“I?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “Of my mother’s bearing, certainly not. Of my father’s siring, I couldn’t say. I had one half brother older and four younger the year I made twelve. How many had been born, or died, before and after I cannot know. Why do you ask?”
“An outlander will save us. Are you that outlander, Commander Anji?”
“It is not my place to answer such a question.”
She knew how to coax a man on. In the temple she’d helped along men afflicted by youth or age or hard luck or certain physical ailments that embarrassed them. This man was crippled by none of those things. She wondered idly if he had pleasured his young wife in the bed or merely taken what he desired. Not a question to ask now!
“You’re surely correct in believing there remains more thunder and lightning and battering winds in store. Why have you approached me tonight? For unless you’ve come to worship the Devourer, I’m not sure why we’re talking.”
“Your Hieros and I have discussed at length that order serves the Hundred better than disruption. Order serves farmers, who must plant and tend. Order serves merchants, who desire safe roads and markets. Order serves the temples, who wish folk to have peace for prayer and tithing. The Hieros, and Olo’osson’s council, agreed I must do what is necessary to restore order. The wrong choices now will have terrible repercussions. They already have had.”
Now she saw where this was going.
“Commander, if you’re not here to devour me, then I must assume you are here to ask me to kill someone. Your mother, perhaps?”
“My mother!” To catch him off his guard—when she knew as well as he did that out in the evening shadows his guards stood with bows at the ready—surprised her. “The woman who birthed me! Raised me! Taught me to ride. Rescued me from death at the cost of her own freedom. Why would I want my mother dead?” He shut his eyes, too choked to speak. Then he recovered, although his voice was hoarse. “She did what she thought was necessary.”
“Obviously I’ve misunderstood. Anyhow, I can undertake no such commission unless the hieros of whatever temple I’m assigned to orders me to carry out an assassination.”
“The Hieros in Olossi told me to do whatever I thought necessary, with whatever weapons I had at hand.” He nodded at her. “You are a sword of finest steel, Zubaidit.”
He wasn’t a man who flattered. Even so, the comment made her uneasy.
He went on. “It is the danger the cloaked demons represent that will prove hardest to vanquish. Maybe there are some people who would interfere out of a sentimental attachment to an illusion—what you might call a lilu.”
“A lilu? Speak plainly.”
For the first time, he hesitated. “You have not heard that one of the cloaks appeared to Reeve Joss as a lilu in the guise of his old lover, a reeve who was murdered twenty years ago by men believed to be in the employ of Lord Radas?”
Handsome Joss! His name spoken in the same breath as the mention of an old lover, twenty years dead, no doubt the woman whose death, like best-quality silk, draped him with that aura of being one laugh away from tears, an aura whose reckless lure had caught many a woman. Anyhow, what demon would not choose to appear before Joss in a guise that might encourage him to a bout of devouring? She could take men or leave them—she’d been trained to hold herself detached—and yet there he walked, the only man who really tempted her. Thoughts of him plagued her like mosks, swarming, biting, impossible. He was provoking and annoying, and too convinced of his charm’s ability to get him out of any situation. He drank too much, and his smile was a cursed yoke, dragging her into endless thoughts of what it would be like to have him close and hot and wild.
The hells!
Was it actually possible Joss was a threat to their hopes for peace in the Hundred? That he was in league with the remaining Guardians, all of whom were corrupt or bound to become corrupt, if Anji was right? Or could it be Anji was just a jealous man who wanted to rid himself of a rival as in an old and tedious tale? But if so, why would it matter now that his beautiful wife had been murdered by his own mother, whose crime he could so coldly forgive as necessity?
Necessity for whom?
“Is there a point to this?” she asked, hearing the irritation she ought to have strangled before its thorny hide crawled out in her words.
“You have a brother whose life you value, do you not?” he asked.
She’d been trained from an early age in a hard school to show no emotion that might betray her thoughts. The tremor that raced through her muscles, that sliced her heart and knotted in her gut, she subsumed, but even so it hit with such force that she shifted from one foot to the other to bleed off its power, and he tensed as if expecting an attack. In the shadows, soldiers tensed as well, their movements like a whisper of thunder on a still day.
Beware.
“Keshad is safe in your household. You assured me of this yesterday when we met on the bridge. Or is he dead, too, in the attack that killed Mai? Is that what you came to tell me?”
“He wasn’t there. He’s alive.”
She had not wept for years. She’d forgotten how tears stung.
“I sent Mai to Merciful Valley to keep her safe,” Anji continued. “We all want those we love to remain safe. Even a man as experienced as Reeve Joss wants to protect a demon because she appears to him as a woman he once—that he still—loves.” He gestured sharply toward the flutter of the awning where lamps burned and Chief Tuvi walked back and forth with the baby asleep on his shoulder. Never letting go. Anji’s grief emerged like a kroke from the murky waters of the swamp, ready to snap. “Just as I want to protect my son, who is all I have left of her.”
The tears dried up. Her heart hardened as Anji’s threat emerged. “A handsome baby, indeed. I don’t think I’ve seen a more beautiful child.”
The teeth of his anger closed; if a tone had color, his would have waxed bright with the shiny hard surface of a gemstone, brilliance without warmth. “I will not let anyone or anything stand in the way of making this land safe for him. So tell me, Zubaidit, how much do you love your brother? Who is confined in my custody. Enough to kill to keep him alive?”
50
COULDN’T A MAN get some sleep? Joss hadn’t realized how exhausted he was until the first slug of cordial left him reeling. He might as well have downed ten cups as one, for the way his head spun. A kind soul found him a blanket, and he lay down in the midst of the camp, yet twice just as he’d dozed off some cursed reveler tripped over him, and then that flirting Naya Hall reeve had to drag a young Copper Hall reeve almost next to him and get noisy. Had these young people no respect for others? Couldn’t they be bothered to seek out a little decent privacy?
Had he suddenly turned into an elder, rapping his cane on his porch and ranting at high-spirited children to get out of his orchard?
He hauled the blanket up to the berm and shook it out before lying down, on his back, to face the stars. There trundled the Carter and his Barking Dog, materializing to the southwest as the last glow faded. Low in the east, the Oxen trudged on their steady path, rising. There were always two, yoked together. How was it possible Mai was dead?
The Ox is always beautiful.
Peddonon sank down cross-legged beside him. “Do I smell tears?”
“She was a lovely woman, but I think that her physical features weren’t her true beauty. If she talked to you, she talked to you, as if you were all that mattered to her in the wide world. I don’t know how confused or frightened she might have been, to walk into the Hundred as an outlander, but she never faltered. She’s the one who overthrew the Greater Houses in Olossi. That settlement in the Barrens flourished because of her, didn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m sorry anyone with a kind heart is dead. If you’re going to sleep out here, mind if I share your blanket? Kesta stole mine to go sneak off with Nallo, and even as filthy and sweaty as I am, I just don’t want to lie smash on the ground.”
Joss scooted over. “Ther
e’s your half.”
Instead of lying down, Peddonon stood. “The hells,” he muttered, looking into the gloom. He snorted. Joss heard soft footfalls. “Looks like I’m the only one who’s not going to get devoured tonight.”
Joss sat up to see—the hells!—Zubaidit approaching along the berm with a blanket slung over one shoulder.
“There’s a woman who plans ahead. I’ll just take this.” Peddonon grabbed Joss’s blanket and yanked hard, toppling Joss sideways. “Greetings of the dusk, verea. I’m out of your way.”
“Greetings of the night to you, ver,” she shot back, as sweetly as the auntie to whom you’ve just brought a basket of fresh-picked duha berries. Peddonon laughed and walked off.
“Reminiscent of the first time we met,” said Joss from the ground, noting how her kilt was rucked up to expose a hells lot of long legs. “Although certainly I’ll be hoping for a different outcome.”
He didn’t ask why she had come. He knew. She knew. Bodies knew. There were some things you just had to get out of your system.
He stood, and that fast she had an arm around him and her hips shoved against his groin, offering a kiss that lasted so long and got so intense he only broke it off because he belatedly heard cheering and hooting coming from the reeve encampment a stone’s toss away. She didn’t ease off on her grip.
She spoke in a lover’s whisper as she nuzzled his ear. “Captain Anji wants you dead.”
He broke away as their audience whooped and laughed. She hitched the blanket higher and walked away along the berm with a twitch of that shapely ass, the motion as much a natural phenomenon like wind or rain as a thing he could actually see in the growing darkness.
“The hells!” he called after her. She kept walking. He pulled a hand over his hair, which was spiky with grime from all that digging. Was it only this morning he had buried Lord Radas’s corpse deep in the earth? It seemed like a lifetime ago, an act that had severed him from the life he’d lived before. Aui! She had him hooked now, didn’t she?
With a laugh, he caught up as she slipped down the side of the berm to open ground. He got an arm around her and reeled her in, and the sheer excitement almost overcame him, but he kissed her hard to relieve some of the heat and then pressed his lips to her ear.
“That’s got me going more than the knife did,” he murmured, his free hand sliding down to cup her buttocks. “You can’t possibly ask me to believe you hope to lure me out and murder me by telling me you’re luring me out to murder me.”
“Obviously it’s working.” Then, a little louder, “Umm. Yes. Just like that.” Her voice dropped again. “Can you swim?”
“Of course I can swim, I grew up on the ocean. What threat do I pose to Anji?”
She nuzzled his neck. “He wants to kill all the cloaks, and he thinks you don’t want to.”
“He agreed we need only kill those who were with the enemy—”
She tripped him, and down they went, the words knocked back into his throat by the impact. She was on top, sitting right across his hips, her hands splayed over his chest. She leaned closer and halted with her face a finger’s breadth above his, their noses kissing, her warm breath tickling his lips. “A man can say anything. He threatened me, Joss. He told me that if I didn’t do something about you and your infatuation with a lilu appearing in the guise of your long-dead lover—”
“Marit!”
She insinuated a finger through the fastenings of his vest and stroked his bare skin. “Is that her name?”
“Yes. Ah.”
“A little louder, please.” She ground her hips into his, her kilt wrinkling around her legs, and he really did groan aloud. How long had it been? Best not to consider that question. He had to listen hard to hear her whispering, as crazy as her words seemed here in the darkness out of sight of the other reeves. “Maybe he envies you your unfortunate good looks, or maybe he wants you out of the way because you’re commander of the reeve halls.”
“Did he threaten to kill you if you didn’t kill me?”
“No. He threatened to kill my brother. Let me tell you something.”
How could she talk this through so coolly while he ached everywhere? He crept a hand up her torso and traced the round curve of a breast beneath her tight vest. Her breath caught; her words faltered as she sucked in a sharp, delirious breath; he grinned.
But she mastered herself, bit his lower lip to break his hold on her, and went on in a murmur. “I love my brother, but I serve the Merciless One. The gods built the land on law. Maybe folk think there are agents among the hierodules and kalos who engage in unlawful activities, assassinating people for coin, for instance. But in truth every case brought before us is carefully considered and only undertaken if three different hieros from different temples agree that a significant breach of justice has occurred and no recourse seems likely through the assizes.”
“That’s still taking matters into your own hands, outside the assizes.”
“I am their weapon, not a judge.” She lay down flat atop him, and stretched out her legs. Her toes rubbed his boots. “To ask me to kill outside the proper channels, and by using a threat as coin, violates the precepts by which every servant of the Merciless One lives. As well force a hierodule to bed a man she despises. It’s like a form of rape.”
“What will happen to your brother if you don’t kill me?”
Joss knew women’s bodies pretty well; when he was with a woman, he was careful indeed to be with her only and entirely. So he felt her attention focus away from him, how the fire of her arousal banked, how her thoughts flew.
“I love Kesh, but I cannot betray the Merciless One to save him. Yet if the Hieros had personally commanded me to kill you for the same reason, I’d have done it, Joss. Don’t think otherwise. I wonder: What if Captain Anji is right? Maybe the Hundred needed the cloaks a long time ago. But I’ve felt their power, I’ve had my heart laid open, and I’ll never trust them now, even if they claim to be holy Guardians.”
The stars bloomed like an echo of the campfires and lamps strewn around the encampment. The past was as unreachable as the stars, something we can gaze on but never touch.
“You’re wrong about the Guardians,” he said. “That some became corrupt doesn’t mean all must. That some turned against justice doesn’t mean all will. We’re all susceptible in so many ways, but we don’t all succumb. That Anji says so, doesn’t make it true. Especially when it serves him to get rid of them.”
“I’m thinking about it,” she murmured. “I haven’t made up my mind. Meanwhile, I have a plan. A strong swimmer can make it across the river. It’ll be a steep climb up the western bank, but at dawn you can call your eagle. Fly me to Olossi, so I can give my report to the Hieros and warn Kesh, get him away to where Anji and his soldiers can’t ever reach him.”
“I thought you disliked her.”
“She is Hieros. She serves Ushara faithfully. Anyhow, I’m bound to report to her.”
“That current is cursed powerful. It would be crazy enough to try to swim across in daylight. At night, it’s a death trap. Better you wait out the night with me here and I’ll take you away in the morning on Scar. Anji can scarcely attack my reeves, can he? He’s not fool enough to kill me in front of the entire army. I’ll whistle Scar in at dawn, and we’ll be out before he knows we’re gone. Of course I’ll fly you to Olossi. Why not? I’ve always wondered what two people could manage while harnessed up in the air. Wouldn’t you like to try?”
She laughed. “No one can see us here,” she whispered. “Now.”
She flung wide the blanket and they rolled onto it, kissing and caressing as she worked him out of his leathers and he unfastened her thin vest, untied her kilt, and loosed her hair so it tumbled over her shoulders. Skin to skin, he thought he was likely to be obliterated out of sheer pleasure, the earth their bed, the river their song, the wind and stars their coverlet, desire blazing.
And they’d barely gotten started. He knew how to take his time. She knew h
ow to make things last.
But there is an end. Afterward the cooling ardor had its own glories: the simple animal sense of satisfaction, a tincture of smugness as she nestles against you well pleased, the easing of your heartbeat as you’re overtaken by smiling lassitude.
He sighed contentedly as he grinned. “If my murderer intends to take me off my guard, now would be the time.”
She sat up and tied back her hair. “Best we go,” she said in a brisk voice that might not have been moaning moments before in that terribly arousing and aroused way. “We shouldn’t have, but—Aui!—I’ve been waiting to do that for a cursed long time.” Yet she briskly untangled her clothes from his and shoved his leathers onto his chest, then dressed so quickly it was obvious she’d trained to have facility at these tasks in the dark. “We must go. He’ll strike when you least expect it. Joss—”
“It’s beyond reckless to try crossing that river at night.” He sought and found a hip, his hand urging her closer. “We’ll go back to camp, wait it out among the reeves. And then tomorrow—or again tonight, if you insist—”
She twisted out of his grasp and rose. “I’m going now. Come with me.”
“You’ll get to Olossi faster if you go with me at dawn. I admit, I have doubts about Anji, about the way he’s taken control of so many aspects of this campaign. But we must take this discussion in front of the councils. Indeed, I have to. For if I seem to have run, bolted under cover of night, I’ll lose what little authority I’ve worked to build. They’ll call me a coward. I can’t—I won’t—do that to the reeve halls.”
“You’re a gods-rotted fool, Joss. Come with me now.”
“Not until morning—”
She loped into the night so abruptly he didn’t fancy leaping up and chasing stark naked after her. The hells! Yet she was a hierodule. An assassin. She wouldn’t have warned him unless there was smoke signifying fire. Not unless there was a deeper plot afoot by the Hieros to set Joss against Anji for the temple’s gain. What did Ushara’s temple gain out of an alliance with Anji? The same things Anji gained: order, and control.