Chapter 30
We tell a great many tales of magical palaces, don’t we?
Lost kingdoms and beautiful royals waiting for an exiled prince, a shipwrecked sailor, a betrayed merchant.
They are nearly as numerous as our stories of tricksters and spirits.
Perhaps it is no great mystery why: the majority of us laboring day in and day out for an unsympathetic overseer, balancing our duties to family, to the children who need tending and feeding in our vast merciless cities with our equally merciless if not inept tyrants lording over all, ruining lives with a stamp of their seal.
Who wouldn’t want to wander the street of the booksellers, to linger when the troupes of puppeteers come calling?
To escape, to dream . . . even just for a little bit?
Granted, my life has always had more adventure than most others’. But I’d never felt more like a character in a fable than I did then: trapped, doomed, and devising a trick I hoped wasn’t ludicrous.
It was night and I was in my bedchamber, staring at my lamplit reflection in a large bronze mirror set above the dressing table.
Everything that surrounded me was lavish: the nigh-wasteful burning of the fragrant almond oil, the carved table set with mother-of-pearl inlays, the mirror so impressive it seemed only a sultan should be reflected in it.
I’d stolen plenty of smaller mirrors in my career but never seen anything like this marvel, and I will confess that I had gazed into its surface more than once, studying the lines that stress and time had carved into my face.
Admiring the strength in the muscles that still rowed and fought.
But it was neither my face nor my limbs that held my attention tonight. It was my hair.
I’ve always loved my hair, a vain admission.
Though my tresses spent much of their existence hidden beneath turbans, my hair was thick and long, still mostly black.
Unraveled and loose, it hung to my waist in gorgeous curls.
I had loved letting it down before my husbands’ admiring gazes, relished their hands wrapping in its length.
In retirement, I let it grow even longer, braiding it in simpler plaits that a toddling Marjana had held as eagerly as my finger.
My hair shone even in the reflection of the dagger held to it.
I hesitated. This could not be called a plan.
It was an instinct, a madcap idea out of a book of charlatans.
But my mind kept returning to that tapestry.
The one that fluttered with the patterns and colors of the city and its people, the one tended and expanded every night by a retinue of textile workers with the solemnity of priests, requiring vast amounts of newly spun thread.
I’d wanted to set it ablaze. I still did.
But I was outmaneuvered and betrayed, isolated and desperate.
I couldn’t yet afford to battle Lab so brazenly.
However, before I was a fighter, I’d always been a trickster.
I pressed the blade to the edge of my admirable hair and sawed.
It took effort; my blade was sharp, but my hair was thick, the strands stronger when gathered together.
Finally, though, it was done, my hair shorn to my throat.
I set the dagger down and ran my fingers through its unfamiliar length, my head feeling oddly light.
At my feet, soft black heaps of hair lay scattered across the floor.
They bore a not-too-dissimilar resemblance to wool.
“What are you doing?” Raksh asked from behind me.
I jumped, spinning around. My husband leaned against the door that I could have sworn I had locked, looking bemused. How long he’d been watching me, God only knew. The massive bed was between us, blocking his sight of my shorn hair.
As discreetly as possible, I pushed the piles of hair under the bed with one bare foot. “Polishing my dagger,” I lied.
Raksh arched a brow, toying with his coral pendant. His posture was lazy, but I didn’t like the intensity with which he was peering into the room. “In the middle of the night?”
“I like to be prepared at all times.”
He snorted. “I bet you do.”
Pulling one of the blankets off the bed, I let it fall to the floor to cover any stray hairs, and then climbed onto the mattress. “What are you doing awake?”
“Prowling.” Raksh grinned and pushed off from the doorframe. There was a languid sway to his hips, a playful familiarity as his eyes swept my body. “And what luck to return to light under my wife’s door . . .” His gaze caught my face, and he frowned. “Did you cut your hair?”
My heart skittered, but I feigned casualness, touching the back of my skull with a grimace. “Yes. I took a blow to the head, and it hasn’t healed neatly. The braids were tugging at the scar.”
Raksh leaned against the bed, his knees skimming the mattress and firelight reflecting off the lines of his bare shoulders.
If he invited himself onto the bed—and he certainly had a tendency to try—there might still be visible stray hairs on the floor.
I could probably pass off keeping them as human weirdness, but there was a trace of suspicion in his dark gaze that I didn’t like.
So I made a terrible decision. I put my hand out to stop him, placing it on the knot of his waist wrap, just below the colorful belt he’d yet to remove.
His eyes lit in surprise. “What are you doing?”
Getting your mind on other matters. “Finding out why you truly came to my room.” I yanked open the knot, sending the wrap fluttering to the ground at his feet.
Raksh inhaled sharply, the answer rather apparent between us, but seized my hands before I could go further.
“Is this a trick?” he breathed. “All you’ve done since I arrived is push me away.” Petty hurt laced his voice. “You even stood up our picnic. That you requested.”
“And yet you came to my door.” Pulling my hands from his, I ripped off my robe. “Well?” I challenged. “Are you not still my husband?”
If Raksh—the most lustful of my spouses—could not be parted from his suspicion by the parting of my thighs, I was in more trouble than I thought.
But I wasn’t the only one who made questionable decisions when aroused, and Raksh’s reluctance lasted one heartbeat more before he grabbed me by the hips and pulled me hard against his body.
“That I am,” he whispered, his lips finding my throat. Heat surged into my belly. The perfume of his breath, the liquid press of his hot skin, and his clever fingers trailing down my side sent a wave of memory pouring over me, along with the promise of future pleasure.
He pressed me against the bed, and it took every bit of shivering self-control I had to push him away, my hand fisting in his chest hair.
“Not here,” I breathed. The bed with its pile of hair hidden beneath was the last place I wanted Raksh to be.
His hands were buried in my tunic, wrestling with the pins holding it in place. “What?” he panted.
I caught his chin in my hand and kissed him, before pulling back and meeting his fevered gaze. I nodded at the door—beyond the door, to the enormous wooden table in the shared chamber.
The confusion that turned into a gleam in his eyes and a lick of his lips . . . God Most Merciful, no one could be expected to deny such an invitation.
“Anything for my wife,” he purred, and without further warning he picked me up, taking the three strides to the accursed table before dropping me on its length. Dishes and cups scattered, rolling away and shattering against the floor. Before I could breathe, he had me pinned beneath his hips.
Hard. A bit . . . unusually hard.
All right, maybe, just maybe, I should have thought this through. But, oh, the way Raksh was moving against me was a navy facing down a fisherman. My remaining clothes felt like shackles, each drive of his body a merciless tease.
He grimaced and then pulled away to remove one of the knives at my waist. “Must you be armed at all times?”
“With you? Yes. With other husbands?” I paused. “Still yes.” I reached for the knife. “Give it to me. I’ll—”
But instead, Raksh held it just out of arm’s reach. His eyes were locked on mine, a test in them that I couldn’t read. Then—purposefully, rudely—he hurled the knife to the floor. I shouted, but before I could push him away, his hands were on my wrists, holding me down.
His black eyes were newly intense. “Did you have plans for that?” he asked, his teasing tone not entirely masking something deeper.
There had been a meanness to the act, not mischief, and it was unlike him.
But he hadn’t ceased the rocking of his hips against mine and it was difficult to think straight, my rising ardor not often the victor in battles with the warning bells in my mind.
I dropped my hands to his belt. “Maybe I was going to cut this away,” I breathed, the words ragged.
“Ah, but that would be rude.” His mouth returned to my throat, his warm breath tickling my ear as his fingers released their grip, trailing down my arms to engage the fastenings of my tunic. “It was a gift from our queen.” He yanked off my tunic, shell clamps and pins snapping and flinging away.
Again, there was uncharacteristic harshness to the action.
I probably should have stopped him. But I could count the number of sexual encounters I’d had in ten years on one finger, and it left me with an ache I tried not think about.
Such abstinence in my husband’s absence was part of my return to the faith that had saved me in so many other ways, a decision that I’d come to terms with long ago.