A burned body slumped in an ornate chair on a scorched dais. More bodies lay in a semicircle, their throats cut. Scavenger birds had been at them. Other than that, the bodies remained perfect, giving a glimpse of ruined beauty.
After a long look, Aryal turned away. She said simply, “They’re dead and it’s awful, and I’m done. I’m full up. I can’t feel anything for them.”
He put an arm around her shoulders and led her away.
They climbed another wide, curving staircase and explored hallways. Quentin opened the large double doors down one hallway and walked into a room that was the size of his apartment at the Tower. A massive bed dominated the room with coverlets and pillows embroidered with gold and scarlet thread.
Wide windows the height of the room looked over the city. The far one faced the white, pillared Temple of the Gods, which stood outlined against the backdrop of the blue-green sea.
There was no doubt in Quentin’s mind whose bedroom this was. He walked around the room, looking in doors. One opened to a huge bathroom, with tiled steps that led down to a walk-in tub patterned with an intricate mosaic. The tub was large enough that a troll could bathe in it. Another door opened to a wardrobe filled with sumptuous clothes that were suitable for an Elven male.
Drawn by the dramatic view, he walked back to the far window. The temple was simple and open to the elements. The side facing the palace had steps leading up to the marble-floored interior. The gigantic statues of the gods on either side, interspersed with columns, provided the main support of the plain prop-and-lintel roof. On the farthest side of the temple, a single god faced outward to the sea. Even though all Quentin could see of that statue was its back, he was certain that it was the god Taliesin, god of all the other gods, the prime mover of the universe.
The bedroom was at the same height as the enormous profiles of the two closest statues, one male and one female, their stern, strong faces looking into infinity. The male statue faced the city, and he held a book tucked under one arm. That would be Hyperion, the god of Law. The female was less easy to identify, but he thought she might be Camael, goddess of the Hearth, age and wisdom.
Aryal joined him at the window.
He said, “Camthalion put himself on the same level as the gods. Can you imagine looking out at this scene year after year for millennia, while possessing Taliesin’s Machine? After all that time I wonder if there was anything recognizable of the original man.”
He glanced at her. As spectacular as the temple was, she wasn’t looking at it. Instead her face tilted up to the wide, cloudless sky, and her expression was filled with so much anguished yearning, it cracked something inside of him.
They were perfect. Perfect, which was insanity all on its own. After hating her so vehemently, experiencing this kind of emotional turnaround was enough to give him whiplash. That issue alone should have been more than enough to deal with for, say, five or six years, but on top of that he also knew what was going on in that spiky, passionate head of hers.
She was about to go into war without having enough to live for.
Gods, he didn’t want to say the things he was about to say to her. He wanted to shut the hell up, take a bath and go to sleep. Heart-to-hearts gave him indigestion. He would do almost anything to avoid them. Hearing the words “we have to talk about our feelings” was the surest way to get him out the door fast, and he had never looked back before, never up until this point in time, with this woman.
He could walk out of this door too and find another bedroom for himself, except that meant he would leave her alone with that heartbreaking expression on her face. And he would rather die than do that, which meant that somehow he had landed himself squarely in the middle of the Deep Shit Zone for sure.
The thought that he was about to initiate a “we have to talk about our feelings” moment was laughable. But there was his internal whip again, driving him forward. With a sigh, he shut and bolted the double doors, and walked over to sit on the edge of the sumptuous bed. He started to strip off his armor.
“I think I might be getting close to mating with you,” he said flatly into the sun-drenched silence. He bent over to work off the leg pieces. “Believe me, I’m very aware of how that sounds. Feel free to laugh if you like.”
He sensed when she turned away from the window, but he didn’t look up. He started working on the other leg.
Still in that flat, matter-of-fact tone of voice, he said, “You’re nothing like anything I would have said I wanted, yet I think you might be everything I need. It’s too early to tell for sure. We’ve spent a week together. One week. Yeah, it’s been one week filled with high stress and intense exposure to each other, and I know this kind of thing can happen fast, but sunshine, we haven’t even really made love yet. All we’ve done is fool around a little. I’m sure you can understand the depth of my perplexity at finding myself in this situation.”
“Are you somehow going to make today all about you again?”
He tilted his head at her. The sun was behind her, rendering her expression unreadable. He said, “Of course.”
He bent back to his task. Elven armor was as light as it possibly could be while still being effective. Still, wearing it over jeans on a scorcher like today was a miserably hot experience, and it was a relief to strip the pieces off. After he took a bath, he was going to raid the wardrobe for something lighter to wear underneath.
She walked over and sat on the bed beside him. He thought he heard her mutter, “So that’s what the crowd in my head has been yelling about.”
He had been in the middle of pulling the breastplate over his head, so he couldn’t have heard her right. “Excuse me?”
“Never mind.” After looking undecided for a moment, she began stripping off her own armor. With her head bent to her task, she asked quietly, “If it’s too soon, why are you bringing this up now?”
Finally he was back down to his filthy jeans and boots. He took off the boots, then turned to kneel in front of her and began to work at the fastenings of her leg pieces. “You know how it goes. ‘Honey, I’m going to war, and I’ve got something I need to tell you.’ ” He leaned his elbows on her knees and looked up at her.
She stopped what she was doing and watched him with a wary, vulnerable look. He almost smiled. She handled her own vulnerability like someone else might handle dynamite, her eyes wide as if something were about to explode in her face.
He said quietly, “I want to know that you’ve got your head on straight when we go to the island tonight. I know you’re struggling with a huge amount of fear. You’ve been doing a good job, but I’ve watched it swallow you up a couple of times, and I’m concerned.”
“I won’t do anything that will get you killed,” she snapped. She yanked at the fastenings of her own breastplate and dragged it over her head.
“That’s not the point,” he said. He reached up to take her face in both hands and insisted that she look at him. “I don’t want you to do anything that will get you killed. You know as well as I do that a fighter who is struggling with despair is a danger to herself. I don’t want you to go into tonight without having considered everything—everything—there is to consider, and yes, that does include me.”
Her expression broke, and the anguish came out. She gripped his wrists. “I’m so scared.”
“I know you are,” he said. “I can’t imagine facing the kind of uncertainty you’re facing. That’s why I’m going to ask you to think outside of the box.”
She looked at him with such surprise he had to laugh. He rose up to kiss her. She put her arms around his neck to hug him with such ferocity, he wrapped her up in his arms too. They held each other tightly.
“Some people,” she said, “would say that I already think outside the box.”
“I don’t mean any regular old box,” he told her. “I want you to think outside of your box.”
She pulled back to stare at him. “I don’t understand.”
“You need to remember all the reasons you have to
live, because if someone goes into a life-or-death fight without having those reasons firmly fixed in their mind, often they don’t make it out the other side alive. The fact of the matter is, you are not facing an either/or situation, where you either fly or die.” He held up a finger. “Here’s the first thing to remember. You may be healed.”
Her face clouded over. “I don’t see how. I—the bone crushed, Quentin. I felt it go.”
He flicked her nose, and he wasn’t gentle about it, so that she jerked her head back and blinked. “You are not a healer. You can’t diagnose yourself, and you don’t know what might happen. Say it.”
“Fuck you,” she said. But she didn’t put any heat behind it, and he could tell at least she was listening to him.
“Number two.” He held up two fingers in front of her face. “You may not be healed back to what you were before, but you may gain something back. Okay, this one is likely. This might mean you go for shorter flights than you’re used to, or it might mean you go parachuting, and you learn how to glide. Maybe we’ll need to build a brace for that wing. Don’t get me wrong, I know that would be terrible and it would suck, and you would have every reason to rage against it. But you’ll be in the air.”
“Parachuting?”
He could tell the thought had never crossed her mind, and why would it? She’d never had to consider it before. He lifted a shoulder. “Along with a version of paragliding. You can ride thermals. Eventually you would have to land, but that’s true now too. I know it’s not the same, and it’s not as good. The point is, there are ways that we can make what was done to you survivable. You just have to believe it.”
She gripped his wrists so hard he felt his fingers grow numb. “I can ride thermals.”
“You can as much as you need,” he said gently. Thank gods, she was listening to him. “You can free-fall and do somersaults in the air. Anything you like. I’ll go with you. I enjoy parachuting.”
“Do you?”
He nodded. “Reason number three. There’s your job to consider. You love being a sentinel so much you endured coming on this trip with me instead of throwing the job back in Dragos’s face.”
“True,” she said, very low. “But if I can’t really fly—if all I can do is ride thermals and parachute, I won’t be the same at my job.”
“You’ll have to rethink how you approach work and what your strengths are, but that is doable too,” he said. “I’m the first sentinel that isn’t an avian, but I am a sentinel. I won my position, and I deserve it. The same applies to you. Your wings didn’t make you a sentinel. You did.” He paused to make sure that sank in. Then he said, “Number four. There are people who love you. Niniane and Grym. Hell, maybe Grym is right, and Dragos does too. Graydon’s pretty mad at you, but you know he loves you.” He took a deep breath. It was time to throw himself on his sword. “Me.”
Her eyes dilated until they were mostly black. “You?”
“Yeah, don’t dwell on it,” he said. Okay, he was done now. He tried to pull back so that he could stand up and walk away.
She lunged forward and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Oh, no you don’t!” she said. “You can’t just throw a tear gas canister like that into the room and walk away when it goes off.”
“I don’t see why not,” he muttered. He tried to turn away, but her face was ablaze with so much emotion he remained on one knee just so that he could keep gazing at her, and soak up the sight.
“If anybody would have said I was unlovable, I would have thought it would be you,” she whispered.
Suddenly he had no desire to go anywhere as his face creased with silent laughter. He told her, “I would have said so too. Then I found out that, even though you are still the most maddening creature I have ever met, you are actually quite lovable.”
Her head bent down as she slipped one hand to the back of his neck. She said softly, “And even though you are every bit the dangerous bastard I thought you were, you are really quite trustworthy.”
The words hit him between the eyes. They were all the more powerful because he knew how little she cared for returning courtesies, mouthing platitudes or pretty nothings. He said, barely audibly, “I’m glad you think so.”
Her long fingers worked at the back of his neck, massaging him. She straightened her back as if steeling herself. “About the mating thing.”
His eyebrows rose. “Oh, is that still in the room?”
Laughter flashed in her eyes. Then she sobered. As blunt and direct as always, she said, “I haven’t put words to what was going on inside me, but I could be mating with you too. I’ve never experienced this kind of—total engagement before. You don’t need things I’m not interested in giving. You fight me, and you don’t back down. You can fight with me on the battlefield as an equal partner. You’re strong enough to hold your own, and you’re willing and able to negotiate.”
When she paused as if searching for more words, he held her gaze as one corner of his mouth lifted. “And I sex your ass up.”
She burst out laughing. “And that too. The thing is, we have a choice right now. We haven’t gone too far, and we can back the hell away from all of this if you want. But before you make any decisions, I want to tell you something. A very long time ago, I made a promise to any mate who might or might not come into my life one day.”
Whatever he had been expecting when he initiated this conversation, this wasn’t it. He whispered, “What did you promise?”
She stroked his jaw lightly with one hand. “I will never betray my mate and never endanger his life with my carelessness or impetuosity. I will fight for and with him, and always have his back whenever he might need me. I will not leave him, and I will not lie to him, and if he will only be patient and forgiving, I will learn how to forgive too, because he will be the most important thing, ever, in the world to me. I will give everything I have to him, along with everything I can be, if he will only do the same for me.”
She couched everything she said so carefully, but those words she spoke were his words. Those promises were to him.
“Why are you telling me this now?” he asked, very low.
“Because as you said, you’re going into war too, and you need to know who your fighting partner is,” she said without preamble. “You need to know that you can trust me. I heard what you said. I heard everything you said, and while I’m still struggling with all of it, I want you to know that somehow it’s going to be okay.” Her eyes filled and she struggled for a moment. Then she said, “I might not know the details of how I’m going to survive, but I know that I will, because I could never endanger someone who was even a possible mate by throwing my own life away.”
That wild, dangerous part of him. He knew now where it was running, and to whom. The panther sank down and put his head in the harpy’s lap. He was an alpha male with too much edge, and he set it all at her feet.
He had never imagined he would find someone strong enough to take everything he was, and willing enough to embrace all of it. He could never have known that the one place where he would find peace was in the heart of the wildest, edgiest creature of all.
As the panther found his peace, the harpy stroked his hair and discovered tenderness. Then everything that lay twisted between them came clear as they reached the heart of the labyrinth they had been traveling together.
NINETEEN
Aryal sat frozen. She didn’t know what to do when Quentin put his head in her lap. It was such an extraordinary experience, so surprising and fine. The weight of his upper torso against her legs felt exactly right. The sight of him on his knees was not at all what she had imagined in the heat of her anger and desire, and yet it was perfect.
They were perfect.
She ran her hands along his broad, bare shoulders and along as much of his wide, tanned back as she could reach. Underneath her touch, his powerful muscles shifted below his skin, a mystery cloaked in silk. His body was so well made, she basked in the pleasure of stroking him. She scratched her fingers
gently against the grain of his short beard and watched as a shudder rippled through him.
“Talking to you doesn’t suck,” she said in surprise.
He lifted his head to look up at her, a grin creasing his face. “No it doesn’t. How about that.” Capturing her wrist, he stood and pulled her to her feet as well. “Come on. There’s a tub the size of a small swimming pool in the other room, and I’ve become obsessed with the thought of getting clean.”
She looked down at herself. She had washed her face and hands with careful handfuls of water from the wineskin, but it had done little more than shift the grime around, and her jeans, along with what remained of her once white T-shirt, were bloodstained and filthy.
With great relief and a lack of ceremony, she stripped. “This outfit needs to be burned.”
He went tense. As his stillness caught her attention, she glanced at him. He was staring at her nude body, traveling from her high, small breasts down the length of her narrow torso to her slim hips and long, lean legs. The private tuft of silken hair between her legs was very black against her pale skin. The reddened scars from the recent wolf attack still marked her, but they were rapidly fading.
While her arms and shoulders were in proportion with the rest of her body, they were cut with muscle. She had a natural aptitude for strength in her upper body, which she enhanced with regular workouts using a variety of weapons, constantly building aptitude and stamina. One of the most dangerous aspects of swordfights, or any fight, for that matter, was that they were so grueling.
While she didn’t believe that she was beautiful, she didn’t have a self-conscious bone in her body, and she liked herself. She had never once wished any of her physical attributes away, and had always believed that all of her flaws were ones that remained unseen. That was why it was a shock for her to encounter an awkward moment, like running into an invisible wall.
Yes, the attraction that coursed between them had been off the charts, but in that moment she couldn’t read his expression.
And she wanted him to like her.