she’d been shameless in her youth, but the unfolding centuries had hardly made an honest woman of her—sleeping with a man she’d neither married nor bound, who held no ties to her beyond his word, no responsibility save for a troth they’d renewed in their lovemaking each day.
This truth made his betrayal somehow worse…that they’d had no contract beneath court or law, nothing binding him to her but his own heart. He’d always been free to leave her side. She’d just never imagined that he would.
Her younger self had never imagined he would want to.
She felt him coming up behind her. The heat of his gaze warmed her more strongly than the fire. His hand slipped up across her breast and then trailed up her neck. He inclined her head back into his shoulder while his other hand sought the heat between her legs. “Alshiba,” he breathed against her ear, “I never wanted to.”
*—*
She awoke in silence. Beyond the windows of her dimly lit bedchamber, night greeted her with stillness and solitude. Alshiba squeezed her eyes shut again and turned a pained grimace into her pillow. By Epiphany’s Blessed Light, if she had a silver crown for every unsatisfying dream she’d had about Björn van Gelderan, she might’ve rivaled Eltanin for wealth.
The effects of the dream notwithstanding, she sensed immediately the change in herself. Gone was
that lingering malaise. She felt alert for the first time in weeks. Her stomach growled a terse welcome to her wayward appetite, which was sneaking in the back door as if from a night of carousing, contrite and seeking absolution.
A sigh escaped her, echoic of regret. Her gaze found the ornate ceiling and the nymphs painted there. At least someone was regularly frolicking in her bedchamber.
“We can do something about that, you know.”
Alshiba tensed. She’d expected him to be gone—she’d assumed he was. Now, as she looked to a dimly lit corner, she saw him reclining on his side on the couch with a book open before him. His shirt was undone, his feet bare. His curls were slightly longer than they’d been in her dream. It really was obscene of him to be so ridiculously good-looking.
She pushed a strand of hair from her face with a weak hand. She hadn’t said her last thoughts out loud…had she? “Do something about what?”
He looked up under his brows. “That growling stomach of yours.” He smiled innocently. “What did you think I meant?”
“You know perfectly well what I thought you meant.”
He rose and crossed the room to her bedside. The picture of that moment reflected a thousand others: herself in bed while Björn reclined on the couch, working or reading through all hours of the night—he’d only ever stayed in bed to be with her—and then, finding her awake, striding towards her with a rather relentless ardor darkening his gaze. Watching him coming towards her like that again now made her body come alive in places it had no right to recall.
Björn sat down on the bed close at her side. She looked upon his face, one she’d known so intimately, which had known her so intimately, before which she’d surrendered every part of herself, to which she’d revealed her deepest desires. A face she’d thought of in the highest esteem, the face she’d come to equate with everything brilliant in the world, the one she saw when she thought of betrayal; just a face, his face, the target of her vehement censure, subject of centuries of her adoration.
He smoothed a strand of hair back from her eyes. His eyes, holding hers, made her breath quicken. “How would you like it, Alshiba?”
She froze beneath the question. A dozen different ways she would like it flaunted themselves before her imagination. “…What?” the word sounded embarrassingly breathless.
“The food.” He looked over her discomfiture with quiet amusement. “Should I bring the food to you, or you to the food?”
“You should go.” She looked him up and down while hauling brusquely back on her runaway imagination. “You’ve been working the lifeforce. They’ll know you’re here.”
He twined a lock of her hair around his finger. “Only if I want them to.”
“Then I should go.” She felt like she couldn’t breathe beneath his gaze. “The Council—”
“Franco is sitting in for you.”
“I may still make it for part of the evening session.” But she didn’t move to leave. He had her heart twisted around his finger as surely as her hair. She dragged breath into her lungs and put heat into her gaze. “I should summon the knights.” But she didn’t move to do this, either.
He caressed her cheek with the back of his fingers. “I will consider my work complete when you’re well enough to do so.”
Something in the way he said this…alarm trilled uncomfortably in her core. “How long did you keep me asleep?”
“Three days.”
She stared at him. “Healing me the entire time?”
He nodded.
He’d had her subdued that long and she still wasn’t fully well? “How…” her voice came more faintly than she would’ve liked. Dear Epiphany! “How bad was I?”
He stroked his hand down her cheek, her neck, along her collarbone… quickening her heart painfully. “Do you really want to know?”
“Of course.”
He removed his hand to his lap. “The Healers you consulted described your pattern as being frayed. In truth, it was disintegrating. By the time I started upon you, it had deteriorated to mere threads.”
Alshiba choked. “You…rewove my life pattern?”
“Thread by thread.”
Even recognizing this was Björn making such a statement, it seemed an impossible feat—and a horrifying truth. How could she still be herself if so much of her life pattern had eroded?
Perhaps he read the concern in her gaze. “There are few patterns on the mortal plane that I know better than yours, Alshiba.” He traced the line of her collarbone with his thumb again, bringing tingles with his touch. “I explored it from multiple angles every time we—”
“Yes, I get it.” She brushed her hair from her face to cover her disconcertion. “So…my illness. Did you determine the cause?”
He held her gaze steadily. “I found enough atrophae in this mansion to kill five Adepts.”
Shock stole the words from her tongue.
He took her hand, entwined his fingers through hers, and gazed contemplatively towards the windows and the moonlit sea beyond. “They weren’t counting on your being as strong in the lifeforce.” He turned a smile back to her. “Or as headstrong.”
Alshiba tried not to imagine her fate if Björn hadn’t arrived to aid her when he had. It seemed almost more frightening to ponder in retrospect. “Who did this? Was it…?” But she didn’t want to say where her thoughts had led her; she didn’t want to believe Niko was capable of such treachery, or think that she’d knowingly brought the viper into her own house.
“The work was Eltanin.”
Alshiba blew out her breath. “That’s revealing of five strands of nothing.”
A slight tension in his gaze conveyed his agreement. “My contact here is looking into it further.”
She eyed him tersely at this. She’d known he maintained spies in Illume Belliel, alliances, allegiances that had weathered Malachai’s genocide, as well as her very vocal vilification of him, with steadfast aplomb. Yet in all of her years in the cityworld, she’d found no clue to the identity of these personages—neither a telling look nor a stray comment, not even a shadow of favorable inclination to lead her to their door. Whoever they were, they wore a flawless mask across their duplicity.
Björn brushed his lips against the back of her hand. Not possessively—that had never been his way—but with an undeniable sense of ownership, less as property than responsibility, devotion…troth. He had as much right to hold her hand this way as she had to desire him to.
Alshiba pressed her lips together. She no longer had the strength to play the role she’d chosen for herself in his game of betrayal and sacrifice. “What I really want right now…” but she saw in his eyes as he lifted them back to her that he already knew what she wanted.
She turned her head towards an antechamber adjoining her bedroom and saw steam rising from a copper tub. Alshiba exhaled a sigh, and her gaze softened as she looked back to him. “How did you know?”
He smiled and brought her hand to his lips once more. “Because I know you.”
He left to arrange for a meal while she bathed. As she stripped out of her sleeping gown to climb in the tub, she wondered if he’d undressed her after she’d collapsed on the night of his rescue. Thinking of his hands touching her bare form certainly would’ve made more sense of her dreams. Not that she didn’t dream of him often, just rarely in an amiable context.
She was brushing out her damp hair when he returned, carrying a tray of food. He must’ve had her staff standing by to prepare such a meal so quickly. But of course, he would’ve had everything in place well in advance of her waking. Björn had always predicted her every need. He was too damnably perceptive, just one of the many attributes that made it so difficult for her to evacuate him from her heart.
She watched him heading for a table by the windows. “Who undressed me?”
He paused and cocked his head slightly. “Just now, or…?”
“The night you brought me home.”
“Ah.” He set the tray down. “Your attend
ants. I would never presume.”
Alshiba shook her head. “I would that you had.”
He lifted his gaze to her wonderingly.
She pushed a palm to her forehead. “That sounded different in my head.” She walked to the table and sat down. “If you had, it would just make sense of my dreams.”
“Dreams…” he smiled inquiringly at her while setting out the food, “was I in them?”
“As if you need ask.”
He grinned. “Were you in them?”
Alshiba crossed her arms. “You knew Aldaeon would offer me the Interrealm Committee Chair.”
Björn set aside the last silver dome and sat down across from her.
Alshiba held a hard look upon him.
He shook his head amusedly. “Was there a question in there somewhere?”
“You wrote the measure, you knew Aldaeon would put it to a vote, and you knew I would accept the chair.”
He searched her gaze with smiling eyes. “And?”
She somewhat fell back in her seat. “Why?” Frustration propelled her forward again. “Why, Björn?”
He knew what she was asking—far more than this inquiry alone. He laid a hand on the table—his right hand, with his oath-ring, diamond bright, glinting on his middle finger—and pointed at her. “You eat, I’ll speak.”
She eyed him narrowly. “The whole truth?”
“As much as you can stomach, Alshiba.”
She picked up her fork. Björn lifted a goblet of wine.
He sat back and watched her as she started to eat, a resolute understanding shadowing his gaze, as of consequences known, choices owned, willingly accountable but far from contrite. “We originally built T’khendar to seal a hole in Alorin’s aether, but soon it would become the realm’s bastion, a fortress against their unmaking…”
Thus followed the story of their endeavor—his and Isabel’s and his Council of Nine—to protect the realm from the very real threat of Malorin’athgul and right the cosmic Balance.
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