She meant it, too, gray eyes sharp as a silver blade. No matter that Ursula claimed the priorities of the High Throne overrode all else, where she loved, she loved fiercely and without reservation. And as Danu’s avatar, she couldn’t abide injustice, especially wrongs against other women. I laughed, running a hand down her back, more in love with this warrior of a woman than ever.
“Jepp would never forgive us,” I pointed out.
“Jepp,” she said reflectively. “How she can love a man like that?”
“Because he’s changed.” I held up my hands when her gaze narrowed and sparked. “He has. You have to realize he was only a youth, too. At seventeen, he had years of bulk and fighting skill on me, but he was, if anything, more selfish, more narrow-minded, able to see only one path, one ambition.”
She snorted, but didn’t interrupt.
“He believed that he’d be made heir in Hestar’s place, as a reward for bringing us back.”
“Would your father have done that?”
I lifted a shoulder and let it fall. “Who knows? Kral believed he would, and his mother Hulda molded him to want nothing but that, except perhaps her approval—which, along with her love, hinged entirely on Kral ascending to the throne instead of Hestar. Kral…didn’t have it in him to have compassion for our sister. None of us were raised to have compassion for the weak, or for the women we believed existed to slake our needs and nothing else.”
She contemplated that—and me. “However did you emerge from that as the man you are now?”
I refilled my goblet and hers. “I broke into pieces and put myself back together in another pattern.”
“I see. So, Kral had you trapped and captive…?”
“Kral underestimated her. It never occurred to him that she’d act without my help, so he left her for the night in her own room at the inn and made me sleep in his.” I raised my brows. “Anything else wouldn’t have been proper.”
“She escaped in the night?” Ursula breathed, a hint of delight in it.
“She did.” I couldn’t help smiling also. “She must’ve climbed out the windows and made her way over the rooftops. No one saw or heard a thing. She was a dancer, did I mention that? I saw her dance the ducerse the night before her wedding, and she was stunning. You would appreciate the athletic skill of it. She wore bells, but danced so that they remained silent until she allowed them to chime.” I shook my head, remembering Jenna, her ivory hair like a banner of silk, gleaming with pearls and sparkling with diamonds, dancing as I’d never seen anyone dance, before or since.
“In the morning she was gone, leaving only that diamond ring behind. She arranged it just so, in the carcass of the fowl Kral had eaten for dinner. You should’ve seen Kral’s face.” I laughed, and Ursula laughed with me, the light of vengeance bright in her eyes.
“Good girl,” she murmured. “Good for you.” Her expression sharpened. “Surely Kral searched for her.”
“Of course—and dragged me with him, also of course. She wasn’t on the transportation I’d booked. No one had seen her.”
Ursula looked interested, loving the puzzle. “She left the diamond but had the other jewels, and you have to be talking sailing ships. So, she set sail for somewhere else.”
I lifted one shoulder and let it fall. “Or she was enslaved.”
Ursula frowned, shocked out of her reverie. “Excuse me?”
“You, yourself, accused me of being from a race of slavers when we first met,” I pointed out. “While not entirely accurate, it’s also not entirely untrue. My sister was a lovely, nubile young woman, clearly of gentle birth, with no protection, no way to defend herself beyond a few last-resort moves I showed her with a dagger.”
Ursula smiled briefly. “Of course you did. But she might’ve found friends. There are good people in the world, too.”
I touched her cheek. “You are the idealist, though you try to act so tough.”
She narrowed her eyes in menace. “I am tough.”
“You are,” I conceded. “My sister… was not.” I could only wish she’d been trained as Ursula had, to be a warrior, to survive.
“I don’t know, Harlan.” Ursula thoughtfully turned the goblet in her hands. “The woman you describe is no fragile flower. She gutted it out on that ride, gave up the drugs when she had to be in horrendous pain—climbed out a window and disappeared. She sounds like a survivor to me.”
“Then why didn’t I find her? Why didn’t she find me?” I tossed back the rest of my wine, the grit in the dregs of it scraping my throat.
“I take it you looked.”
“Later, yes. After I left the third time.”
“The third?”
“Yes. So, once Kral—to his intense fury and frustration, which I greatly enjoyed—couldn’t find any trace of our sister, we journeyed back to the Imperial Palace. No surprise, though I went peaceably enough, all was not forgiven.” I smiled without humor as Ursula’s gaze darkened. “My father, the emperor; Empress Hulda; my brother Hestar; Kral—they all brought considerable pressure on me to reveal where my sister had gone.”
“You didn’t tell them you didn’t know?”
“Sure I did. They didn’t believe me. If I hadn’t helped her final escape, then they’d have to accept that a young woman, barely more than a girl, whom they’d devoted enormous effort into molding to be obedient and helpless, had somehow succeeded at defying them all. Which is more likely?”
She nodded, slowly, then looked at me with concern. “What pressure did they put on you?”
I lifted a shoulder and let it fall. “It was long ago, and the young man I was no longer needs defending.”
“I’ll decide what needs defending. What pressure?”
“The usual, Essla,” I told her wearily. “What you’d imagine—beatings, flogging, starvation, back-breaking work, humiliating me by stripping me of rank, of what little power I possessed.”
“I’m so sorry, Harlan,” she murmured, looking bereft.
“As I said, it was long ago, and it did a great deal to strengthen me. I learned a lot about myself and what I could withstand. I discovered they couldn’t do anything to me that I wouldn’t willingly suffer, as I always had in my mind’s eye how much worse my sister had suffered, simply for existing. Eventually, however, they discovered something I couldn’t bear.”
“Your mother, and your other sisters,” Ursula guessed, then smiled ruefully at what she saw in my face. “Standard technique for breaking someone, yes? If you can’t break them, hurt someone else in their stead. I bet it worked, too.”
“It did. You know, through all that, I still hadn’t seen Helva. She was only fifteen and not old enough to leave the seraglio and attend the wedding festivities. But they brought her out to be flogged. Her and Inga both. I couldn’t stop it.”
I thought I’d done well, making it through the story thus far—past what I’d thought were the worst parts—without giving into the wracking grief. But the stricken look on Ursula’s face did me in. I’d shed tears for her before, and now she wept for me, mirroring my terrible sorrow.
“I couldn’t stop it,” I told her again. Suddenly weak with the memory, I slid down the wall to sit on the carpeted floor. Ursula sat with me, her silver-clad legs crossed under the split gown, looking almost girlish, nothing of the regal queen or vicious warrior in her now.
She took one of my hands in hers. “No, Harlan, you couldn’t have stopped it. They did it, not you. You bear no guilt for this.”
I nodded so she’d feel better, though I knew the guilt was in fact all mine, and knuckled away the tears. “Fortunately, they didn’t whip Inga and Helva much.” I barked out a laugh, bitter. “Much. How’s that for temporizing?”
“It’s meaningful,” Ursula insisted. “Your sisters were young, naïve, tender—it would’ve been easy to make them cry without hurting them severely, especially if the goal was to goad you.”
“I’m not sure that helps.”
“Set it aside for now, but you might find it does help, over time.”
“When did you get so smart?” I touched her cheek and she smiled at me, watery.
“From being around you, obviously.” She cocked her head. “Why didn’t you lie, give them some story for where she’d gone?”
“Two reasons: first, because I didn’t know. I was afraid of inadvertently putting them on her trail. Second, I knew it wouldn’t end anything. When they didn’t find her, they’d just come back to me, and do it all again, only escalating faster. The Konyngrrs don’t give up easily.” I gave her a humorless smile. “I come by my stubbornness honestly.”
“So you had to stop it. The Skablykrr training.”
I sobered. “Exactly. I stole out of the Imperial Palace for the second time in my life—which, as you may recall from Jepp’s reports, was by no means an easy task—and I spent six months with the monks of Skablykrr.”
“And no one found you?”
“Oh, they knew where I was, all right, but even the emperor didn’t dare violate the sanctity of the Skablykrr. And when I returned to the Imperial Palace, they left me alone.”
“But you left a third time. The final time.”
“Yes. I couldn’t live there. Couldn’t be part of any of that any longer. I stayed a few months, recruited some friends, and we stole away. Had some adventures.” I grinned, crookedly, and she smiled back. “I traveled the world, looking for my sister. Eventually I formed the Vervaldr, taking any job in a place I hadn’t yet searched. Later I ended up here, thinking I might find her somewhere in these lands. Instead, hlyti has guided my footsteps to you.”
“And your family just let you go?”
“Oh, they’d stripped me of my rank and disinherited me already. And they knew they’d get nothing out of me since the vows I’d taken couldn’t be broken.”
“Couldn’t?” she repeated with emphasis.
I cupped her hands in mine, looking into her gray eyes, so keen and troubled. “Can’t. It’s nearly a magical binding—could be magical, for all I know—but the information I consigned to secrecy is beyond my ability to speak. I literally cannot say my eldest sister’s name, or certain details I omitted. Even telling you all of this has been … painful in a way I can’t quite describe.”
“Thank you,” she said gravely, gripping my hands. “I apologize that I ever doubted you.”
“You had good reason,” I said gravely. “I’m sorry for it.”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t think I did have good reason. But I can promise I’ll never doubt you again.”
I frowned a little. “Don’t be hasty in—”
“I swear,” she interrupted me viciously, “that I will never doubt you again, as long as I live. In the name of the boy you were and the girl she was, and the man you’ve made yourself into, and the woman she is, out there somewhere, I so swear.”
My heart, so raw and bleeding, felt as if it swelled in my chest. “I love you, Ursula, with everything in me. The Elskastholrr is a vow like the others, something that cannot be broken, but even if it could be, I’ll always love you. You are the best part of me. You can send me away from you, but know that it would end me. Nothing they could do to me could break me, but losing you from my life surely would.”
She let go of our joined hands to crawl back onto my lap, straddling my outstretched legs and framing my face in her hands. The summer sun set her hair on fire and her eyes shone as clear and bright as Danu’s sword. “I will never send you away, Harlan. You might wish to go, but it would break me to lose you, too.”
“I’ll never leave you willingly,” I breathed, her lips coming tantalizingly close.
“Don’t make that promise just yet,” she urged, “but would you make me forget, for a while? I want to be only us, if only for another hour.”
I didn’t ask what she meant, for I knew we had yet to get to the second issue she’d closeted us to discuss. Instead I did as my queen commanded, taking her fierce mouth with mine, savoring her heat and flavor, relishing how she surrendered to my touch. My Essla, who melted only for me. Her lips parted, bringing me in, her hands working to unlace my shirt, caressing my chest. She’d long ago discovered how her calluses aroused me and she used them to good effect, with urgency and skill.
I groaned, loosing the chains I’d kept on the desire evoked by the healing, the need flooding me. For her and only her. My warrior queen. With a growl, I tumbled her onto her back, catching her wrists and pinning them. She glared at me in defiance. “Do your worst,” she hissed, using her lithe strength to attempt to squirm out of my grip. Not quite shapeshifting, but slithery and as difficult to contain.
I bared my teeth at her. “You awakened the dragon, little hawk, and I plan to eat you alive.”