Zyr knew everyone we passed. No surprise since he’d lived in Annfwn his whole life and it’s not a big place. Probably their whole country would fit inside just the city of Jofarrstyr, which is part of why I doubted the Thirteen Kingdoms could withstand the empire, should His Imperial Majesty be serious about acquiring them. The magic barrier protected them, yes, but obviously Deyrr had found ways through the barrier—and had been planting sleeper spies for some time that way—so that might not last long.
The Dasnarian Temple of Deyrr wasn’t the same as the emperor, but from what Jepp had uncovered in her spying, the followers of the dark god might be His Imperial Majesty’s tools in expanding his empire.
Even so, everyone said hello to Zyr. He might have been king the way each person took pains to greet him. Walking with him was like being in a bright circle of light. Even if only reflected, it still warmed me.
“You were going to tell me about Zynda,” I prompted him, a little tired of him talking to everyone but me.
He slid me a glance. “I will, but it’s something of a secret, though a poorly kept one. I’d like to wait until there are fewer people around to hear.” Indeed, the road had grown quite busy while we ate, so I nodded agreement. “Sorry about that,” Zyr added. “If Zynda hadn’t given me this thing, we could’ve gone straight down to the beach.”
I focused on his aggrieved tone rather than on the surprise that a man had apologized to me, and for something as trivial as inconveniencing me. “If you don’t like it or want it, why are you keeping it?”
“Besides the fact that my sister made me take it and I’m afraid of her?” He flashed me a cheeky grin when I laughed. “No, I do like and want it; I just don’t like things, you know.”
“Things?” I repeated in the same tone. The Common Tongue word meant any physical object, I thought, but maybe I misunderstood.
“Yeah.” He shrugged, the elaborateness hampered by the wooden box. “Most shapeshifters don’t. You understand.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Oh. Hmm.” He considered. “Well, I guess it’s that you can’t take much with you when you shapeshift. Some Tala get really good at it and can keep special, small mementos that come back with them to human form, but mostly, why bother? You either leave it behind or lose it forever.”
“You came back with clothes on just now,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but very simple ones. Nothing special. If I shifted and took this box with me, it would be gone. And my sister would kill me,” he added as an afterthought.
“Where would it go?” I asked, completely perplexed.
“A question for the ages,” Zyr agreed.
“You don’t know?”
“Why would I?”
“Because…” I floundered. “You go there, when you’re in between one thing and another.”
He flashed me a smile. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Oh. I really wanted to ask how it did work, but that seemed to be rudely pressing for an answer to a question I’d already asked and he’d ducked answering. And he called me evasive.
“Why is the wooden box important?” I asked instead, as that seemed safe.
“Here.” He stopped and turned toward me. “Open it.”
Delighted to satisfy at least this itch of curiosity, I undid the latch and lifted the lid. It was filled with pieces of wood in varying sizes. “Oh,” I said, disappointed. How dull.
“That’s what I said to Zynda,” Zyr confided with a grin. “Take one. Doesn’t matter which.”
I plucked one out at random and Zyr nudged the lid with his chin, making it drop with a clang, then started walking again. I hastened to catch up. His rooms must be near the top of the cliff.
“What do you think?” he asked.
Turning the stick over in my hands, I studied it. It had been more deliberately formed than I’d thought on first inspection. Not round, but flat, it had irregular indentations all along two sides. And it felt smooth, polished by the maker, yes, but also by the action of many hands touching it over time.
“I think it’s very old,” I said.
“You can sense that?” Zyr’s eyebrows winged up.
“Sense? No, I mean, it feels old, like a staircase where the passage of feet from generations of family have made indentations in the middle of the steps.”
“I’ve never seen a place like that.”
“Dasnaria is a very old civilization,” I informed him with pride. “The Hardies have held our lands for a long time.”
“How long?”
“Eight hundred and twenty-seven years.” Unlike most Dasnarian women, I also knew how to read and write, and the history of the Hardies. “Long enough for the stone steps in the original hall in Castle Hardie to have big scoops in the middle.” I drew it for him in the air.
“Ah, well, Annfwn is a child in comparison then,” Zyr replied, seeming not at all upset to come in junior. “Current guesses are we’ve only been living here for a few centuries.”
“You don’t know?”
“The Tala aren’t much for writing stuff down. Goes with not liking things maybe.” He shrugged that off as unimportant, pointing his chin at my stick. “But that’s where that comes in.”
I gazed at it, perplexed. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s a map!” He grinned in excitement. “See?”
“Ah.” I nodded, totally not understanding at all.
“Look.” Zyr set the box down on the low wall. We’d climbed quite high by then, but he seemed not to notice the precipitous drop. I stayed well back from the edge. He took the stick from me, holding it so we looked down on it. “Imagine you’re looking at it like this as you fly along a coastline.”
Oh, right.
“Got the image in your head?”
“No,” I burst out, more than a little annoyed. “I’ve never flown, Zyr!”
“Oh.” His face wrinkled in chagrin. “I forgot. Wow. I’m sorry.”
Abruptly I realized he wasn’t apologizing, but feeling sorry for me. “People aren’t meant to fly,” I informed him crisply. “That’s not the way of things.”
“Good thing I’m not a people then,” he retorted, “because flying is the best feeling in the world, a goddess-given joy beyond compare.”
“I thought that was sex,” I shot back, realizing too late I shouldn’t have let that particular arrow fly, because his smile went salacious.
He leaned in. “They’re a lot alike,” he confided, his tone velvety.
“I wouldn’t know,” I replied stiffly, looking away, wishing I could control my stupid blushing.
“Never mind.” He sounded conciliatory. “That was unfair of me. I’ll do better. Don’t be sad.”
“I’m not,” I said, meeting his gaze with some surprise.
“But you are,” he insisted softly. “You’re one of the saddest people I’ve ever met.”
Our gazes locked and held for an endless moment before I wrenched mine away. “Explain this stick. I’m flying over a coastline.”
“And these ridges are how it looks from above.” His long finger traced the uneven edge on one side. “These are bays, inlets, rock outcroppings, river deltas.”
He seemed so concerned I understand that I nodded. “And the other side?”
“That’s the best part—those are islands!”
I gazed in incomprehension, not getting his excitement. “Islands,” I repeated. There were a lot of islands out there. We’d sailed around them for weeks in the Nahaunan Archipelago.
“See.” He was losing patience now. “I can shapeshift into a bird and carry this stick in my talons. If I can match this side to a known coastline, like somewhere in Annfwn, then I can find the islands represented on the other side.”
“Because you want to find more islands?” I ventured.
“Because we can find n’Andana!” He said it with such explosive excitement that I smiled and nodded. Hopefully that would be enough. But it wasn’t. He frowned at me. “Haven’t you been paying attention to anything?” he asked, with enough preemptory dismissiveness that it put my back up. In my realm, a man of his rank wouldn’t dare speak to me that way, even though I was a woman.
“Which things?” I asked icily. “The war-planning sessions I’m not admitted to? The conversations in Tala I can’t understand? Oh! Maybe you mean all the secret meetings I’m not privy to? You’re right—I really need to make up for my lack of attention.”
I must’ve surprised him—either with my vehemence or the different perspective—because he stared, as if seeing something new in me. We stood in front of a rambling set of apartments near the top of the cliff that must have been his, because he started in. When I didn’t follow, he looked back, cocked his head at the open doorway. “Come on in.”
“I’ll wait out here.”
“Karyn.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “How can we be friends if you don’t trust me?”
So much for that. I followed him into the bright interior. Much of the ceiling was open to the sky, making me wonder what he did when it rained.
“Zyr?” A naked Tala woman emerged from the next room, her long hair falling around her like a cape, hiding very little. Her heavy-lidded eyes looked sleepy as she spoke to him in their language, glancing at me with a warm smile. She came up to me and—before I realized her intention—gave me a lingering kiss on the mouth. Stroking my braid, she said something, including Zyr in it.
For his part, Zyr looked…chagrined? Embarrassed as I’d never seen him. He set down the box, speaking rapidly in their language, then took her hand and led her away from me, explaining all the while. The woman pouted, shaking back her hair, then leaning into him. Setting her firmly away, he said something that seriously annoyed her. With a last sharp set of words, she condensed into a crow, flapping mid-air, cawed at him a final time, and flew out the open ceiling.
Zyr slid me an assessing look. “Sorry about that. I forgot Sey was here or…”
“Or what?” I asked, genuinely curious, and not at all sure what he was apologizing for.
“Well, I wouldn’t have brought you here,” he replied defensively. “I had no intention of throwing another lover in your face or for her to…” He trailed off again, watching me warily.
“For her to assume you’d brought me here to join you in bed play?” I was developing an affection for watching the confident Zyr flounder when I put him off his game. “It seemed a natural assumption for her. Likely you’ve done so before.”
He cocked his head, no ready words for that. “You know…about…”
Heavens. The man couldn’t finish a sentence. “I’m a virgin, not ignorant,” I replied, quite tartly. “The women of Dasnaria receive extensive training in bed play, which includes satisfying multiple partners. Men very often like to enjoy several women at once, isn’t that so?” I gestured to him and the next room.
Zyr regained some of his composure, regarding me narrowly. “I’m surprised you consider this a proper topic for mixed company,” he retorted.
“Yes, well.” He had a point, but never mind that. “You’ve made it clear you have no respect for such conversational boundaries.”
He grimaced ruefully. “I deserve that. But I’m surprised you’re not angry.”
I considered him. “Why would I be?”
“Because I’ve been courting you but obviously just had sex with another woman.”
“Isn’t that the Tala way? Very little monogamy. Much free trading of partners?”
He actually looked uncomfortable. “Yes, but…”
I waited and he didn’t finish. “It’s much the same in Dasnaria,” I explained gently. “Men rarely confine themselves to one woman. It’s not their nature. Everyone understands this.”
His arched brows drew together, a vertical line between them. “Then why wait for marriage—what’s the point if you all sleep around anyway?”
“The men do,” I clarified. “The women are monogamous. At least, wives are.”
“How is that even fair?” he burst out.
I lifted my shoulder and let it fall. The word “fair” always struck me oddly in Common Tongue. The closest translation to Dasnarian that I knew was a legal concept that explained the equal division of property among a man’s sons. “That is the way of things,” I told him.
“That’s fucked up,” Zyr replied with some bite, a bit of that predator behind it.
“Is it?” I gestured to the inner room where Sey had been waiting in his bed for his return. “Isn’t that what you do?”
“Yes, but—” He flung up his hands. “Sey does it, too. It’s fair when everyone gets to.”
“Though ‘everyone’ doesn’t want to,” I pointed out.
He fumed at me, momentarily wordless. “You,” he finally said, pointing an accusing finger at me, “make rational argument impossible.”
The words hit me hard, thudding into me like so many well-aimed shafts. What in Sól’s name was I thinking? Arguing like this with a man—even one not of my rank and culture—not at all who my parents had raised me to be. Abject shame seized me and I fell to my knees, putting my forehead to the stones.
“I apologize most sincerely,” I babbled. Then realized I’d spoken in Dasnarian and had to search through my frantic thoughts for the right Common Tongue words. “I’m so very wretchedly sorry. I’ve shamed myself and my family in offending you.”
I had my eyes tightly squinched shut against the onslaught of shame and guilt, so I only realized Zyr had fallen to his own knees before me when he ran a hesitant hand over my hair.
“Karyn,” he said quietly, voice breaking a little on my name. “Don’t do that. Sit up. Look at me.”
Knowing I must obey but reluctant to, I sat up, finding a balance between looking at him without meeting his direct gaze. He didn’t say anything for a moment or two, the silence of our mutual chagrin settling around us like dust motes from a scuffle soon ended.
“I’m discovering,” he said finally, and wryly, “that I must watch my words with you very carefully, which anyone can tell you is not my strength. Will you forgive me?”
Nonplussed, I flicked a glanced at his eyes, finding them full of remorse. I had no idea what to make of this beautiful, feral man, kneeling on the floor, his hair spilling around him, gilded by the morning light flowing in from above as if the sun himself caressed him.
“I wonder what you are thinking,” Zyr murmured, searching my own eyes. I seemed to be unable to look away, much as I knew I should. Applying force of will, I lowered my gaze, staring fixedly at his wickedly curved lips, which didn’t do anything to restore my poise. “If you were any other woman, I’d kiss you right now,” he said, his sensuous mouth shaping the words.
I stared at them helplessly. “Zyr,” I breathed. “I can’t.”
“No, I know.” He shook himself, took my hands and drew us both to our feet. “I shall have to find my way with you through a maze of words, it seems.”
With nothing to say to that, I stepped back, the sunlight warm on my head. Which finally penetrated my brain. I glanced up at the sun, now completely risen over the cliff’s edge. “I’m late,” I gasped. “I should’ve been down to the beach by now.” Now maybe I would get thrown out of the Hawks.
Zyr strode to the window, looked out, then shook his head. “Just a few of them there. You have time.”
I moved beside him, this window part of an outthrust of rock that overhung the path and afforded a dizzying view straight down to the beach. The people there looked like ants to me. “How can you possibly see who is who?”
Zyr turned sideways, cocking his hip to lean against the window ledge, saucy grin on his face. “Trade secret.”
Fine. “Well, regardless, I’ll be late because I have to stop by my rooms and get my bow, then walk all the way down there again.” I’d forgotten more than my manners on this strange morning.
“Really, there is no ‘late’ in Annfwn. The Tala don’t care for such things.”
“I, however, am not Tala—and neither are most of the Hawks.” In fact, I wasn’t even one of the Hawks. They tolerated my presence, but barely. “I have to go, Zyr. Right away.”
“But we never finished our talk,” Zyr protested.
“We can finish it later?” I said, desperate enough for him to let me go that I made such a wild proposition.
He studied me, thinking. “I want to share something with you. Something special, as friends, to make up for before. If I give you a ride, we can stop at your rooms, get your bow, and get to the beach in time for me to explain a few things and you’ll still be on time.”
“A…ride?”
“Yes!” He grabbed my hand and pulled me back through the room, then out the door to the path. “Time for your first flight.”
And he shapeshifted.