Chapter 11 #2
“We are bonded. Deeper than any bond a Karath has with his Elthika. My magic has been intertwined with his for years. And…” He blew out a rough breath but met my eyes with an intense ferocity that would keep me pinned in place, even if he released me. “I’m scared for him.”
There was a startling vulnerability to the words, one that made my glare soften. I heard the strain, the worry, the fear in the timbre of his soft voice.
Maybe I was just easy to manipulate…but I believed him. And it made me want to help him, help Samryn, even if he was an arrogant bastard.
But if Karaths were anything like Vorakkar, horde kings, was I really surprised?
“Tell me you’ll stay and speak with me. And then I’ll release you,” he said, his thumb still moving against my flesh, his eyes bright as they seared me.
“I’ll stay,” I said. “But if you do that again, I’ll leave.”
A sound chuffed from his throat, and he inclined his head. “Agreed.”
He maneuvered off me, releasing my neck from his grip and leaning back into the cushions, though he was closer to me than he’d been before, the side of his thigh nearly touching mine. I shifted farther away.
“You cannot escape your blood,” he told me, “and sometimes the Hartan in me comes out. Forgive me.”
I swallowed, touching the lingering heat of his hand. “Everything you say sounds like an order,” I informed him.
The edge of his lip curled. “I wasn’t always so high-handed. In fact, once I rarely spoke at all.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, eyeing him carefully.
After the tussle, the slitted end of the drying cloth revealed even more of him.
I saw the softened edge of his cock, a glint of metal before I sucked in a sharp breath, my gaze darting to the wispy white smoke from the blue ash across the room.
My heart was beating, my face felt hot.
“I heal,” I said finally. “That’s what Kakkari gifted me with.”
“How?” he asked, leaning forward, his eyes pinned on me, seeking answers he was, apparently, desperate for.
“What do you mean, ‘how’?” I asked, a humorless smile passing over my features as my stomach rumbled. I ignored it. “The same way you use yours, I imagine.”
His chin tilted back. “And your gift works on creatures and beings alike?”
“Yes,” I said. “Though I’ve really only used it on my own family and pyroki.”
“Has it ever failed?” he wanted to know.
“Only…” I hesitated, a memory of a pyroki I’d tried to save, only to feel her soul already gone. Until all I could feel had been an iciness so bitter that it had hurt. “Only if they’re already gone.”
Though, on rare occasions, I had managed to claw a pyroki’s soul back to life. But that was only if their heart had stopped beating while my magic was already threaded through them. I kept that to myself.
Because regardless, those pyroki hadn’t lived very long lives after that. They’d been sick, a sickness I hadn’t been able to cure.
Sometimes, I thought, it was better to let nature take its course. It was Kakkari’s will, after all, for her creatures to be returned to her in the earth.
“Tell me what happened with Samryn,” he said quietly. “During the night of the feast.”
I blinked, but my memory was in pieces. It took me a moment to find them, to stitch back together what happened that night.
“I saw him fall into the forest, and I went after him, thinking he was injured and needed help,” I said. “I didn’t know it was Samryn at the time. But I came upon him, and he let me touch him. And what I felt…”
“Tell me,” Alaryk said. An order but also a plea.
“I’ve never felt anything like it,” I said, worrying my lip as I bit it. “It’s some kind of disease, eating him from within. The pain was…unimaginable.”
I was growing nauseous just thinking of it.
“How is he?” I asked.
“Resting,” Alaryk told me. “In his mountain hold. Whatever you did, it did help him. He was out today, patrolling the territory.”
A small sense of relief at least. “Good. I’m glad. But…”
“He’s not healed,” he finished for me. Once again my stomach rumbled in hunger, and once again I ignored it.
“Do you know what’s wrong with him?” I asked, thinking that if I knew the root of the disease, it might make it easier to help him.
Alaryk regarded me. Then he stood, snagging my water goblet to refill it.
He pulled a wooden tray from a cabinet. From another, he gathered a plethora of cured meats, fruit, and a small loaf of dense brown seeded bread.
He brought it all over to me. And if I was surprised that I’d be served a meal by a Karath, I tried not to show it.
“It was a curse,” he finally told me, settling back into his seat, though farther from me to make room for the tray of food between us. I didn’t touch it, however, listening, rapt. “By a Hartan witch.”
My belly sank, churning. “A witch? Like a…sorceress?”
He inclined his head.
A sorceress was a powerful thing. And a Hartan, no less? I knew they were an enemy nation to the Karag, though there was an uneasy peace for now. How much malice and hatred had been imbedded into a curse like that?
“Why?” I asked.
“The why doesn’t matter,” he told me firmly. “Only the what. She placed it upon Samryn nearly a decade ago. It was meant to be a slow death. She said it would ‘rot his heart,’ like mine had been.”
He let out a humorless dark scoff.
“A decade,” I said softly. “So it’s taken root. And for a long time.”
“I’ve used my own magic over the years to help slow it,” he admitted. “But even my own power has proven to not be enough. I don’t have the ability to heal. Only to…change. And twist.”
I didn’t know what he meant by that, but I wouldn’t ask right now.
“But you took his pain for him. I tried to take some too,” he continued. “That night. Yet it hurt you.”
I swallowed. The pain had become so much that it had eventually turned me numb, until I couldn’t feel my limbs or feel the cool wind against my cheek. It was like I’d been suspended in it.
I nearly shuddered, remembering it. “Yes,” I replied. “That’s always been the nature of it. I can heal, but it requires me to siphon away the sickness and pain. It takes a toll. It doesn’t usually knock me out for a couple days though.”
“What do you want?” he asked, face suddenly serious. “What do you want for trying to heal him?”
The nausea was rising, but I took a hasty sip of water. The cowardly part wanted me to lie, to tell him that I didn’t think I could help Samryn, if only to spare myself the suffering.
“Can I think about it?” I asked instead. There was a flash of wildness on Alaryk’s face, one I didn’t want to try to decipher, but it had me adding, “Not about helping Samryn. About what I want for it.”
There was a hesitant relief in his gaze. “Very well.”
“It might take a lot of time,” I warned. “And I’m not certain I can save him at all.”
Alaryk wiped a large palm over his face. “We aren’t in the position to turn away a thread of hope.”
He meant Samryn and himself, I knew.
He stood swiftly, rising silently, towering over me in the small lounge space.
“I know it’s unwise to show you all my fears.
It gives you power. But truthfully, I don’t care what it takes, what you want.
I would give anything. And you should know that…
because I felt an inkling of what you would take for him.
I would be forever in your debt merely because you tried. ”
My lips parted in shock, hearing a gruff vulnerability in his voice I hadn’t expected. He loved Samryn. Deeply. Even I could sense that plainly. And it made me soften toward this arrogant, high-handed male.
“Think about your price,” he continued, “once you’ve recovered fully.”
He walked from the lounge area, going to a built-in wall of drawers near the bed. Steel, polished drawers came out smoothly from the wall. I watched as he unknotted the drying cloth, let it fall to the floor.
My breath hitched, spying the firm, rounded, strong backside and the telltale scar just below his spine where his tail had once been. I’d heard that the Karag riders cut them off after they completed their training, a final commitment.
I looked away swiftly, reaching forward to take a chunk of cured meat from the tray, popping it into my mouth as I tore into the bread. When I chanced another glance up at him, he was lacing up his dark trews before pulling on a riding vest, one made of scales.
“I’m going to check on Samryn,” he informed me. “Eat. Rest. We’ll discuss this more in the morning.”
Before I could say anything else, he was gone.