Chapter 14 #3
the warmth of his earth-brown eyes, eyes that would light up with
teasing laughter and darken with passion.
If she wasn’t pregnant and they didn’t marry,
if he left her and returned to his homeland, she’d miss his teasing
and his cocky grin, his solid steadfastness and his will of
granite. She would even miss his strutting about, and she’d
definitely miss his strutting about naked.
She would miss him.
It seemed her only choices were to marry him
or miss him. If she married him and bore his child, where would
they live? She was a princess with rank, wealth, and a family who
loved her as she loved them, and who would surely accept Aleksi
into their fold. He and her father had apparently already formed a
friendship of sorts, and her mother would understand his position
as a person of lower rank and no wealth marrying into royalty
better than anyone. Sahar didn’t think her parents would hold her
and Aleksi’s premarital sex against him. It had been no secret that
her mother and father had been lovers before they wed.
No, she did not think her family would be a
problem. Aleksi, on the other hand, might.
She couldn’t see his pride allowing him to be
consort to a princess in her father’s court any more than her own
would revel in being the wife of a horse trader.
Which left them where?
“There they are,” he said.
“Who?”
“Your search party.” Aleksi pointed to the
far side of the open meadow. “They’re here.”
Sahar sent Lasair flying across the meadow
toward her father, whose black stallion broke away from the group
of riders. They met in the middle of the open meadow, where she
flung herself onto her father’s lap and hugged him with every fiber
of her being. She was still hugging him when Aleksi rode up on
Zolotoy leading the two geldings who’d belonged to Yago and
Taweel.
“Thank you, Aleksandr,” her father said. “You
brought my daughter back to me.”
“You are most welcome, your majesty,” Aleksi
answered with a dip of his head. “Though it was not all my doing.
Princess Sahar kept herself alive while captive to the Wolf and his
curs until I could help free her. It was she who killed Taweel the
Tall while saving my skin.”
“Of course she did,” the king chuckled. He
ruffled Sahar’s hair, hair that Aleksi had been running his fingers
through this morning. Then the king cupped her chin and held her
gaze. “Are you… Did they?”
“No,” Sahar shook her head and gave her
father a reassuring smile. “They didn’t.”
“Not for lack of trying, it seems.” The king
reached up and touched the purple and yellow swelling on her
forehead.
“They starved me, beat me, and threatened me
daily with rape,” she said, and Aleksi’s chest was not the only one
rumbling. “They were saving me for the Ox, so he could publicly
rape me and whip me before killing me, all to get his war against
you.”
The king growled. “I should have killed that
cowardly pollution of a man twenty years ago.” He hugged her close.
“I am so sorry you had to suffer because I didn’t.”
“I survived, Father. My wounds will heal,
though the Wolf’s may not.”
Her father cocked his head.
“Aleksi knifed Yago in the belly,” she said.
“Yago fled like the coward he is and left Taweel to his fate. The
Wolf may be dead or dying along the road somewhere.”
“If he is,” Brawn spoke up, “I’ll find him.
Odds are, he’ll make for the nearest city two days’ ride south and
west of here.”
“Which is ruled by the Crow, allied to the
Ox,” her father said. He looked to Sahar. “Was the Wolf expecting
to meet up with anyone else?”
She shook her head. “I never heard them speak
of it. They only talked of taking me straight to the Ox.”
Her father and Brawn exchanged glances. “If
he makes it to the Crow,” her father said, “they’ll be watching
everyone coming and going from the city.”
“I expect they will.” Brawn’s brown eyes
glinted with the challenge. “Farid, Matin,” he singled out two of
the six guards, both of them of medium height and unremarkable
looks, as long as a person didn’t look too closely, much like her
uncle Brawn. “You’ll be coming with me. We leave at dawn.”
Later, Sahar sat beside her father and sorted
out clean strips of linen to bind Aleksi’s shoulder wound as Brawn
and the two guards going after Yago made their preparations. They
were to bring him or his body back if found, and if not, to go into
the Crow’s city and ferret out what information they could before
returning home. Another of the guards stoked the camp’s fire where
a pot of water was set to boil as the fourth laid out a quick meal
of cheese and dates and dried meat. The other two guards sat watch
away from the camp.
Her father peeled away the blood-stained
bandages Sahar had wrapped around Aleksi’s wound two days ago as
the guard set the pot of boiling water down alongside them. The
king, a learned healer, dipped a wash rag into the water and rubbed
a dab of soap into it. He began to gently wash the reddened skin
around the wound, working his way to the blood-crusted hole, and
did not speak until everyone else was out of earshot.
“You tended to Aleksi’s wound, my
daughter?”
“I did.”
“You have done well. I see no infection and
the skin is already knitting together.”
“I did as you taught me, Father.”
He nodded as he rinsed the rag and rubbed
more soap onto it. “It helps to have such a fine, strong young man
as a patient, does it not?”
She flicked a quick glance at Aleksi, and saw
the muscle in his clamped jaw tick. “Yes,” she said. “It does.”
Before her father could say more, she added rashly, “I would say
his wound is worth one hundred gold pieces, wouldn’t you?”
Her father’s hand stilled mid-air. Aleksi met
and held the king’s accusatory glare without flinching.
“So much for your word of honor,” the king
said, resuming bathing Aleksi’s wound a little less gently than
before.
Aleksi said nothing.
“It was the Wolf who gave your secret away,”
she told her father, not even trying to hide the disappointment she
felt that he had not trusted her to be able to take care of herself
and shrugging off the fact that he’d proved to be right. Even a
grown man such as himself would have been at the cur’s mercy under
the same circumstances. “One of Yago’s spies saw you coming out of
Aleksi’s room the night before the race.”
“His spy would not have known what was spoken
between me and Aleksandr,” the king said, still eyeing Aleksi.
“Nobody but he and I could know that.”
“The Wolf is, was, many things,” she added
stubbornly, “but stupid is not one of them. He knew enough to put
two and two together.”
Still, her father eyed Aleksi.
“Sahar asked me directly,” Aleksi said after
a long, terse moment. “I told her the truth.”
“Which was?” the king said.
“That we made a bargain, you and I. I would
watch over her and make sure she returned home safely, and you
would pay me one hundred gold pieces whether I won the race or
not.” Aleksi turned to Sahar, his expression somber. “I would’ve
done it without the promise of your father’s coin. Nothing short of
death would’ve stopped me from going after you.”
“I know,” she murmured. And she did.
“I knew this also,” her father said. “That’s
why I asked you, Aleksandr. As king and father, I am neither deaf
nor blind to what goes on in my household. Ratter was not the only
person to notice you two ‘courtin ‘n sparkin’ as he put it. The
promise of coin was to repay you if you lost the race due to
circumstances exactly like these.”
Sahar and Aleksi both sat silent, neither
looking at the other. Her father slowly looked from one to the
other, his gaze settling on Aleksi.
“My only question now is, could my daughter
be pregnant?”
Sahar’s mouth went dry and her mind went
empty. She’d thought she was prepared for her father asking, but
now that he had, she couldn’t speak or think.
“I have sworn to stay until we know for
certain, one way or another,” Aleksi said, and his voice was
amazingly steady and sure under her father’s heated stare. “I have
offered marriage if there is a babe.”
Her father looked to Sahar.
“I have accepted, if there is a babe.”
Aleksi rolled his bandaged shoulder and
donned one of the king’s clean tunics. They were of a similar size
and the tunic fit well, its fine weave a testament to the rank of
its owner who sat nearby watching his daughter as she tucked into
the supper set out for them by the campfire. Aleksi’s empty stomach
rumbled and growled, but he didn’t join Sahar. Though her father
hadn’t said a word otherwise, Aleksi knew that his audience with
the king was not over yet. Not by a long shot.
“How is Munir?” Aleksi asked, eager to get
the coming interrogation done and over with.
“His ribs and his shoulder will heal,” the
king answered as he turned around to face him. “He told me you
jumped into the river and saved his life.”
“He would’ve done the same for me.”
“Yes,” the king said. “He would have. I sent
word to your father, informing him of what I knew of the
situation.”
“What? Why?”
“Because he’s your father.”
“I doubt he will worry himself overmuch about
it.” About me.
The king studied Aleksi for a long moment,
but said nothing further. Aleksi recalled hearing that there had
been no love lost between the Black Mane and his father, the
Panther, even before the Swan. He recalled too what Sahar had said
about how his father could’ve been protecting Aleksi from
Theodesia, and the little seed of hope her insight had planted deep
in his soul stirred in light of her father’s words.
Because he is your father.
Sahar’s father still watched him with those
uncanny cat eyes that his daughter had inherited, along with a
backbone of forged iron.
“Do you love her?”
Aleksi did not need to ask who the king meant
any more than the king needed to name her.
“I admire her, and desire her, both her mind
and her body,” he answered honestly. He had seen the way the king
looked at his wife and queen of twenty plus years, the man
understood desire. “I believe she feels the same about me, but the
word love has never been spoken between us.”
“I see.”
“You do? Because truly, I don’t.”
The king gave him a sympathetic chuckle,