And that I’d never be empress. I supposed I’d understood that on some level, that Empress Hulda would’ve seen me dead before I took her place.
“How could anyone hate you?” Zyr asked, cocking his head and studying me, as if searching for the reason.
“Very easily, I’m sure.” I wrinkled a nose for his flattery. “But as we only ever met a few times, it was really a matter of principle.” I could see that more clearly now, too, that her hatred and relentless campaign to undermine my confidence had nothing to do with me personally. “You know—she’s the sort of mother who treats her son like a substitute husband, doting on him and wanting his love and attention all to herself.”
“Hmm.” Zyr sounded like he didn’t know.
“How long ago did your mother pass away?” I asked, trying to find gentle phrasing while desperately wanting to change the subject.
“Oh, a while now, but not that long. I haven’t counted the years,” he replied carelessly, but he stirred the gravel at his feet with a stick, making circles. “But she wasn’t like Kral’s mother at all. She didn’t want my love and attention. Not from a boy who became a gríobhth in the cradle.”
That still unsettled me, the idea of an infant shapeshifting—and yet, how adorable would a baby gríobhth be? All kitten fur, fuzzy down, and big blue eyes. “I don’t understand why that’s bad,” I ventured.
He flashed me a wry smile. “I suppose you wouldn’t. It’s a complicated history.”
I gestured to the campfire, the still light sky. “We have time, and you said you’d tell me more of your story.”
“Teach me to make glib promises,” he muttered, but he scooted off the log and settled on the gravel, stretching out his long legs and crossing them at the ankle, leaning back with his hands folded comfortably over his belly. “My mother was the Sorceress Queen Salena’s sister—the Salena who was mother to Queen Andromeda, and the others.”
“I remember. That’s why you call them cousins.”
“Yes, the Tala aren’t so much for royalty, not like Dasnarians, apparently.” He slid me a wicked smile, but I didn’t take the bait. “But we are about power. The more magic we can do, the more forms we can take, the more… rank we have. Salena—she had it all. Magic, foresight, an incredible range of forms. That’s part of how she became queen. With us, the most powerful become our rulers. My mother, well, she didn’t have much ability. No magic, a few forms, nothing like her sister.”
“Ah.” I understood that kind of jealousy.
He nodded. “So she devoted herself to producing powerful babies. She mated with the most powerful sorcerers and prolific shapeshifters. But compatibility is an issue. We’ve all lived inside the magic barrier for so long that we’re terribly inbred.”
“That’s why the babies don’t thrive,” I commented. When he raised a brow at me, I explained. “It happens in some of the Dasnarian ruling families—they’re so intent on keeping their lands and power within the family that they marry brothers to sisters. After a few generations, the babies are born dead, or twisted, or both.”
He stared at me a moment, lip curling. “Now I have an image in my head of bedding my sisters and… eh.” He shuddered. “Thanks a lot for that. Anyway, my mother endured a lot of miscarriages—and babies that didn’t survive long—before she bore Anya, my older sister. Anya was born healthy and lived to adulthood, but she’s, if anything, even less powerful than my mother was. But my mother stuck with the same mate—since at least they were compatible enough to produce a healthy baby, and the magic isn’t predictable, who it settles on and who it doesn’t—and she conceived Zynda and me.”
I blinked. “You’re twins?”
“You didn’t know? No reason you would,” he mused before I could answer. “Yes, a miracle in our small world, healthy twins, and both of us born with indications that we’d have magic aplenty. Zynda shapeshifted first—she always has to be the best at everything—and became a baby hummingbird. You can imagine the trouble that caused.”
I could. “How do you manage a baby like that?” I asked, fascinated.
He smiled, a fondly nostalgic curve to it. “We slept and played inside gauze nets. Some of my first memories are watching those white curtains blow in the breeze.” His smile faded. “Then my own First Form manifested and my mother gave up on me.”
“But why?”
“I could never be King of the Tala. Not with a First Form like that. The Tala would never accept me. Not like King Rayfe with his noble wolf First Form. A born leader, as it were.” He didn’t sound bitter about it, though, just amused. He cocked a brow at me. “You’ve seen for yourself. The gríobhth is… not easily controlled. I can lose myself to it.”
“I think you control it and yourself just fine,” I said staunchly.
He smiled a little, but sadly. “Zynda… My mother held out hope for her to be queen, but even when we were children, Zynda wasn’t interested. She loves to be best, but she also loves the freedom of shapeshifting. She never wanted to rule. When Salena left us, my mother and Zynda had a terrible fight about it. It drove Zynda to the shamans, for which I’ve never forgiven my mother.”
“The shamans are bad?” I asked.
“They’re the ones who cooked her brain into thinking taking Final Form is a good idea.” He shook his head. “She categorically refused to consider competing for the crown, but she’ll sacrifice her freedom to be locked in a dragon’s body for all time. Thick-skulled heroic idiot.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t seem to need me to.
“Then my mother kept trying and trying for new and better children, and ultimately died for it. There’s a waste of a life for you.”
“What about your father?”
“Him?” Zyr shrugged, elaborately. “Never knew him. Mother wouldn’t say, and he wasn’t interested in being more involved than depositing his seed. Like father, like son, eh?”
I didn’t return the smile, fake as it was. “It’s a sad story. My father is the one who gave me the bow, and taught me to shoot. Not common in Dasnaria, but he loved me and wanted me happy. My mother, too.”
“Except they sold you into a sexless, loveless marriage.”
I nearly asked which aspect bothered him more. Instead, I pondered the truth of his words. “I know that it’s as hard for you to understand what my parents wanted for me as it is for me to understand how your parents treated you. In Dasnaria, there aren’t a lot of options for girls. Among the small array of finite futures for me, being married in name only to the brother of the emperor was truly one of the best. I lived at home, with my family, and never had to live full-time in a seraglio with, for example, a mother-in-law who loathed me and had a reputation for skill with poison. I’m not at all sure that’s worse than growing up feeling like my parents didn’t love me enough to even care what happened to me.”
Zyr considered me for a long moment, then looked away. “The meat looks ready,” he said and dished it out into bowls. We ate in silence, he sunk in his thoughts and me turning over what he’d told me, wondering if I’d been too harsh. Feeling like I needed to say something more.
“No wonder you don’t want babies,” I finally said. “Or to know about them, if you have fathered any.” He raised a brow at me, so I went on doggedly. “Who could blame you, with so much pressure? So much potential for sorrow. Maybe Zynda wants to take Final Form to do her part to make up for all those lost children.”
“And I scatter my seed to the wind, making sure I don’t have to witness the results?” He tried to sound mocking, but I heard the old grief beneath.
“I think you’d make an excellent father,” I said. “If you decided you wanted to.”
He took a deep breath and leveled a long look at me. “I…” He seemed to think better of whatever he’d been about to say. “We should get some sleep. It’s a warm night—shall we sleep out here? I can take panther form.”
“I don’t want you to drain your energy before the long flight.
” He seemed like he’d been in other forms a lot the last few days. How much was too much?
He smiled, somewhat grim. “It will be all right. Sleeping beside you as an animal removes… certain temptations.”
My turn to take a deep breath. “Maybe we should change that.”
He eyed me. “What are you saying?”
Now or never. He wasn’t taking my hints, so I’d have to be brave and just say it.
“I’m saying I want you to take my virginity. I want it to be you.”
~ 18 ~
The look he gave me wasn’t pleased. It had a hint of sharpness in it, the way he’d looked when he said I’d given him insult. “You make me sound like a thief poised to rob you.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. The translation is bad—I don’t know how else to phrase it,” Why did this have to be so difficult? After all his flirtation and efforts to seduce me, he should simply take this out of my hands. I tried again. “I mean I want to be your lover. I’m accepting your offer.”
He’d already started shaking his head, one hand straying to the ribbon I’d tied onto his wrist, plucking at it as if he’d like to get it off. “That’s not a good idea.”
The beach seemed to drop a little beneath me, humiliation staining my cheeks hot. “I see.” No doubt my being so unkempt and unlovely repelled him. And seeing me so ill, having to—how had he put it? Wipe my ass—had destroyed all attraction. It was one reason women kept to the seraglio, so the men only saw them perfectly and beautifully presented. “I understand,” I said, then realized I’d repeated myself.
“Get some sleep, gréine,” he said gently. “I’ll clean things up.”
I wrapped myself in the blankets he brought and lay there with my eyes closed.
But it was a long time before I could sleep.
At one point during the night, something woke me, and I startled at the feel of velvety fur under my hand. A familiar purr welled up, the big cat stretching and curling into me, cupping my hand in his curled paws, only a hint of the prick of claws carefully sheathed. The night had cooled, but his heat warmed me. I snuggled closer, musing vaguely how much the purr of the panther sounded like the gríobhth’s.
In the morning, Zyr was back in human form before I woke, making me wonder if I’d dreamed of cuddling with him as the panther. But I never dreamed, so I didn’t think so. A mist had come in during the night, making everything cool and gray.
“Good morning.” Zyr smiled at me with his usual charm, as if he hadn’t rejected me the night before. Though I supposed I’d managed to be polite to him after rejecting his advances so many times. Had he felt this crushed? He hadn’t seemed like it, but if I’d learned anything about Zyr, it was that his mischievous carelessness covered quite a lot of pain. Maybe he’d just meant that sex last night wasn’t a good idea and hadn’t meant never. My eyes fell to his wrist, where I’d tied my ribbon in such a ridiculous burst of sentiment—and it was gone. I shouldn’t feel so bruised. After all, it was only a silly bit of ribbon, without any real value.
“How do you feel?” Zyr asked. His smile had dimmed at whatever of my thoughts showed in my face.
“I feel good,” I answered with forced cheer. No mooning like a heartsick maiden. “Rested and ready for our adventure.”
Fortunately, he accepted that at face value, handing me a bowl of leftover fish, and indicating the mapsticks he’d laid out where he’d been dragging the stick through the gravel the night before. Fog shrouded the beach, obscuring everything beyond a few arms’ lengths, and brought a bit of chill with it. It seemed like a bad omen to me, but I didn’t say so.
“Come look at this,” he said, and I obliged, studying what he’d done. They hadn’t been random circles at all, but some sort of map of his own. “I’ve been thinking about this. The departure point isn’t all that far beyond where we are now, and from what I recall of flying over this area, we’re not going to find another high point for me to take off from. Getting off the ground here will be effort enough that I’d rather not try it more than once. Do you have any objection to us simply striking out across the water once we reach this point?” He poked at it with the stick, and it did indeed seem relatively close.
“I thought you wanted a full night of rest before heading across the water,” I ventured with some hesitation.
He shook that off as unimportant. “We’ve lost so much time here that I don’t think I’d rest well anyway. Who knows what’s going on back at Annfwn?” He gazed down the coast, as if he could see through the morning mists to the cliff city. “I don’t think we’re going to find much of anything in n’Andana, if that’s even where these mapsticks lead.”
“How will you know it’s n’Andana if there’s nothing there?”
“An excellent question. I suppose it would be too much to hope it’s got a big sign saying so, hmm?” He grinned at me, though it lacked his usual humor.
“And I still don’t understand how we can find it if it’s been hidden all this time.”
He shrugged. “Well, the sorcerers and scholars have worked this out and understand it better than I do, but the way some enchantments work is you have to approach from a particular direction.” He tapped the mapsticks. “Which is what these tell us. Also, the thinking goes like this. Deyrr and n’Andana were at war for a very long time, and the ancients of n’Andana implemented a last-ditch solution—they took all the magic in the world and condensed it in a place that’s now Annfwn. So they could starve Deyrr of the magic that made them such a terrible enemy.”
That kind of extreme solution sounded like something out of a Dasnarian tale, so I could believe it. “So n’Andana starved of magic, too?”
He nodded. “Exactly. And dragons are magic, so the people who’d taken Final Form couldn’t shift back to human, so they either died or hibernated beneath the volcanoes.”
That explained a great deal. “But there was still magic in Annfwn.”
“Well, yes—but likely that was a mistake. It seems the Tala were probably n’Andanans who didn’t want to live without magic, so they manipulated the rules and lived within a very small dome of magic.”
Lawless and wild. I’d known it all along. But I didn’t say so to Zyr. “So, if n’Andana was outside that dome of magic, why didn’t anyone find it?”
“There are ways of making spells that last forever, by embedding them in objects—or in the land itself—so that they’re self-sustaining. They can’t be changed or made to do more than that, but they can keep going forever.”
I thought of the Imperial Seraglio and how it stayed warm and green forever. Magic from a time when it was everywhere, perhaps.
“So it could be n’Andana was cloaked in some spell that made everyone forget it existed, and didn’t notice it when they did see it. Then that changed when the barrier around Annfwn expanded outward, bringing magic to everything inside again,” Zyr continued.
“Like putting a spark to a pile of kindling,” I ventured.
“Good analogy.” He poked at his map in speculation. “It could be they forgot about us, too—or didn’t know—so our arrival will be a big surprise. Still, best case scenario, if we do lead back a league of reinforcements, they’ll do Annfwn no good if Deyrr has already overtaken it.”
“Do you have a bad feeling?” I asked, mirroring his worried frown.
Giving me a half smile, he shrugged, but only a little. “I told you, foresight is not one of my gifts.”
“But something is bothering you.”
“Yes.” His frown drowned out what little smile he’d managed. “Not about this, though. I dreamed of being a dragon.”
I didn’t quite follow his concern at first, then I understood. “Zynda?”
He started to nod, then stopped, scrubbing hands over his face. “I don’t know. We’ve never been twins like that, and yet… You dreamed, too. What were yours?”
“I don’t dream,” I replied automatically.
He produced a knowing grin. “So you claim, but
I know you do. Maybe you just don’t remember them.”
I decided not to argue about that. If I had dreams, I’d remember them, so for him to claim otherwise was silliness. I could at least be agreeable—and keep my insecurities to myself. After all, I had been the cause of the delay, and he clearly didn’t want to spend any more time alone with me than he had to. I’d refused him—multiple times—so I could hardly assume the tragic role of the heartbroken maiden. I’d see this mission through, make my attempt to do something worthwhile, and then… go on with my life somehow.
Surely I’d find a man who wanted me, out there somewhere. The idea that I couldn’t picture anyone but Zyr touching me was a temporary one, born of my own infantile attachment to the first man who’d put himself out to care for me.
“I’m fine with your plan,” I told him. The sooner we left, the sooner we’d be done.
We left everything we didn’t absolutely need behind in the cave, nestled in a cache above the tideline. That included the extra blankets, changes of clothes for me, my useless quiver, and all but one flask of water. The dried fish fortunately weighed very little—which, upon reflection, must’ve been Zyr’s clever foresight. His apparently carefree ways seemed to be anything but.
The Arrows of the Heart Page 20