“Oh for heaven’s sake—” Now she sounded angry. Fox shivered, despite his struggle not to.
“In the tub with you.” The man took hold of his arm, offering too-welcome support. “Step high. The water’s hot, but you can stand it. There’s a lot of dirt to soak off. Khralsh, you smell worse than you did after that pig dragged you through all the pens at the market when we were twelve.”
How could he know that, if he were not in truth…?
“Step down now. Get in. Gods, don’t tell me you’ve lost your wits as well as your sight.”
He did as he was told, sinking his feet one by one into the hot water, his mind as unsteady as his balance. Perhaps he was dead. Though Fox had never heard tales of the casteless being ushered into death with the tooth-rattling explosion of the most powerful sexual climax a man could ever know. He forgot to hide his smile as he lowered his bony arse into the water.
“Fox.” That was Kallista. Only now did he think to wonder how she knew his name. “Not only do I give you permission to speak, I require it of you. Whether it is a question or a silly comment, I expect you to say it. Beginning with what made you smile just now.”
Oh damn
. He startled as something plunged into the water behind him.
“I’m just wetting the soap,” she said. “Would you rather I wash you, or one of the men?”
She expected him to speak, but did the men? What was their caste, their rank? Who gave the orders? Fox opened his mouth but couldn’t force out any sound.
“Kallista is the captain,” the man said, his voice gentle. “She commands us all. I know it’s impossible to believe, but it’s true.”
“I can wash myself,” Fox said very quietly. He did not know what would give least offense.
“I know.” Kallista used a cloth to splash water onto his shoulders. “But can you tell when all the dirt is gone?”
He could only hunch his shoulders at her teasing truth and submit to her washing. What
did
she want of him? What use could he be to her?
“Stone, dip some water to pour over his head. Let’s rinse as much of the dirt as we can before we use the soap on his hair.”
Fox caught his breath. “
Am
I dead?”
The man laughed. “No more than I,
brodir
.” He poured the water over Fox’s head.
When he shook it away, Fox spoke. “If it is you, Stone, then I must be dead. We’re both dead. But—” Nothing made sense. If he could see, maybe it would help. “Where are we?”
“Not dead, Fox. I swear it.” The man gripped his forearm exactly the way Stone would have, making one of his everlasting oaths. “Do I feel like one of the dead? We’re deep inside Adara. You spoke to me on the street. Don’t you remember?” He let go and poured more water over Fox.
“I thought I dreamed it,” Fox admitted. “The last weeks, since I left the camp, it’s all been like a dream.”
“No more dreaming. No nightmares. This is the reality. We lived, Fox, you and I. Just as we asked of Khralsh. We’re the only two who lived, out of all the Tibrans inside the city when the dark magic struck, out of all those in the breach, out of all those on the battlefield below. We lived.”
Kallista scrubbed a cloth down Fox’s back hard enough to make him wince. Her bare hand followed it, smoothing away the pain with a caress. Did she mean it as one?
“You swore an oath?” She dipped the cloth in the water and squeezed it out over his back, then scrubbed again.
“Yes.” Stone answered for them both. “We swore to Khralsh and gave our lives into his hands.”
“And so, when all the others died, the One accepted the lives you offered and bound us together for Her purposes.” Kallista tipped Fox’s chin up and washed his neck. “And that is how you lived.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“W
hat use can I be to any purpose, as I am?” Fox struggled to keep his voice level and matter-of-fact, but even he could hear the despair in it.
“You’re godmarked. You carry magic inside you,” Kallista said. “Magic that I as a godstruck naitan can use.”
There was that word again. “Naitan—what is that?”
They told him. While Kallista washed his face, ears and arms, Stone told of his own capture and journey to the Adaran capital. While she washed his feet and legs, Stone told of his introduction to Kallista.
“Here.” Kallista draped the washing cloth over Fox’s hand and placed the soap in his other. “Wash the rest. I’ll go see what’s become of that other bath.”
After wrapping the soap in the cloth to have one hand free for balance, Fox stood to do as he’d been told.
Stone took Fox’s elbow to steady him. “What laid your leg open like that?”
“Don’t know. Don’t remember.” Fox dropped the soap in the tub and began to carefully wash the half-healed wound. “They must have thought I’d die of it, so it didn’t get stitched. It’s healed badly.”
“And lamed you in the process.” Stone paused.
Fox could almost feel Stone’s discomfort like a tangible thing. Why?
“Did it also—”
Fox moved on to wash other tender parts. When Stone didn’t finish his question, he prodded. “Also what?”
“Stars, Fox. If I had a woman washing me like you just did, I’d be standing straight up ready for action. I am just from watching her. Did it—Can you still—”
The laughter bubbled up from nowhere, demanding Fox throw his head back and let it fly. He laughed so hard, he lost his balance and fell, slipping through two sets of masculine arms to splash half the cooling water out of the tub.
“Are you hurt?” Kallista called from across the room. “What happened?”
“I laughed too hard.” Fox struggled to get his feet under him again. “I’m fine.”
“Good. You’ll have to get out of the tub and wait while they change the bath. They’ve only the one tub.”
“I fail to see what’s so funny about…that,” Stone hissed between his teeth. Two men—Stone and one other—hauled Fox to his feet so fast he almost lost balance again.
“Careful.” Fox clutched Stone’s close-fitting tunic until he felt steady. “And no matter how you might brag, Stone, you would not be standing straight if you’d only just spent everything you had saved. Who’s this?” He patted the other man’s chest. “Torchay come back with fresh trousers?”
“I am Obed im-Shakiri, ilias to the Chosen One.” The man’s voice was deep, dark, oddly accented.
“Chosen—” Confusion struck Fox again as he stepped out of the tub. Would he ever understand?
“He means Kallista.” Stone draped a towel over Fox’s shoulders and handed him another to wrap around his waist. “Don’t be too impressed by the ilias thing. We’re all iliasti. You too, now, mostly. What do you mean, ‘spent all you’d saved’? You mean, just now? When you and Kallista—” Stone fell into silence for a few moments, then whispered a worshipful “Khralsh.”
Fox let the men guide him away from the tub, out of the way of laborers working to empty and refill it, and sat in the chair they brought him to. “But—you said when you and Kallista first touched, it was the same as with me.”
“Obviously not,” Stone said. “It felt good, but not
that
good. It wasn’t like that with Obed either.”
“How do you know? Obed—you have this mark? Is Stone right?”
“I am privileged to bear the mark of the One, and Stone speaks truth. We did not…spend when this first joining happened.”
“We. You mean you and Kallista, or—” Fox collected himself. “Or you and Stone? Or—”
“Wait a minute,” Stone interrupted. “Are you saying that
Kallista
did—that she—Too? You brought her
too?
”
“Brought me where?” Kallista said from close by. She moved too quietly. Or maybe Stone made too much noise.
“To paradise,” Fox said without thinking.
“To climax,” Stone interpreted. “Did he? Just now?”
“It was the magic.” Kallista’s voice sounded somehow strangled.
Fox heard her retreat and cursed his too-quick wit and the mouth that let it out. Then Stone laughed and the knot in his belly relaxed.
“Damn, Fox, you have got to teach me how to do that.” Stone paused, apparently watching Kallista, for he said, “Stars, she’s pretty when she blushes.”
“She is beautiful always,” Obed said.
And Fox couldn’t see it, had no inkling how beautiful she was save the softness of her cheek and the gentleness of her hands on his body. At least he had that. “Stone, how do you know what happened when Obed and Kallista first…touched?”
“Because he didn’t touch Kallista. I blocked him, he touched me, and all his magic went through me to get to her. And that’s how I know what didn’t happen.”
Now Fox breathed an awed oath. “So why now? Why with me?”
“Don’t know,
brodir
. Goddess knows your skill with women can’t be the cause. You haven’t got any.”
“Chosen.” Obed’s word was a mere breath, but Fox heard it, turned his face to her presence.
“Maybe it happened because the magic knew me,” she said, perching on the arm of the chair where Fox sat. “It was different with Fox. I knew him.”
“Do you not know me?” Obed asked.
“I know you now. But then, when we first met—don’t you remember that feeling of something shifting? As if you had to be…adjusted. Made to fit. There was none of that with Fox. I knew him already.”
“What of Stone?” Obed said. “Did you know him?”
Kallista leaned into Fox, stretched her arm along the back of the chair. He scarcely dared to breathe. “I don’t—” she began. “It’s hard to remember. That was the first time. I wasn’t expecting it. But—I don’t remember that shift, that adjustment.”
“What do you think it means?” Torchay’s raspy tenor was back. “Should you ask Belandra?”
“She doesn’t know,” Kallista replied while Stone quietly explained to Fox who Belandra was. “She and her ilian were marked at virtually the same time and place. They already knew each other, some of them already pledged to one another. I asked, after Obed. She knew that sometimes the marked were separated and would be drawn together, but she knew nothing of the—explosion when we first touched.”
“Do you want to know what
I
think it means?” Stone spoke slowly as if uncertain of his reception.
“Yes.” Kallista’s finger drawing designs on the back of his neck made Fox shiver.
“I think it’s because we were there at the beginning, you and me and Fox. We were all of us together in the city when the God marked us. You were on the wall above the breach, weren’t you.” Stone didn’t ask a question.
“I was.”
“When I came to consciousness, I was in the breach. When I found Fox, he was in the breach. At the foot of the ladder as if he’d started to climb. We were there. Trying to reach you. Already bound.”
Fox shivered again, this time with the weight of Stone’s words.
“The bath is ready.” The other woman, Aisse, spoke from a space away—near the tub, perhaps.
By the time the women deemed him sufficiently clean, Fox had heard all of Stone’s story, all of Obed’s, and most of what had happened since. Stone explained the rules to be followed, and did his best to explain ilian, but Fox still couldn’t grasp the concept. He would follow his own rule—that of the casteless blind: Do whatever you’re told when you’re told, to the best of your ability, and avoid giving offense.
He believed Stone when he promised that no one would beat him without cause, but how could he be allowed to refuse anything? He would do whatever was necessary to stay with this ilian. He had his
brodir
back, alive again. That was part of his reason. But more—Kallista held him.
She might be woman, but she was also captain and naitan. He was nothing. Less than that. He didn’t understand most of what they’d told him. But he didn’t have to. He was hers.
Clean, dressed in Torchay’s extra summer tunic and a pair of Obed’s loose trousers, his hair drying into red-gold curls, Fox proved almost more handsome than his partner, despite the just-healed scar cutting down one side of his face. The scar only made him look more masculine. Acknowledging the thought as a bit blasphemous, Kallista still had to credit the One with excellent taste in male beauty.
His face was broad in the middle, narrowing a bit at the chin, with a jutting blade of a nose that rivaled Torchay’s. His eyebrows and lashes were thick but fair, their color blending in to the gold of his skin. He was too thin but his frame promised strength once he regained the weight he’d lost. The injury that had lamed him was still raw and red, laid open from hip to knee. It hurt her to see it, but she thought something could still be done to correct the problems caused by lack of treatment.
Had her companions been given her as a test or a gift?
What
kind of test? What kind of gift? Why couldn’t the One speak in plain language rather than obscure symbols and images?
When Fox finished the light meal Aisse had delivered, Kallista sat at the table opposite him. “How are you feeling?”
He folded his hands together atop the table, gripping tight when his fingers shook. “Fine. Wonderful.”
“Truth?”
“Yes, of course, truth.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “I am possibly a bit…overwhelmed as well.”
She nodded, then realized he couldn’t see her. “Ah,” she said. She stretched her hand across the table and laid it over his clasped ones. “Fox, I’d like you to tell me what happened to you after that day in Ukiny. I won’t force you if you can’t bring yourself to talk about it, but I think it’s important.”
“What do you want to know?” He spoke into her pause. “I don’t remember that day. I don’t remember anything until I—”
“Wait. Do you mind the others hearing, or would you rather send them away? Or would you rather tell Stone instead of me?”
He jerked, his head beginning to shake no, then seemed to force himself into stillness. “However you wish it, Kallista.”
She separated his hands, taking one into hers and curling his fingers around her palm with her other hand. “I want to know what
you
wish. Do you want me to go, or stay?” She didn’t need another worshipper. She already had Obed to deal with.
“Stay,” he said. “Please.”