Chapter 11 #3
“Look.” He pointed up the mountain’s side to
where a small fire flickered. “Either Yago and Taweel are thinking
we’re long gone, or they are trying to trick us into showing
ourselves.”
“Hard to say with those two.”
“True enough.” He untied the saddlebag full
of chestnuts and tossed it to her, grinning as she caught it
without even blinking. “Shell those for our supper while I set up
some traps around camp.”
“The woman prepares the food while the man
lays protection, huh?”
Aleksi understood her aversion to being seen
as merely a woman, to be thought of as nothing more than a pretty
face incapable of any but the most menial of tasks. Surely, she
knew him better than that by now.
“Do you know how to set up traps?” he
asked.
“I never have,” she admitted. “But I can
learn.”
“I’ll make you a bargain.” He rubbed his
grumbling stomach. “I’ll teach you tomorrow, if you shell the
chestnuts tonight. I’m starving.”
“We’re not going after Lasair?”
Aleksi shook his head. “I want them good and
complacent with their guard down. Another night should do it.”
Sahar eyed him for a long moment, and then
held her hand out. “I need a blade,” she said, “to shell the
nuts.”
After they’d eaten their meager supper of
chestnuts and dried meat, she sat down on the bedroll and reached
for the leather tie at the end of her braid.
“Here,” Aleksi said, kneeling behind her.
“Let me.”
“I can do it myself.”
“I know you can,” he said, untying the
leather strip, “but I like doing it for you. It gives me
peace.”
For some inexplicable reason—reason seemed to
be in short supply when it came to them being together—when Aleksi
had his fingers in her hair gently combing out the tangles into a
veil of sooty black, he felt peaceful. He supposed it was like the
sense of concentrated calm he always felt brushing down a horse,
except his tigress was the one woman he wanted above all others. A
princess he’d sworn to protect and keep from harm.
“How did you learn so much about surviving in
the wild?” she asked as he unraveled the glossy ropes of her
braid.
“Hunting trips with my father when I was
younger and still a prince. Though even after I became a stable
boy, he would still take me hunting with him as his horse master.”
Aleksi smiled. His best memories of his father were of their
hunting trips, away from the palace and the queen where they could
be Maksimillian and Aleksandr, father and son, not king and bastard
stable boy. “He claimed that I was his best tracker.”
“What did the bitch queen have to say about
your hunting trips?”
He laughed at her description of Theodesia as
he wove his fingers through her hair and gently shook it out,
fanning the heavy veil across her shoulders and down her back.
“They say the rafters of the palace were raised more than once by
the shrillness of her response when told.”
He started to comb his fingers through her
hair, gently untangling a snarl.
“But she wasn’t able to stop your father from
continuing your hunting trips.”
“She wasn’t, though I know for a fact she
tried.”
“Because your father’s love for you was
stronger than his care for her.”
Aleksi’s fingers stilled as twenty and five
years of grief, anger, and longing gripped him by the throat. “Then
why,” he choked out, “did he deprive me of my mother’s love and
then his own?”
She turned and met his gaze and held it, and
thanks be to the gods, there was no pity in her expression. He
couldn’t have stood to see that. Not from her.
“Did you ever ask him?”
He sat back on his heels and slowly shook his
head. “I only ever accused him of choosing the queen over me, his
own flesh and blood.”
“What did he say?”
“That he hoped I would understand
someday.”
Sahar turned to face him. “I don’t mean to
defend him,” she said. “I can only imagine how you must have felt,
a young boy seemingly abandoned by his father—”
“Seemingly?”
“Have you ever considered that it was his way
of protecting you?”
“He was and is the king,” Aleksi said,
sounding as petulant as the boy of ten and two he had been when his
father had exiled him to the stables. “From whom would the king
need to protect his son?”
“The queen, or his second wife, mother to his
legitimate son and heir to the throne.”
Aleksi was fairly certain she hadn’t said it
to hurt him, but it hurt and he hated that it did.
“In some ways you should be grateful,” she
said. “It’s made you the man you are.”
“And who is that?”
“An arrogant ass who despises royal
princesses.”
Aleksi chuckled. “Not all of them,” he
admitted. “Not anymore.”
She laughed, light and quick. “If you were
still a prince, Aleksandr, you would already be married to some
soft, spoilt princess who would be pregnant with your fifth
daughter.”
“Ha. You have a mean streak.”
“It’s how I keep my claws sharpened.” She
arched her brows while flexing her fingers.
He grinned. “Glad to see you back, my
tigress.”
“I’m not your tigress,” she chuffed.
“I’m not only an arrogant ass.”
“No,” she said, her expression serious.
“You’re not. You’re also a man determined to make his own way in
the world. I respect that.”