Chapter 16 #2
with staying in her rooms the past three days and everything to do
with the look on Aleksi’s face at supper. The way his eyes had
bored into hers and his jaw had clamped tight. The moment he’d
realized what she had yet to tell him.
Tired of pacing and fretting, she slipped out
her balcony door, climbed down the trellis into the courtyard and
up the hand holds into the cedar’s treehouse where Aleksi was
sprawled out on a bench, a wineskin in hand.
“Come on up,” he said, saluting her with the
skin. “What shall we drink to? Our safe return? Our near escape?
Our chance to prove the world wrong about bastards and women?”
Sahar reached for the wine and took a swig
from the half-empty skin, and then another, and another while
Aleksi watched with an amused smile on his half-drunk face. The
warm liquid spread to her hands, her toes, and her tongue.
“Munir said you have agreed to stand for him
at his wedding.”
“I did.”
“My father says you have sworn to stay here
until the threat of the Ox is dealt with.”
“I have.”
She took another drink and handed the almost
empty skin to him, wishing the spirits had loosened his tongue as
much as hers. At the thought of his tongue and all the delicious,
tantalizing sensations it had brought her, her nipples hardened,
her core melted, and her cheeks flushed. She licked her aching
lips, and Aleksi drained the wineskin.
“How did you know?” she asked, her throat
almost closing before she got the words out.
His throat worked as if he were swallowing
around the same stricture. “By the way you looked at supper
tonight.”
“Which was...?”
“Pale, somber…sad.”
She said nothing. Her throat closing
completely.
“That, and you had taken to your chambers the
past three days.”
She nodded, still unable to say anything.
Besides, what could she say? That she wasn’t sad she didn’t carry
his child, she was bereft. Her narrow escape felt more like a trap
of regret and grief. As glad as she was to have proven a woman
could ride in and win a race, she was tired of showing the world
that she was more than a pretty princess in need of a husband. The
princess didn’t need a husband or a man to complete her, but Sahar
the woman wanted Aleksi in her life.
She couldn’t tell him this. Not now. Now that
the life he wanted and had worked so hard for was about to come to
fruition.
She stood on shaking legs and gave him a wan
smile. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m not pregnant. We are free to
go our own way. You to return to your home a self-made man, to
build your stables and find yourself a wife of easy temper and me
to…”
Aleksi stood, his spine as stiff as his jaw.
“To what?”
She swallowed her tears and pain to meet and
hold his gaze. “To live my royal life.”
Aleksi hunkered low over Z’s neck, the
stallion’s hooves churning up earth as they galloped at full speed
across the river delta with no destination in mind other than
getting away from the palace. Aleksi needed air and open space to
think.
In the past ten days, ten and two more
emissaries had returned to the palace, all with pledges from their
kings to ally with King Asad against the Ox, which left only
another two still to return. Word was, the Ox had been doing the
same, with much less success. In fact, four of the kings the Ox had
sent emissaries to had sent their own to King Asad with oaths of
alliance to him. Which left the Ox’s armies outnumbered four to
one.
The riders Asad had sent to King Maksimillian
had returned this morning with the message that Maksimillian was on
his way and was expected to arrive at the palace in three days with
twenty horsemen.
Aleksi’s father was coming here.
To ally with King Asad, Aleksi told himself,
though if that were the case, Maksimillian would surely have
brought more men. He had an army of five hundred horsemen, and two
thousand yeomen and foot soldiers at his command. King Asad had
to’ve sent his missive when Sahar had first gone missing and Aleksi
had gone after her, weeks before Asad knew of the Ox’s plan.
Aleksi couldn’t puzzle why his father was
coming now with no more than a traveling guard. To force
Anastasia’s portly prince to marry her perhaps, but he could’ve
sent a proxy with her dowry, unless Theodesia had insisted their
father come himself to ensure his daughter an advantageous match.
That didn’t seem likely, especially for a second marriage.
Anastasia had her prince slavering at her heels, and she could’ve
married him any time she chose. Not for the first time, Aleksi
wondered why they hadn’t left to complete their nuptials. When,
over breakfast, King Asad told Aleksi and Anastasia of their
father’s missive, it was as much news to her as him.
So why was his father coming? The question
reverberated in his brain to the pounding rhythm of Z’s hooves as
they galloped across open fields and meadows. He slowed Z as they
reached the wooded river course and gave the stallion his head,
content to let the horse pick their way along the river path as
Aleksi laid back on his saddle, his face to the noon sun, soaking
up the last of autumn’s heat, giving himself up to Z’s rolling gait
as the sound of birdsong and rushing water filled his racing
mind.
Step by rocking step, Aleksi’s breathing
slowed and his jaw unclamped and his shoulders dropped down from
his ears. Zolotoy stopped, and Aleksi sat up and opened his eyes to
the vision of Sahar sitting on a boulder with her cheek on her
knee, facing downriver, her loose hair falling in black waves down
to her waist.
It was the most he had seen of her in the
past ten days, other than at supper, where she would sit with her
family, as beautiful and untouchable as a statue. The rest of the
time she’d been like a ghost, slipping in and out of the stables
whenever he was least likely to be there, flying past him in the
racing kraal, her face buried in Lasair’s mane, or pacing her
balcony at night, a haunted spirit in a flowing white
nightgown.
Lasair whinnied at sight of them and Sahar
whipped her head around, her hands on the boulder, her long legs
bunched up beneath her, a tigress ready to spring. He nudged Z
forward and dismounted, then tied off his horse next to Lasair
under Sahar’s guarded gaze.
Aleksi walked over to the boulder, climbed
up, and sat beside her, his shoulder barely touching hers. They sat
silently, and he hated not hearing her sultry voice.
This, he knew as surely as he was sitting
here, was the boulder she’d lain on, belly down, hanging over the
edge holding on to Ommar’s hand, unable to pull him up out of the
swift running current below until Ommar had let go. This was where
she’d watched helplessly as her beloved cousin had been swept away
to his death, unable to do more than scream his name. This was the
place she’d found her outer strength lacking and vowed never to be
found lacking again. To prove to the world that she was more than a
girl, and to prove to herself that she would hold on, no matter
what.
This was where a kitten had become a
tigress.
“The palace is abuzz with the news of your
father’s imminent arrival,” she said.
They were the first words she had spoken to
him in ten days and nights. “Yes,” he answered, his witty
conversational skills deserting him. “It is.”
She turned her gaze to his, and Aleksi could
have happily drowned in the mossy green depths of her eyes. “He
comes for you.”
Hope, as unsure and shaky as a newborn foal,
rose in his chest. “Why do you say that?”
“For him to be only three days away already,
he had to leave his palace almost as soon as he received my
father’s missive.” She echoed Aleksi’s earlier thoughts. “At which
point all anybody knew was that I was likely kidnapped by the Wolf,
and you had gone after me, alone, into the wilds. He has come with
enough men to fight for you, not enough to go to war with my
father. He comes for you, to take you back home with him.”
“That may be,” he said, unwilling to give his
tentative hope. “But I will never go back to being his stable
boy.”
She smiled, eclipsing the late autumn sun.
“If your father knows you at all, he realized that the day you
left.”
Aleksi chuckled.
“You’ll go back with him once all this
posturing and war threat is over,” she said.
“I have no reason to stay,” he replied, and
when she did not dispute him, he changed the subject. “You don’t
think the Ox’s threats will come to war?”
“No.” She shook her head. “The Ox has been
outplayed once again by my father, who has the oaths of ten and six
kings to the Ox’s four. Even the Ox is not that foolhardy. It’s
almost certain that he’ll back down and try to save face, and the
Wolf will live to tell his own twisted tales of our ordeal, making
himself the hero, no doubt.”
“Too bad,” he grumbled. “I was looking
forward to meeting the worm on the battlefield.”
She gave a rueful laugh. “As if he would ever
brave the battlefield, or you, again.” She met his gaze and held
it. “I should’ve let you kill him right off and been done with
him.”
“You had your reasons, and they were good,
sound reasons, which is why I went along with the plan to capture
him alive.”
She nodded, and then fixed her piercing green
cat eyes on his. “Plans do change, don’t they?”
He wanted to laugh. “They do.”
“And yours?”
“Have changed daily since the day I met you.”
And asked you to marry me.
“And what are your plans today?”
“To kiss you until you beg me to take you
home with me.”
Sahar could have turned away. She could’ve
told him no. She should have, but she missed his kisses and how he
could make her beg for more of everything he had to offer. She
smiled into his earth-brown eyes and ran her fingers along his
clean-shaven jaw, wrapping her hand around the back of his neck,
and whispered, “Kiss me then, kiss me until you’re begging to stay
here with me.”
He kissed her softly, tenderly, his lips
brushing hers as lightly as his fingertips played over her breasts
until he pushed her tunic down over her shoulders, exposing her
pebbled nipples to the brisk air and his warm touch. He rose to his
knees, bringing her with him, and pressed the fullness of his mouth