That smug look was back on his face as he moved in closer, gliding his callused palm down my forearm, making his intentions quite clear.
He was a handsome male, to be sure. But I’d slept with handsome males before. I’d been mounted and thrust into. There’d been some grunting, things got a little sweaty if they bothered to try and please me at all, and then it was over, and I was left feeling just as disappointed as I always had.
I shook my head. “He camps along the thicket tonight.”
His nostrils flared. “You banished your male?”
He sounded positively stunned, which almost made me laugh. I supposed for a centauress, I was more of a feminist than most. I did not particularly subscribe to the patriarchal system. That did not mean I was against it either. It just simply wasn’t for me.
Most herds were actually ruled by queens, and our shamans tended to be women, but in other ways, we were just as backwards as the humans.
“I did not banish him, and he is not my male, nor is he a centaur. He is my dear friend.”
“A human?” He said it with a curl of his nose.
“No.” I shook my head as I pretended to casually slip my arm away from his reach. “A satyr.”
“Oh.” He rolled his eyes, before suddenly guffawing with laughter. “And here you had me worried. Only a satyr. I think we both know that goat face can do nothing for you that I can’t do bet—”
“Good day, Nigel,” I countered icily, turning and marching off, gnashing my teeth as my tail flickered in agitation behind me.
That bloody, damned bastard. How dare he? He knew nothing of Petra. “Goat face!” I scoffed loudly enough that if Nigel were still behind me, he’d hear. “Indeed!”
Several pairs of eyes turned my way, but they were nothing to me, and I did not pretend to care. I no longer wished to be here, not even a little. But I had an appointment to keep and by damn, I’d be keeping it.
Marching toward the wise woman’s hut, I tossed aside the strings of dried hay and twisted twigs that comprised her doorway and walked in, determined to hide myself away from any and all until she showed.
So I was startled when an older woman with a thick head of gray hair and a coat of steely silver-blue along her hindquarters looked up at me with wry amusement.
“I wondered when you’d show, Tymanon.”
I blinked. This was not the shaman. She was still back at the fire telling stories. I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “I’m sorry, I thought—”
“No. No.” She got gingerly to her feet, dusting off her coat with several flicks of her tail. “No worries at all. I’m an old woman and find I’d rather keep to myself anymore. Come, come. Join me. I was just about to enjoy a pot of stew.”
Stomach growling with fierce hunger, I gave her a grateful nod. I’d never turn down food.
“You may call me Kezia,” the wise woman said as she ladled a heaping spoonful of meat, veggies and steaming broth into an earthenware bowl for me.
I took it gladly, drinking from it before even blowing to cool it. It burned going down, and it was glorious. Already, I could feel my heavy spirits lifting.
“Good?” she asked, steel-gray eyes twinkling.
“Very,” I said, munching on a meaty chunk of carrot.
Kezia ate alongside me, saying nothing, only looking at me every so often, and giving me time to study her humble home, mud-bricked and smelling faintly of fresh hay and smoke. She had nothing in the way of furniture, but then, my kind generally didn’t need it. There was a small tub full of plates and utensils, a well in the corner to pump fresh water from. Mostly what she had was ornamental trophies dangling from leather thongs from the beams above—little odds and ends, unusually-shaped woods, feathers, butterfly wings, and chitinous beetle armor threaded together to create a string ten and twenty long.
Woven mats of colored straw decorated the dirt floors, reminding me of the one Petra had made me, and I smiled softly to myself.
“That is a look of love if ever I’ve seen one.”
“What?” I asked, frowning at her words.
She grinned, scooping out a piece of meat from her bowl with her fingers. “The stars in your eyes, the bloom high on your cheeks.”
“I’m not in love.”
Her eyes thinned.
“Truly, I’m not. I can’t be.”
“And why not? There can be no crime—”
“Crime, no. But to fall in love with him would be seen as... anathema.” I frowned, feeling faintly bitter that it was so.
Kezia snorted. “Yes, well. The forbidden is often the sweetest kind of fruit.”
There was a secret sort of look about her, as though she not only spoke the words, but had once lived them too. Kezia was long in the tooth now, but even so, there was an inherent beauty to her.
“Petra is a satyr,” I said it quickly, nostrils flaring as I waited for her to mock or laugh as Nigel had.
“Oh,” she said softly. “Oh. Like that, eh?”
My brows dipped. “I don’t know. I feel such strange things around him now. I’m far smarter than him. I’m faster, stronger, swifter with a blade. And yet...”
“You are drawn to him as a moth to flame. Mm.” She nodded, sighing deeply. “And yet, my dear, when all is said and done, you love him.”
“I can’t.”
“Why? Because our society says you can’t? Because you’ll be shunned or whispered about? I know who you are, Tymanon, centauress without equal. You have a mind far more brilliant than most of us. I think you know what’s going on, and I think you fight it because you don’t believe you should be feeling this way. But let us be honest for a moment, at least here.” She spread her arms, encompassing the whole of her hut. “Will you do that for me?”
I thought about what she’d asked me. Kezia was wise. I could tell that already. And I knew, without needing to ask, that whatever I said here would remain between the two of us. So I nodded.
“Do you love him?”
“He has engendered great feelings in me, feelings I did not know myself capable of before.”
“But you have not answered my question, my dear. Do you love him?”
I blinked, measuring my words, thinking the matter through. Fate heard all. Anything I said now could be used against me at any time.
But could I truly hide what I felt? I did not think so. Not truly. Even that perfidious Nigel had seen the look of desire blazing on my face.
Kezia said, “If the Fates demanded his head for your answer, could you do it?”
The thought was so abhorrent that I literally growled. When she smiled, I instantly stopped. I hadn’t truly known myself until just now, but the thought of ever harming him, of hurting him in anyway, pained me to my very core. I swallowed hard, feeling the delicious stew settle like a stone in my belly.
“You see, Tymanon, the Fates will use whatever weakness they can perceive against you. So I do not want you to answer that question out loud. But answer it honestly to yourself and then determine what your course will be. You know already there will be three tests. What they might be, none can know. But you are brave and you are intelligent. My guess is your battle will be fought there. I would caution you against giving them anything more.”
My nostrils flared. “So act not and say nothing?”
She shrugged. “That, my dear, is a question only you can answer. Whatever you decide, make certain you can live with your decision.”
“What if he doesn’t... feel the same?”
She raised her brow. “I think you are wise enough to know the answer to that.”
I thought about what she’d said, and what she hadn’t said. If I chose Petra, if I walked out to meet him tonight and told him how I felt, fate could alter.
“He has a sister,” I said slowly. “I know little about her other than she is a captive of the Fates.”
She cocked her head, looking me up and down slowly before saying, “And you fear he might choose her over you?”
I sucked in a sharp breath, because from the moment he’d told me of Myra, it had been a terrible burden buried deep within the confines of my very secret self.
“I do not want to love anything,” I said, trembling as I did, glad that Petra wasn’t here to hear my confession because deep down, I knew the words would wound him.
He and I should never be. It would be a kindness to walk away from him when this was all said and done, to part our separate ways. Our life together would be one of shunned exile, never accepted by his kind or mine. We would be mocked. We would be ridiculed by all. That fate that meant nothing to me, since I preferred my solitude.
But satyrs were nothing like me. They needed the company of peers to thrive. They needed the touch of their nymphs to find pleasure. And the thought of being forced to share Petra’s affections made me want to retch.
“Yes, but it is far too late, my dear, at least for you. True love, once found, can never be buried, forgotten, or shoved aside. The feeling will only grow greater and greater, consuming your mind, twisting you, until all you can do, think, and be is his. It is an emotion that will turn into an obsession, and the only way to stop that is to confront it, face it, challenge it, and accept whatever the outcome may be.”
Once I thought that, should I ever find myself handfasted, I too would want my stallion to find comfort in the arms of others more willing, because my heart and mind could never fully be his. I was a creature of science, of books. Those were my true passions.
But I wanted to kiss Petra again. I wanted to touch him, to hold him, to feel him as a woman felt a man. I’d never wanted to do that with another before.
Why had he kissed me?
Had he done it to force me to confront myself? Or had it been a passing fancy, a momentary lapse in judgment? He’d laughed it off at the end, running as far and fast away from me as he possibly could. It’d stung at first, but now I wondered if he’d mistaken my shocked reaction as disinterest and had burned with shame. Had he used laughter to hide his humiliation?
It made me ache at the thought.
“Dark magic fell over Kingdom. The rumors travel the lands.” Kezia’s voice deepened. “It has not affected this corner of the world as badly as the rest, but the changes are here too. I remember some of what was lost, lovers and children, now memories known only to a very few.” Her lips pulled down.
I cocked my head. So Kezia too remembered the past. That was interesting. It didn’t seem to me like all centaurs did. Certainly not all hybrids did. Petra knew of the dark curse, but he didn’t seem as in tune to the changes as I. So why could Kezia and I remember?
She was the wise woman of her tribe. I was a scholar.
Hm.
“You’ve been sent on this mission by the fairies, have you not?” she asked, interrupting my slowly building epiphany.
I blinked. “How did you—?”
She shrugged and pointed up. “The winds. They speak to me, tell me a great many things, like the fact that you still don’t know what question to ask the Fates.”
“No,” I admitted, “but I’m sure I’ll figure it out.”
“I’m sure you will.” She nodded.
But I sensed a reticence on her part, like she was withholding something from me. I pursed my lips.
“What is it?”
“Well, it’s just a crazy thought, really.” She grinned. “But I got to thinking. You are a centaur who never knew love. What if it’s all connected? What if whoever cast this curse knew and planned for this? You are a scholar who never knew love before. But you are learning it now? What if this dark curse wasn’t cast out of spite or fury, but love?”
Love? The thought had never occurred to me, not with the type of damage that’d been done to our world.
“Love?” I asked her, shaking my head. “How could that be?”
Giving me a soft smile as she shrugged, she said, “Just a thought. Now you must decide the rest.”
I frowned, eyes darting back and forth at the ground, seeing nothing as I suddenly recalled the time loops in the games. I’d thought them both random, but what if they weren’t? What if there was a connection?
I wet my lips, thinking about Kezia’s words, about the possibility of it being tied to love and wondering if she was right. Both times there’d been a time loop, I’d been with Petra. And not merely in his presence, but deeply entrenched in either saving him or kissing him.
The first time I’d lost him, I’d cried bitter tears of devastation. I thought it’d been losing the game that had cut me so deeply. But I could see now, in a way I hadn’t seen then, that it hadn’t been losing the game but losing Petra that’d cut me to my soul. I’d wanted desperately to fix things, and then I blinked, and I’d returned back to him. Time had altered, changed, forcing a different outcome, though I’d not known it then.
The second time the time loop happened, it’d been right after kissing him and right before telling him we could never, ever do that again.
My heart banged wildly in my chest. If I’d said those words out loud, I knew I would have destroyed any and all chance of getting to the place where Petra and I were today. He and I both had fought this attraction, and we were both just stubborn enough to deny it to the bitter end.
Was it possible that something, or someone, had looped me back in time to force me to study my own heart? Was it possible that Petra and I were truly fated to be?
If so, who had done it? And why should they care?
I wet my lips again as I thought about Harpy, her secret smiles, and the way she talked with me about Petra. I’d thought her silly, imagining a time when the satyr and I might declare our love for each other. It was impossible. We were simply too different and neither of us attracted to each other.
Had she done that to me? Was she capable of adjusting time that way? The more I thought about it, the more it started to make sense. She could walk between worlds. She’d wanted to know all there was to know about love, about what it did to a person’s soul. She’d wanted to save me from myself.
I gasped, feeling unbelievably dull and stupid that I’d not realized this sooner. The time jumps had been Harpy’s doing. But Harpy had known her fate, known the curse she would be forced to take on in Galeta’s stead. There had to be more to this than just wanting Petra and I to fall in love.
Like maybe the fact that it was only the combination of Petra and I that could succeed in turning Kingdom around.
Click.
Every piece of the puzzle suddenly slid into place for me and I shook as I finally turned my astonished gaze toward Kezia’s warmly smiling one. The old woman was far wiser than I could have imagined.
A secret smile played about her lips.
“I am tired, Tymanon, but I thank you for your company this eve,” she said, tipping her head toward me in farewell.
Realizing I’d been dismissed, I tipped my head back. I needed to think on this more. I needed to find Petra. “The stew was wonderful.”
“Take a bowl for your man.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to correct her as I had Nigel, but instead, I nodded my appreciation and ladled broth and vegetables into the bowl I still held.
“Wash the bowl and leave it by the brook. I’ll find it in the morning. May your journey be well. I believe we shall never meet again, Tymanon, but I wish you all the best.”
She knew. Kezia knew something more, knew what came for us. But just like me, she knew to give it voice would alter it all. So I thanked her, and I left to find my Petra.
I’d made my decision.
But the truth was there’d never really been one to make. I’d merely needed to find my courage.
Chapter 9
Petra
I was stoking my fire with a long stick, poking angrily at the cinders, when I heard the clop of hooves coming in fast. Standing, I looked ahead, making out the faint form of a centaur.
Moving my hand toward my pouch and to the waiting dagger within, I stood still and watched. I breathed a s
igh of relief when the shadow drew closer and I was able to scent Ty’s unique scent of fresh-cut hay and wild flowers.
I didn’t even think about what I was doing, but suddenly I was running out to meet her halfway, feeling light and almost weightless, freed of the dark cloud that’d hovered over me since our parting.
“You came back,” I grunted when she was close enough to hear, trying not to show just how happy I was about it, but unable to stop from grinning like an arse from ear to ear when the soft glow of my fire danced across her lovely face.
She wore the same kind of smile I did, and my heart trembled. It wasn’t possible that she was as happy to see me as I was to see her, and yet she was looking at me in a way she never had before.
“I brought you food, gída.” She thrust a leaf-covered bowl into my chest.
I reached for it, expecting her to move away the second I had a good grasp on it, but she didn’t. Instead, our fingers glided over one another’s.
For the past four hours since she’d left me, I’d been calling myself all sorts of fool for kissing her, for touching her, for letting her see just what kind of call, what kind of power she had over me. I was sure Tymanon would mock me, scorn me for my weakness.
Instead, she moved in closer, and still hanging onto my hands, she called the light of her shift to her. Blinded by its sudden brilliance, I had to screw my now-tearing eyes shut against it.
A few seconds later, it was the glide of her strong, warm hands over my cheeks that had me blinking them open. What I saw made me feel weak in the knees. Tymanon was biting her lower lip with what looked like nerves, but her rich amber eyes shone with determination.
It wasn’t until her lashes flickered shut that I knew what she was about to do. The bowl in my hands shook when her soft lips grazed mine, not just once, but twice, three times, like flickering butterfly kisses, gentle and infinitely tender.
I’d been licked before and bitten, clawed and scratched, and I’d always thought there was nothing more exciting than a rough and wild tussle. But I swear to the gods and the heavens that no kiss had ever blazed through my blood quite the way her whispering, feather-light touches did.