Chapter 16
Mystique remained completely composed until she had reached the landing.
Then, abruptly, she began to tremble and shake until her knees gave out beneath her.
Reule swept her up against himself in a rush of resplendent gold fabric.
Her arms wound around his neck, her face hiding against his throat as the Shadows looked on with worry and a protective anger.
They said nothing, knowing Reule would care for his woman with all haste and capability, but he felt their banked hostility toward those who had upset her.
He was proud of her. She’d earned their loyalty on her own merit, rather than his say-so.
Reule turned from them and carried Mystique into his bedroom, laying her on his bed and quickly climbing in behind her so he could draw her into the warm, safe armor of his body.
He withdrew the length of golden wire from her hair, tossing the circlet aside somewhere.
He rapidly undid what had no doubt been Para’s best work on her hair to date, but now that they were alone he preferred her hair loose and long and spread wide for his pleasure.
She smelled clean and warm, all the uniqueness of herself, but deeply blended with his own scent.
She bathed in his bath, slept in his bed, reveled in his body.
Of course she would reflect him. And he was fiercely glad of it.
She was his, and no one would or could change that.
When he’d undressed her hair to his satisfaction, he stroked gentle knuckles down her temple and cheek, pausing to brush a thumb over her petal-soft lips. She turned her gaze to his, looking up at him as he hovered on an elbow above her.
“Sylva,” she said. “It seems so simple a name for so complex a life.”
“To that end, I prefer Mystique. You’re as much a mystery as ever. You remember nothing of these people? Only Knar seems to recognize you.”
“Knar was the only one who knew the woman they’re looking for. He’s a Middle King. The Yesu have one High King, but many lesser Middle Kings who all answer to the court of the High King. The Middle Kings lead individual tribes in the mountains. And King Derrik rules those Middle Kings in turn.”
“I wonder how they live,” he mused, making no commotion over the information she was recalling. She’d known a lot about the Sánge as well. Apparently the Yesu had had detailed information on Jeth for some time. This was likely to be where she’d earned some of her knowledge.
“There are villages and communities buried in ice and snow, and wonderful caves tiered against mountains like nature-made buildings. Places like the Crystal City, the home of the High King, are vast and beautiful. A tall, vertical metropolis in stone honeycombs; ice slides and wooden ladders access the different tiers, and the higher you go, the more of the mountain range you see. I’ve only been there once.
We stayed on the uppermost tiers and it was like looking toward the end of the world.
That high up, all you see are caps and clouds. ”
“It sounds like you were young,” he said in a soft, neutral tone, giving nothing away of the reality that she was without a doubt Yesu.
He didn’t think she realized what she was revealing, and he didn’t want to disturb the chain of memories.
But he wanted to try to direct the conversation at least a little.
“I was twelve. Since I’d been born in Sapra, a very small village, I felt like I had entered the Edge of the World. We moved into the Atham tribe after that. That’s the tribe Knar is Middle King of now. Not so big as Crystal City, but not so small either.”
Reule monitored her emotions as she spoke.
Whenever she said “we,” there was affection and love, but it churned up that sorrow within her as well.
If he asked for elaboration, it might trigger emotions that would get in the way of her steady remembering.
Knar fell into the same category. When she said his name, the disdain and fear she felt had little to do with what had transpired in the parlor.
“So you’ve lived there ever since?”
“Yes. The Yesu don’t switch tribes often, but my mother married a man from Atham. After they died, I had too many people who depended on me, so I didn’t move away even when—”
She broke off, and like a steel gate, everything slammed shut inside her. He wouldn’t let her off so easily, though. He cupped her chin and cheek in his hand and looked down hard into her eyes. “Even when trouble began?”
“I … I don’t …”
“You do, you just don’t want to,” he corrected her firmly. “Kébé, it’s important that you remember this. These details can make all the difference in what will happen tonight.”
“Why? Will you protect me more if I’m not a murderess and less if I am?”
She was being nasty and hurtful on purpose, pushing him away as she went from receptive, warm, and soft to hard, stubborn, and afraid.
“Rather the opposite, I’d think,” he said just as harshly.
“I’ll need to protect you more if you’re guilty of that crime than if you aren’t, Tell me what you remember, kébé.
Your parents died? How?” She looked at him with surprise, expecting him to cut to the meat of the issue rather than peripheral memories.
He gave her a small smile and stroked his thumb over her forehead. “Tell me,” he encouraged her.
“My father—natural father—I don’t know. I don’t think I knew him.
Or I just don’t remember. But I remember Mama and my stepfather.
Strangely, Rye reminds me of my stepfather.
Rye before, I mean. Easy, charming, and an incorrigible flirt.
A merchant. Very successful. I … I think Knar and he were friendly.
I remember …” She shuddered and burrowed against him, her small hands actively clasping him around his back.
It broke their eye contact, and he let it happen for the moment.
She might better manage her memories if she pretended to speak only to herself, eyes closed as tight as they now were.
“Things are confusing. I start talking about one thing, and then my mind is flashing onto something else, and I don’t know … I don’t know where it all belongs.”
It was the flashes that held her trauma, he knew.
He felt them, read them, seeing them in his mind like a chaotic indulgence in hallucinogens.
The flashes sometimes ran backward, like when Darcio sorted through a body memory.
She strained to push him out, but she was too emotionally overwrought.
She stopped speaking, somehow knowing the minute he slipped into her mind and read directly from her.
There was much of it in Yesu, a language he didn’t have a hope of understanding.
That seemed to be mostly from her youth.
The Common language, or the “trade” language, one more easily exchanged between tribes, came as she grew older.
It had been the same with his own experience.
They’d learned the Common language during their journey to the wilderness.
The Yesu, he realized, were a far vaster civilization than he’d comprehended.
His idea of the area bounded by the mountains behind them was sorely mistaken.
Most of her memories surrounded a gracious woman with a noble bearing and a way of seeming constantly amused by her surroundings.
She smiled and teased as she corrected and guided and disciplined.
This had been the woman who had taught Mystique tolerance and the sweet, elegant facets of her personality.
Her shrewd stepfather, whom she saw as her only father and had loved devotedly, had been similar to Rye in ways she hadn’t come to know yet.
A scrapper, a survivor, and one who negotiated with everyone on all subjects except his right to live his life.
This was the man who had taught her patience, charm, and her diplomatic ways of defusing anger and violence before the rift became irreparable.
He’d taught her, to her mother’s dismay, that wearing breeches and learning to hunt, ride, and survive would serve her just as much as good manners and ladylike elegance.
He was the reason she couldn’t bear the idea of Reule laying a hand on Rye.
There was a flash of jealousy in Reule as he recognized the connection Rye would forever share with her because he was so much like her father.
“He was a good man. They are both good men,” she murmured against the cloth of his shirt. “When he realized I was different, Kisto could have been horrified and might have shunned me and my mother both, but instead, he embraced me.”
“You were his daughter, and he loved you,” Reule whispered soothingly.
“Most Yesu have the Intuition. But a very few of us are born special. Some tribes fear and reject these types, others tolerate, and still others accept them wholeheartedly. Atham tolerated me. Because I could heal. It was in their best interest to do so, and I had Kisto’s reputation and nobility to protect me.
” Her laugh was bitter. “While he was alive. When he died, everything was calm at first, no better no worse, and then one day … it all changed.”
The day, or rather the incident, screamed at him in snatches of violent, thrashing imagery. Since he saw it from her perspective, the event was wrought with emotion and fear, pain and the crush of betrayal.
A small home, two rooms deep, full of Mystique’s beauty and touches, hung end to end with dried herbs and things he knew through her but had never seen before.
The surroundings were familiar. She was safe and content.
She tended familiar faces, curing and healing, some just needing loneliness eased and a few kind words.
Some urgently begging her to help find lost children, pets, and others by pressing things into her small hands for her to use telemetrically.
But one day home became hell.