KISS IT BETTER #4
Bal caught her hand on his shirt and held it tight.
Calluses scratched at her palm, and his muscles flexed.
Again, she found herself noticing his size.
Bal was massive and capable. Even lounging below her, hidden under a sweet dinner with a ribbon on his shirt and a sling he didn’t need, it was obvious.
She’d likened him to a beast before and it had made her heart race.
Now, the uneven thumping in her chest was half out of fear.
How many of those missing Wail soldiers had died by his hand?
Esme could nearly count them in the cruelty of his voice, the viciousness of his fighting style, the stench of death that haunted him like the legions he’d no doubt put down all on his own.
Balthazar Joh’el was a snarling beast. She wondered how long he’d nuzzle her before setting his fangs at her throat.
“So, the children?” Esme changed the subject quickly. If she was any better of a spy, she’d have tried to weasel more of his dangerousness out of him, but right now she just wanted her Bal back.
At the mention of his children in Prelyn, Bal’s violence abandoned him.
He let go of her hand and his gaze dipped to the stones below them.
“They leave the kids for last. The Wail descends at night and kills the husbands in their beds. They drag the wives out screaming and kill the loudest ones. They take the rest. Then they round up the kids, sort them biggest to smallest, and kill the littles. The strong boys they train. The girls…” Bal looked away from her.
“We usually get to them before that happens.”
Usually.
“And the borders?”
“Gustoe sends out a roaming band of men to keep the borders tight. They’re told not to kill the women, so they send them back.
Men, they can do with as they please. They usually round them up, wait until the first of the month, and build a big fire to burn them all at once.
They used to just kill them, but the mess got too difficult to clean, and the land was poisoned, so… ” Bal locked up under her.
“How many have you saved?” Esme asked him.
She didn’t know how to comfort him, whether she should touch or hold or hug him.
His face was carved and cold, and his pulse was a heavy thump.
His jaw shifted from side to side, and it looked like it was all he could do to stop himself from getting up, grabbing a sword, and riding back to the border to fight again.
“The children?” he repeated. “A bit over a thousand. Sometimes we find border crossers and help them on. They’re a few hundred.
” He didn’t smile for his successes. “The Wail has killed around five thousand in all by our count, though. We’re just starting to dent their numbers.
I almost didn’t even come here until I realized who I’d be up against. Then I knew I had to come.
I had to win. Because if I didn’t, there would be no children left to save, no families to help across the border.
Just a big fire for all of us. I’ve seen it enough. Can’t let it happen again.”
Disgust and horror turned Esme’s stomach together. Anger that it had been happening for so long bled in too, eventually, but she couldn’t fix what had already happened. All she could do was stop it from going any further.
“You didn’t know about the Scourge, did you?” he said, jolting her from her spiral.
“I knew you’d been robbing the crown, that your soldiers were well trained, and that the Wail’s numbers were dropping,” she admitted. “I didn’t know it was because you’d been fighting them, though, no.”
“Hmm. So you’ve been doing all of this to stop Janos.” There was a touch of insecurity to his voice.
“I think you’re a fine man, Bal, but I didn’t need you to be perfect. I just needed you not to be him,” Esme told him. She leaned forward on his lap again, grazing her nails against his cheek. Bal didn’t pull away, but he bit his lip not to lean in.
“So, you’ve been spying on him while I’ve been spying on you. Now this attraction feels one-sided.” He practically coughed the words out.
“I didn’t spy on you because I knew you’d tell me if I batted my lashes at you enough,” she said. “Does that help?” She touched a finger to his nose and he caught her hand.
“No, it doesn’t. Nor does it make me feel better that you were right.” He pulled a twist from under her scarf and twirled it around his finger. “If this has been an act, you should tell me plainly. I promise I’ll take it well. I just need to know before I get any deeper.”
“Mm-hmm, I’m sure you can take me well enough.” Esme planted a kiss on his check, and Bal’s breath shuddered out of his chest, half relieved, half winding up again. “Don’t worry. I can hate Janos and fancy you in the same breath.”
Bal grinned. His eyes dipped down to her lips, but before he kissed her, he wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled them chest to chest again. There wasn’t a breath of space between them, not a breath in Esme’s lungs.
“Why did you pretend to have a broken arm?” she asked.
Bal grinned, and for the first time she noticed the sharpness of his canines. “You look at me like an injured dog when I have my arm all strung up. Easiest way to get you to let me drag you off is to convince you I need help getting there.”
It was a slimy bit of trickery. It was also a little sweet.
“Not to mention the longer I drag this out, the longer Janos stays away from the Lake. No lord of the courts, no tax collection. If I can draw out this competition, I give families at the Lake a bit of reprieve.” Bal’s grin dimmed.
“So, as long as my arm stays in this little scrap of fabric, everybody wins.”
Esme sighed out a laugh. On the one hand, he was outright manipulating her fondness for lost and broken things. On the other, he was buying a whole country of victims time.
“Well, now that I’ve spilled my guts, it’s your turn,” he said, leaning back on his hands.
“Why should I?”
“Because you will if I flutter my lashes at you,” he said, reusing her line, perhaps to test if she did, in fact, like him.
Esme asked herself the same question. She was used to fancying people, but Bal’s helpfulness as king couldn’t be extracted from her attraction to him.
Fine, he was tall and smart and sweet and so handsome it could be infuriating to look at him too long.
The calluses on his fingers gave her a pleasant tingle when they ran down her skin. But none of that made him a good king.
It did, however, make him a man she enjoyed very, very much.
“You didn’t ask me a question,” she told him, pressing her chest ever closer and wrapping her arms around his neck. His leg slid up between hers, and when a gasp tripped out between her lips, he grabbed her hips to keep her in place.
“Maybe I want to know everything about you,” he said, his hand flattening down her back from her shoulders to the base of her spine. She wondered for a second if he could feel Omniel’s name branded there… but no. No, she wouldn’t let Omniel steal this moment from her.
“Is this your longwinded way of finding out my measurements?”
“Oh, I know your measurements,” he said, and winked. Esme pinched his ear. “But how about we start with your favorite color?”
“Purple,” Esme said.
“I can tell.” He cast a look to her tiny nightgown again and dragged a finger down the velvet covering the side of her breast. “For some reason, I thought it’d be black.”
“Second favorite,” Esme said. She waggled her fingers and a shadow wove through them before exploding in a black firework.
Bal shook his head at the little show, drawing back from her an inch. “I refuse to believe Muhnir is so dastardly a god. Not if he made you.”
Esme snorted. “Don’t worry, he didn’t,” she said, and Bal’s face fell. She’d forgotten he actually believed in all of that.
“Then who made you?” he asked.
“My mother. I hear my father was there as well.” Esme smiled at his confusion before continuing, “Me and the other Wraiths aren’t divine plagues. We’re just people with Magic.”
“But where does Magic… come from? What does your magic come from?” he asked.
“My father,” Esme said, smiling at the memory of his warm, dark face full of freckles and dense crown of black hair. “He was granted the ability to sculpt shadows, and when he and my mother had me, I inherited those abilities. Just like when your mother has green eyes, so you get them too.”
“Was he born that way?”
Esme shook her head. “My father was born under my grandmother’s empire—”
“Your grandmother is an empress?”
“Well, she was. She abdicated when I was little.” Esme wiggled away from him and widened her hands between them to conjure the inky shapes of her parents in shadow.
“My father was born a normal boy, but he had the extraordinary talent to sculpt anything with lifelike precision. Even from a young age, people would travel from worlds over just to watch him work. When he grew up, he entered into my grandmother’s court and became her royal artist.” Esme played the scene out with her shadowy puppets, making sure to perfect her grandmother’s large, funnel-shaped crown woven from dried reeds and gold.
She’d been told this story every night as a child, with her father, Ligoo, playing it just like this for her.
“There, he met my mother, the princess,” Esme said, and sculpted Isre just as she remembered her: a shard of obsidian, tall and beautiful, with gleaming black diamonds for eyes set in a face sweeter than a whole orchard’s bounty.
“You take after her, I see,” Bal said, smiling down at the little shadow sculpture.