Chapter Five
Xander jumped to his feet when he saw me and made a sound in the back of his throat that had my toes curling. His eyes devoured me, and I shivered under his gaze, my heart thumping in anticipation.
He walked toward me, and my breath caught.
But my ridiculous plan hadn’t worked, as at the last moment he veered left and went into the washroom.
And he locked the door.
I had no right to feel crestfallen.
Nor could I continue to stand here pathetically waiting. I needed to get dressed. I glanced around and saw that probably several maids had come in and cleaned up our room, putting away my things. I was glad they had swept up the red dirt—I didn’t like the idea of touching it with my bare feet.
I went over to one of my trunks and found something boring to wear to bed, instead of what I had been considering—the practically see-through nightgown I’d worn the night I was attempting to distract him so that I could sneak out. I shouldn’t be trying to provoke him.
A bird cawed in the distance and I wondered if it was Rokh, which made me think about what Ahyana had just admitted.
She had said that he held back in their physical interactions because he wanted them to get to know each other better.
That told me that he hadn’t shared his secret with her yet, that he was a shape-shifter and if he and Ahyana married and had children, their sons would be under the same curse that he was.
They would suffer excruciating pain while being compelled to turn into ravens.
I wondered if he was delaying being intimate with her because of his secret.
Rokh wasn’t the only one still keeping secrets.
As I put my tunic over my head, I thought about how there was still so much I hadn’t told Xander.
I kept things from him and I suspected that he kept things from me.
How could I want our relationship to become deeper when we couldn’t even fully trust each other?
I tied my belt loosely, went over to my table, and grabbed my brush. I sat down and began to work it through my wet hair. Part of me didn’t want to look at my own reflection because I was disappointed in myself.
Even if I wanted a closer connection with my husband, I knew it was selfish and put so much at risk, not to mention how much it would upset Io. I wanted to be strong. To do what was required of me.
A voice inside me whispered that maybe Ahyana had a point: If I really was fated to die, then I wouldn’t be able to save Locris anyway. Wouldn’t it be better to have a few days or weeks of happiness with him than not ever having it at all?
I hated how torn I felt. I reminded myself that there wasn’t a future here—things would end with us one way or another. The problem was all rational thought fled when he was near.
It had been easier before, when I’d been using anger to drive a wedge between us. I wasn’t sure how to hold on to my resolutions without it.
But I was done with being mad all the time, so I would have to find another way.
I decided to begin by making plans for myself. Perhaps if I stayed busy, it would help. Xander had already told me that he would take me to see Lysimache tomorrow. I wanted to be prepared—I would be going into a kind of battle—so I started braiding my hair.
Xander came into the room and I got a brief glimpse of his bare chest in my mirror. I didn’t allow myself to look at him and tried to focus on my hair. I’d never been as good at this as Quynh was. And knowing that my husband was mostly naked behind me was not helping me to concentrate.
The strands kept slipping through my fingers and I had to restart an embarrassing number of times.
“Do you need help?” Xander asked, and it startled me. I was usually so aware of where he was and what he was doing—how had I not realized that he’d come to stand directly behind me?
“You know how to braid hair?”
“I do.”
Send him away, I told myself. Tell him you don’t need help. The very last thing I needed was those marvelous fingers of his running through my hair.
Instead of doing the wise thing, I opted, again, for the selfish one. “I do need help. Thank you.”
“How many braids?”
“Three, one in the middle and one on each side, and then braid them all together in the back.”
I had to stifle a moan when he pressed his fingers against my scalp to separate out strands. He took to his task quickly and I forced myself to pay attention to what he was doing instead of focusing on how amazing it felt. The intimacy of this moment was overwhelming.
He was quick and efficient, which shouldn’t have surprised me. His braids were smooth and even and tight against my head.
My husband really was good at everything he did. “How do you know how to do this?” I asked, mostly to distract myself.
“It’s very simple and doesn’t take much to learn. You just need to practice.”
The anger that I’d tried to banish wanted to rise, accompanied by jealousy. That ugly monster inside me wanted to roar and demand that he tell me who else’s hair he had braided.
I closed my eyes for a moment and took in a calming breath. I wasn’t going to do that anymore. I wouldn’t jump to the worst possible conclusion.
If I couldn’t master the desire I felt for him, at the very least I could control my anger and stop letting it rule me.
He immediately made me glad that I’d made that choice when he said, “I used to do this for Io. The women from my mother’s nation always braided their hair at night, and our mother would do that for Io.
After she died Erisa was trying very hard to curry favor with my father and wanted to braid Io’s hair.
Io would scream and wouldn’t allow her to do it.
Erisa forbade any of the servants from helping and I was the only one who could do it without risking bodily harm.
So I braided her hair every night for years until she could do it herself. ”
He was only a few years older than Io. I imagined him as a little boy, as I’d seen him in our shared dream, dedicating himself to learning how to braid his sister’s hair to comfort her and make her feel loved, and a swelling of warmth filled my heart.
I looked at his reflection. “Erisa did inflict bodily harm on you.”
“It’s only a scar,” he said, his eyes meeting mine in the mirror.
And I thought about how the scar on his face was just one of so many. His life had been full of scars, one after another, piling up on top of each other so that it was a marvel he was still moving forward, still striving.
A lesser man might have crumbled under the weight of it. He was so strong.
I felt guilty that I had inflicted some scars on him as well.
“Tie,” he said, and it took me a moment to realize that he’d completed the first braid and needed something to finish it off with. I opened a drawer and pulled out some twine, handing one length of it to him and keeping extra strands for the others.
“Io doesn’t do that anymore,” I told him. I’d never seen her braid her hair before bed.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” he said, finishing the first braid and starting on the second.
I had to fight off a sigh. How could something be so soothing and stimulating all at the same time?
“I think when Io moved to the temple, she put a lot of things from the past behind her. She wanted to start over, have a different life.”
And now she was back in the palace, forced to be near the woman who had abused her and having her life threatened on a constant basis because of me. I didn’t want her to be in danger. “I’m sorry that she came here for me.”
At that he stopped and stared at our shared reflection. “I’m not. Her being here saved her life. If she had been in that temple . . .”
Io would have been killed. Something that had nearly taken out Antiope would have crushed Io first thing.
I saw him swallow hard. “I’m sorry that I accused you of putting Io’s life in danger while you were in the temple together. I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have blamed you.”
My lungs couldn’t manage to gather in air. That was something he had said he would never forgive me for, and now here he was apologizing for it. My throat felt too thick and it prevented me from speaking. I nodded.
He went back to braiding and worked in silence. I was too overwhelmed by what he had just said. Should I apologize to him for the things I had wrongly held against him?
I hadn’t been wrong about everything I’d accused him of. Dolion, his own phratry brother, had confirmed that Xander had known who I was the moment he had stepped foot in Locris, something he continued to deny.
What would he do if I asked him to just be honest about it? I wasn’t angry about it any longer because I knew that had our positions been reversed, I would have done the very same thing.
But this was such a nice moment that I didn’t want it ruined. So instead I stayed silent. I handed him the ties when he requested them.
He was combining all three braids when he said, “It’s not like you to be so quiet.”
“I . . . have a lot on my mind,” I said.
“We all do.”
The last few days had been nightmarishly horrendous. The atrocities we had seen—they changed everything. Before we had gone to Lycia, I’d planned to tell him that I wanted us to have separate rooms.
Now I didn’t want to be apart from him, even if it was unwise.
“All done,” he said.
“Thank you.” We looked at each other in the mirror and it made the memories of him undressing me in front of my full-length mirror flood into my mind.
I wondered if he was thinking the same thing, if he noticed how my breathing had gone shallow.
“We should go to sleep,” he said, and he started his nightly walk around the room, putting out the lights.
I got up and went to my side of the bed and climbed in. My palms were clammy, my heart was racing. I was nervous and didn’t know why. We had done this so many times already, but tonight felt different for some reason. He put out the last candle and I felt him get into bed beside me.
He lay there for a little while before he turned and said, “Are you going to . . .”
Taking that as my invitation, I snuggled in closer to him. He put his arms around me, but his hold felt tentative. Usually he was so sure of himself. We had both let our guards down and were in a new, strange place.
One I had promised his sister we wouldn’t be in.
Even when we’d been angry, we’d always been drawn to each other, two flames burning so bright and hot that we would leave nothing but ashes in our wake. I put my hand on his bare chest, letting the steady beat of his heart comfort and soothe me.
I still felt strange. This was like it had been in the beginning, when he’d first started holding me while we slept. I remembered how we’d have stilted conversations about our days and everything felt awkward until it didn’t.
“I need to learn to ride a horse,” I announced, looking up at him.
He turned his head toward me. “Why? Were you planning on fleeing in the middle of the night?”
I smiled at his teasing tone. “No. But I need to learn how.”
“Io could show you. Maybe you can practice on your way to the temple to train.”
Disappointment made my shoulders drop. I had wanted him to teach me. “What do we do next?”
“Sleep.”
“No, I meant what do we do about Ilion being attacked?”
He hesitated before answering. “I thought you planned on seeing my entire nation burned to the ground.”
“Not anymore. People I love are here.” I regretted the words as soon as I said them, as they made the awkwardness of the moment intensify. He tensed with what I guessed was surprise, and I considered going back over to my own side of the bed and dealing with whatever nightmares might come.
Would he think I was talking about him?
“I’m concerned that none of our spies saw this coming,” he said, and I was intensely grateful that he changed the subject. “Rokh has been trying to track them down and hasn’t been able to find a single one.”
How could his spies have just disappeared? “Do you think Erisa had something to do with them going missing?”
“I wouldn’t know who else to blame. I’m going to recruit new spies and have them report directly to Thrax, so that no one else will know their identities or locations. We will also have to gather what allies we can. I’ll have to send out riders with messages.”
“We don’t know what direction the enemy will attack from.” Those riders could be heading directly into a trap.
“Which also presents a problem,” he agreed. “But if those messengers see an approaching army, they can ride back quickly and warn us.”
“And you’re planning on bringing in the people outside of Troas.”
“Yes. I’m going to send my phratry brothers and members of the army that I know I can trust to every village, town, and city to convince the people to come to Troas so that they can be safe behind the walls.”
I remembered how he had said people didn’t want to believe the worst was coming, that they wanted to stick their heads in the sand and ignore it. “What if they won’t come? If they don’t believe your men?”
“I’ve already thought of that. I’m going to try and use Erisa’s party to gather them in.”
“Using your stepmother’s diversion to your advantage.”
I saw the ends of his mouth curl up in a satisfied smile. “Yes. And if that doesn’t work, they’ll tell them about the attack and that they’re not safe out in the open.”
“What if they don’t listen?”
“I can’t force anyone to come. And without the council’s support . . .” He let out a frustrated sigh. “If only I were king. Everything would be so different.”
He was right. Everything would be different.
Our contract would be ended. He wouldn’t have need of me any longer.
Would . . . would that change things between us?
What if he wanted to find a true wife?