“If he knows we’re following, he seems unconcerned,” Cub said.
“Or that’s what he wants,” she suggested, her mouth twisting downward at one corner.
“You’re such a pessimist.”
“Realist, you mean.”
For a long moment Cub just looked at her before saying gently, “Do not let what happened with your father turn you sour, Shaina.”
“I have not changed.”
“But you have. And I miss your moments of sweetness.”
“Sweetness?” she scoffed. “Me?”
“Yes,” he said. “You have them. You used to have them more.”
“Most would laugh themselves sick at that idea.”
“Then I’m lucky, if you save them just for me.”
She stared at him for a long, silent moment. Everything she’d been feeling welled up anew inside her. It seemed to force out words she otherwise never would have said.
“Always for you,” she whispered.
“Shay,” he said, his voice as hushed as hers as he whispered the childhood name he’d not spoken since she’d declared herself too mature for such things, even as she continued to call him Cub. Hearing it now, his voice sounding like this, made her feel as if all pretense had been stripped way.
When he leaned toward her, she wanted to shout “No!” but perversely that word wouldn’t come. Nor could she seem to move, even as her body tensed and her breath stopped in her throat.
Her last thought before his lips reached hers was “Inevitable.”
And then he was kissing her, and all thought was seared away.
Chapter 23
DARKNESS HAD FULLY fallen, but it seemed to have no effect on the revelers. They were determined to get their fill of this week of endless celebration, and it made progress through the crowded streets difficult.
“At this rate it will take until dawn to get to the skyport,” Rina muttered, dodging a reeling celebrant who had clearly imbibed too much lingberry, but seemed intent only on drinking more.
“You’re leaving?” Tark asked.
He sounded . . . something, Rina thought. Since he usually betrayed no emotion at all, it was hard to tell what. He hadn’t always been that way. When she’d first met him, she’d been drawn by the reckless joy he took in living—something that, coupled with sheer courage, made him a fearsome warrior. He’d reminded her of Dax in that. He still did, but now it was a Dax of grimmer moments, when he’d been on trial for his actions and thought his fate sealed, when he expected nothing less than death by order of the king.
She couldn’t imagine what it was like to live feeling that way constantly.
“No,” she said. “Not leaving. I have a room at the billet there.”
“Not in town?”
“Amid this chaos? No, thank you. Besides, everything is full.”
“The Council Building has quarters.”
“For visiting dignitaries,” she said with a laugh.
He shrugged. “It is by tradition also open to all who fought there.”
She stopped amid a gap in the crowd. A half step later he stopped as well, and turned to look at her with that lifted brow.
It amazed her that the revelers, even drunk as many of them were, could be so oblivious to the simple fact that the man who more than any other had made this celebration possible was standing in their midst.
“Then why are you not there?” she demanded.
Again he shrugged. He looked toward the large white building visible in the distance even in the dark. “If pressed, I suppose they would make room. But I make them uncomfortable, which in turn makes for unpleasantness. But you would be welcomed.”
“I clearly have a different definition of welcome. Mine includes all that matter to me.”
His head snapped around with a sharpness that betrayed him. She met his gaze levelly. If he did not know he mattered to her by now, it was time he did. That he mattered more than most, and in a most different way, was something she herself wasn’t quite ready to face.
“Besides,” she said when she realized he was not going to speak, “I’m not here officially. Yet.”
“If they find who you gather with,” he said, his tone dry now, “you might not be so welcome.”
“Then I’ve made the right choice, haven’t I?”
Only after she’d said it did she realize there could be two interpretations of her words. But again something flashed in his gaze, that same heat she’d seen outside the meeting room, and she bit back an explanation that she’d only meant her choice of rooming options. But it made no difference, again the look vanished in an instant, leaving her wondering if she’d really seen it at all. And when he started walking again, apparently not caring if she followed or not, she was sure she’d been mistaken.
She caught up with him, spoke as if her internal foolishness had never happened. “Besides, I wish to stop at the comm center at the skyport to send a message.”
He gave her a sideways glance. “To Trios?”
“Yes.”
“About what we learned tonight?”
“Yes.”
“To the king?”
“Yes.”
He was silent for a moment. “You have suddenly become fond of one-word answers.”
“Yes.” His mouth twitched. She couldn’t help it, she laughed. “Now you know what it is like trying to converse with you.”
“I spoke at length tonight,” he protested. “And,” he added, “I speak to you.”
A warmth flooded her all out of proportion to the simple words. She fought against betraying herself; he would not welcome it, she thought.
“Yes,” she said again, only this time it was an effort to make it sound casual, level.
He grimaced, whether at her single-word answer again or at the thought he then expressed, she didn’t know. “We did not learn anything we did not already know tonight, merely more of it. More sightings of more high-level Coalition strategists in more places.”
“Names they will know were in that room tonight. Dax especially. People he fought alongside here. Although your name was enough, it will lend even more credence when Dare takes it to the Council of Elders.”
He still didn’t seem comfortable with the thought that his name was of such renown on a planet not even his. Surely he could not prefer the way he was treated here?
“It is this council that will decide? Not the king?”
“They decide together. Each has the power to say no, although it rarely happens that they disagree. Except perhaps on method, not on what needs to be done. Not,” she added, “that those disagreements don’t get a little . . . hearty.”
They threaded their way through a knot of carousers gathered at the base of Dax’s statue. Some were still upright and staggering about, more were sitting on the statue’s base, lifting their mugs of lingberry, and a group of about four were singing, or trying to. It was a bawdy song about Dax from his skypirate days, one she hadn’t heard in many years.
She gave them a glance, and grinned.
“Drunkenness amuses you?”
“When it is born of celebration, yes,” she said. “When it is to avoid truth, no.”
To her surprise he winced. “Some wish mightily to avoid reality.”
She wondered if there was too personal a note in that observation. “And some have every reason. You, for example.”
He let out a weary breath. “I tried, for a time. But whenever I stopped reality was still there. It seemed a pointless—and expensive—exercise.”
She ached for him, but knew he would not want to hear that. Tark would want no one feeling sorry for him, although what she felt was so much more than that, so much more complicated.
So complicated she couldn’t fathom it o
ut herself. At least not when there was so much else at hand.
“Besides, that song takes me back,” she said. “I was merely wishing I had my vidcom unit on me, I would like to send a shot of that to Dax.”
Tark looked back over his shoulder at the revelers they’d now worked their way past. “How much of those . . . exploits they sing of are true?”
“More than he would ever tell me, I’m sure,” she said with a grin. “I was of very tender years in those days, after all. But I think he would laugh to hear it again now.”
One corner of his mouth quirked upward. “I have a feeling he would consider it the best use of that statue, as well.”
She laughed, startled by the observation and the fact that he’d made it. “You’re right. He would.”
He was silent until they reached the interplanetary center. And then, unexpectedly, he stopped and faced her.
“You love him, don’t you.”
It did not sound like a question, as it should not for something so self-evident. “Of course I do. I adore him. He saved my life, over and over. I loved him when he could not love himself. I love him still, and will forever. I would die for him, if need be.”
He lowered his gaze, as if her answer was too much. She didn’t care, it was all true. When he spoke again, it was softly, as he avoided looking at her. “Yet he bonded with a Coalition hero.”
“Califa was that, yes. That is why they understand each other so well, she knows much of hating yourself. She—” She broke off suddenly as the true meaning of his words struck her. “You think I love Dax in that way? God save me, I’m not that foolish!”
Or maybe I am, she thought as she stared at this man who had bedeviled her thoughts all the years she’d thought him dead, and tenfold more now that she knew he was alive.
His mouth twitched. “Careful. He is the hero of the week here.”
She snorted inelegantly, a habit picked up from the crew of the Evening Star long ago, and never quite shed.
“Dax is a brother to me. At times even a father. An annoying one.” She hesitated to say more, ask more, then realized she was hesitating, and wondered when she’d become so cautious. With the memories of those bolder days stirring, she leapt. “Why would you ask such a thing?”
He looked startled. He lowered his gaze once more, and she wondered in turn when the intrepid Bright Tarkson had become so hesitant.
“Perhaps I’m worried about your happiness,” he muttered.
“Perhaps,” she said with some sharpness, “you should worry about your own.”
His mouth twisted as a sour chuckle escaped him. “Not something that I aspire to any longer.”
“Then what did we fight for, if not every man’s right to find his path to his own happiness?”
That brought his head up sharply. He opened his mouth to speak, then halted. For a moment he just looked at her, and when he finally answered she was almost certain it was not what he had originally been going to say.
“Apparently we fought only to have to do it all over again.”
“As Califa would say, the most precious things require considerable maintenance. So we do it again.”
And she realized with her own words that she had accepted it. What she had heard tonight, and the people she had heard it from, made it impossible to ignore. All the denial taking place in the streets of Galatin and all over Arellia this week couldn’t make it go away.
She wished they were wrong, all of them, wished she herself was wrong for believing them. For believing Tark.
But she knew she wasn’t. Just as she knew he wasn’t wrong. He might be battered and scarred and not the same man he’d once been, but his deep-down instincts had never failed, and she knew they were not failing now. What she did not know was what to do next.
She looked at the man beside her, remembered the tactical session before the Battle of Galatin, when he and Dax had huddled over the projections of the city, planning, mapping, strategizing. Remembered the reckless, powerful energy and determination that had somehow overflowed to them all. They had been determined to take the city back. And take it they had.
He should not have to fight again. Ever. He had paid so much, given so much to this world that didn’t appreciate it as they should. Yet here he was, trying to sound the alarm even though those fools would not listen. And when the time came, as she was sure now it would, he would fight again.
A chill swept through her as another reality struck.
This time, she very much feared he would see to it that he did not survive.
Chapter 24
“WHAT IF THEY decide against it?”
Dax was pacing the outer council chambers restlessly. He had run all the way from the palace to the skyport and back again this morning, yet he still felt as if he would fly apart from the unspent edginess building inside him. He was ready to go, his crew had arrived, the Evening Star was ready. He had only delayed to find out the results of this emergency session, and whether he and his crew would be going this alone.
It was taking too long. Things of state always and ever took too long. If Trios herself were under attack, there would be no delay, but it was Arellia. And there was, so far, no attack, just a lot of suspicion.
Would it be enough for that robed assembly?
As if she had read his thoughts, Califa spoke. “Dare is speaking, is he not? He has yet to fail to persuade them to his view, whatever the issue.”
“But this is bigger. It will take more to convince them. We have had relative peace for years now.”
“Thankfully.” She glanced toward the closed double doors. “But they know Arellia would be the prime base for attacking Trios. Surely they will not allow the Coalition to gain a foothold there again.”
“I hope not,” he said grimly, turning to cross the white Triotian marble floor once again.
“Do you truly think they would fall prey to the same thinking that allowed Trios to fall before?”
“‘Too much peace softens,’” he said.
“Geron.”
“Yes.”
“I know you are concerned when you begin to quote ancient Triotian warriors.”
Dax stopped in his pacing and turned to look at his mate. They had been through so much, each of them alone and then together. She had come to love Trios as her own. In the way of many who were here by choice, she loved with more fervor even than some born here. She had thrown herself into learning about her new home as fiercely as she had once fought for their enemy.
“I love you,” he said suddenly, warming at how she, once the careless, cool, and uncaring Major Califa Claxton, colored as he declared it.
“And I you,” she said softly. “And if it comes to it, I will fight beside you again, Dax Silverbrake.”
He frowned. “I—”
“Do not even say it. Nothing you can speak would stop me.”
He drew in a long breath as he looked at this woman who was his mate in all things. They had had their rough times over the years, they were both so independent and had led such different lives that it had been inevitable. But the bond between them had yet grown continually stronger.
“And what,” he said softly, “makes you think I would venture into any battle without the premier tactician in any system at my side?”
She smiled then, and that heated combination of pride, gratitude, and pure, deep love shot through him. Spiced with a jolt of the lust she never ceased to rouse in him, it had him wondering just how long they might have before the council rendered the decision.
“And what of the next flashbow warrior?”
The question drove the breath out of him as if she’d hit him with that driving fist of hers, something that had happened occasionally in the beginning, as they’d struggled to find their way together.
“No,” he said instantly, instinctively.
“Hmm.” Her voice was carefully even. “Our daughter is showing her father what it is like to live with one so stubborn.”
He let out the breath he’d been holding since the moment she’d planted the idea of Shaina actually fighting. The thought of the current state of his relationship—if there was one left—with his daughter brought tightness to his chest once more. And with that unerring sense of hers, Califa knew it.
“It will be fine, in the end,” she said quietly. “She will forgive you, and you will be . . . not as you were, perhaps, when she was a child, but as adults who love and respect each other.”
“Not encouraging,” he muttered.
“Did you wish to keep her a child forever?”
“Yes,” he said, knowing even as he admitted it the foolishness of it.
“Then it will be the only thing you ever fail at,” she said.
“I feel as if I have already failed her.”
“I doubt there is a parent alive who has not felt so.”
“You’re saying it is part of the process?”
“I’m saying it’s part of loving so fiercely.”
He turned then, came back to her. Reached for her. She went into his embrace as if she were a whisperbird coming home.
“You do not want her to risk herself, to be in danger, to be hurt,” she said against his chest. “Perhaps you should think more of what you do want for her.”
“I know what I want for her,” he said, his voice low and rough as he tightened his arms around her. “This. This is what I want for her.”
She made a low sound as she snuggled closer. “My skypirate. You always find the right words, eventually.”
He sighed. “Except with our daughter, it seems. Or she would be here now, instead of scarpering around the mountains of Arellia.”
Rebel Prince (The Coalition Rebellion Novels Book 3) Page 18