He struggled to his knees and Jerick was there, slinging one of his arms over his shoulder to help him stand.
“Are you ill, Captain?” Jerick asked, realization making his voice rise in panic. Kjell could heal his men, but none of his men could heal him.
“Stop talking, Jerick.”
He didn’t allow himself to think at all, to wonder if his Gift was waning. He stumbled through the rows of sleeping soldiers, Jerick supporting him like a drunk being led to the next round of debauchery.
When they reached the ailing soldier, Kjell fell to his knees beside him.
“Get me something to drink, Lieutenant,” Kjell ordered. His throat was so dry he couldn’t swallow and, as usual, he didn’t need an audience. Jerick hesitated but turned to leave.
“We need you, Captain,” he said softly. “Don’t give what you don’t have.”
“What I don’t have is something to drink,” he muttered, and Jerick sighed and left to do his bidding. Kjell flexed his hands and laid them on Peter’s chest. The young man’s song was low and mellow, and Kjell strummed it carefully like a loose lute string.
“There you are, Peter,” he urged. “Make it easy on your Captain, will you? I’m a little spent.”
He thought of the first time he’d seen the boy, light on his feet and impossibly quick with a sword. He’d grown into a powerful man and a trusted soldier of Jeru. The fondness in Kjell’s heart became instant warmth in his hands.
Peter moaned softly, and his breathing began to ease. Kjell tightened the metaphorical string, the tone becoming more strident, and marveled at the impossible ease of the task.
Peter was sitting up asking for water before Jerick even returned.
When Kjell, hydrated and somewhat revived, eased back down beside Sasha, she stirred and opened her eyes.
“Sleep. All is well,” he soothed, covering her with a blanket and moving his rolled cloak beneath her head.
She sat up gingerly, as if she weren’t sure of her body, and he worried again at his difficulty in healing her.
“Sleep, Sasha.”
“You are covered in blood,” she murmured.
“Yes. But it isn’t mine.”
“I will wash you,” she insisted. He clearly hadn’t healed her need to coddle him.
“No. You will sleep.”
“But I am healed. You healed me again.” Her voice was almost a wail, and it made him smile, in spite of himself.
“Your dress is in tatters. If you rise it will fall off.”
She frowned. “It was my favorite one.”
“I will buy you a new one,” he reassured her. “Please . . . I need you to sleep.” She laid back down reluctantly, but she didn’t sleep.
“I have seen the Volgar before. They were in Kilmorda,” she said.
“Yes. You remember?”
“I don’t know if it’s a memory . . . or a story someone told me. They don’t look the same.”
“They are dying.”
“I feel no sadness for their suffering,” she admitted as though she thought she should.
“Compassion is wasted on the compassionless. There are some things not meant for this world. A man has the right to survive. And Volgar and man cannot exist together. I don’t want to eat him. He wants to eat me. Do you see the dilemma? There are some beasts that should not exist.” He thought about his father, about the animal he’d become, the monsters he’d made, and the creatures he’d harmed. The only sorrow Kjell felt was that he hadn’t been the one to stop him.
“I should tell you a tale,” Sasha mused, refusing to quiet down. “Something about a mighty Healer who is lucky to exist, considering he refuses to protect himself.” He heard teasing but sensed pique. It made him smile again.
“If you will rest I will tell you a story,” he offered.
“You will tell me one?”
“Yes. I will tell you one. Now hush,” he said.
She smacked her lips closed and widened her eyes, indicating she was ready.
“When I was a child, there was a hound that used to sleep in the king’s stables. He was ugly. Someone had burned his fur off in huge patches. He was missing an eye, and he always limped. But he was sweet and docile. He didn’t snap or bite. He didn’t act as if he’d been abused.
“No one knew where he came from, but the servants didn’t run him off because he had a calming effect on the king’s horses, particularly one stallion—a gift from a lord—that would not be tamed. The horse was violent but his blood lines were impeccable, and King Zoltev wanted to get at least a couple of foals out of him. The hound would sleep at the stallion’s feet. The horse would stomp and whinny and thrash for a few minutes, but the dog would not be cowed, and the horse would settle, covering the mares without hurting them.
“No one bothered to give the dog a name. No one showed him any affection. They called him dog. But he was allowed to stay. He never barked, and he was always glad to see me, so when no one was around, I would pet him and call him by the name I’d given him.”
When he didn’t offer the name, Sasha looked up at him expectantly.
“Tell me what you called him,” she demanded.
“Maximus of Jeru.”
He’d never told a single soul about Maximus of Jeru. He expected her to laugh and felt his own lips twitch at the memory. But Sasha looked at him steadily, absorbing his words as if they revealed something terribly important.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because he deserved a noble name. He had a noble heart.”
She nodded once, accepting that.
“His limp improved, and his coat began to grow lush and shiny around his scars. Maybe I healed him, though I didn’t know it then. I thought my affection was healing him. He started following me around wherever I went.”
“What happened to Maximus?” There was trepidation in her voice, and Kjell answered immediately, not allowing himself to feel pain over old wounds.
“King Zoltev, in a fit of anger, killed him. Kicked him until he was dead and threw his body into the moat. But the king paid for his anger when his stallion went berserk and killed his prized mare.”
“Is that what Gibbous meant . . . when he referred to me as the stable dog? He was talking about Maximus?”
“Gibbous called you a dog?” His voice was flat, but he was instantly seething. He would sentence Gibbous to a dozen lashes.
“He meant no harm. He said he liked dogs more than people, so I should be flattered. Gibbous is not especially . . . tactful.”
No. He wasn’t, but he had always been a good soldier, and Kjell’s temperature cooled slightly. He would still have words with the imbecile.
“So tell me . . . how am I like Maximus?” she pressed, not seeming to care that she’d been insulted. Kjell was not eager to further the comparison, but he knew instantly what Gibbous meant.
“You follow me around because I healed you. You don’t get angry when you should. You are kind to those who are cruel. You have a noble heart.”
“And a noble name,” she added without inflection.
He laughed and she laughed too, softly.
“Your name is growing on me,” he admitted. She sighed, a happy sound that made him pull her closer, letting his body more fully shelter her.
“Sasha?”
“Yes?” she answered, her voice drowsy.
“You must never do that again.”
“Do what, Captain?”
“Try to protect me.”
She was silent, considering, and he waited to see if she would argue or acquiesce.
“I saw you die. I saw talons pierce your heart. And I could not let that happen,” she whispered.
She said no more, but he felt her distress at the memory and wished he’d waited until morning to chastise her. Eventually, her breathing eased and her muscles loosened, and he closed his eyes, drifting off to sleep, tucked beside her on the Jandarian plain.
The rains began to fall just after dawn, waking them and s
oaking their clothes. It wasn’t cold—the rain or the air—and they stood out under the sodden sky and let the torrents wash them, cleaning their skin and rinsing their clothes. The horses had been gathered while they slept, and Kjell even retrieved his soap, using the opportunity to get as clean as modesty would allow. He shrugged off his shirt and soaped his chest, reveling in the natural shower and the woman who held her tattered dress around her shoulders and let the rain comb her hair. Laden and dripping, it reached the tops of her thighs, covering the scars on her back and sparing him the pangs of doubt that rose in him when he thought about them.
His men acted like children, scampering in the downpour with bare feet and wrestling in the long grass, and when the rain ceased as suddenly as it had begun, they built a makeshift tent to allow Sasha the privacy to peel off her ruined dress and don a new one. Traveling with a group of men in a landscape that afforded minimal natural cover was its own hardship, but they’d all managed, and she’d never complained. Kjell and his men did their best to get dry themselves, eating a breakfast of dried meat and hard bread, while they waited for the sun to dry the prairie so they could continue on their way.
Isak, the fire starter, approached him when he was checking Lucian’s hooves for rocks and thorns, the memory of the bolting mare still fresh in his mind.
“Captain, can I have a word?”
“Speak,” Kjell agreed, running his hands down Lucian’s legs, over his sides, and inspecting his teeth. The stallion let him, accustomed to his master’s attentions, but the fire starter waited for him to finish, as if he needed his captain’s eyes. Kjell released Lucian’s head and met the younger man’s gaze. A thin line of sweat broke out on Isak’s lip, and he cleared his throat once before proceeding.
“Captain, last night I drew second watch. I was weary, but I’d had no spirits.” His eyes shot to Kjell’s. “I know the rules. I saw . . . a woman. She . . . she was unclothed. At first I thought it was Mistress Sasha. And I looked away. I thought . . . I thought maybe . . . she . . . you . . .” he rubbed his hands over his face. Kjell waited, unable to tell where the story was leading and unwilling to steer it, even if it meant steering it away from himself.
“I looked again, Captain. I’m sorry. I couldn’t help myself. But it wasn’t Sasha. The woman’s hair was dark and she was . . . fuller . . . than Mistress Sasha.” His hands created the outline of a voluptuous body, and he blushed furiously before scrubbing his hands over his face again. “My apologies, Captain. I have no opinions on whether Mistress Sasha is . . . full . . . or . . . flat.” He winced and Kjell ground his teeth. Damn Jerick.
“Focus, Isak.”
“There are no tribes here on the plain, are there Captain? Could she have been a tribal woman? She was there, naked, standing just beyond that fire.” He pointed to the fire pit nearest the tree beneath which Kjell and Sasha had slept. Kjell’s blood ran cold.
“Then she was gone. She just disappeared into thin air. I searched the area, walking the perimeter over and over. I almost stepped on a snake—a big, spitting adder that scared me half to death. I looked for prints this morning, but the rain has washed everything away.”
“What happened to the snake?” Kjell asked, eyes narrowed on the young man.
“I left it alone, Captain. That snake took off through the grass, away from the camp. I let it go.”
Kjell nodded, his lips pursed and his eyes grim.
“Do you believe me, Captain?”
“Yes, Isak. I do.” He believed him, and the possibilities made his mind reel. He turned away from the man, his eyes finding Sasha, the melon color of her fresh dress giving her the appearance of an exotic flower. She’d worked her hair into a fat braid that hung over her shoulder like a red boa constrictor. The comparison made his heart catch.
“We’re leaving,” he shouted to his men. “Mount up. And keep your eyes out for snakes.”
***
They traveled for two days without incident—no Volgar, no snakes, no naked women appearing on the edge of camp. But it was not unclothed phantoms or birdmen that concerned Kjell. He tripled the nightly watch and put a guard near Sasha while she slept. His men didn’t question him—Isak had shared his account of the black adder and his sighting of the tribal woman, carefully omitting any mention of Sasha and mistaken identity in his retelling.
“This was not like the snakes in the cave. This snake was aggressive. It spit like a cat and rose straight up into the air,” Isak marveled.
“They don’t like the herds. They shake the ground and make the snakes nervous. They don’t want to be trampled. Our horses are probably to blame for the adder’s irritability,” Jerick mused.
“Adders are deadly, but the captain could have healed you,” Peter chimed in, still awed by his own curing at the captain’s hands.
“Yes, but who will heal the captain?” Sasha rebuked gently.
Kjell’s men shifted in their saddles, chagrined, and Kjell sighed, wrapping Sasha’s thick braid in his hand and tweaking it gently. “You will cease trying to protect me, Sasha,” he murmured, speaking directly into her ear so he wouldn’t have to chastise her in front of his men.
“I will not,” she whispered, but raised her voice to include the guard, evading him and turning their thoughts from their captain’s vulnerabilities. “I know a tale about a snake . . . would you like to hear it?”
The men agreed heartily, but Kjell did not release her braid.
“There was a place, a land of great beauty, where the flowers grew endlessly and the air was soft and mild. Where the seas were fat with fish and the people flush with happiness. There was a good king and a young queen who ruled over the land. The king built his wife a beautiful garden and filled it with every kind of tree. But there was one tree whose fruit was more desirable than all the others. The fruit was white and sweet, but the man told his wife she could not eat that fruit. He told her she could eat the bounty from every tree in the garden, but not that one. She was forbidden to even go near it. Every day the woman would look at the tree, longing for a piece of the fruit, because it was the one fruit she could not have.
“The king knew that the queen desired the fruit from the forbidden tree, but instead he brought her grapes from the vines, firm and dripping with juice. He brought her apples and pears of every color. He peeled oranges and fed them to her with his fingers, trying to distract her from the fruit of the one tree she wanted.
“But one day, the young queen went to the garden alone, and she found herself drawn to the tree again, hungry for the fruit. She got closer than she had ever been, so close that she could see a snake, glittering and gilded with gold, wrapped around one of the branches. To her surprise, the snake began to talk to her. He hissed a promise to the woman, ‘If you eat this fruit, you will see all things. The king doesn’t want you to eat it, because you will be all-knowing and all-powerful, and you will leave him.’
“The queen scoffed at the snake. She would never leave the king. She just wanted to taste a perfect, white pear. She moved closer to the tree. Too close. She reached out her hand to pluck a piece of the fruit, and the snake struck, sinking his fangs into her arm.
“When the king found the queen, she lay next to the tree, dying, a piece of the white fruit still clutched in her hand. She never even got to taste it. The king realized that he’d forbidden her to eat the fruit but he’d never warned her about the snake.”
“The snake tricked her,” Gibbous whispered, shocked. Some of the men shared smirks at his outrage.
“Yes. But he hadn’t lied about everything. The queen did leave the king. She died,” Sasha said, her gaze solemn. The smirks disappeared, and the men grew reflective. Kjell stared at the landscape ahead, wishing he’d never heard that particular story.
In the days that followed no one shirked his duty or fell asleep on his watch. No one wanted to be the cause of the captain leaving them.
They did not continue in a straight line along the Jandarian Plain, paralleling the cliffs t
hat dropped into the Takei Sea. Kjell had intended to travel to the city of Janda, just east of the sea, to confer with the lord of the province. But every step toward Janda took them further from the City of Jeru, and Kjell was eager—for the first time in his life—for the cover and safety of the castle walls. He saw danger around every rock, trouble around every bend, and an attack from every direction.
He kept his concerns to himself, driving his men hard, their horses harder, and veering north instead of east, heading for the mountainous pass that cut through the hills that bordered the southern edge of Degn. It would have been less strenuous to go around, but foregoing the journey to Janda and cutting through the mountains of Degn shortened their journey by two weeks.
Sasha showed no signs of fear or fatigue. She seemed to enjoy the journey, perched before him on Lucian, taking in the scenery and keeping them all from wearing too badly on each other’s nerves. In the evenings, surrounded by the King’s Guard, she told stories, in the day she made conversation, and each night she slipped her hand into Kjell’s as she fell asleep. He didn’t kiss her again, didn’t look for moments to steal her away and take what his body increasingly yearned for, but each day, she sectioned off another piece of his heart, and his impatience for Jeru became anticipation for something he hardly dared hope for. He could only pray his growing obsession with having the fruit would not blind him to the snakes.
The sun was just beginning to lower over the ancient seabed beyond Nivea when Kjell, Sasha, and the guard began to descend into the city of Jeru. Light dappled the ground and pinked the sky, and the walls of Jeru gleamed with black brilliance in the distance.
“She is the most beautiful city in the world,” Kjell said softly, and Sasha could only stare. Green flags beat the rosy sky and sentries sounded their horns. Even a mile off, the sound carried on the wind. They’d been seen.
“Are you sure you aren’t a prince?”
“I am a brother,” Kjell said. “And that is infinitely better.”