Struck hard by the wave of guilt and remorse from Lonen—along with a vivid memory image of a dying doe and blood on his hands—and with surprising, strong protective feelings of her own, Oria wrestled the potent emotions. He’d meant every word of what he’d said about not harming her, and about holding the female sacred—a fascinating and foreign image in his mind of a fertile goddess bestowing blessings. The truth resonated in him regardless of the rest.
She deeply regretted bringing him to this meeting.
Once a model of hwil, the former queen had become like the bay beyond Bára, her emotional state as unpredictable as the bore tides, and as lethal in their ability to swamp the unwary.
“Enough, Mother,” Oria said, venting some of the emotional tension with some judicious grien that took the form of a dust devil swirling past the window, briefly whipping the sheer silk curtains that hung limply by the sides. “We’ve all committed grave sins in the name of war. You and I may not have held the knife blades, but we’ve drunk the water bought with the blood of Destrye children. Something you confessed you knew was happening and that you did nothing to stop. None of us are innocent.”
She caught a flash of surprised gratitude from Lonen, glad then that she’d stood up for him in that rare moment of weakness. He seemed so strong, so fierce—even brutal in his anger at times—but he possessed a tender heart under that muscled chest.
“Something you detected in him all along, hmm?”
Ignoring Chuffta’s too-smug observation, she forged on. “You’ve left this to me, Mother. Unless you wish to reclaim your mask and your crown, in which case I’ll gladly step aside for you, I need you to support me in this decision.”
“So much of this is my fault, the result of my many failures to act…” The former queen nearly chanted the words, sounding like those prematurely aged out of sanity. Oria put a finger to her temple, in lieu of putting her face in her hands. Sometimes her mother seemed like her old self, her mind as incisive as ever, then suddenly…
Lonen brushed the sleeve of her robe, carefully not touching her skin, but putting her on alert regardless. He had an inquiring feel to him and an image formed of a person tending to her mother. Was he silently asking if the former queen needed a healer? She shook her head minutely, just in case. Her mother was beyond help.
“Then don’t fail to act now.” She said it crisply, as her mother might once have prodded her, adding a nudge of grien. “You promised to help me. This is how you can. I need you to do this.”
Rhianna lifted a tear-streaked face, her sgath hanging about her like tattered rags. “I wanted so much more for you, my beautiful and powerful daughter. You should have an ideal match, a man who will treasure you and know you as you deserve to be known, give life to your magic, bring you wealth and glory, and provide you children. No one less than the most powerful of Báran kings deserves you, not this mind-dead—”
“Will you intervene with the temple or not?” Oria cut her off as she should have done much earlier. No anger wafted off Lonen, however—at least, not more than the dark, brooding fury that seemed to underlie most of his thoughts. Had he always been of that nature or had the war done that to him? An intensely curious interest prowled over her that tasted distinctly of him. No doubt he’d have more questions for her. Joy.
Then disappointment crushed her relatively minor aggravation.
“I won’t do it.” Her mother lifted her chin, an echo of the proud queen she’d been. “I won’t cooperate in sending you to your doom. Not even to save Bára. The sacrifice is too great.”
“This is my marriage, my decision, my life.”
“Don’t ask me to help you ruin it. I love you too much.” Her mother fulminated with dark sgath, much of it reaching towards Lonen like the shadowy tentacles of the wyrms that lurked in the damp cellars of Bára. Time to get him away from her. No telling what her unstable magic could do, even as passively as sgath typically worked. Oria had seen her mother blur those lines, too.
She set her teeth, keeping the flawless façade of hwil. “I won’t ask it then. But I will marry him and petition the council for the crown tomorrow. Will you support me then?”
Rhianna turned her face to the window, face once again remote, seeing only the past. “I am not well.” Her voice wobbled and she swallowed hard.
“I know, Mother.” Oria’s heart thudded dully with the pain of seeing her like this. For a while it had seemed she’d recover, but lately she only seemed to fall further into the depths of her mind, her sanity fracturing more with every descent. “Don’t fret. I’ll visit you in the morning and we can talk.”
Her mother didn’t reply, so Oria beckoned to Chuffta, who flew to her shoulder. The winding of his long tail around her arm gave her comfort.
“It was a bad day. Perhaps she’ll be more lucid tomorrow,” he said as they withdrew. Lonen paced stoically at her side, his emotions tightly reined, thoughts unusually opaque.
“She was lucid enough for a while there—enough to recognize what a terrible idea this is.”
“I don’t think it’s a terrible idea.”
“You don’t?” Her toe caught the hem of her robe in her moment of inattention. “But you said that—”
“That the Destrye king would not be easily led. I think he is a good mate for you.”
She rolled her eyes behind the mask. “Like you’d know.”
He gave her the mental equivalent of a shrug. “You like him. The rest can be overcome.”
“Now you sound like him.”
“Attempting to summon the Trom yourself, however,” he continued, turning severe, “that is a terrible idea. Even your mother retains enough wit to know that. You run the risk of—”
She bumped her shoulder to interrupt the lecture, making her Familiar spread his wings for balance. “I’m not discussing this right now.”
“You could be having this conversation with me, you know,” Lonen commented.
They emerged into the servants’ corridor and Oria paused, both undecided about the direction they should take and chagrined at Lonen’s remark. “I apologize.” She made herself face him. “I’m in the habit of being with Chuffta and talking to him, not with…”
“Another human being?” he supplied, a ripple of humor beneath it.
Why that made her blush, she had no idea. His body heat, perhaps, like a coal brazier in the narrow, enclosed hall. “Right,” she replied, determined to leave it at that.
“What happened to her?” Lonen asked, with so much gentle concern it nearly undid her.
“I explained already. My father’s death damaged her.”
“You said because of this ideal mate business.”
“Yes.” She braced herself for a barrage of more questions.
He pondered, however, hand stroking thoughtfully over his beard. “It seems to me that if I make guesses, then you’re not technically telling me secrets.”
“Lonen…” She hated the helpless sound in her voice, but she didn’t know what she could possibly say to explain any of it. The encounter with her damaged mother had left her wrung dry and facing High Priestess Febe felt beyond her. They should go to the temple and do that next, but she couldn’t quite find the impetus to leave the stuffy, shadowed corridor. Perhaps all of it had been a stupid, hopeless plan. She was so tired of fighting.
“Give me some rope here and see if I can climb on my own.” Lonen leaned against the wall and crossed his ankles, still stroking his beard as he studied her. She didn’t object because at least she could hide a little longer. “Your mother called me ‘mind-dead,’ which I assume refers to my not being a sorcerer.”
“I’m really sorry about that,” she whispered in furious embarrassment. “She’s—”
“You apologize too much. I’m not offended, though I gather that’s an insult. I know as well as you do that I don’t have magic. I don’t consider this a failing. I don’t want it, except maybe to help build aqueducts.”
Bemused, she parsed the word. “Build what?”
“Never mind. An idle thought, and something we can discuss later, when you come with me to Dru.”
“Which I can’t promise that—”
“Yes, yes, I know. Never mind that, either. What’s important at the moment is that I gather that is this ideal mate thing would connect you mentally to your husband, and there’s some sort of magical component, too. Which your mother and father had and she’s distressed to the point of refusing to help you marry me because she places such a high value on wanting that for you.”
“It’s not really that—”
“‘The sacrifice is too great’—her exact words.”
“Stop interrupting me!” She nearly stamped her foot with the frustration at both the Destrye and Chuffta snickering in her head.
“Then stop saying things that don’t matter,” he fired back, shocking her. “This is an important conversation.”
“That we’re having in a servant’s corridor,” she pointed out.
He chuckled at that, that welcome sunny humor of his dispersing some of her emotional gloom. “When we celebrate our two decades’ anniversary, we can recapitulate this day and meet each other entirely in baths and hallways.”
“We did talk on my rooftop terrace earlier, as well, when I proposed marriage.” Which seemed like days ago, not hours.
“Good point. I’m adding rooftop terraces to the list, though if we’re in Dru we might have to substitute a treehouse.”
“A house in a tree?” Something that had never occurred to her, partly because she’d never seen a tree big enough to hold an entire house. But the image in his head showed a forest of enormous trees, the leaves so dense they blocked the sun, and a structure of wood in the crux of a network of branches. The image changed so it seemed she stood inside it, looking out, the forest floor as far below as the streets of Bára from her terrace. It struck her that he’d changed the ‘view’ deliberately, to show her another angle.
“Are you doing that on purpose?”
“What—picturing things for you to see in my mind? Yeah. I figure if you’re going to read my thoughts anyway, I might as well take advantage of it. It could be a handy secret weapon for us.”
A laugh escaped her, lessening the tightness of grief and despair. “You’re unlike anyone I’ve ever known.”
“Good.” He grinned, but under it a surge of possessive lust intensified the simple approval. “As I’m the only husband you’ll ever have, mind-dead and unable to give life to your magic as I might be, I’ll have to make it up in other ways.”
“I’m really sorry she said those things.”
“Another apology, and for something you can’t control. I don’t mind, Oria.” He pushed off the wall and it seemed he might reach for her, but he stopped himself. “I’d much rather know the unvarnished truth of how it will be between us. No secrets to fester. If you’re making a grave sacrifice by marrying me—one I approve of as it will save both our peoples—then I want to know exactly what you’re giving up, so I can do what I can to compensate for it. I’d like to think I can offer you some happiness, if not exactly what you were expecting.”
“Oh.” The corridor was too hot. That was why she felt a little faint.
“Your mother is wrong.” Lonen sounded gravely determined, that warrior’s resolve enfolding her, an image in his mind of him taking her in a gentle embrace that very nearly felt real. “I will treasure you, Oria, and I’ll do my best to know you, but you have to let me in.”
“I don’t need that. That’s not why we’re doing this.”
“I need it.” His emotions, complex and shifting with layers, intensified.
“But why?”
He shrugged, impatient with the question, but continued to refine the image of holding her in his mind. “Maybe I’ve had plenty of misery, too much blood and loss and death. We might be marrying for political reasons, but that doesn’t mean we can’t bring something bright to each other’s lives. That we can’t take care of each other.” The sense of his arms around her made it almost believable.
“How are you doing that?”
“If you sense how I feel, what’s in my head, then I can give you this much. If I can’t hold you and comfort you, then there’s this, yes?”
“The Destrye is wiser than he seems at first.”
Oria didn’t know what to do with Chuffta’s seemingly sudden and enthusiastic approval of Lonen, so she ignored him.
“I know it hurt you to see your mother that way,” Lonen continued in a gentle tone. “It would be painful for anyone. My father, King Archimago, when my brother Nolan fell into a crevasse on the battlefield… in some ways he never recovered from that.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Stop,” he replied, but with a kind of tenderness. “As you said in there, we’ve all done things. I’ve done things I’ll carry the stain of to my grave. But what I’m trying to tell you is that if your mother is in this state because her ideal mate died, then perhaps it will be a strength for you, that you won’t be exposed to that danger with me.”
She lifted her head in surprise, amazed at the way his masculine vitality had filled the narrow space, embracing her, weaving in with her sgath. “I’d never thought of it that way.”
“See?” He was all smug male then. “You can learn things from me, too.”
She huffed at him, not even caring that it made him grin. “I’m not convinced of that, Destrye.”
“That’s all right. I’ll be convinced for both of us.” He lifted a hand, moving close enough to trace the fall of one of her braids, though he kept a whisper distance from it. His granite-colored eyes seemed silver bright viewed with her sgath, like the white-hot heart of a glass forge. “Maybe I should be sorry that I won’t be the husband you deserve, but I’m not. I’d hate to see you like that, with your fire dimmed and your sharp mind dulled.”
“She used to be so much more.”
“I saw glimpses of it. She must have been a formidable woman and queen. I regret I didn’t meet her before.”
“We all carry regrets,” Oria echoed his earlier words. “And I, for one, am tired of wallowing in them. You’re right—you and I are about moving forward. No more apologies, yes?”
“Works for me.”
The moment felt oddly intimate. So much so that she moved away, putting safer distance between them. “I suppose that moving forward means going to the temple and convincing High Priestess Febe to marry us.”
“Time for the strategy that Bára and everything in it, including you, belongs to me?” Lonen’s energy took on a feral, sharp edge—one that strangely put her in mind of the iron axe he carried on his back.
“As a gambit only,” she told him, bringing her own mettle to it. “Don’t go getting the wrong idea about me.”
He only nodded and gestured for her to lead the way. “This time, you’ll leave the talking to me.”