Chapter 13
Choices
Sahar lay belly down on the riverbank beside
Aleksi under the cover of night, both of them watching the glow of
the campfire on the other shore, straining to see movement,
shadows, anything.
“Do you think it’s a trap?” she asked.
“I think everything the Wolf does is a
trap.”
“What’s the plan?”
“A cross wind blows the smoke of their fire
our way, so we needn’t worry about their horses smelling us. But…”
He met her gaze and held it. “We’ll have to swim across the river
to get to them.”
She looked out over the rushing water, her
blood coursing as wild and swift through her veins. “I know.”
He laid a hand on her shoulder and gave it a
gentle squeeze. “I know you know, and so does the Wolf. We can be
certain he is counting on it.”
She swallowed and nodded. “He’s counting on
my fear,” she said.
“Because he doesn’t know you.”
“No?”
Aleksi shook his head. “No.” He pushed a
loose strand of hair back from her cheek. “I’ve heard the story of
your cousin Ommar’s death. Of how you, Ommar, Asim, and Munir were
tossed from your makeshift raft into a rain swollen river. That
Asim and Munir made it to shore safely, and you made it to the
rocks on the other shore, but that Ommar had injured his back and
couldn’t climb onto the rocks. You held onto him as long as you
could, but the river was too strong, and you, a ten-year-old girl,
not strong enough.”
She hung her head and flexed her fingers, the
old shame filling her.
“What the Wolf doesn’t know and I do is that
you are not the little girl who could not save her cousin,” Aleksi
said. “You never were.”
“Why do you say that when everyone else, my
brother, who was there, my parents, Ommar’s parents, everyone, says
exactly that?”
“Because they don’t know you as I do.”
She swiped at the sudden rush of heat to her
cheeks. “Nobody does,” she said, glad the dark of night hid her
furious blush.
“True enough,” he said with a cocky grin.
“But what I meant, my tigress, is that nobody else seems to know
that you didn’t let go of your cousin. Ommar let go of you.”
The heat rushed from Sahar’s cheeks to her
spinning head, and her ears rang with Ommar’s last words. Let
go, cousin. Let me go. You must let me go.
“How do you know this?” She’d never told
anybody what Ommar said, what he’d done. Not even her brother or
Munir, who’d been there. She had barely admitted it to herself.
“Nobody knows this.”
Aleksi reached over and pulled her to him,
holding her tight. “I told you, I know you, my fierce tigress,” he
whispered into her hair. “I know you would die before letting go,
and so did Ommar. That is why he let go, to keep you from being
pulled in with him.”
She buried her face into Aleksi’s shoulder.
“He died to save me,” she whimpered.
“No,” he said, leaning back and cupping her
chin, holding her gaze. “He was as good as dead already, and he
knew it. He wasn’t going to let you die needlessly with him. In
that moment the boy Ommar chose to die as a man.”
Ommar’s eyes, wide with fear and panic came
to her, as did the way they had calmed, the way he had smiled,
perfectly at peace right before he’d let go of her hand. She
shuddered, and when she could speak again, her voice was raw with
the pain she had lived with for the past ten and two years.
“Ommar may have died a man, but I have
carried the guilt of his death since I was a girl. I fear I’ll
always carry it.”
Aleksi rubbed the pad of his thumb along her
clenched jaw, easing some of her tension. He smiled, but when he
spoke, his voice, his expression, were serious. “My father once
told me that courage was not a lack of fear. It’s the strength to
fight through that fear, to stand up for what you believe is right,
to do whatever is needed to make it right. You, my tigress, have
this courage. You’ve shown this courage time and again. I’ve seen
it. I see it now burning deep in your eyes. The Wolf hasn’t because
he sees only what he wishes to see, which more often than not is
nothing more than his own pretty reflection.”
Sahar sniffed and nodded and pressed Aleksi’s
palm to her lips. He may be proud, stubborn, and arrogant, but he
was also strong and true. He didn’t lie, not to her, even when it
would have been easier to, and she believed him and felt the
welcome stirrings of her courage rise up from her belly and light a
fire in her veins.
“Do we swim with Z?” she asked, “or tie him
off on this side of the river?”
Aleksi gave her a smacking kiss and a playful
slap on her backside. “We swim with Z,” he said, and then all his
playfulness was gone. “Swear to me that if anything happens to me,
you will jump on his back and swim right back across this river and
ride away as if your life depends on it, because it will.” When she
didn’t answer, he insisted, “Swear you will.”
She held up her hand. “I swear I will,” she
said, and then dropped her hand and muttered under her breath,
“not.”
Aleksi cocked his head as if trying to figure
out what, if anything, she’d said after swearing to ride off on Z.
Not that it would matter. Nothing he said or did would sway her
from going after Lasair tonight.
“So be it,” he said with a resigned shrug. He
crept back to the copse of trees where Z was tied and kicked off
his boots, and then untied his belt and his breeches, letting them
drop to his bare feet.
She rolled her eyes. “This is not the time or
the place for any of that,” she said, waving at his half hard
cock.
“No?” he asked with a low chuckle as he
pulled his tunic up and over his head. “It’s time to strip, unless
you wish to try to sneak up on the Worm and the Tall with dripping
wet, sloshing clothes, and then fight them wearing damp, chafing
leathers.”
He rolled up his clothes and pulled his otter
skin cloak out, grinning from ear to ear as she doffed boots,
tunic, and breeches, her nipples pebbling in the cold night air.
She handed her clothes over, and he wrapped them with his. Then he
tied the bundle of clothes and both pairs of boots on top of Z’s
saddle.
He strapped his sword to his bare back and
held the belt with his waist blade out to her. “Just in case,” he
said, tying the belt around her waist, his hands lingering on her
bare skin a moment.
She leaned into him and gave him a long,
searing kiss on the lips. “Just in case,” she said. She walked to
the edge of the river and stood, naked and unafraid.
“Hold onto Z’s stirrup and let him do all the
work,” Aleksi told her as they stepped into the water. “All you
have to do is kick your legs and not let go.”
Sahar clamped her jaw tight and nodded.
Aleksi led Zolotoy into the water and swam ahead of him, holding
the stallion’s reins. Sahar held on to the stirrup strap on Z’s
upriver side and kicked as she floated out and across the river,
keeping her gaze on the back of Aleksi’s head.
They made the far shore a good hundred paces
upstream from the Wolf’s camp, sopping wet and freezing. Aleksi
rubbed her icy skin with a drying cloth and then did the same to
himself as she dressed. Clothed and armed, he tied off Z to a tree,
pulled the sturdy walking stick with the tip he had whittled to a
sharp point from the saddle straps, and turned to her as she was
tying off her braid.
“If this is to be my last night in this
world,” he said, “I regret nothing.”
“Nor do I,” she said. She took a deep breath
in and blew it out. “I don’t fear the fight to come,” she vowed. “A
wolf and his pack of one is no match for a stallion and a
tigress.”
Aleksi held her chin and gave her a fierce
kiss. “No,” he said, handing her the sharpened stick. “They’re
not.”
Step by slow, cautious step, they walked
toward the camp, Sahar following in Aleksi’s footsteps, careful not
to make any sudden noise. They hunkered down behind the tree line
at the edge of the little clearing. From there they could see what
looked like two heads poking out of the one bedroll, and heard the
low, sonorous snore of a man. They crept a little closer, trying to
see the rest of the camp, but the fire had burned to embers and the
waning moon had disappeared behind a bank of clouds.
The horses looked to be sleeping where they
stood tied to a line, and Sahar breathed a sigh of relief that
Lasair was at least upright on all fours. She looked to Aleksi, and
raised her brows and jutted her chin forward, but he shook his head
and pointed toward a pile of something big and dark that was most
likely saddles and gear by the horses, though something seemed odd
about the shape and mass of the pile.
They watched it closely for a while, but the
pile didn’t move or worry the horses, and after giving the camp one
more look over, Aleksi nodded to Sahar.
“First we secure the Wolf and the Tall,” he
whispered. “Then we free Lasair.”
“Of course.”
He rose to a crouch, indicating that she
should stay behind him, and began to enter the clearing. They had
taken no more than three steps in when Lasair snorted and threw up
her head with a loud whinny. Aleksi cursed and leapt the remaining
distance to the bedroll, which was now rolling away from him. The
dark pile by the horses rose into the shape of a man throwing off a
blanket and closing the distance between them, short sword in one
hand and blade in the other. It was Yago who advanced on Aleksi,
forcing him to fight, leaving Sahar to deal with the longer reach
of Taweel the Tall, the exact opposite of what they’d planned.
“I have Yago,” Aleksi yelled over the
stomping and snorting of the horses. There was a rending tear and
Taweel emerged from the rent bedroll, his blade glinting in the
light of the emerging moon. “Sahar,” Aleksi yelled.
“I have him.”
The Tall was armed with a short sword and a
waist blade, and easily had half an arm’s reach on her. He had the
advantage and he knew it, sneering smugly as he swung his sword
with a turn of his wrist. She sheathed her waist blade and gripped
her stick with both hands. While it was no match for a sword, it
was six feet of sturdy oak honed to a deadly point in the hands of
a woman who had plenty of practice stick fighting with her
brother.
She bent her knees and glared at Taweel as