by Jane Kindred
Jak leaned forward and kissed his lips, and they were Ra’s lips, soft and sweet—and Meeric. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to feel the kiss deep inside, where Ra had never touched. The kisses of the Meer devoured and carried one away until everything else was forgotten.
Jak pulled away from his mouth, gasping for air, and whispered against his neck, “Ma aovet tene tams”—the Deltan words Ra had once insisted on: I want your skin.
Rising onto his knees, Ra threw off his coat and unbuttoned his shirt, and Jak was shocked to see the firm slope of muscle in place of the generous swell of breasts, but it was unmistakably Ra’s body, more ruggedly cut. The oddly beautiful filigree of the scars of Shiva’s lashing still framed his chest. Jak’s fingers traced the outline of a nipple, the same deep tint Jak remembered. It seemed he was more sensitive there now than Ra had been as a woman, and he tilted his head back and closed his eyes, a soft breath of sound escaping him.
Jak threw both arms around his neck. “You can’t leave me. You’ll kill me.”
Jak had gone to Ra. Ahr knew it without any Meeric intuition. Ra was impossible to resist. Waking alone in Jak’s bed, Ahr tried to ignore this certainty, but the more she tossed and turned, trying not to think of them together, the louder the thoughts became, until she gave up and threw off the covers, and went to Ra’s room.
They were there, in Ra’s bed. Though Ahr had suspected it, the reality struck her to the core. Her mouth was open, poised on a bitter rebuke, when Ra turned toward the door.
Ahr’s bones turned to chalk. It was he, and Jak was in his bed. Jak was with her Ra.
Jak grabbed for a blanket as though Ahr hadn’t already seen what was being presented to Ra. She tried to speak, so angry her mouth wouldn’t work. What a deceiver Ra was, playing at the meek and penitent woman and then becoming the zealous devourer, his body hard and insistent as he’d been with Ahr. He was a rabid animal. He was the unrepentant demon who’d taken his vetmas from Ahr’s body without permission. He’d plumbed her depths, infusing all of her with him, every part of her body his. There was nothing of her he hadn’t penetrated with his cock or his mouth. He’d possessed her completely. And now he gave that unspeakable voluptuousness that was his touch to Jak.
But that wasn’t what she was angry about. She didn’t want him. She was angry with Jak. Jak was her lover.
“How could you?” The words choked out of her at last. “You let him—him—into your body when you wouldn’t let me?”
Jak flinched at the accusation. “I haven’t. We were only lying together.”
Ahr realized they were only naked to the waist. But what did it matter? “I see. Because you were tired—and you took off your shirt because you were hot?”
“Ahr.” Jak tried to climb over Ra to reach her.
“Don’t you touch me.” Ahr held up her hand. “You stay there with him.”
Jak sat back against the mattress. Ahr’s words had power. “Ahr, please.”
Letting go of the doorknob she’d clutched until her hand had gone white, Ahr looked once more at Ra—the one who’d taken her, taken from her, and now taken her love. Renaissanced emotion warred in her head as a barrage of words warred with her tongue for release: Ravager—lover—baby-stealer—RaNa’s father—crush your skull!
“You bastard,” she whispered instead. Ra, unbelievably, said nothing. Ahr fixed her gaze on Jak. “I want my things.”
“Your things?”
“My belongings, my mound, my old clothes. There must have been something left of me, and I want it.”
Jak’s fingers raked the fine, birch-bark hair. “It’s all at Mound Ahr. But please don’t do this. Let me talk to you.”
“Talk, Jak!” Ahr laughed. “You’re nearly Meeric in your sophistry. I’m done listening to you.”
Jak tried once more to dissuade her. “You can’t go out in the storm.”
“I want my things!” Ahr resisted a childish urge to stomp her foot.
“You had a bag with you when you came back from Rhyman.” Jak tried once more to slide out of the bed past Ra, who’d silently drawn his legs out of the way. “It’s in my wardrobe. Let me get it.”
“No. You stay with him.” She’d spoken. Jak had to obey.
Ahr went back to their room—Jak’s room—and yanked open the wardrobe door. Behind the fawn lace dress was a small pack Ahr remembered. She took it out and sat with it between her legs, rummaging through the contents—a toilet kit, a blanket, a length of rope. They’d used that rope to reach the mad Ra in her fortress. Beneath the blanket, she uncovered a pair of heavy canvas bags. She held them in her hands and felt time rip through her. This had belonged to the other Ahr. He’d held them. But they hadn’t been his; they were hers. She took them and returned to Jak and Ra.
Jak was fully dressed, putting on the boots that had been kicked off in the overwhelming “tiredness” that had come over them. Ra, beside her, was unchanged, as if he hadn’t moved. Ahr brought the open bags to where they sat.
“You’ve both had my virginity. Here’s the price for it.” She poured the bags of coin into each of their laps: gold in Ra’s, silver in Jak’s. “See how trifling a thing you’ve conquered?”
Ahr turned to leave, but Ra leapt from the bed with the feral limbs he’d always possessed, coins scattering in his wake, and held her from behind, arms crossed over her chest.
“Let go of me!” Ahr jerked against his hold, but a Meer’s word to another Meer apparently held no such sway—at least, not to this Meer.
Ra pressed his head beside hers, something wet on his cheek. “You are worth the soth of Rhyman, the soth of AhlZel, the world. I was never worthy of you. But Jak is an equal jewel. Don’t leave Jak. I beg you.” Ahr twisted in his arms, but he wouldn’t release her. He turned her instead toward Jak and held her before her most recent betrayer. “Forgive Jak as you forgave me once. Jak is more deserving of it.”
Wrestling against his grip once more, Ahr tumbled into Jak’s arms as Ra let her go, looking up into steel eyes as mesmerizing as any Meer’s. “Why couldn’t you just choose?” Though she’d meant to hold on to her anger, the tears began to flow. “I chose you. You told me to choose, and I let go of half my heart. Don’t you know what it meant to me?”
Jak too was weeping, though Jak’s were ordinary tears. “I do. And I’m sorry. I was wrong.”
Ra picked up his shirt from the floor and put his arms into the sleeves. “Jak doesn’t have to choose. I’m going home.”
“Dammit, Ra.” Jak’s grip around Ahr tightened as if holding Ra instead. “You said you’d stay.”
“No, lif.” Ra buttoned his shirt and picked up his coat. “I said I’d do whatever you asked of me. I’m asking you not to ask it of me.” Impeccably dressed, he stood before them, the one who’d seen Ahr in the dusty street, the one who’d leapt from his dais to give her body obeisance with his mouth. How cruel of him to take this form now. But he called Jak lif.
“You’d go?” Ahr wiped at the tears. “You don’t want Jak?”
Ra looked up at the ceiling and drew in a breath. “I want Jak. Meershivá, I want Jak.” He lowered his gaze to her once more. “Almost as much as I want you.”
His admission ought to have stung Jak, but instead Jak turned Ahr toward Ra, comforting arms enveloping her. “You don’t have to choose, Ahr. Don’t let him leave.”
Ahr shook her head. “But I want him to leave.” Her heartbeat quickened as Ra took a step away, buttoning his coat.
“Do you?” Jak kissed her cheek. “Tell him not to go.”
Ahr took a painful breath. “For you?”
“No. For you.”
She shook her head, trying to resist Jak’s persuasion, trying to resist her own traitorous emotion. “But I hate him.”
“Do you hate him? Or do you love him so much you had to invent hatred to push him away because I mad
e you choose?”
“No. No.” Ahr let out a small moan. Ra was at the door, turning to leave. “It wouldn’t be fair.”
“What wouldn’t?” Jak rubbed a thumb against her tears. “That the two of you share a love beyond what you can share with me? How could it matter to me, when I’m loved by you both? It takes my breath away.”
As Ra turned the doorknob, Ahr’s mouth betrayed her. “Don’t go.”
He paused and stood still for a long moment before he turned back, his ebony eyes destroying her as they always had. “Do you want me, Ahr?”
She turned her head, burying her face against Jak’s neck. “Meerrá, yes,” she moaned. “I want you. I want you both.”
Ra came away from the door and knelt before her, taking her hand. “I need you to know something. Something I should have told you long ago. I didn’t know you wanted me to take your veil.” He lifted her palm and pressed it to his lips. “I wanted to see your face. I was mad to see it. But I thought you kept it there. I knew nothing of the customs of my own soth. What a fool to live among them for more than three centuries and not know.” Ahr’s tears were loosed again. Ra touched her cheek beneath the patch. “Your beautiful eyes, lif. Was it because of me? Was it Shiva?”
Ahr nodded and then shook her head. “It was because of me. Meershivá, I deserve so much worse.” Her voice caught in her throat, the rest coming out in a hoarse whisper. “I don’t know how you can forgive me. For any of it.”
“Ahr.” Ra held her face gently between his hands and made her look at him. “Mene ahlzel midtlif. You were forgiven before my body reached RaNa.”
A great sob rose out of Ahr’s chest, and Ra kissed it away, and these were his lips, this was her love, whom she’d punished for not loving her. He was risen from the dead and still he kissed her as though she’d held his body in her arms as he lay dying instead of spitting her last curse at him as his head was beaten. He kissed her, and it was the kiss of Meer on Meer, a sundering cataclysm of merging souls.
Ahr hardly realized until Ra released her that Jak still held her. A wave of fear and guilt rode through her, but Jak placed a tender kiss on her throat in reassurance, while Ra rose and unbuttoned his coat.
He gave Jak a questioning look, and Jak nodded. To Ahr’s surprise, Jak slipped the robe Ahr wore from her shoulders. She tried to pull the sleeves back up, but Jak only kissed her again.
Ra’s eyes were on Ahr. “I didn’t ask your vetma before I took it from you in the last life. I asked you nothing but whether you came to me willingly after I’d already taken it.” He slipped out of his clothes as he spoke, folding each piece carefully. His body was hard and uncompromising in its expression of his desire. Ra knelt once more before her. “Vetmaaimeeráhr. May I rise as Meer?”
Ahr was unfamiliar with the etiquette between Meer, but it was abundantly clear what he meant by this request. She glanced at Jak, her cheeks warm, certain this couldn’t be what Jak wanted, but Jak nodded encouragement.
Weeping softly, Ahr loosened the ties of her robe and held out her hand to stroke Ra’s arm, fingers tracing the terrible scars from Pike’s knife. “Vetmaaimeerrá.”
Without hesitation, Ra lifted her from Jak’s arms and laid her on the bed on a blanket of her own coin, cold and arousing beneath her bared skin. Still fully dressed, Jak lay beside her and kissed her while Ra climbed onto the bed.
“Forgive me for hurting you,” Ra whispered at Ahr’s throat beside Jak’s caress, poised above her as he’d once been poised inside the violet-scented silk of a Meer’s litter. “I knew less of women than of Rhymanic custom.” He stroked her neck with his lips, sending an uncontrollable shiver through her, while Jak mirrored this touch at her right, until Ahr shook between them like the limbs of a birch in a winter storm. “Forgive my brutal ignorance. You are the greatest pleasure I have ever known.”
Ahr’s body arched from the bed, blood tears flowing anew, as Ra entered her with sacred care. Her body was still new, and there ought to have been discomfort despite her deflowering at Jak’s hands, but he was like solid silk inside her. Each motion was for her pleasure, not the furthering of his, a union of divine transport that took Ahr nearly out of herself. She’d forgotten the inhuman joy of this.
She moaned Jak’s name, though it was Ra inside her. It didn’t seem to matter. Jak’s mouth was at her breast, and Ahr was a willing captive to them both as they brought her to the brink of an oblivion in which she’d gladly perish.
“Kiss me,” she begged as she soared into the obliterating waves, and both mouths came to her. Jak’s took her as the waves broke and crashed against her body, and Ra’s as she was moaning softly into the receding tide, holding tightly to Jak. Ahr no longer knew the difference between them.
Beside Ra in the pre-dawn gloom, Ahr was utterly relaxed, cocooned in Jak’s arms, both of them soundly sleeping. Ra hadn’t promised to stay. He wasn’t breaking his word. He rose with the stillness and silence only a Meer could achieve, not disturbing even a coin on the bed, and dressed for the trip to Rhyman. Ahr and Jak had each other, and Ra had been blessed with what he’d believed would never be his again: a night with both his loves. It would suffice. It was more than he deserved.
He stepped out and pulled the door silently closed behind him, turning to mount the stairs, but he wasn’t the first awake. In the gathering room, Keiren and Mell were absent, but a fire burned on the hearth, and Shiva sat beside it in the same blood-red blouse and slim black pants she’d worn the day before. Ra was frozen in place. He hadn’t meant to see her before he left. There would be too much to explain.
“The storm is still raging,” she said quietly, sensing his presence. “Or I would have gone myself.” She glanced up and took in his appearance, and a look of shock, phenomenal and complete, transformed her face, as if it were the first time she’d been surprised in the entirety of her existence. Gripping the arms of the chair, she rose and stared at him. “In the name of all Meerity…what have you done?”
Ra stepped down into the gathering room. He had to face her.
Shiva came forward and grabbed him by the arms and turned him about, disbelieving, repeating the words in dismay. “What have you done?”
“I think what I’ve done speaks for itself.”
“Have you gone mad once again?” She shook him roughly. “Had you no faith in me at all to bring Ahr to you? You had to do this to seduce her?”
“I’m sorry,” said Ra. “My heart—”
“Your heart?” Shiva gave him a contemptuous look. “You act like an ordinary fool instead of the Meeric one you are. Desires can be fulfilled without following the transitory delusions of the so-called heart. I told you to be frugal with your conjuring, and you do this for a lay.”
“No,” he insisted. “It was much more than that. Rhyman needs its Meer.”
Shiva laughed bitterly. “No one needs the Meer. And now not even you will need me.”
“Of course I need you—”
Shiva slapped him, and Ra put his hand to his cheek, surprised and chastened. “I don’t want your need. The renaissanced Ra, the one that you were, she needed me. And you’ve taken her from me.”
He shook his head, holding the throbbing cheek. “I’m the same Ra.”
“You’re not. You’re the one who took my AhlZel.”
“No,” Ra insisted. “I’m not your son. That Ra died on the steps of Ludtaht Ra.”
“Is that what you told your concubine? That you were not the one she wanted?”
Ra blushed, unable to answer that. Perhaps he was twisting the meaning of renaissance to suit his conscience. “MeerShiva—”
“You will not interrupt me! You came to me a woman after nearly four hundred years, someone altogether different from the Ra I brought into this world. Your spirit called to me with need and pain, begging my chastisements, begging to be made whole. You suffered my lash, and still you l
onged for my comfort and companionship. And at last, you also comforted me. When have I ever had that? Not even from Hraethe. To him, I’m just another hollow portal to an end. And now you peel away the Ra you have been to me, and you are nothing but this usurper underneath. How dare you?”
He hated the look of betrayal in Shiva’s eyes. Why hadn’t he thought before he’d done this? “I’ll go back. It was a mistake.”
“Back? If you’re not insane already, you will be. Not even I could withstand that.”
He’d lied to Jak and said it was simple. He hadn’t told Jak he’d had to stop his heart with a lightning shock and raise the temperature of his body at the risk of his brain in order to rework his chromosomes from within. He hadn’t told Jak how easy it was to become lost in the elemental mix and how difficult to return.
He’d wounded Shiva with his thoughtlessness, and she was the only one who could remedy it. “Then I have one more selfish thing to ask of you.” Ra knelt at her feet, head to the floor, as he’d done a thousand times in his youth at her temple, and prepared to wait. As then, her feet were decorated once more in pearls, but they were black pearls adorning a blacker slipper.
Shiva didn’t bother to entertain the question. “The answer is no.”
As Ra lifted his head, a door opened from one of the rooms along the spokes of the corridor. He rose and turned to find Hraethe staring at him from the edge of the gathering room entrance.
“My liege,” Hraethe breathed, and as he’d never done before, he came to Ra and took his face in his hands and kissed him.
Turning on her heel, Shiva returned to the room Hraethe had vacated and slammed the door.
Hraethe stepped back and looked over his shoulder with a sigh. “There’s no pleasing her.”
“I don’t think it was you who upset her,” said Ra.
Hraethe laughed. “Perhaps not this time, but I seem to excel at it. And you, meneut… Did she effect this change in you? To what end?”
Ra shook his head, running his hand over the plait at the back of his head. “It was my doing. The Meerhunter intends to reveal my return to the solicitors. I figured I’d meet their expectations.”