Chapter 12
Twelve
Cara
Ihad many questions for Fear, but the largest could not be asked inside the queen’s city.
We went directly from the Trials to Fear’s house, where I had the distressing opportunity to see Sera in an enchanted mask to mimic my face. Her height was wrong, so Fear warned her to pass quickly by the windows. Her mouth did a smirky sort of thing that I hoped I did not.
Fear had a twin as well, a Bismyth member named Kav, who cut almost as fine a figure. From there, we traveled in our own enchanted disguises and met Kiegan at a stable at the edge of the city.
The horse Fear had acquired for me was dark brown and enormous and regarded me with the patience of an animal that had been asked to tolerate a great many things, of which I might be the worst.
“You’ve genuinely never ridden?” Fear sounded perplexed. “You just walked everywhere on those mortal legs?”
“Yes, I’ve walked everywhere I’ve ever needed to go. And I borrowed the horse and cart sometimes from our neighbor.” Which had already been set up for me, and the horse knew the way to the village and home again without much entreaty from me.
Stonehaven had horses. Smaller than these war horses, they were steady, practical creatures that pulled carts, carried merchants, and occasionally threw someone into the mud if sufficiently provoked. I had always assumed that reflected poorly on the rider. A personal weakness, really.
I put a hand on its side, testingly. The entire animal shifted and I yanked my hand away as if I had been burned. I now felt less judgmental than I had once been.
Kiegan, already mounted, did not try to hide his amusement. I made a note to be uncharitable to him at the first opportunity.
“You’ll ride with me,” Fear commanded. He swung up onto his enormous black horse with the effortless ease of someone for whom this was entirely routine, then extended a hand down to me.
I took it, and he pulled, and I flailed at the horse’s side until Fear had somehow sorted me onto the horse and against his thighs. Fear gripped my hip and did not comment, which was wise.
I ended up in front of him. His thighs bracketed mine, longer than mine, the inside of them pressed against the outside of mine through too few layers of fabric.
“All right?” he said, close to my ear.
“Fine.”
I was not fine. The horse was far from the ground, and I had not fully thought through what we’ll share a horse meant in terms of proximity. His chest was warm against my back. I could feel his breathing, slow, even, deliberate. Mine was none of those things.
He took up the reins, his arms coming around either side of me, and we moved with a sudden lurch for which I had not been prepared.
I gripped the front of the saddle with both hands. Fear, for once, mercifully, said nothing. He’d teased me about my fear of riding a dragon; now we were not far above the road and I was still anxious.
He took the reins in one hand and put an arm around my waist. His hand, with the reins, rested lightly on my thigh, and I was far too conscious of the solid wall of muscle that he was at my back.
Apparently, even my fear of being thrown to a slow death—as opposed to the quick death falling from a dragon—could not distract me from Fear’s body.
“Stop fighting it.”
His lips were altogether too near my cheek. When he spoke, his voice was a vibration in his chest that traveled through my back, my ribs, the base of my spine. I felt him speak before I heard him.
As if I needed that much more of Fear’s overwhelming presence.
“I’m not fighting it.”
He probably didn’t just mean the horse.
“You’re always fighting. Trust the horse.”
I was going to say something about the horse being a stranger to me, though perhaps more trustworthy than Fear, but then his hard forearm settled across my thighs, and the insult dissipated like smoke.
It took a significant amount of road, but slowly, something in my clenched-as-a-fist body began to relax.
My shoulders first, dropping away from my ears.
My thighs, which had been gripping the horse hard enough to ache.
My back, which I had been holding away from his chest until I gave up and leaned against the warm expanse of his chest. I stopped bracing against the movement and settled into the rhythm of the horse’s long strides.
“There. You’ve got this. Good girl,” he murmured into my ear.
I wanted to tell him to fuck off. His words warmed me anyway. I settled for saying nothing.
He held the reins loosely. He held me with the same loose competence.
I was acutely aware of what he was not: his breath at my ear; the rhythm of his chest expanding and contracting against my back; the fact that the horse’s gait was moving me, very slightly and very repeatedly, against his lap.
There was nowhere to go that was not further into him.
If I had known riding with him would require me to be planted in his lap, maybe I would’ve tried harder to bond with the horse.
The road unrolled ahead of us out of the city and into the wider morning.
Kiegan pulled up alongside us on his own horse, a stockier, enormous animal that suited him, and looked at me assessingly.
“You’re doing better than I thought,” he said.
“You thought I’d fall off.”
“At best.”
“Thank you,” I said dryly. “Generous as always.”
He nodded with what appeared to be complete sincerity. Perhaps that was what passed for encouragement among the orcs.
Once we had left the city and settled into a rhythm, I had questions for Fear.
The city was far behind us. The road had narrowed into something that moved through open country, the kind of landscape that made the world feel large and our party small in it.
Kiegan was riding ahead by about twenty paces, close enough to matter but far enough to give us privacy.
I had the feeling he knew exactly what was happening behind him and was not going to look back unless there was screaming.
Fear was hard against my ass, so at least I was not the only one who found this proximity both pleasant and punishing. I tried to push it away and focus on my many questions.
“Who is Tesa?”
His arms didn’t shift, his hands stayed easy on the reins. There was no tension, and yet I had seen his face for one unguarded second when Ander named Tesa. He was back to being Fear now, too skilled at deceit to be a comfortable husband.
“Tesa was my friend and Ander’s…” He paused, searching for words, and ended on, “Everything. A childhood friend. His tether to the past when his parents were alive. His hope for the future.”
“Ander implied you got her killed.”
“It’s not that simple.” Something worked in his throat, some emotion even Fear could not hold off.
Nothing was simple for Fear.
“Was she someone you were involved with?”
“No.” No hesitation there. “She was Ander’s. She suffered when Ander and I tried to cast the queen off her throne.” He paused, a note of grief entering his voice when he amended, “She suffered because we tried to cast the queen off her throne.”
I let that sit for a moment. I wanted the story, but Fear’s voice dipping with emotion made me question pressing him about the past. Instead, I returned us to the present, which overbrimmed with troubles of its own.
“It’s the first time I’ve heard her name.”
“That cost him.”
I looked at the road ahead, at Kiegan’s broad back moving with his horse’s easy walk, at the country shifting on either side into something wilder.
There were deeper stretches of forest, green and inviting and glimmering with dangers.
There was a reason the patches of villages and farms were grouped together, as Stonehaven had been; the world around us was slowly turning strange.
“He’s a better person than you give him credit for,” I said.
“He’s a better person than I am,” Fear said, and something in the way he said it, flat and without self-pity, as if it were a fact he had made his peace with, unsettled me.
I didn’t answer that. I wasn’t sure there was an answer.
He must have read my reaction; he always did. “I’ve told you before that I will be seen as a monster if I fail. But if I change the world for mortals and shifters, then I’ll be what this world needed. More than it needed a good man like Ander.”
Gods, he was dramatic. And arrogant. “You’ll never be a monster, Fear.”
His breath was a sigh against my cheek. “Anyone can be a monster with enough reason.”
“The reason makes or unmakes the monster,” I disagreed.
His arm tightened around me slightly, maybe involuntarily, as if he could hold me closer. “I think that is an innocent perspective.”
The horse leapt slightly over a puddle in the road.
Briefly, my ass lifted from his lap, then came down again.
Not just down, but sliding, a fraction of an inch of friction that I felt in two places at once: the back of my hips and somewhere lower.
His hand at my waist tightened. He had felt it too.
Fantasies of Fear tried to invade my mind, and I shook them off.
We were racing Obsidian to get the knife to heal my brother; there was no time.
We were not going to slip off into the forest to test the limits of not completing the marriage bond with those deft hands between my thighs or that unbearably handsome face between my thighs.
“Will you tell me the story?”
The wind came off the open country smelling of sweet grass. His jaw grazed the top of my head as he looked to the side, checking the countryside for threats.
When there were none, he had to answer. “I made decisions that I believed were correct that cost Tesa her life. That’s the truth, and it’s not the only truth, but it’s all that matters to Ander.”
This sigh of his I felt through my body before he added, “I will tell you the story, but will you wait? I hold on to the possibility of making things better, still. Of being able to atone for what I’ve done.”
“Yes, of course.” I glanced at him over my shoulder. “I thought you said Ander betrayed you.”