Chapter 40
Chapter
Forty
HAVEN
Grandmother dispersed, leaving me alone in the cave with Gladys. Even as vapor, Grandmother had brought the warmth of home. Now that she was gone, I pulled the cloak more tightly around me. “What now?”
Destiny wasn’t hanging out in the cave with us. Or was she? I scanned the wall carvings for a depiction of the goddess. I didn’t find her. Instead, my gaze snagged on the dragon. Its eyes, rubies that were bigger than my two hands fisted together, seemed to stare back at me.
“Are dragons real?”
You’ve seen the answer. The basajaun will take you where you need to go.
“Which is where?”
Not here.
Grinding my teeth was probably bad for them. “Are all disembodied voices as annoying as you?”
Oh, Haven, I’m the long straw. My sisters would have burned you alive for your impudence.
Getting out of the cave became my top priority. “The basajaun is missing.”
He’s leading your friends on a wild-goose chase.
“My friends?”
The four handsome guards.
“They came looking for me?”
You’re a powerful shield.
As if I needed a reminder that they cared about my power and not me. I ignored the unwelcome pang near my heart and asked, “Where do I need to go?”
You’re leaving Legacia.
“But Grandmother—”
Your grandmother is perfectly capable of taking care of herself. Gladys, who’d rudely interrupted me, sounded bored.
“They said if I didn’t go with them, they’d throw her and the girls in jail.”
Never play cards. You can’t read a bluff.
“They weren’t bluffing.”
Hmm. We’ll see.
“If they think I’m dead, they might leave her alone.”
You withstood Carron’s poison and the pit, fought off a wolven, repelled wraiths, killed a wyvern, punished the men who wanted to rape you, and fought rebels; no one will believe a basajaun killed you.
I couldn’t even scowl at her; she had no face. A sound coming from behind me drew my attention, making me turn. A basajaun stood at the cave’s entrance. “Does he have a name?”
You couldn’t pronounce her true name. You may call her Mildred.
“Mildred? You’re sure she won’t bite my head off for calling her that?”
Why would she care what you call her?
“I hate it when people call me Shield.”
Fair point. But she doesn’t mind Mildred.
“Maybe she’d prefer Bianca?”
The basajaun grunted.
“See?”
Fine. Call her Bianca.
I wrapped my cloak tightly around me and said, “Bianca, lead the way.”
We stepped outside into a world painted white. I followed as best I could, but Bianca’s annoyed grunts made it clear my best wasn’t good enough. After I stumbled for the third time, face-planting into a snowdrift, she’d had enough. She picked me up in a bridal hold.
“I can walk,” I insisted.
She grunted her dissent and trotted ever upward.
The men would never find me—not in this storm. Part of me was relieved. If Gladys was to be believed, Grandmother and the girls were safe, which meant I didn’t have to stay with the men who’d allowed Drake to whip me yet still called themselves heroes.
The cold didn’t nip. Instead, it took sharp bites, leaving my exposed skin raw. The bitter wind howled into my lungs, freezing me from the inside out.
“So cold,” I muttered, teeth chattering.
Bianca chortled.
“I’d like to see you survive Grimswood on a hot afternoon.”
She grunted, and we fell silent.
We traveled for hours and hours and hours.
“I need to stop.” The thought of lowering my pants to pee made my whole body tighten with anticipated chill, but my bladder was filled to bursting.
Bianca put me down, and I ducked behind a tree.
When I emerged, a gallon lighter, I was alone.
“Bianca?”
Snow-wrapped silence answered me.
“I thought we were friends!”
I got more silence as a response.
Great. I kicked a snowbank. Just great. She’d left me alone on the trail.
I waited five minutes, then another five, but Bianca was gone. She’d left me to freeze.
Cold and annoyed, I tilted my face toward the heavens. “Really, Gladys?”
She didn’t respond either.
With no other option, I followed the path.
Snow over a foot deep made walking slow; I fell often and swore loudly.
“Destiny’s champion, my ass. My frozen ass.
Let someone else save the world.” I’d gripe about saving the world all day long, but I refused to waste a single brain cell thinking about what else the pool had revealed.
“Save the world? Me? Find a different woman. One who can lead an army.”
That thought brought me dangerously close to thinking about the other visions. Me atop a horse with a sword in my hand, legions spread behind me.
I tripped again and was almost grateful for the resulting face full of snow. “Gladys, you suck. And Bianca, I’m not happy with you either.”
I pushed myself up, pausing as a tingle of pine-scented magic kissed my cold nose. Turning in a slow circle, I spotted a larger break in the trees. The magic was stronger there. I walked until I bounced off a barrier.
“Ouch!” I rubbed my cold, flattened nose. “What now, Gladys?”
Was that laughter in the wind?
I touched the barrier, using just enough wyvern venom to eat away the magic.
Then I paused. Gladys had said I needed to leave Legacia.
This far north, a border crossing meant I’d be entering Rymar.
Legacia and Rymar had been at war my entire life.
What would happen when someone spotted a woman wearing a Legacian shield’s uniform?
Gathering the frayed strands of my courage, I ducked through the passageway.
Electricity zipped through my veins, and every nerve ending in my body burned with strange magic. It felt … good. Better than good. It felt freeing, as if crossing the border had unwound a tangled enchantment, as if my lungs were fully inflated for the first time.
I stopped, overwhelmed by the sensation. Had Legacia somehow suppressed my magic? The implications made my head spin. If this was what I felt like in Rymar, what had I been missing my entire life?
The world seemed sharper; my eyes were able to pick up details I’d missed on the Legacia side—the deep green of pine needles, the vibrant red of a holly bush. And the air—I sniffed, discovering smoke and cold—was crisper. I pinched the fabric of my cloak and felt each thread.
Thwack.
I frowned, unable to place the sound.
Erring on the side of caution, I summoned a sword. Only when my hand was wrapped around its grip did I continue forward.
Thwack.
Half a mile later, the trail opened into a clearing.
Thwack.
A man—somehow even taller and broader than Grayson—was splitting wood. Despite the cold, he worked without the benefit of a shirt. He lifted the axe, and the muscles across his back and shoulders rippled.
Thwack.
A log split in two.
I squinted, looking more closely at his skin.
A dragon tattoo rose from the waistline of his pants, spread its wings across his mid-back, and breathed fire across his neck.
The colors—blue, green, and silver—were mesmerizing.
And with my newfound vision, I could discern each scale, each shift in hue, the subtle shading. The tattoo was a work of art.
Thwack!
Again, he swung the axe. The way his muscles bunched and pulled left me near breathless. “Eep.” I pressed my free hand against my lips, but it was too late. He’d heard me.
He turned, lifting the axe as if he meant to throw it.
I didn’t react. I couldn’t. Not when confronted with taut abs and a chest that seemed to go on for days. Somehow, I wrenched my gaze upward.
His face. If I thought looking away from his abs was hard, looking away from his face was impossible.
I knew that face. I’d seen it in the pool’s visions—not just glimpsed, but burned into my memory alongside images I’d tried to forget.
The strong jaw, the golden eyes, the way his mouth curved when he looked at me.
This was one of the men I’d seen when I touched the water.
And now those impossible images felt suddenly, terrifyingly real.
He stared at me with a carnal intensity that made me want to run.
I didn’t. Mainly because I knew he’d chase me down.
“You’re here. We’ve been waiting.” His voice was a raspy growl that promised more than mere passion. Passion was a chemical reaction. His voice was whiskey and the grate of stubble against soft skin and the perfect balance between pleasure and pain.
“We?” I squeaked, then I tightened my grip on the sword to make up for the reedy sound that had escaped my lips.
His eyes sparkled as if he knew a joke and couldn’t wait to tell me the punchline. “Remy is hunting. We’ve been here for three days.”
The wind swirled around us, carrying the unmistakable scent of hot tea. My mouth watered, not just for the taste, but for the feeling—home.
I glanced at the fire, but no kettle sat on the grate. Where was the tea?
“We knew you were coming.” A slow grin split his face. “You’re even more gorgeous in the flesh.”
My stomach dropped, and heat tinged my cheeks. He’d seen me? The way I’d seen him? “How did you know I was coming?”
“A vision.”
“You’re a seer?”
“I wouldn’t go that far.” He stretched his arms above his head, and every muscle in his torso rippled. Deliciously. “I catch glimpses of the future.”
Now my cheeks flamed. “Where are we?”
“Rymar.”
I’d been right. Had he noticed my gray Legacian uniform, or did the cloak hide it? “And you are?”
“Zane Stark.”
Zane Stark was the general who led Rymar’s armies. He was the boogeyman Legacian parents used to threaten their children when they misbehaved. He was not a young, virile, half-naked man in a snow-filled woods.
The man from my visions was Rymar’s most celebrated general? The one who’d outmaneuvered Legacian forces time and again, not through brutality but through sheer strategic genius? Even Legacian military academies studied his campaigns. In the pool, I’d seen him, not his name, not his title.
His impressive title.
Zane Stark was not someone who had the time to wait three days for a Legacian shield.
Are you sure about that? Maybe he’s been waiting for Destiny’s champion. I scowled. Having Gladys’s voice in my head sucked. “General Zane Stark?”
“You’ve heard of me?” He rubbed the back of his neck, almost as if I’d embarrassed him. I found the gesture endearing.
“I lived in Grimswood, not under a rock.” Perfect, Haven. Tell the large man with the axe that you’re the enemy.
His slow blink let me know I’d said too much. “Where’s Grimswood?”
“It’s just a neighborhood.” I glanced at a stack of logs that reached nearly seven feet tall. “What’s the wood for?”
He followed my gaze, then looked back at me with that slow smile. “Wouldn’t want you to get cold.”
I narrowed my eyes at his naked chest, pointedly ignoring how the firelight played across his skin. “Aren’t you freezing?”
“Am I distracting you?” He leaned against the axe handle, clearly enjoying my discomfort.
Yes. Badly. “That’s a lot of wood.”
“You haven’t seen anything yet.”
My cheeks combusted, and I desperately cast about for something else to say. “Are we staying here?” We? Had the cold frozen every brain cell I possessed? Or maybe it was the terrible innuendo that had rendered me stupid.
“No. I split the wood because I got bored. We’ll leave when Remy gets back. He’s hunting.”
“So you said.”
He ducked his head. “What’s your name?”
“Haven Ford.”
“Ford?” His brows drew together, and the weight of his dark gaze made me shiver. “You’re from Legacia?”
The enemy. “Yes.”
“Welcome to Rymar.”
That was it? “Welcome to Rymar?” I knew my luck. It wasn’t this good. “That’s it?”
His lips quirked. “You were expecting a welcome party? I didn’t have time to arrange one.”
“You had three days.” Where the fuck did that come from? I needed to seal my lips. Permanently.
“Maybe I didn’t want to share you.”
Again, my cheeks heated, hot enough to melt the snow. Damn Gladys and her pool filled with naughty visions.
I’d tried to dismiss them as fantasy, but here he was, exactly as I’d seen him—powerful, magnetic, and looking at me like he’d been waiting not three days but his whole life.
I pressed my palms to my cheeks, needing the cold bite of my fingertips.
Zane gestured broadly at the snow-laden trees around us. “What do you think?”
I followed his movement, then looked back to find him watching me intently. “Of?”
“Rymar.” He settled onto a log across from me, close enough that I could see the darker flecks of gold in his eyes.
I tilted my head and stared up at the towering pines, their boughs weighed down with snow. The storm had passed, so the wind didn’t howl, but the sky remained an unrelenting gray. “It looks like Legacia.”
“If you think that, you’re not looking closely enough. Can’t you taste it in the air?”
“It?”
“Magic. Freedom. Dreams yet realized.” The enormous axe-toting man was a poet. Or a romantic. Possibly both.
I used my hand to hide a smile. “What do dreams taste like?”
“Like spring flowers after an endless winter, like the finest wine, like the most delicious meal, like you.”
He paused, as if surprised by his own words, then gave me a rueful smile. “Sorry. That sounded hokey. It’s just that the visions make it feel like I’ve known you forever, but I suppose to you, I’m still a stranger.”
My cheeks flamed yet again. Fortunately, my rumbling stomach distracted him.
“You’re hungry?” He sounded horrified. “When did you last eat?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Sit.” He pointed at a merrily crackling fire surrounded by large logs. “Are you cold? Thirsty?”
I wanted a hot meal, a hotter bath, and a soft bed more than I wanted to keep breathing, but I’d settle for a place to warm my fingers and toes and a sip of water. I sat, and he shoved a canteen into my hands.
There it was again—the scent of tea. It was coming from him. Zane Stark smelled like tea. And tea smelled like home.
“Drink.” He touched my cheek, and I melted.
Melted.
I didn’t trust. Especially not men. But his touch eased the tension in my neck and back. This stranger, the man who claimed to be a commanding general, the man with the naughty smile and devilment in his eyes, felt inevitable.
He shouldn’t feel familiar, but he did. The pool hadn’t just shown me possible futures—it had shown me this moment, this man, this inexplicable sense of belonging I felt in his presence.
“Please, Haven.” His golden eyes implored me. “Drink. You don’t want to get dehydrated. I’ll get you something to eat.”
I drank. The ice-cold water tasted like heaven. I raised the canteen for a second drink and choked as the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen emerged from the trees with a brace of rabbits hanging from his arm.
If Zane meant comfort, this man was the opposite. An enigma.
He spotted me and smirked. I knew that smirk. I’d seen it before. More times than I cared to count. It was one of the expressions men used to make women feel small. Unworthy. Intimidated. It reduced me to my face and my boobs. An object.
This object lifted her chin and glared.