by Gail Dayton
Torchay and Aisse followed her back down to the public room, Torchay because it was his duty, and Aisse because he insisted she come for the lesson. At least he’d consented to change out of his bodyguard’s black into the brown tunic that flattered him more and made him less noticeable. Aisse wore her same baggy unbleached cotton and looked virtually invisible.
Kallista hadn’t reached the bar before a crowd of soldiers invited her to join their table. While she looked them over, another table issued an invitation. When did the soldiers get to be so young? They all looked younger than eighteen, but she knew they didn’t leave the remote camps for the first two years. They had to be at least eighteen. She finally sat with the first boys who asked. They looked a little older than the others, a little closer to the end of their service.
They were all lovely with their fair Adaran skin, light eyes and hair in all shades of yellow, brown and red. Kallista couldn’t choose among them so she let them sort themselves out, laughing at the games of arm wrestling and dart throwing that determined who would sit next to her as she ate. Until the end of the next competition. One young man with soft brown hair and deep green eyes seemed to win more than his share of the games. As the evening wore on, she touched him and allowed his touch in return, until he opened his mouth close to her ear and murmured, “Will you come upstairs with me?”
Amused by his boldness, Kallista smiled. She stood, trailing a hand over his broad shoulders, then took his hand to lead him away while his comrades shouted out good-natured advice and abuse. Torchay would follow, of course. He’d be in the next room, but she could pretend he wasn’t. They’d learned how to make this work long ago. She stopped with her young soldier on the stairs’ landing out of sight of the public room to share a kiss. It was more sweet than hot, but Kallista let it go. There would be time for heat.
He was so young, his body not yet filled out to the promise of his broad frame. Outside the room, Kallista stopped again. She ran her hands down his back to cup his buttocks and he seized her face between his hands for another kiss. Again, it held light without heat. She opened the door. Inside the room, he stripped away his tunic before wrapping his arms around her, grinding his erection into her stomach.
“Easy, soldier.” She slowed him with her hands on his face, his chest. “Plenty of time. No hurry.”
“You sure?” He gasped for breath. “I feel like I’m going to explode.”
“Not yet, if you please.” She trailed a hand down to find the drift of fine hair descending from his navel.
He stopped breathing. She almost made a joke of it before she remembered he wouldn’t understand. He didn’t have Torchay’s obsession with breathing.
That thought spoiled her mood and she reached for it, wanting it back. She leaned close to breathe in the musky male scent of his skin. He found the side lacings of her dress and began to loosen them, running his open mouth along the side of her neck from shoulder to jawline. Kallista shivered. That was it. This was what she wanted.
She let a finger dip into the waistband of his trousers. He froze for a second before drawing her earlobe into his mouth and sucking on it. She whimpered, turned her head to the side to give him better access. She needed this.
“Tell me,” he whispered into her ear.
“Tell you what? Tell you you’re sexy? Tell you I want you? You are. I do.”
He gave a breathy little chuckle. “Yes, that. But—is it true? Did you slay a thousand Tibrans with a single word?”
Kallista went cold from the inside out. Was this the attraction? Was this what had him here panting over her like a rutting stag? “Who told you such a thing?”
She wanted to hurt him, to punish him for the gossip, but he wasn’t to blame for anything more than listening.
He nuzzled her neck. “The courier,” he said. “It’s all over barracks. How the enemy battered down the wall in Ukiny and were coming through. Until you spoke the word.”
“Is that why you’re here with me?” She backed away, her voice cold as the winter inside her. “To see what I might do? Is it the fear that excites you?” Kallista began drawing off one of her gloves, watched his eyes go wide with fear. She wouldn’t call magic, wouldn’t actually remove the glove, shouldn’t tease him at all, but the cold made her cruel.
He shook his head, swallowed hard, cupped his hands together over his groin.
“No?” Kallista tugged the glove back into place, denying the temptation. “What then? Knowing I killed so many? It wasn’t a thousand, you know. More like ten. Ten thousand. Though not all of them died. Nor did I speak. Not a word.”
She lifted her hands high like a theatrical charlatan pretending to call power. True calling required nothing so showy. “I merely—” She threw her hands wide as she had cast the magic, and the boy stumbled back, fell onto the bed. Terror showed in every line of his young face and it shamed her.
“Goddess.” She turned away, smoothing her gloves down. “I’m sorry.” She rubbed a hand over her face. “I’m so sorry.”
What right did she have to anger? Her motives tonight were no purer than his. Less so. He at least wanted something of her. She wanted someone else. She was just using him in a stupid attempt to satisfy that want. She should know by now it wouldn’t work. She’d have to simply endure it till it wore off.
“I—it’s the power,” he said, voice shaking. “All that magic. A woman with so much—it’s—”
Kallista nodded. That was a more pleasant thought than the alternatives she’d come up with. She picked up his tunic and tossed it at him. She yanked her laces tight again, but didn’t bother to tie them.
“Can’t we still—” He balled up the tunic in his hands.
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have led you on. I’m—there’s someone else.”
“Someone you can’t have.” He sounded far wiser than his years.
“You’d better just go.” She couldn’t bear looking at him any longer, couldn’t face any more guilt.
“But—my friends. They’ll think—”
“The truth?” Kallista shook her head. “No. I’m—” She would not apologize again, though she should. “This isn’t your fault. Stay. I’ll go. You can tell them…whatever you like. Except that I raised power for you. I didn’t.”
“You didn’t?”
Kallista held up her still-gloved hands and turned them this way and that to remind him they’d never been uncovered.
“Oh.” He walked with her to the door. “Are you sure you won’t—”
She put two red-gloved fingers over his mouth, then kissed his cheek. “I hope you find your naitan,” she said. “But love her as well as her magic.”
He swallowed, nodded, and she left him.
Torchay and Aisse were already in the room next door. Aisse was bundled in her blanket in the cot near the door, asleep or pretending to be. Torchay had changed out of his finery into old trousers, his tunic off against the heat as he worked through his bodyguard exercises.
“Don’t you usually do that earlier in the day?” Kallista tossed her pendant on the table beside the big bed and kicked off her shoes.
“I did.” He finished the flowing form he was doing and stopped. The faint sheen of sweat over his lean musculature tempted her eyes to look, to drink their fill. “I felt like doing it again. I didn’t expect to see you before dawn.”
“Yes, well…” She tugged her fingers free of the thin snug leather and pulled her gloves off, flexing her sweaty hands in the slightly cooler air. “Didn’t work out.”
Torchay walked toward the table. Kallista backed off. She couldn’t bear being so close to him. Not now. He poured water from the pitcher into a cup and drank it, then poured the rest into the basin and splashed it on his face. Kallista watched his every move.
When he had dried his face with the flimsy towel, he turned and saw Kallista watching. “Can I ask you somethi—No.” He shook his head. “Never mind.” He hung the towel up and reached for his hair to relea
se his queue.
“What?” Kallista loosened the laces of her dress tunic. “If you have a question, ask it. You know you can ask me anything.”
“Can I?”
She looked up and saw his gaze focused on her. The candlelight reflecting from his eyes made them glow with blue flame. She lost herself in them for a moment before she recalled he’d asked her a question. “Yes, of course. Anything.”
Once more he hesitated, seeming to look for something as he gazed at her, but what, Kallista didn’t know.
“All right,” he said finally. “I will.” He ran his fingers through his unbound hair and it fell in waves around his face, crimson in the candlelight. “When you have gone out hunting all these years—” He paused for a deep breath, looking away only an instant. “When you have hunted a man, why did you never choose me?”
CHAPTER TEN
Kallista swayed, Torchay’s question touching unseen things deep inside her, drawing her tight, opening her up. Her nipples beaded beneath the brocade weave of her dress and she tucked her hands beneath her arms, more as a guard against unwanted magic than an attempt to hide her body’s reaction. Why did he have to ask her that question now? Now when she wanted him so much it made her mouth dry and other places all too wet?
“I—It’s not that—” Goddess, what could she say that wouldn’t either insult him or encourage him?
Torchay waited, his face an impassive mask, candlelight licking over his sculpted form, tempting her to do the same. She curled her hands into fists against the urge to touch.
“You’re my bodyguard, Torchay.” She winced at resorting to that old excuse yet again. He deserved more than that. “Goddess knows you’re an attractive man. But I have seen so many solid, working relationships ruined when a naitan gets involved with her bodyguard. It’s not so much his protectiveness—you’re all so protective to begin with you’re paranoid. But she becomes protective of him.
“She starts avoiding her duty because it might get him hurt, or doing—doing stupid things that wind up getting him killed anyway. And jealousy? You’ve seen it too, how crazy they can get. We’ve talked about it, how sex messes up a perfectly good partnership. We have a good one. I don’t want to ruin that just for a few nights of horizontal hide-and-seek.”
His smile flickered. “I’m good for a few nights, eh?”
Kallista raised an eyebrow. Honestly. Men and their self-esteem. “Okay, a week.”
The smile flashed again and faded away. “I didn’t die.” The intensity in his gaze made her look away. “You’re talking about your first bodyguard, aren’t you? The one who was killed.”
The army had no secrets, but gossip wasn’t always accurate. “My first bodyguard retired to the coast to sell beer and tall tales.” She took a deep breath. “It was the second who died.”
“Did you love him?”
Did she? She’d thought so at the time. But she’d learned since then that sex and love tended to get tangled no matter how hard one tried to keep them separate. That was why she never took a lover for more than a few months, preferably one near the end of his enlistment. Simpler that way. “It was a long time ago. I don’t remember.”
He nodded. His hair fell forward, hiding his face as he looked down, fingers fidgeting with the edge of the table.
“Is that what you wanted to know?”
He shrugged, nodded again, picking at the rough wood, creating splinters.
Kallista sighed. Why couldn’t a man be more like a woman? “Torchay, it isn’t that I didn’t want to choose you…” He looked up and she met his eyes briefly before letting her gaze trail down over his breathtaking body, letting him see just how much she appreciated it, how much she wanted him. Goddess, he was as aroused as she.
She spun around, clamping her hands securely in place, fighting for breath. “I can’t do this. It’s too much.” She heard him move, coming toward her, and she flinched away. “No. Don’t touch me. Don’t. If you do—”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
Her laughter sounded more like a sob. “I would. Sex would ruin everything, Torchay. What we have is too important to me to risk that. I won’t. Please don’t ask it of me.”
“It doesn’t have to ruin things.” He stood so close behind her she could feel the heat radiating from his body.
“It would. You know it would. Even though we’ve been friends for ages, saying it out loud has changed things already.” She ought to move away, put more space between them, but it was all she could do to stand upright without swaying back into him.
“For the worse?” His voice sounded flat, the way it did when he locked himself away inside.
Kallista fought the urge to turn into his arms and bring him back. She hated hurting him. Hated it. “No, of course not. How could it be worse? But it is different. We haven’t adjusted to that much change. More could be disastrous.”
Torchay backed away now. From the corner of her eye, Kallista saw him cross to the open window and turned to watch him. He leaned on the sill to stare out into the raucous barrackside night. The old threadbare trousers he’d changed into stretched across his buttocks and had her catching her breath all over again.
“I thought it would be easier if I knew,” he said without turning. “If I knew for certain you’ve never fancied me. I was sure that was why…” His hands tightened on the wooden sill until Kallista feared it would crack. He lifted his face to the night sky, his hair sliding back with a crimson caress. Kallista wanted to touch it, to run her naked hands through it and watch the way it twined around her fingers.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He shook his head, his hair sweeping his shoulders. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
“Probably not.” When she had indulged herself enough with his hair, she wanted to slide her hands over those shoulders. She took a deep breath and squeezed her fists tight. “But we’ll manage. Somehow.”
“Aye. Somehow.” Torchay gave her a quick glance over his shoulder. “You should go on to bed. The upriver boat leaves early tomorrow. I’ll join you after I finish my Fan Dai.” He gave the intricate graceful exercise of the bodyguards its proper name.
“You still mean to…?” Kallista gestured at the bed. She shuddered at the thought of sharing it with him after tonight’s conversation.
“Are you still dreaming?”
Goddess, yes. Every night. But nothing she could share with Torchay. She dreamed of men. Sleek, hard bodies, golden and pale and brown, caressing her in turn, arousing her, driving her relentlessly toward tonight’s disaster. The dreams were erotic, though. Not prophetic.
Torchay took her silence as answer. “Then my place is there.” He took a deep breath, hands tightening on the sill again. “We can bear it because we have no other choice.”
He was right. They had no choice. Not one they were willing to make. She refused to ask for another bodyguard. She prayed he would not request reassignment. Kallista found her bag and drew out a chemise. She’d left it off when she dressed for her abortive hunt. Quickly she changed, laying her dress tunic over a chair to let it air before she packed it again.
She crawled into the bed, moving to the side against the wall to give Torchay his space. He waited until she stopped rustling around then stepped back into the center of the room. He stood for a moment, head down, motionless. Then he poured himself into the proper position. Another second of stillness and his body flowed from one action to the next, pure masculine grace in motion.
Kallista let her eyes slide half-shut as she lay there in the bed. The damp breeze from the river wafting over her bare legs did nothing to cool her as she watched him and wanted him. She drifted off to sleep with his image burned into her brain.
The next morning as they headed up the docks to the shallow berths where the upriver boats were docked, they passed some sort of uproar near the downriver boats. Someone was shouting, almost screaming, as soldiers rushed to bring the man under control. Kallista caught a glimpse of him as his eyes rol
led back in his head and he began to convulse, poor soul.
She felt magic stir around her, seeking entry, and she shut it out. The East naitan trying to calm him wouldn’t welcome Kallista taking what wasn’t hers. Torchay caught her arm and hurried her past. She could do nothing to help.
The journey up the Alira, which joined the Taolind there at Turysh, was slow due to spring runoff from the mountains. The boat’s single naitan could not maintain a constant wind pocket strong enough to fill the sails against the current, so they anchored at night. They didn’t reach Boran until Sixthday, and in all that time, Belandra failed to appear. Kallista began to doubt she ever would. At least she hoped it.
In Boran they hired horses and attached themselves to a caravan whose merchants were so delighted to have a military naitan with them, they waived any fee. Kallista hadn’t heard that bandits were preying on the Arikon passes again, but one never knew.
Late on the second day out of Boran, the caravan emerged from Highroad Pass into the broad Veryas Valley and Kallista saw Arikon the Blessed rising from the slopes and cliffs beyond. The gray stone spires glowed warm and welcoming in the golden light of the setting sun. The new copper roof of the Mother Temple of all Adara gleamed as it towered high above the city. The massive blackwood gates in the high south wall stood open, admitting any who cared to enter. Here, Kallista felt as if the city reached out to welcome her, unlike Turysh, which barely tolerated her presence. Here, she had been trained in the North Academy. Here, she had found her place.
A chill gripped her as a cloud cut off the sun. In the lower fringes of the Shieldback Mountains, it was cooler than down in Adara’s flat plain. But she wouldn’t lie, even to herself. The chill was fear. She feared what would happen when she passed through those gates. Would she lose the place she had made? Would she lose herself? She wanted to run away, pretend nothing had happened. But she couldn’t. Duty required she report to the Reinine. If she didn’t have her duty, she had nothing.