CHAPTER 26
THE A’KORI PALACE
Present Day
Must I forever be made to rise by a knocking at my door? I open my eyes, squinting at the light and glaring at the tall panels of wood across my room, willing them to turn to stone so that I might in turn fall back to sleep.
No. Not my room.
The general dips down from where he stands over me, planting a kiss on top of my head and draping a robe over my body. He’s fully dressed and wide awake. Too awake. I glance at the side of the bed where he’d been sleeping when I dozed off, and there is hardly a wrinkle in the sheets.
Sitting on my knees, I tie the robe around my waist as I stifle a yawn.
I smile sleepily at Riah when she walks in, ushered into the war room by the general.
The female goes ashen, her eyes bulging when she sees me.
Despite the blows exchanged between us, it is certainly not the greeting I expect, and I frown when I lose sight of her beyond the doors.
I thought we got on rather well.
Wiping the sleep from my eyes, I tip my head toward the door.
Even with it closed I can hear the general’s voice rising behind the thick hardwood.
I only catch a few words, but it’s clear she’s taking a verbal lashing over my unnecessary visit with Caden last night.
The female had only done what Awri asked of her, and I had been more than a little willing to go along with it.
I don’t tell my feet to move, they just do.
I’m in the war room a moment later with a stunned and still pale Riah, an angry general standing across from her.
“Is there something you need, mi’ajna?” he asks.
Riah groans, and I think her eyes are about to roll into the back of her head. The female doesn’t seem the type to faint, but whatever he’d said to her before my arrival is certainly testing that theory.
“I just came to see what time Riah would like to meet for our morning training sessions,” I say, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“The lieutenant will not be—”
“Is seven too early?” I ask and she gapes when I ignore the general’s interjection. “Perhaps the afternoon would be better for you?”
“Would you mind giving us the room, Lieutenant?” The general forces a level voice when he says it.
She jumps at the general’s command, keeping her eyes on the floor as she shuffles into the main room, shutting the door behind her.
He flicks an invisible speck of dust from his tunic and tips my chin up with a single finger until I’m staring up into a sea of deep blue eyes and says, “No.”
The command should annoy me, should chafe against my bullheaded nature, but the word only makes my core go molten beneath the male’s demanding gaze.
“I’ll find someone else to teach you,” he says, as if that will be the end of it.
“Someone less skilled,” I say, tearing my chin from him in annoyance.
His jaw ticks. “Someone who won’t send you back to me broken.”
“It was hardly a scratch,” I say and he huffs at the declaration while I continue to argue. “And I like her.”
“You like Riah?” He gapes. “You hold a knife to my throat when I try to help you, but the female gives you a black eye and you like her?”
“She wasn’t trying to undress me,” I say with a pointed stare.
“I was saving your life,” he growls.
Clearly, he isn’t over it.
“So is she, by training me,” I bite back, “But she can’t if you won’t let her.”
He looks like his teeth might crack under the pressure of his jaw when I temper my stance and take his hand in mine.
“Please, Xeyvian.”
I thought he might be softened by my plea, but I’m wrong. His eyes are pure desire when he lifts me onto the war table. Scattering wooden ships and infantry across the maps of Terr, he presses in between my legs, and his mouth is on mine the next second.
The passionate heat of his lips. The handful of hair he grasps at the back of my head. The press of his body against mine. The male is practically feral. He breaks the kiss, and I pull a deep breath, my heart thundering in my chest.
“Say it again,” he says.
I swallow the lump in my throat. “Please.”
He smiles, shaking his head. “The other part.”
Now I understand what lit the fire in him. What it is he wants from me. I brush my lips against his when I repeat his name in a breathy whisper. “Xeyvian.”
He swallows the sound, his tongue delving in long sweeps like he’s memorizing the curve of my lips, the shape of my mouth. He wraps me up in his arms, his fingers a tangled mess in my black curls as he drinks me in. A sharp fang nips at my bottom lip, and I smile against his mouth.
Coming up for air, he rests his forehead against mine and sighs deeply. All the fight is gone from the male when he says, “No earlier than eight. I want you in my bed until then.”
I nod, and nothing in the world can remove the smile from my face when he drops a kiss on the tip of my nose and heads for the door. He calls the lieutenant in and her eyes flick to where I’m sitting on the table, the scattered remnants of the A’kori military at my back.
“Have Seke cover your morning tasks,” he orders, “You will be training with Shivaria moving forward.”
She nods dutifully, and just when the color returns to her face the general takes a heated step toward her and warns, “Careful with her, Riah.”
I roll my eyes. The male must think I’m made of glass.
“As you say, General.” She salutes.
She’s gone the second she’s dismissed, replaced almost immediately by Riesh and Kishek. The circles under Kishek’s eyes continue to darken and if he wasn’t feyn I would be worried. Though, with what little I really know about the feyn maybe I should still be concerned.
Awri collects me not long after, her face as drawn as her brother’s, but still, they both look better than Kishek.
The grounds are quiet this morning, and my friend tells me that many of the guards have been dispersed in pursuit of the La’tari crew.
She says there have been whispers of sightings near town, but so far, all of their searching has left them empty-handed.
The breeze coming in from the harbor is absent its normal morning chill, and the blue sky overhead brings with it the promise of warm summer days soon to come. Flittering birdsong fills the air with merriment, and my friend could not look less cheerful as she trudges along beside me.
“Is everything all right?” I ask, knowing it’s a silly question.
She fails to muster a convincing smile when she nods. My brow pinches and she lets the facade fall with a sigh when I stare back at her in disbelief.
“Kishek,” she admits.
“Is he all right?”
“He will be.” She says it like a warning to the fates to let it be so. “He’s never known when to quit.”
“Sounds like a rather feyn trait, present company included,” I say, giving her a friendly nudge with my shoulder as the stables come into view.
I cringe when her frown only deepens and she says, “Being difficult to kill does have a tendency to skew your idea of what you consider dangerous. Centuries go by, and it’s easy to begin testing mortality.
Millennia pass and maybe you begin to believe you truly are immortal.
And then something happens to remind you that somewhere, unseen, is a tiny thread, an invisible line woven by the fates that marks the end. ”
Riah comes into view when we round the last of the wild hedges that border our path. She paces the ring, hands clasped behind her back, a strong muscle bouncing at the edge of her jaw. It appears the presence of the warship is weighing even more heavily on the A’kori military than I first thought.
“I’ve never been much for consoling or giving advice,” I tell my friend, “But I will say that it isn’t a purely feyn trait to need to be reminded of your own mortality.”
I shiver off the memory of icy water entering my lungs as a hand wraps around my ankle to pull me into the depths.
I continue, “Perhaps humans don’t need to be reminded as often because our lives are already so short by comparison, but it really is the knowledge of our own fragility that makes the rest of life so sweet.”
She hums thoughtfully as I clasp the wooden border of the ring and leap over it. Riah raises an eyebrow, and I make a mental note to use the gate next time.
“Will you be training with us today, Awri?” the lieutenant asks.
When she doesn’t answer right away, I look over my shoulder to find her contemplating.
“If it makes any difference to you, training always helps me clear my head,” I say.
She takes a deep breath, nods firmly, and rushes toward the stables to change.
“Who was it that saw to your training in La’tari?” Riah asks.
My head whips back to the lieutenant to find her eyes narrowed on me.
“A friend of my father’s. A soldier who retired after the war.” The lie slides off my tongue with ease.
“A soldier?” she balks, and I wonder if I’d been too sloppy with my form for the tale to be convincing.
The air leaves my lungs in a forced exhale when her fist strikes out toward my heart.
It’s a killing blow, if thrown hard enough.
The force of the impact interrupting the natural rhythm of the heart can stop it altogether, ending your opponent before the fight even begins.
The attack is pure Drakai, and she delivers it perfectly—her stance, the curve of her elbow, a flawless portrait that even Bront would applaud.
She only makes a single error, and it has nothing to do with her form. The mistake is her choice of target.
For every deadly strike crafted by the Drakai there is an equally lethal counter.
I shift my body, just enough to let the blow glance off my chest as I step into her, throwing a fist to her ribs.
It’s a reflex, one I’d been taught in order to survive.
The return strike will break a rib when landed correctly, often puncturing the lung.
A sure death sentence on the battlefield.