The Wildest Woods

by S. K Munt

  ‘Larkin?’ Cairo called through the door. ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Just a minute…’ I called out, rolling onto my back and drawing my feet up so that I could take a moment to compose myself. I rested my hands on my lower stomach and attempted to knead some of the butterflies that had come to life within it into a deep slumber while I drew in a deep, full breath, but the warm touch of my hands only made it worse, and drew my attention to the fact that there were other areas close by that could do with a bit of fondling too. ‘I’ll be right-’

  But the door open then and with a squeal I bolted upright and then immediately began to tug my skirts down from where they’d gathered around my hips while I’d been reading. I’d done it in order to deflect any unsolicited attention from the area, but my frantic movements drew Cairo’s eyes to my bare thighs immediately, and he didn’t even try to hide his delight as he raked his gaze from them and up to my flushed face.

  ‘Holy shit!’ he leaned against the door and assessed me frankly while I shoved my cuff back up over my brand. ‘Prayer works.’

  ‘Well start praying for a long, happy life because you’re about to be deprived of one!’ I stood up, smoothing my skirts more forcefully. ‘I said, ‘Just a minute,’ you know! Since when does that mean barge in?’

  ‘When it’s mis-heard as: Come on in, which is what I thought you said.’ He rapped on the door with his knuckles as he leaned against the jamb and said. ‘This is thick wood, your highness, and it’s breezy out there so I could barely hear you at all. And although I know that it’s customary to apologise in this sort of circumstance…’ his eyes flickered up and down me, and I felt like I didn’t have a stitch on. ‘I’ve got to admit that I’m not sorry at all. In fact, I’d very much like to know what you would have done in the following minute, if I’d left you to your own delicious devices…’ he waved his hand at me. ‘Feel free to demonstrate it too- I’d very much like to know how to drive you wild.’

  I scowled at him, turning to neaten the two stacks of the manuscript so that I wouldn’t lose my place. The larger half was what I’d already read, and the other stuff, which was only about eight pages thick, was all I had left to go. ‘I wasn’t doing anything that would appeal to your dirty mind or drive me wild,’ I said crossly. ‘I was just trying to finish this book that I’m editing and-’

  ‘Is it a Cookbook?’ Cairo asked, sauntering into my room. ‘I know that when I’m reading cookbooks, I like to take breaks so that I can touch my-’

  ‘I wasn’t touching anything,’ I snarled, whirling on him and poking him in the nose before he could get close enough to see what I was reading. ‘I had a sore back and so I was stretching it when you-’

  ‘Interrupted?’ Cairo bit his lip and hoisted his brow as he stepped in closer, and the moment I smelled the wine on his breath, I knew I was done for. He’d obviously been at the Inn while he’d been waiting for our rendezvous, and that was going to make talking to him a nightmare because I knew from past experience alcohol completely and utterly deprived him of his inhibitions, in addition to making his accent heavier and sexier. ‘Well I can help- just show me where to rub and-’

  ‘Captain Kingslater, you are forgetting yourself,’ I said firmly, and a bit of the silvery sparkle faded from his eyes as I took him by the hand and led him out my door. ‘But the wind on the terrace ought to be crisp enough to bring you to your senses while we-’

  ‘I’m not drunk,’ Cairo scoffed, yanking his arm out of my grip, but taking my hand and kissing it. ‘I’ve had three wines- it takes a lot more than that to write off a man my size, you know.’

  ‘But it takes half that to loosen that tongue of yours enough to get you into trouble,’ I reminded him as I led him across the gusty catwalk and towards the central tower. It had been closed off inside the castle so no one could get up there, but I’d made good use of the cavity under the floorboards so now, it was a safe. ‘And if you want to prove me wrong, then act like a perfect gentleman for the next half an hour, and try not to fall off the edge, okay? It really is windy up here and only one of us has a set of wings.’

  Cairo cocked his head as I released is hand and knelt by the bolt on the floor so that I could slide it back. ‘Are you saying that you wouldn’t catch me if I fell?’

  ‘I don’t know if I could,’ I said, lifting the trapdoor and motioning for him to look inside it too. I smiled a small, warm smile as he knelt, peering into the dark cavity below with unfocused eyes. ‘But how’s this for a safety net, hmm? Like I said, it’s considerably more than spare change, but the question is… is it enough to restore your treasury to its former glory?’

  Cairo leaned more over the hole, gasped, and then reached it, retrieving one of the gold bars and holding it up to the light. ‘Is this real?’ he demanded breathlessly.

  ‘My hand got covered with a nasty rash after I held it in my hand to test its weight so yes, I think they’re all real.’ I wet my lips and realised that my heart was pounding hopefully. ‘There are thirty of them in total, and each one is stamped to say that it is one hundred grams. They’re all a bit dented and worse for wear as that one is, but they’re still worth something, right?’

  ‘You have thirty of these in here?’ Cairo was as white as a sheet. ‘Larkin, do you have any idea what that’s worth?’

  I bit my lip. ‘Hundreds of thousands, I hope.’

  ‘Try just over two million dollars!’ Cairo put the bar down and grasped my shoulders over the hole, forgetting his strength in his exuberance and damn near lifting me off the ground. His smile was ear to ear, and my heart began to race with excitement- he really was as thrilled as I’d hoped he would be! ‘Where did you find this?’

  ‘Back in The Wastelands,’ I admitted, as Cairo pulled me across the void and onto his knee, which was bouncing happily. ‘Last summer, a group of us decided to go for a hike back the way we’d come, wanting to see how much of the land had changed thanks to Satan’s intervention. The wastelands had been covered in snow before, but it’s more like a marshland now thanks to the thaw, so there are a lot of ruins to explore. I think a harbour had been there once back in the time before, because there were a lot of rusted old boats lying around... but we found a truck buried in the mud that, although dented and ruined on the outside, seemed to be almost completely sealed shut. We were able to break into it, and that was where we found the gold, all packed away in odd little containers that were sealed too. There was other stuff in there too- some jewels that were mostly tarnished, some old guns that were completely ruined and a lot of pulpy stuff that Bastien said would have been paper money once-’

  ‘It was a secure truck- meant for transferring precious items,’ Cairo said quickly, and I nodded because that was the conclusion that we’d arrived at also.

  ‘Bastien said back in the olden days, humans used them all the time. Only it would have been rare to find one with bars of gold stored inside it, because those things rarely left their vaults.’

  ‘Someone would have been trying to transfer their riches to wherever they were while the world was falling apart,’ Cairo agreed. ‘Only they never received them. Wow.’ The pirate leaned over me, staring down into the safe again. ‘This is amazing, Larkin. I mean, I’ve heard of people finding more than this, but not often and not recently.’

  ‘And you really think it’s worth over two million dollars?’ I asked, and Cairo nodded quickly, squeezing me tightly.

  ‘At its current market value, maybe even more than that.’ He turned to me, grinning dopily but looking a lot more sober now. ‘This is quite a find, your highness. I could buy anything you desire for you now- and then some!’

  ‘I desire to repay you for the way you have helped me!’ I pointed out. ‘So tell me honestly: what was your treasury worth before you used your own money to make my ends meet? Is half of this going to be enough to square us off, or do you need more?’

  Cairo drew back, eyebrows lifting. ‘You’re not serious! Larkin, I know you joked about giving me ha
lf of your finds before but that’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard!’

  ‘Why?’ I demanded, tummy tightening at the way he accented my name. ‘You helped me get on my feet, didn’t you? I wouldn’t have had the time to go exploring The Wastelands in the first place, if you and your crews hadn’t returned to Raphael to help us construct everything we needed so! Hell, I’d still be trying to construct huts out of mud and sticks!’

  ‘That was not a million dollar’s worth of work-’

  ‘Actually, I think it was rather more than that,’ I said quickly. ‘Kohén might have left me out of important matters back in Eden in the end, but I read the newspapers, you know. If it cost the Barachiel treasury four million to construct Nitika in the desert, then this place is worth at least six; especially if you take the mines that you helped us establish into consideration.’

  ‘Satan did most of the hardest stuff though, and your people worked every bit as hard as mine did, and more constantly! Reward them.’

  ‘I do- every day of their lives.’ I cupped his face and forced him to look into my eyes. ‘Now I want to reward you.’ Cairo’s eyes dropped to my mouth and though I stiffened, I didn’t draw back. ‘No, I’m not going to reward you like that,’ I whispered, for I wasn’t going to give him a kiss as payment any faster than I would sell off the Barachiel diamonds because both acts were forms of prostitution in my eyes. ‘I want to do something for you that will improve the quality of your life, not complicate it further.’

  Cairo looked down at my mouth again, then up to my eyes. ‘A freely given kiss from you would help me sleep at night… is that not improving the quality of my life?’

  I drew back, making a face. ‘Are you seriously telling me that you’d trade a million dollars for a kiss from me?’

  ‘Are you seriously acting surprised, given how the last men that fell under your spell evidently traded eleven million dollars worth of diamonds for a lifetime with you?’

  I scowled at Cairo, thinking of the crown that I only wore on formal occasions. ‘That wasn’t a sensible trade, you know.’

  ‘I concur.’ Cairo brushed my hair over my ear. ‘You’re worth so much more than that- you should have demanded a crown.’

  I averted my eyes, not wanting to think about Karol’s engagement ring and of how close I had come to being offered the position of Crowned Princess of Arcadia. Cairo got a lot of updates about what was going on in Calliel, so I’d heard reports to indicate that Kohl was thriving in the Corps in Pacifica, that Karol was a very high-handed ruler and that Kohén had disappeared from the headlines completely… but I’d never heard the fact that Karol had been about to propose to me mentioned, so I assumed that it was being kept a secret by Karol, Ora, and whoever it was that he’d gone to for permission to marry me. And so long as they were keeping it a secret, so would I.

  I suppose I could have raised hell in Arcadia and exposed the Barachiels for what they were if I spilled all of their secrets to every ship in Cairo’s fleet in the hopes of getting the rumour mill churning against them, but I’d held my tongue on the matter, even amongst my own people, because I knew that it would be easier to keep up the pretence that I was dead or at least, harmless, if the rumours that circulated about me and the Barachiel’s continued to be told from their point of view only without a counterpoint ever being made that could be traced back to Raphael. Yes it bothered me to know that they’d twisted around the entire situation to make it seem like it had been completely my fault, and it bothered me even more to know that Amelia-Rose and her father were living in Eden permanently now when she deserved to be rotting in jail, but revealing the sins that had been committed by Calliel’s so-called nobles would put my people in danger and that would bother me a hell of a lot more so I kept my mouth shut. A lot of people in Raphael still wanted to start a war with the rulers of Calliel one day, (once we were strong enough to do so) but a lot more didn’t, and so I took a lot of measures to keep my secrets and the peace; safe in the knowledge that the majority of Libertie’s citizens agreed that the best revenge was to live well.

  For instance, everyone that entered Raphael had to be scanned by Sam when they departed to make sure that they had no intention of mentioning me and my kingdom to anybody, and every resident had memorised a ‘fake’ history of our city to offer as an explanation to anyone that might happen by, by chance. We had contingency plan after contingency plan in place- right down to emergency exits and weapon’s stores- and I’d even gone as far to decree that every building erected in Arcadia had to look rough and unfinished from above, just as the palace did, so that it would look more like ruins from the air than the blossoming Utopia that it was.

  People had laughed when I’d ruled that, but a plane had flown overhead at the end of winter and it had put the fear of God into everyone- inspiring them to plant rooftop gardens and to build their various businesses into clearings that were nestled amidst leafy trees. Luckily for us, the entire region had been blanketed in snow so it and the heavy mist had hopefully concealed our roads, fields, and lake from above that morning, but none of us had slept very well until April, when three months had passed without another plane returning. If they’d seen us, they apparently hadn’t seen anything worth investigating and until I had an army of my own, I wanted to keep it that way.

  Yes, I’d made a lot of progress with the land that Satan had defrosted for me, and I felt a little prouder every day about what I’d accomplished, but the fact that I’d built my kingdom upon a stack of favours kept me up at night the way Cairo swore that fantasies of kissing me did. The Captain was right to say that my people and I had worked hard to get Libertie to where it was, but how would we ever be able to feel truly proud of what we’d accomplished, knowing that Satan had done so much for us in the beginning, and that a gang of pirates had chipped in to help us finish off the rest since? It would be different if they lived here and got to reap what they’d helped us sow, but they’d done all that they had done for a slightly increased wage and their Captain’s respect, and I knew that they deserved more compensation than that.

  Cairo frowned then, examining my face closely. ‘What’s going on in that head of yours, Larkin? I’ve told you that I want you to keep the money, so as the ruler of an independent nation, that offer ought to fill you with joy and relief because it will help you to provide for them for decades to come. Yet, you pucker your face like I have said something cruel…’ He tilted my face up to his, frowning. ‘Did I upset you by insinuating that your affection could be bought with money? By reminding you of how the Barachiel’s did the same?’ His brows nudged together. ‘Or were you hoping that by paying me off, you’d release yourself from the private transaction we made back when we first met?’

  I sucked in a breath, meeting his gaze directly. ‘Cairo, no, I wouldn’t do that. I remember the transaction that you speak of, and I assure you that it has never occurred to me to try and weasel out of it.’

  He raised an eyebrow, looking sceptical. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ I insisted, for it was the truth. ‘I’ve made an arrangement like that before, and though I kicked myself for making it every day after, I swear to you that that is not how I feel about ours: If it ever occurs to me to get myself a romantic entanglement, I would be lucky, indeed, to have a man like yourself to get myself tangled up with, and I’m more than aware of that.’

  Cairo’s face tightened as he searched my eyes again. ‘So you truly haven’t developed feelings for anyone else?’

  I frowned. ‘Who on earth would I develop feelings for? All the boys here that are close to me in age treat me like I’m their boss not their peer and I’m glad for it, because I haven’t taken interest in any of them.’ I touched his face, puzzled by how relieved he looked. ‘Besides, every woman in the kingdom wants you, you know, and with good reason. I am afraid of falling in love and terrified of physical intimacy- but I’m not blind or stupid.’

  ‘Good,’ Cairo said shortly, making me laugh. ‘I’d hate
to think that my considerable good qualities were completely lost on you.’

  ‘They’re not,’ I assured him, but then I bit my lip. ‘But I still want to repay you financially to make what is between us feel like more than a transaction, and I’m afraid that I will not be talked out of it. So you have two options- take at least half of these bars of gold off my hands, or know that I will get someone that is not allergic to them to dispense them between your men.’

  Cairo snorted. ‘That’s not being generous- you know damn well it’ll all go back into your Inn.’

  I sighed. ‘Then take it yourself!’

  ‘No.’

  A frisson of irritation ran through me. ‘Take it yourself... or I’ll tell your men that you turned it down!’

  ‘Do that if you must- but I don’t think you’ll feel very good about yourself or your generosity after they beat me to a bloody pulp... do you?’

  ‘Right now I can’t say that I’d object to seeing your ass kicked!’

  Cairo chuckled and pulled gently on my hair. ‘Go on then…’ he leaned his head into the crook of my shoulder and made a big deal of inhaling my scent. ‘Feed me to the wolves, your highness. In fact, I’ll throw myself at their fists, safe in the knowledge that you’ll feel so guilty after that you’ll probably come to my deathbed in order to kiss me goodbye…’

  I tittered to think of how many men it would take to beat Cairo to death. ‘Are you sure you were born to be a pirate, and not an actor?’

  Cairo looked up into my eyes, and his grey ones were soft and warm. ‘Which career is more likely to impress you? I’ll do whatever it takes.’

  ‘Neither. I’ve had my fill of men that are manipulative and overdramatic.’ I pushed him off me, and got to my feet, thinking the matter over. I had an idea, but it was making me tingle with dread and something else I wasn’t eager to label.