15
Marin didn’t say anything, only worked on spreading on a healing cream that felt like paradise, then wrapping my thighs with soft bandages.
“I didn’t mean to be cruel to him,” I told her, feeling I needed to explain. “I was really trying not to.”
“Sometimes it’s not about you,” she said, more than a little terse. The she blew out a breath and patted the outside of my leg. “It’s a difficult lesson to learn, but often how people behave is all about their own wounds and has nothing to do with what you do or don’t say.”
“Oh.” I turned that over, but my mind was muddy with exhaustion. “I’m so glad the baby is okay. Maybe this mission was a bad idea.”
“I can’t speak my mind without doubting my king, but this venture could have benefited from better planning.” She sniffed and wiped her nose, which was red from the cold. When she said “my king,” I knew she meant Erich and not Uorsin.
“Well, we were already here—the way was so close.” And I’d wanted to go. Had pushed for it. Glorianna willed it, but I wasn’t going to say that to Marin, especially as she seemed less angry with me finally.
“I suppose that’s true, but there’s no never mind. You can’t possibly ride again tomorrow. There won’t be a mission now.”
That woke me up. “I’ll be fine in the morning,” I insisted.
She gave me an incredulous look. “Shall I unwrap these bandages and show you how your poor legs look? I’d tear into you for being such a fool if I didn’t know you did this partly because of what I said to you, to prove yourself to us. You’re blistered as badly as someone burned in a fire. The disruption of the tissue goes deep. We’ll be fighting infection as it is.”
I’d never really been hurt before, so I didn’t realize how bad it was. She’d said the White Monk’s scars came from burns. “Will it leave scars?” I levered myself up to see, but my slim thighs were wrapped in the bandages, the white of the cotton nearly the same as my skin. Strangely, I kind of hoped there would be a mark, an unexpected longing for some sort of permanence.
“Not if I can help it,” Marin declared, as if I’d questioned her abilities. She handed me some tea that had been steeping and covered me with several blankets. “Drink this and sleep. We’ll make decisions tomorrow.”
Come morning, I was not fine. I lay there, sweating with fever, while Marin and the White Monk argued over me.
“Graves says we cannot stay here!” the White Monk insisted, all semblance of the diffident priest gone. “The family already wonders who slept in the stable. Amelia will be discovered and that will go very badly for us all.”
“Not so badly as the Prin—Amelia losing the child or her own life!” Marin snapped, nearly nose to nose with him. Her broad figure would have eclipsed his, had he not been so much taller, bending over to skewer her with that apple-green gaze.
“She’s not safe either way. Better to go.”
“Go where? We should take her down to Ordnung.”
“And say what? ‘Oops, look who we found in the forest. Sorry’?”
“Does it even matter?” Marin gestured to me under my pile of blankets. “Look at her! We have no choice.”
He did look at me, a muscle in his scarred cheek jumping with anger. Then his gaze softened and he dropped down beside me, once again smoothing my hair from my forehead. “Here we are, debating this as if you’re not even here. What do you say, brave girl?”
I didn’t feel brave at the moment. In fact, facing my father’s rage at my disobedience was the last thing I felt up to doing. Had Andi felt this way? All of a sudden, I understood how she did it. Not kill Hugh, but defy our father. It’s not always a huge decision, like you wake up one day and know what you must do. Instead it kind of happens by accident, because you’re just fumbling along, trying to do the best thing.
“I don’t want to go back,” I told him. “I’m so sorry I screwed this up, but I want to complete my mission. I need to do this.”
He nodded. Was that approval in his eyes—and why did it matter to me what he thought? It mattered, though, that he’d asked for, and apparently would abide by, my decision.
“Well, you can’t, missy,” Marin said. “You can’t sit on a horse and we have no other way to carry you through the snow.
“I can help her.”
At first I thought the White Monk meant that he would carry me, as he’d done the night before, but that would be impossible, even as strong as he was.
“How?” Marin oozed cynicism.
“Leave us for a bit.”
“Absolutely not.” She folded her arms over her substantial bosom. “I cannot possibly leave Amelia alone with you, even if you are a priest of Glorianna.”
Neither of us spoke the rest—that he’d likely lied about that. Glorianna’s church didn’t accept escaped prisoners.
“Do you worry I’ll impregnate her with my bastard seed?” he tossed at her with impatience.
“That’s not the point.”
He ignored her and spoke only to me. “Do you trust me, Ami?”
I searched those odd eyes. They were the bright spot in his angular, corrugated face. As with the lighthouses on the craggy coast near Windroven, beacons cutting through the storms and fog. I shouldn’t trust him, this criminal who’d lied about who he was—probably for this very reason, to insinuate himself into my company. It seemed clear that had been his agenda all along. What remained obscure was why.
And yet, he’d been bare-hearted honest with me in a way no one else ever had. He never fawned over me or praised my beauty. Sometimes I thought those flashes of hatred were because of how I looked or acted—but they were sincere, gut reactions.
I did trust him.
“If I agree, will we go on to Annfwn?”
The scar across his lip tugged and twitched up into his half smile. “Yes. Yes, we absolutely will.”
“Then yes.”
“I don’t like this,” Marin grumped.
“You don’t have to, old woman,” the White Monk said over his shoulder. “Go away. You can stand outside the door, in case she cries rape.”
“Why can’t I stay? I won’t be in the way.”
He just stood and regarded her. I had a sense of the implacable stare-down he gave her because the stalwart Marin shook her head in disgust and left, grabbing her cloak and muttering about how she should never have left home. The White Monk moved a heavy grain bucket in front of the door and returned to me.
“What are you going to do?” I ventured, my fingers curling into the blankets up under my chin. It did unsettle me, to be alone with him. Really, the only man I’d ever been alone with before was Hugh.
The White Monk raised his eyebrows, punctuating the expression with a sardonic twist of his lips. “Magic.”
I remembered how my blood had unsealed, then resealed the tile. “Okay,” I answered, which wasn’t what he expected.
“I’m going to have to raise your skirts and undo the bandages.” He regarded me steadily, waiting for me to object. But I’d figured as much when I agreed.
“Help me sit up, then. I want to see.”
He did, mounding a blanket behind me so I leaned comfortably against the stable wall. I kept the blankets over my lap and pulled up the hem of the nightgown I’d changed into. The White Monk averted his gaze while I bunched the cloth and some of the blanket over my crotch, for what little modesty I could salvage. Fortunately my flesh there only felt bruised and sore. The worst damage was where my thighs had rubbed against the saddle, the coarse cloth of my borrowed pants acting as sandpaper between, from the rounds just above my knees up to the fullest swells before where my legs hollowed out again to meet the pelvis.
He knelt between my spread legs and my face grew hot. He touched me with impersonal fingers, though, unwrapping the bandages with gentle care, commenting that we’d want to reuse them, to give me some protection. The innermost layer came away wet with yellow fluid and spots of blood.
“Dear Glorianna,” I whispered at the sight of it. My flesh looked like a raw side of meat, the skin ragged at the edges. Even I didn’t understand how I’d kept riding.
“Pain is funny that way.” The White Monk finished unwrapping the other leg. “After a while, you don’t feel it. Especially once you’ve decided you can’t do anything to stop it.”
I wanted to ask if he spoke from experience, but of course he did.
“This might sting, quite a bit. You can’t cry out. Do you want something to bite down on?”
“Can I try to see if I can do without?”
He shook his head, laughing a little under his breath. “Of course you want to try. I thought I’d gotten this pretty, pampered princess and she turns out to be a badger in disguise.”
Oddly this pleased me, though I knew it shouldn’t. Badgers were well-known for their irascible tempers and fierce claws. He flexed his fingers, rubbed his hands together, and laid his hand over the weeping corroded expanse of my inner thigh.
It did hurt, and I clamped my teeth together over my cry of pain. His gaze flicked up to my face, assessed, then returned to focus on my wounds. Heat flowed from him to me, little lightning bolts of fire pricking my skin and making my leg jump. I couldn’t hold it still, and with his free hand, he clamped down on my calf, pinning my splayed-open leg to the floor.
I understood he needed to do that, but something about the way he knelt between my spread thighs, holding me open for him, reminded me of those intimate dark nights with Hugh. My woman’s parts heated, all wrong in this moment, but I found myself pulsing with longing to be touched again. Touched the way Hugh had touched me, what I’d never have again.
The White Monk’s gaze returned to my face, a thread of something dark beneath, and I wondered if he sensed how I felt. The thrilling vibrations of the magic ran up and down my leg, coiling deep into my sex. I had to restrain a moan.
At least the pain was gone.
I stared at him, our eyes locked, and I shuddered under his hands. His lips parted and I thought he might kiss me.
“Other side,” he said.
Bemused, I looked down at my leg. The skin looked pink and tender but was whole again.
“Praise Glorianna,” I breathed.
“Glorianna has nothing to do with this. Healing is not Her provenance.”
“All things under the sun are Glorianna’s provenance,” I reminded him.
He laughed that under-the-breath chuckle. “We are not under the sun, are we?”
Well, only because we were inside. “Who, then?” I challenged him, gasping a little as he arranged my still-injured thigh to his liking, pinning my knee down in advance this time and sending a surge of longing through my intimate folds, hidden away from sight.
He took a breath, seeming to need to calm himself. Then he looked at me, and that current of something ran stronger, pulsing through him. “Her dark sister, Moranu,” he answered—her name sounding like a prayer—and put his hot hand on my wound.
I threw back my head, straining not to make a sound. The pain spiraled through the desire until I couldn’t tell them apart. I came undone under his touch, my breath coming hard and fast. When he took his hand away, I managed to focus on his face. Sweat rolled in beads down his face, tracking sideways over one scar. He panted, too, as if he’d run a race. The skin on that leg gleamed pristine again, if terribly pink.
“How does it feel?” he asked, gaze riveted on my thighs.
“It doesn’t hurt.”
“Good. It will be tender still, but that’s the best we can do.” Cutting away the fouled part of the bandages, he rewrapped my thighs and I concentrated on not squirming. A hungry, dark part of me wanted to press my sex against his hand, as an animal would, wanting only in the moment, thinking nothing of the future or what was right or appropriate. I hoped he wasn’t aware of it. Then a thought occurred to me.
“Is this why you had Marin leave?”
“I didn’t want her to see exactly what I’d do, yes.” He didn’t look at me. “Surely you know how the folk of the Twelve Kingdoms feel about magic.”
“I mean—you knew how I’d react.”
His eyes found mine. They looked like molten glass. “You’re never quite what I expect, Ami.”
He set to work on the other bandage, the unspoken words uncomfortable between us.
“I didn’t expect it, either,” I confessed to him, unwilling to leave it unsaid. “But then I—no other man has been so close to me, down there, this way.”
I sensed more than saw that he raised his eyebrows. “Don’t tell me you’re a virgin. Even Glorianna doesn’t work that way.”
I blushed, sorry I’d pursued the conversation, wishing I could close my legs. “No. No—I mean . . .” I sighed. “You understand how it works, I’m sure. Hugh didn’t have to be so close to me, like that.”
He stopped, his hand still half on the bandage, fingertips brushing the skin in the hollow of my inner thigh, stroking me a little, though I thought he didn’t realize it. That hot, dark thing in him ran strong, and he smelled of sweet smoke. This is how lust looks. He swallowed visibly, his lean and bristled throat moving with it. “Did your husband never sit between your thighs like this, hold your knees open and place his mouth on you?”
“Glorianna no!”
My face flamed hot. My ladies had sometimes giggled over such things, but I thought they were mad stories. Jokes. But the White Monk wasn’t joking.
Embarrassment found refuge in offended outrage, and I jerked away, standing and pulling my nightgown into place. “I grant that you didn’t know Prince Hugh, but he was a fine, noble man who loved me. He would never have treated me like a . . .” I floundered, grasping for the right word. Trollop. Whore. Slut. All so ugly.
“Like a real woman,” the White Monk finished, as if that were the only possible, natural ending to my sentence.
Where were my clothes? I hated that his words echoed some of my disloyal thoughts, that Hugh had treated me as a precious doll and not . . . like a real woman. “That is not what I meant!”
“Perhaps not, but only because you haven’t experienced what is real. What truly passes between a man and a woman when they’re not spinning sugar-coated fantasies for each other.”
“And what do you know of it?” I flung at him. “You’re consecrated to Glorianna’s service.” Too late it came back to me that he was a fraud, a criminal masquerading as a priest. The words hung between us, a challenge.
He inclined his head. “Do you imagine that all of Glorianna’s priests remain faithful only to her?”
“Do you suggest that any real priest of Glorianna’s would dare fail her?”
Shaking his head, he pulled the pale cowl around his face, hiding the scars, which seemed even deeper now, crevasses of shadow, the green as dim as stagnant water. “Just when I start to find you interesting, I am reminded what a fool you are.”
“I don’t care if you find me interesting,” I snapped.
“Nor should you.” He seemed inexpressibly weary. “But I crave a boon from you, Princess. Will you promise me that you won’t tell anyone what I did for you here?”
For a heated moment I thought he meant how I reacted to his touch. But no.
“The healing? Why didn’t you make it contingent on keeping your secret?”
He kept his head bowed. “Because I would have done it for you, regardless.”
“Why?”
“Why indeed?” The smoky scent froze brittle at the edges. “I’ll send in Marin with your clothes.”
Graves and his men did not comment on the delay. I wasn’t sure what Marin and the White Monk, my team of minders and defenders, had said to them. We met the soldiers in the woods, well away from the cabin, the three of us from the stable having gone the long way around, sneaking out the back.
We rode along three abreast, Marin on my left and the White Monk to my right, the soldiers leading the way and bringing up the rear. I held a string of yarn in my right hand that trailed between me and the White Monk, tied around his wrist. He’d handed it to me after he helped me mount.
“Yank this if anything happens.” He mounted his own horse, making sure there was some slack in the yarn. “But do me a favor and try not to wake me if you don’t have to.”
“Wake you?” I echoed, sounding like an idiot. “Do you plan to sleep?”
“No planning about it.” His voice sounded rough, rocks grinding together. “Sleep will grab me by the throat and take me under at any moment. I can’t promise I’ll awake in time if we’re—should anything happen.”
If we’re attacked, I thought he meant to say. “Did you not sleep last night?”
“Magic exacts a price. Never forget that.” Princess. He didn’t add the mocking title on the end, but I heard it there anyway. “And clasp the horse with your knees, hold yourself tight to it, so you don’t bounce around so much.”
“What about your steed—what if he stops? Or tries to wander?”
The White Monk patted his horse’s neck with affection. “Least of my worries. We have an understanding.”
True to his word, he soon fell into a deep sleep. We rode for hours, cutting through the woods, following what Graves called deer trails. Amazingly, my legs felt good, tingly but not painful. I wore several pairs of silk trousers under a top pair of wool, which made for a lovely cushion. The magic still zinged through me—flowing down to my ankles and up through my hips, a healing, energizing stream.
I practiced squeezing my thighs as I pressed against the saddle. This had the side effect of bringing my woman’s mound hard against the leather, rubbing me in the same way Hugh’s body had. Instead of abating, the desire continued to simmer in me. Likely an ongoing effect of the magic. I’d certainly never daydreamed about being intimate with a man before. At least not like this, in such a nonromantic way. The thoughts bubbling up in my mind weren’t of sweet kisses and whispered love poems.
No.
Instead . . . instead this fantasy kept building in my head of the White Monk and his strong, heated grip on my skin. I imagined him tossing me to the stable floor, tearing my clothes away, and pinning me with his weight. Those penetrating eyes would flay me with their ferocity and he would put his mouth on me, devouring me as a wild animal might.
I thrust the images away, appalled at myself, and concentrated on a cycle of prayers to Glorianna. But the fantasies simply roared in again, and I found myself grinding against the saddle, imagining the White Monk ravishing me with hard hands and ravenous mouth.
They were my own thoughts, and no one—certainly never he—would know. But Glorianna saw me, and Hugh, looking down and protecting me from above—he would see how quickly I turned from his memory and indulged in prurient longings for the most inappropriate of men.
He would never have imagined it of me.
And that bothered me, too. Why hadn’t Hugh seen me as a real woman? It made me angry, enough that I dreamed up the conversation where I’d demand that he explain himself to me. But he was dead and gone, which only made me angrier, which then faded into guilt.
We stopped at a hunter’s shelter for the midday meal. The White Monk never stirred, despite the relative commotion among the men of dismounting and discussion of whose job it was this time to dispense rations. Marin heaved herself down and trudged into the woods to answer the call of nature.
Uncertain if I should wake him, I nevertheless thought the White Monk probably needed to eat. I wound the yarn around my hand, giving it a gentle tug.
He didn’t move, head bowed, face hidden away. I pulled harder.
Still nothing.
Some defender he’d be. With increasing irritation, I gave the yarn a hard yank.
He exploded into action. In a blur of movement, he’d thrust back the hood and cowl, a long blade in his hand, scarred face set in harsh lines as he took in the situation in a moment—and settled a black scowl on me.
“Explain yourself,” he demanded.
“I thought”—I clamped my teeth together to keep them from clacking together, he’d frightened me that much—“you might want to eat.”
His gaze assessed me with something barely short of contempt. “Did I say to wake me if there was a picnic?”
“Fine.” I tossed the yarn at him. “Stay here, then.”
I swung off my horse and tramped through the snow to the little shelter, feeling as if I could eat a side of beef.
“You’re moving very nicely, Ami,” he called after me, once again his taunting self. My face heated as I remembered how intimately he’d seen me. He could never know of those horrible, tempting fantasies that plagued me so.