Not that he hadn’t enjoyed himself, of course. But it had barely taken the edge off.
The trouble with Eiryn was that she was arrogant and tough, like every other member of the brotherhood. It was what made them who they were. But she was worse than all of them as far as he was concerned, because he’d never fucked any of them and yet a taste of her pussy was never, ever enough.
Riordan had spent every minute since he’d pulled out of her tight, hot cunt in Louisville trying to find a way back in.
It took a solid week to get to Kansas City and the ferry ride over had been a miserable experience, as promised. The Louisville bunkhouse had been spacious and luxurious in comparison. They’d been packed in belowdeck, wave after wave of people, crammed into every bit of available space with only a few passed-around buckets to use as toilets and a total disregard for safety or hygiene or anything even resembling comfort. It might have been the only week of his life Riordan hadn’t wanted to get his dick wet at all. In practice. But still, the whole time they’d huddled together to keep their packs to themselves and everyone else in that filthy cargo hold off of them, he’d indulged himself. With one fantasy after the next of Eiryn on a nice, wide bed—or hell, an open field or a forest clearing or a big ass rock—where they could stretch out. Take their time. Get a little creative.
It was no different from the past ten years, really, because he’d always had this same craving for her he’d never managed to wipe out completely. But now that he’d gotten a taste of her again? Forget it. He was addicted all over again.
But an overpacked ferry dripping with compliants and traveling priests was hardly the place to get into any of that.
Kansas City was one of two major Mississippi Sea port cities on the western mainland’s eastern coastline and was the only one considered safe, relatively speaking, for regular people who didn’t sail where they liked and anchor where they pleased. To the north, the port of Lincoln, Nebraska, had been held by an ever-shifting horde of bandits since about two decades after the Storms. There were no bandits in Kansas City. It was a curious swamp of a place that should have been submerged by the rising tides of the hungry Mississippi Sea, but had, through the ingenuity of long-lost ancients, managed to survive in its own unique way. Now it was a collection of walled and heavily fortified islands, each ruled by a separate western kingdom.
Or more accurately, each kingdom’s militia.
After a necessary trip to the public bathhouses that had sprung up near the docks for travelers to wash away the aftermath of the ferry rides from the eastern mainland, Riordan and Eiryn strapped themselves into their packs again and started walking. They made their way from the ferry terminal down on the public docks to the first of the many drawbridges that connected the little collection of islands that all called themselves a part of Kansas City proper. The bridges were heavily guarded on both sides as if every kingdom was strutting around trying to outgun the next. One big game of chicken, as far as Riordan could tell.
But he and Eiryn were raiders. They were good at playing games.
Today it was a matter of keeping their heads down and navigating their way past the hard-eyed military men who stood watch on each island’s border, loaded up with assault rifles and handguns and more than happy to stop pedestrians to ask them a series of pointless, invasive questions, simply because they could. Riordan knew the power games weak men played when he saw them. Accordingly, he didn’t hunch his back or try to look any smaller. He didn’t get in anyone’s face, but he didn’t cringe away, either, and one gun-toting bitch after the next maddogged him, then let him through anyway.
Cowards, all of them. Riordan had yet to encounter a preening douche with a gun who wasn’t.
Riordan paid attention to the scenery instead. Because Kansas City’s network of bridges and islands was fascinating, spanning what had once been a landlocked area of a much different continent and the confluence of at least two major rivers. Every time they crossed a bridge it was as if they’d entered a different world, some small and compact and some much larger and more expansive. There were private, heavily guarded dockyards on islands with restricted access, a bridge over from islands like Country Club Plaza, packed with intricately styled buildings full of people and carefully maintained streets wide enough for the kinds of vehicles that no longer ran on them with any regularity. One island was unnaturally clean and sterile, all the buildings painted the same color and all the people the same sort of wan. The next was bursting with more character in its architecture and citizens, if not with quite enough unbridled passion to draw the notice of the priests.
They found what they were looking for on the fifth and biggest island. They crossed the most heavily guarded drawbridge yet and had to stop twice to answer different intrusive trick questions to make it through. Only when both sets of grim-faced guards in riot gear were satisfied did they make it over the wall and then down the long stairs into what Riordan thought had to be the most perfectly preserved slice of an old city he’d ever seen above water.
Kansas City’s ancient Union Station, once a railway hub, stood in a protected swath of green grass that stretched out to the far side of the island. It looked much as Riordan imagined it must have hundreds upon hundreds of years ago, when it was new. There was a wide pool in front of it where fountains shot water into the hot summer air, an ancient fantasy come to life. He’d never seen anything like it.
This was a ruined world. It had drowned a long time ago, and they all did the best they could in the shit that was left. But this didn’t look like any kind of compromise. This didn’t look like settling for scraps and ruins and leftovers. It looked like a memory made real.
Eiryn was close at his side, but he didn’t dare look at her. Riordan felt . . . outside himself, somehow. As if the particular, deliberate beauty of this place was a personal attack. As if it was doing something to him.
He wanted to walk inside Union Station the way some were already lining up to do. He wanted to know what something so terribly old and exquisitely cared-for looked like, or what it felt like to breathe the air inside such ancient walls. The people walking beside him talked excitedly of glorious paneled ceilings and old-time shops maintained in their original form, like a museum. He wanted to see how any of that could possibly exist in this strange place, below sea level on these sunken islands with their fortified walls, when everything else had been lost or destroyed or abandoned so long ago.
“Stop whatever you’re doing,” Eiryn murmured from beside him, her voice pleasant despite her words. In case anyone was listening, he knew. She was as good at her job as he was, which was only one of the reasons her attitude this summer had bothered him so much. “You look like you’re chewing steel.”
Riordan took a breath and ordered himself to relax. Or at least look relaxed, if he couldn’t quite get there. But Eiryn led him down onto the vast, manicured lawn and the deep green smell got into his head. It smelled the way the long yard that wrapped around his father’s house had, like lazy afternoons in a high summer like this one, and the few, magical times his hardworking parents had sat out there to catch the breeze and few sweet moments of sunshine. It catapulted him back to his early childhood, when he’d run around barefoot in grass that smelled exactly like this. He’d rolled in it until he itched. He’d pulled up clumps and had tried to make whistles from the blades. He’d understood who he was and what his life would look like in same visceral way he’d understood the earth beneath his feet and the sky arched high over his head. There had been no mystery, no darkness, no shame or guilt in all that green, all those years ago when he’d still been innocent.
It messed with him, here in this foreign place with an old stone railway station in place of the log cabin his parents had called home. It made him feel a little less steady than he should have.
It made him feel a little too reckless for someone who was supposed to be playing a very specific role.
There was a line of caravans parked on the far side of the
vast lawn. According to Helena, they were all privately owned vehicles headed into the western highlands, waiting to round up a decent set of passengers to make the demanding trip. All they had to do was walk over there and start their bidding and negotiations, but Riordan couldn’t bring himself to move.
It was the goddamned grass. The grass and the sun above him and the clear blue summer sky, like a flashback he couldn’t scrub out of his head and no matter that he was half a world and two oceans away from the farm where he’d grown up. It was that astonishingly pretty building with its great arched windows, a throwback to a long-lost world that made him question all the other things he’d always accepted were simply . . . gone. Drowned. Out of reach forever. Maybe it was even the woman who stopped to look up at him, too much summer light in her face while her sleek hair flowed all around her, one more lost thing he’d been so certain he could never have again—until he had.
Or maybe it was the fact he looked like the farmer he’d been bred to become, but still wasn’t one. And no matter how many times he told suspicious border guards that he was all about seeds and crops and his made up land somewhere in the western highlands, he wasn’t his father. He wasn’t even the son his father had wanted, the heir to all his old man had built and tended and maintained.
When Riordan had been given the choice—or what he’d imagined, at ten, was a crucial decision he was called to make or die from the agony of not trying—he hadn’t recognized it for what it was. He’d known what he wanted, oh yes, but he’d had no earthly idea what he’d have to give up to get it.
How had he failed to recognize that when he’d walked away from Eiryn ten years ago it had been the same thing all over again?
He knew why he’d done it, both times. It was always the same reason.
The brotherhood. The blade.
But he’d just spent the first week of his adult life without his blade in his hand, something he’d always imagined would kill him—and here he was. Fine. He’d tasted Eiryn again, which was a mistake so vast it was eating him alive, and the worst part was he had every intention of making it worse. Much, much worse. These caravans were up close and personal affairs, Helena had told them. There would be no avoiding their compliant duties and Riordan couldn’t lie to himself. He didn’t bother trying.
He couldn’t wait.
Riordan had been so focused on what he was giving up, he hadn’t paid enough attention to what he was getting. This was a finite mission, not a life change. He wasn’t a kid hiding under a porch this time around. His king wanted him to do exactly what he was doing.
Which was, basically, to act like the mainlander version of the man his father had been. The man Riordan was supposed to become before he’d taken matters into his own hands. The man he’d killed with his own selfish bullshit—
But his ghosts were his problem. He’d carry them inside him, like the crisp scent of grass and those precious summer afternoons and the quiet laughter of people he’d never see again. Like Eiryn ten years ago when her smile hadn’t been so rare, her gaze open and too much emotion in her young face, before he’d crushed her, too. He’d do what he had to do this winter, and when it was over, he’d take himself to task for enjoying it.
He was sure there was more space on his skin to mark his shame and pay his penance. There always was.
“Riordan.”
His gaze snapped to Eiryn’s then. She was still standing there, frowning at him despite the sun in her eyes. The crowd of people around them had thinned, spreading out over the grass. Some had gone to the caravans. Some had headed for the western bridge off the island, the one that actually linked these Kansas City islands to the mainland. Still others were heading into Union Station to soak in all that history.
“Do you want to check that place out?” she asked, looking between him and the building that stood there, serene and something like sweet in the summer afternoon. No trains ran in or out of it now. No one had seen a train in centuries. But still it stood, as if the seas had never threatened it. It looked as if it always would.
“No,” he said, aware that his voice was rough. He ignored it.
He reached over and took her hand, because he could. Because out here in the light of early September and the end of another summer, it didn’t matter. They weren’t brothers here, not where anyone could see. That meant he could do what he wanted, like enjoy that instant bolt of sensation that surged through him when he touched her. That meant he could hold on when she tried to pull away.
Riordan smiled. A real smile, from a place inside him he hadn’t known was there. He’d save regrets for the spring. He’d match them with his ghosts and kick his own ass, the way he always did.
But first he’d make sure there was something worth regretting. A whole lot of somethings, or what was the point?
“I have everything I need,” he told her, this woman who would play his mate for a season. This woman he couldn’t get enough of, then or now, and he figured it was high time he stopped trying. “Let’s go.”
9
It wasn’t the caravan itself that bothered Eiryn.
Sure, it was a rickety old thing held together as much by chance as the various things Lang, its remarkably hairy and pale owner, and Xela, his thick and weathered mate, used to patch up holes and paper over potential issues inside and out. And it lacked pretty much anything in the way of amenities. There were a series of bunks in the back and a sitting area in the middle, and neither part of the vehicle was remotely luxurious or even particularly comfortable.
Eiryn had always taken her rooms in the Lodge back home for granted, she realized now. All those warm and toasty furs. Hot water and a private shower. Heat in the winter and cool breezes from the sea in summer. Though as the days wore on, while Eiryn didn’t dream about life back home any less, she somehow . . . got used to the endless, jolting ride. She started finding the bunk she shared with Riordan almost comfortable—or at least, more comfortable than the disgusting ferry ride, that cot in Louisville, and sleeping on the ground during raids. She found that after a day or two she even relaxed a little bit while sitting on one of the built-in couches, as long as no one else tried to creep up behind her.
Eiryn wouldn’t want to live in the ratty old caravan any longer than she had to, but she was fine with it. More or less.
The people she was sharing her space with weren’t the problem, either, though having to deal with mainlanders up close and personal had certainly taken a small period of adjustment. This was one of the smaller caravans that had lined the green lawn across from Union Station, with only four built-in bunks. With one reserved for Lang and Xela, that left space for two couples other than Eiryn and Riordan. And they were all . . . fine. Or relatively unobjectionable, anyway.
Eiryn knew how to judge a person by their prowess in battle and the strength of their swing. The honor by which they lived—or didn’t. In the absence of a battlefield where she could read opponents instantly in the ways they attacked or held back, feinted or struck, who could tell how to measure these mainland creatures? She understood that not one of them was a threat, which instantly downgraded them in her eyes from potential opponents to . . . curiosities.
Dimitri, long-limbed with freckles on his light-brown face, was a carpenter on his way back from a job in Atlanta to spend the winter with his people in Wyoming. His woman, Gretchen, with her deep-set eyes, olive skin, and strong nose, was nursing their ten-month-old baby. Jonathan, meanwhile, was a stern and burly butcher by trade with sallow white skin, thick black brows, and a fierce, downturned mouth who spent a lot of his time quoting dire church teachings, particularly to his much younger previous winter’s wife. Kamala, for her part, bared a bit too much of her ruddy brown skin for Jonathan’s taste and smiled a little too intently at the other men on the caravan, clearly planning to switch things up at the equinox celebration she was headed to somewhere in the settlements outside the Great Lake Cathedral. If not before.
Eiryn didn’t feel the urge to kill any o
f them outright. They were almost entertaining, in their way. She could admit that a part of her enjoyed listening to them talk about their strange lives, all of them so far removed from what she knew that it was like listening to the old fairy tales her mother had told her when she was very small. Carpenters. Babies. A ranting butcher. It was like a winter play put on for her personal amusement.
Then again, sometimes there were moments that had nothing at all to do with fairy tales. Eiryn had been shocked on that first morning, when she’d been able to tell by the scent wafting up from each mug that all three of the other women were drinking the same herbal tea that she’d brought with her. In bulk. They’d all met each other’s gazes with the same bland expression. None of them had said a word. And no one had ever mentioned out loud that the herbs they were drinking and calling their morning tea were what ensured they wouldn’t get pregnant no matter how low the chances were anyway these days. Church teachings and the rantings of winter husbands like Jonathan were one thing, it seemed. Reality was something else.
Eiryn’s problem wasn’t even Riordan, necessarily. She didn’t know what had happened to him back in Kansas City. She hadn’t been able to read him at all. They’d hardly had a second alone to discuss it, and when they had, he’d only shaken his head and told her—a bit gruffly, to her mind—to stay in character. So that was what they’d done.
For going on a week now.
And that right there was the problem. Not the close quarters, though that, too, was an adjustment. Because she could hear everything, of course. Like Dimitri and Gretchen whispering and laughing like people who genuinely enjoyed each other’s company, something none of the formerly compliant women Eiryn had spoken to had indicated was a possibility in such relationships. Or their cute little baby with all that black hair and those big brown eyes making her little and sometimes not so little noises. Or Jonathan’s long and inescapable nightly sex sessions with a Kamala, who never sounded like she was nearly as compliant as he was, followed by much longer and louder prayers, as if he felt he needed to cleanse them both of any lingering, contaminating lust. Eiryn heard round-faced Xela and bear-like Lang snap at each other as they tended to the business of running the caravan and offering the precious few services the rest of them had paid for, like the anemic breakfasts of a few waterlogged seeds and a cup of dried oats they put out each morning. Just as Helena had warned back in the Catskills, there was no escaping the noise and the knowledge it brought of other people’s business.