33. Max
Max
We’d ride out at night, the dragon and I. No torches. No honor guard.
By morning, the fortress would be told that General Drakken was touring the southern forts and that Spartan Max had been reassigned elsewhere.
Aelindor came for me at four in the afternoon, two wooden practice swords in his hands.
He wore a white linen tunic and black trousers, and I tried not to stare at his powerful frame, not to show him how his beauty affected me, even though we’d mated. Especially because we’d mated.
He smiled at me. “Come, Max.”
He was already walking.
I jogged after him, out of Elenmoor, the white-stone building half-swallowed by ancient trees, the place my sister and I now called home.
I knew where he was taking me before we came to the training ring that backed onto the silver lake. The forest breathed pine and a dozen other scents I had no name for.
We’d trained in this clearing before, and he’d tried to coax out my dormant magic, only to have my power try to seduce him. I’d seen him almost lose his shit. That was the first time I’d ever seen the Fae heir, the most disciplined man on the continent, lose control for me.
I’d been mortified at seducing him like that, but I’d been out of control too. My inner power knew how badly I wanted him, and it acted on that.
He’d turned away, but not before I’d seen the front of his trousers strained by his erection.
The past swirled back, and I tried to shake it off.
Now that I finally had him, I wanted him even more, so much so that my body hummed for him, burned for him, despite the geas chaining me.
The two feet between us spread out like an endless cold ocean.
“Take the metal off,” he said. “On the bench.”
In my head, I’d been hoping for “Take your clothes off.”
I blinked at him, trying to regain my presence of mind.
Shit, this was hard.
“It’ll behave,” I protested, pushing the haze of heat out of my head.
We don’t like parting from you either, Max! the Coldiron chorused.
“That isn’t the reason.” Aelindor handed me a wooden blade. “You’re about to fly into a place where it won’t always answer, and I want you to prepare for every situation, especially when you have nothing to wield but your wits.”
I sighed and took it off. The Coldiron came away from my forearm slow and reluctant, and I laid it on a bench at the edge of the training ring.
Max, we’re here! The sentient metal kept clamoring for my attention.
I’ll pick you up later, I said.
Later, and don’t forget! the metal shouted back.
“Prepare for every situation?” I purred. “What situation, my prince? And how hard will we go?”
I shouldn’t have flirted with him in the middle of serious training, but it was too late to clamp my big mouth shut.
A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. He seldom smiled, and I treasured every one.
“Hard enough that you’ll stop asking me that.”
The first bout lasted four seconds. On the third I scratched my wooden blade across his forearm, and I had one second of triumph before the point of his blade touched my throat.
I understood he’d given me the forearm the way you give a dog a bone.
By the eighth, I was driving him back toward the edge of the ring, winning a little, and only because I let my magic leak.
It curled around him, trying to seduce his magic like the first time he’d trained me.
Then I took advantage of his moment of distraction, grinned, and struck.
There!
He hadn’t set the rules, had he? He hadn’t said seduction wasn’t allowed.
My gloating lasted exactly that long. A wooden sword I hadn’t been watching spanked me across my butt cheeks.
Shit!
How did he…?
I’d thought I had him.
Then the Fae prince moved in a blur.
Left hand. On the backstep. While I watched his right. The ninth he did with a bench. The tenth with a bucket of sand he tipped into my path with his foot. The eleventh he walked three steps out of my line.
Then another spank from his wooden blade made me stumble, my hips jerking forward to stop the fall. Pain bloomed across my butt while liquid fire curled between my thighs.
My face flamed.
“That’s completely unfair!” I called a foul, threw up a hand, and pitched the practice sword at the bench.
The Coldiron jumped. Unfair, Max!
Aelindor chuckled. So amused. “You asked how hard we would go, and I was merely trying to show you.”
“Fine, I’m not ready.” My face burned. “But you don’t need to spank me so hard!”
“Was I spanking you too hard?” he purred, his gaze dropping to my lips.
Heat rushed from between my thighs, reddening my neck and face.
“You know we can’t do this, Aelindor,” I whimpered, clenching around nothing to ease the ache and getting no relief.
Oh, fucking kill me already!
If I failed in my mission to get rid of the geas, I would never have relief. Fear and desperation shot through me, forming a cold knot in my throat, and I couldn’t get air into my lungs.
Aelindor looked like he wanted to cross the two feet between us and pull me into his arms more than anything. Yet we both knew it would end in agony for the two of us. Or worse. From what I knew about him, the Fae prince wouldn’t mind burning for me, but he could never bear to see me hurt.
Rage and agony and longing twisted across his handsome face.
He tossed his wooden blade to the grass.
“Breathe, Spartan,” he barked.
Unlike Drakken, the Fae heir rarely barked, rarely raised his voice at all. His sharp command and being addressed as Spartan snapped me back to reality. I breathed deep and got myself under control.
“Feeling better, love?” he asked softly.
I felt the sting of my tears wetting my lashes, and I fought them back.
This pent-up feeling, this longing, this misery, this helplessness—they all came up at once. And soon I’d have to leave him. How I hated it. What if I never saw him again? He was my mate.
“Look at me, love,” he said.
I gazed at him with trust and vulnerability. I could be raw in front of him, in front of Caspian, and in front of Nikolai.
“You fight what’s in front of you. The world narrows to the man you’re trying to kill.
While you’re in there, I could carry this whole clearing out from under you and you wouldn’t notice until the lake was at your back.
” He walked a slow circle, and I turned with him, keeping him in front of me, because in this ring he was my opponent.
“You track the sword. You never track the field. It isn’t a bad habit, Max.
It’s a survival instinct out of a tunnel eight feet wide, and it kept you alive for years, but you aren’t in a tunnel anymore. ”
His hand came up.
It got as far as my elbow, an inch off the sleeve, fingers open to turn my arm the way an instructor turns an arm, and he stopped.
We both looked at his powerful hand.
How badly I wanted it to touch me, even if he was just showing me the drills in training.
He put it down.
“Eleven bouts,” he said quietly. “One touch would have done it.”
We had our wooden swords in our hands again, and the session resumed. It wasn’t just training—it was the last of the time we had alone before I left.
I made him do it four more times and lost three, and I called it a small win.
“Fifteen.” I said it like a tally. “Write it down somewhere, Aelindor. Because when I come back out of the DarkVeil, we’re doing this again, and I’m going to make you work so hard for the sixteenth that you’ll double over.”
“Count on it.” He grinned, and his eyes shone. “Come back to me, love, and you can ask me for anything that’s in my power to give.”
He’d already done it—given me everything I needed, which was himself.
He just hadn’t realized it.
I’d hold that back and tell him when I came home.
What was left of the afternoon went to letters. Five of them, brief and sealed, one for each heir and one for my sister. The heirs’ letters took an hour between them, because there are only so many ways to write thank you and I chose you and live.
Missy’s took longer.
I locked all five in my desk drawer, where someone would find them if it came to that, and not before.
Then I made one more delivery.
Nikolai’s penthouse in the Sanguine Tower was dark and cold and smelled of sandalwood. I found the refrigerator by the glow of my own armguard, and when I opened it, the light fell across three bottles of wine he never drank and a shelf of nothing.
I set the vials in a row against the back wall. Twelve of them, sealed, still warm from my pocket, my own handwriting on every label.
I straightened them so they sat even. Then I straightened them again.
He’d never ask. So I made sure he’d never have to.
Then it was full dark, and the hardest part was here.
“I don’t want you to go!” Missy’s voice broke on the first word and kept breaking. “You can bring me with you! You said you’d never leave me behind again!”
The promise from the station. My own words, filed away in her little vault of a memory and fired straight at the joint in my armor.
I knelt so we were eye to eye.
“I’m not leaving you behind, little viper. I’m coming back to you.” I tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Where I’m going, I have to move faster than anyone can follow. Even you. Especially you. If you’re with me, I’ll be guarding you instead of fighting.”
“That’s cheating,” she sobbed. “You can’t use me as the reason.”
“You’re the reason for everything. You and the heirs.”
Drakken crouched beside us, and the general of the Zodiac Covenant addressed my sister as one commander to another.
“I’ll bring Max back to you,” he said. “Free and safe, if you promise to help our people hold the fort here. Deal?”
Missy scrubbed her eyes with her wrist and held up the smallest finger in the courtyard. Drakken hooked it with his own, solemn as a treaty signing, and shook.
I hugged my sister, and she clung to me, fists in my jacket, face in my neck. We did the square one last time, forehead to forehead, breathing four and four and four until her sobs got in line.
“One good thing,” I whispered.
“You’re coming back.” Her breath hitched on it. “Square rules.”
“Square rules.”
Ross wouldn’t be left out. He wedged his horned head between us, whimpering, and turned his big blue eyes up at me with the full unfair artillery of a baby animal who knew exactly what those eyes were worth. I hugged the cub too, and he pressed his scaled nose under my jaw and rumbled.
“Guard her.”
He growled, and I took it as a vow.
Then I stood and faced my princes.
They made a half-circle in the dark, keeping the distance the geas demanded. That gap was the whole cruelty of the thing, laid out in flagstones.
Caspian tried to smile at me, and the smile kept losing its footing. Twice he opened his mouth around a joke. Twice nothing came out.
Nikolai stood marble-still with his hands clasped behind his back, knuckles white. His crimson eyes roved over my face like he was copying it down.
Aelindor’s winter-blue eyes had gone glassy, and when he breathed, it took a second longer than normal.
“The thread will carry you east.” Our bond, the one living line between us the contract couldn’t sever. “I’ll feel you until the Veil takes it. Then come back, my love, and let me feel you again.” His jaw tightened. “And make me work for the sixteenth.”
“Come back and I’ll have new jokes, sweetheart,” Caspian managed, hoarse. “You’ll laugh.”
“I’ll be waiting right here for you, Eirath,” Nikolai promised.
What I wouldn’t have given to cross the space, throw myself into their arms, and never leave. Xander had made paupers of all five of us with one line of ink.
The rage of it steadied me, and I used it to make my feet move.
Drakken let the dragon out.
I leapt onto the beast’s back and settled at the base of his neck, palm on the warm scale. The one touch left to me.
Below us, three princes, one small girl, and one cub stood together in the dark with their faces tipped up. Nobody waved. Waving was for partings smaller than this.
The dragon gathered himself and took the sky.
If anyone saw us go, it wasn’t news. Drakken flew most nights. A dragon over the walls was weather.
We climbed high and fast with the cold sharpening around us, and over my shoulder the courtyard shrank until my sister and my princes were small dots among the lights of Elenmoor, then sparks, then part of the general glitter of the kingdom. I was leaving it so I could come back to it free.
I didn’t look away until the mountains took them.