32. Now Seductions
NOW: SEDUCTIONS
We had been on the road for two moons, and summer faded into fall.
Evangeline’s presence was a priceless reassurance as every penitent was under the army’s constant surveillance.
Our wagon full of only women drew every soldier’s eye.
Her daily visits were a blessing. One day, the one-eyed man took her place.
It was a hot day, autumn rarely a cool season for the low country.
Ilsit and Jade were napping in the shade of the wagon, more so out of being overheated than actual exhaustion.
Tessa was driving with Fox and Daisy perched beside her on the bench.
Tessa had insisted that Fox, also looking wilted from the heat, sit beside her until the latter part of the day was upon us, bringing some relief with a setting sun.
It was not a practice we liked to keep, having more than three of us in the wagon, not wanting to continually strain our horses.
Zara—tied to the back of the wagon—and I walked in silence, horse and woman. I was dead on my feet. I had not had a turn to nap or to drive yet, and I wanted to ask Tessa to trade, but I felt guilty when my place was the worst of the deal.
“Here, madam midwife,” came the salt man’s voice, startling me out of my waking slumber.
He was sliding off his roan as he spoke. He pulled the horse alongside Zara and held out the reins to me.
I stared at him as we walked together. “No thank you,” I said and then looked away from him to face the back of the wagon, peering inside to see Jade and Ilsit dozing on quilts.
He remained walking beside me, but I did not acknowledge him.
The wagons around us rumbled along. Sometimes I could hear the muted voices from those inside or also walking at the backs of their wagons. Occasionally, a weak breeze would carry a man’s shout from down the line.
After a quarter of an hour of walking together, he spoke.
“It is just a peace offering, Robbie.”
I said nothing.
He had tied his own horse to the back of our wagon, and with Zara to my right and his horse to his left, we had a sort of privacy from everyone else on the road, even in the bright sunlight.
I guessed he had chosen this side of me because he could see me better, his lone eye being on his right side.
I turned to him to see his own head tilted towards me.
“Can we ever be at peace?” I asked. I heard the ridiculousness of my question as I asked it.
Yes, I could not trust him. Yes, I could not begin to know him, but would it not be a better strategy to play nice with him rather than anger the one person, outside of my family, who knew my secret?
But then I remembered that he had said I was a poor criminal and I bristled anew.
“You had no right, by the way,” I added.
“No right to what?” he asked, his voice still pitched low.
“You had no bloody business,” I went on. “No business whatsoever, accusing me of—of being what I am when you are too the same way. I will never understand your being so accusatory when—”
“Maybe I wanted to warn you—”
“You called me a piss-poor criminal easily caught,” I went on, now warming to my own temper.
It felt good, after weeks of keeping my mouth shut, an eye cast over my shoulder, sneaking around at night with mother’s moss.
“You have some nerve pretending to understand who I am and what I am to my town. I will have you know I am a prolific and successful outlaw. You called me clumsy. And yet, salt man, you do not even know me. You know nothing about me. You know my name and my magic. That is all.”
I could have sworn something like offense or hurt flashed in his eye, but then it was gone and his regular ease was back, that polite mask of indifference in place again.
“You are correct, madam,” he said. “I do not know you at all. But perhaps you could at least call me by my name. Reed is an easy name to remember.”
“You told me you were content with being my salt man.”
There was a small smile on his lips. “As you like,” he acquiesced. “Perhaps one day I will earn the sound of my own name from your lips.”
The words he spoke were simple, but they had an effect on me. I found myself thrilling at his implication that me saying his name would be something he would have to earn.
“And how do you plan to earn it?” I blurted.
Without breaking his pace, he turned his face fully to me. “What do you suggest?”
I had bedded a few men in my time and flirted with plenty others.
And as handsome as I found him, I knew that objectively there had been better-looking men in my past. And it was not his missing eye or the scarring around that area that detracted from his having a perfect face.
It was more so that his nose was rather long, and there was a flatness just under his eyes between his cheekbones and nose that made him look rather hawkish, even when his mouth—a sly, mocking thing—was relaxed.
He was a good-looking man, but certainly not the best I had ever seen or even coupled with.
And yet, I suddenly found him beautiful, devastatingly so, irresistible even. Ilsit had been right.
She wants to have a hearty rut in the woods with the one-eyed man.
I did want a rut with this half Tintarian, half Vyggian scout, a stranger from out of nowhere, the only other person—save Magda and her vague explanations of her earth penchant—I had ever met with magic.
This lithe, tattooed stranger with his lowered eyelid and wildcat musculature, serpentine in his movement, somehow both careless and measured in his gait, had bewitched my body.
I was overcome with the sudden urge to be naked with him, or at least to be seated in his lap with a lifted skirt, to have a mouth bruised and swollen from his own mouth, to run my hands down his long, lean frame and take his prick in my hand, to straddle him and show him how my own sex worked.
I swallowed and looked away. I was delirious. I prayed he did not see any of this in my expression. “The heat is making me insane,” I muttered.
“You did not answer the question,” Reed said, a note of confusion in his words. “What do you suggest I do to earn your saying my name? Which I think we both know is symbolic for my earning your trust.”
“I will have to think on it,” I replied lightly, my mind whirling. Then I said, “And you have not answered my own question.”
He made a hmm noise. “What is that now?”
“Your reasoning for calling me inept,” I said, exasperated.
“But you did not ask a question. You repeated my words back to me.”
“Well, I ask it now. Why did you insult me so?”
Reed was looking at the back of the wagon now too. “Well. I suppose I have good reason to say you are a piss-poor criminal.”
I gritted my teeth, grateful to feel irritated instead of aroused, though the skin on the upper part of my left arm prickled every time he was just near enough to barely graze it.
“Because you caught me? Perhaps you are just a very skilled scout. More so skilled than I am at being a criminal. Meaning that you are applying your own standards to me, which is unfair.”
There was a beat and then he said, “I would agree. That was unfair of me. I am a skilled scout. And it is hard to hear my feet as they are soundless. My air penchant. I think . . . Perhaps I was frustrated that though I caught you, you almost eluded me.”
Confused, I asked, “Eluded you?”
He let his eye flit to me for a moment and then, his tone careless and indifferent as it so often was, he said, “I almost fell for your seductions. I am a man, after all.”
I could not help myself and gave a highly unladylike exhale through my nose. “This again.”
“You protest again,” he answered. “But again, I charge you with this.”
“Charge me?”
“If I were a sheriff, a guard, a magistrate, I could easily charge you with the crime of seduction. And you may be a piss-poor criminal, but you are a proficient temptress, madam. Probably often victorious too.”
I turned to him.
He was no longer looking at me, simply walking while looking at the back of the wagon, his left hand on his horse’s neck, idly petting.
He was wearing his usual sleeveless, hooded jerkin made of thin leather over a short-sleeved tunic tucked into his breeches.
His twin short swords hung off his slim hips on either side.
Because it was a hot day, the hood rested on his shoulders and back such that I could better see his face and head.
His brown hair was cropped close, nearly shaven on the sides so that the snake’s head could be seen inching into the skin over his ear, the flicked-out tongue lacing down to the sharp cut of his jaw.
I gave myself a moment to admire his corded arms, eyeing the god snake’s tail curling around the one nearest to me. I looked away before he caught me.
“I grow weary of this,” I sighed, putting as much boredom into my words as possible. “You act as if I am bedding men all over this caravan.”
“Oh, no, that is not what I mean,” he replied, his tone also uninterested. “I think a triumphant seduction does not require the seducer to swive the seduced.”
I was annoyed with myself for blushing at this.
He went on. “The victory is not in the bedding; it’s in the prey thinking they are predator, that bedding the seducer is their idea.
Had I fallen for your charms, as powerful as they may be, I would have said to myself, ‘I can let this woman go, no harm done.’ And I thought about it, and then I grew angry with myself for considering it.
So I think that is why I pointed out your lackluster lawbreaking.
To draw attention away from my being so easily baited. ”
“I think you are raving mad,” I said, my tone almost friendly.