Oria's Gambit (2 page)

Even the exotic taste of cheese and honey on
his tongue evoked her vividly. The Destrye said that all roads led
to Arill’s temple—which, in fact they eventually did. Apparently
all of his craziness led straight back to Oria. Back home in Dru,
the land of his birth that he’d nearly killed himself to return to,
he’d craved that flavor with much the same unreasonable longing
he’d somehow attached to the woman who’d introduced him to it.

Both of which he’d been certain never to
encounter again. Wonders never ceased.

Bero trimmed his beard, then lathered and
shaved his neck, throat and surrounding skin. He stepped back,
watching anxiously as Lonen rubbed a hand over it. The Báran oils
made the hair soft, and Bero’s careful work created crisp
demarcations between the hair and his skin. He probably wouldn’t
recognize himself reflected in still water.

“Does it meet with your approval, Your
Highness?” Bero asked.

“Feels great.” He nearly told the boy he
didn’t have to use the honorific every time—though he’d nearly
gotten to the point of not looking for his late father when people
used it—but he probably needed every measure of pomp he could
muster among these status-conscious people. “Would you—”

He broke off at the echo of booted footsteps,
and sprang to his feet, iron-headed battle axe leaping to hand. The
Báran city guard who approached gave him a strange look—no doubt
bemused by a nearly naked Destrye wielding the heavy, unrefined
weapon in the sumptuous perfumed baths—but quickly bowed. “King
Lonen, the Princess Oria would like to enter and speak with you
once you’ve finished bathing and have dressed.”

Oh sure. Exactly what he’d expected. And why
in Arill not receive his erstwhile enemy and future wife in the
bathing chambers of Bára?

“Tell her I’m at her disposal.” At her beck
and call, even, which stung his pride more than he liked. After
all, he was doing this for his people, as a good king should. If he
didn’t find building aqueducts and shoveling manure beneath him,
marrying a foreign witch shouldn’t be.

The man hesitated fractionally—perhaps Lonen
had snarled too much—then bowed again and stepped out.

“Your Highness, fresh clothes for you
are—”

“I saw them. In a minute.” He sat again,
handing Bero the leather tie for his hair. His favorite one, in
fact, exactly the right length and suppleness. He’d been sorry to
realize he’d lost it in Bára, then bemused when Oria handed it back
to him. Odd that she’d saved it all that time. The tie might be his
preferred one, out of long habit, but it didn’t look like much. Not
like the fancy gold cords she wore in her braids. “A bit more oil
in my hair, if you will, Bero, then tie it back.”

He wasn’t putting off dressing only to poke
at Oria—or only to test how much she saw through that solid gold
metal mask without eyeholes. No, he told himself, he acted out of
practicality. There was simply no sense getting oil on the silk
shirt, borrowed or not. If the side benefits alleviated his
stinging pride, so be it.

He watched for her through the gloom,
catching the exact moment she faltered at the sight of him. She
didn’t hesitate long, forging gamely forward, but it gave him a
welcome bit of satisfaction that she saw him and that he could give
her unease. Anything that awarded him an edge with the canny
sorceress would be a welcome weapon.

She strode towards him in that impetuous way
of hers, as if she brimmed with more energy than she could contain,
crimson robes swirling about her long legs. The dragonlet, her
constant companion, rode her shoulder, scales shining even whiter
in contrast to the vividly colored silk, long tail wound around her
arm like a series of decorative bracelets finishing at her wrist.
Its green eyes shone in the dimness, as if lit from within.

Oria stopped her usual decorous and obvious
distance from him, which perversely made him want to close the
space between them. But he didn’t, forcing himself to stay put.
He’d never pressed unwelcome advances on a woman in his life,
always careful of his size and strength. With Oria a slender
sapling compared to the more robust Destrye women, he’d been
particularly observant of her physical fragility and aware of
crowding her.

Not that she credited him with any of that
restraint. She wavered, well out of reach and poised to flee, as if
he might seize her and tumble her to the floor. The idea had its
merits—and were he another kind of man he might act on them—if only
to reassure himself that she was still the same person inside.
Innumerable sorceresses hid behind those featureless gold masks and
the crimson robes of their office, virtually identical from any
distance. He recognized Oria by her scent of night-blooming lilies,
her low musical voice, and that bright copper hair that shone in
the elaborately coiled braids. Also no one else carted about a
winged, white dragonlet. But none of that substituted for seeing
her.

When he’d met her before, she hadn’t been a
priestess and wore no mask. He missed Oria’s lovely oval face and,
most of all, her expressive eyes, so full of life and nearly the
same color as her metallic hair. Maybe he’d carried anger for too
many things for far too long, but all too familiar rage coiled in
his gut that she’d glibly offered him marriage then coolly informed
him that their alliance would be in name only, that he’d never
share her bed or body.

Not only would he give up a normal marriage
to a woman of his own people, he’d also never satisfy that
unreasonable and burning desire to strip Oria naked and feel her
slim body beneath his, to touch that fair skin, watch her
extraordinary copper eyes darken with pleasure. Surely Arill had
devised this torture in punishment for the many profane deeds he’d
committed in the name of war, to bind him in marriage with the one
woman who’d obsessed him like no other, and simultaneously ensure
he’d never taste the single reward that might make tying himself to
his foreign enemy bearable.

When Oria didn’t speak, instead remaining
rigidly silent and caressing her pet’s tail where it looped around
her wrist—a nervous gesture, to be sure—it occurred to him that
she’d likely glimpsed that potent fantasy in his mind, along with
his fury. Overheard how part of him howled to strip her of those
shapeless robes and find the luminous slip of a candlelit woman
who’d caught his eye in a window and reminded him of the fantastic
tales of his boyhood, even amidst the blood, gore, and terror. Too
late for her to unsee it, in that case. Teach her to snoop in his
brain.

“You wanted to speak to me?” He prompted.

“I thought you were finished bathing.” She
shifted on her feet, masked face turned away, voice stilted. “I
apologize for catching you undressed.”

“I am finished,” he told her, enjoying her
unease far more than he should—though it rankled that she couldn’t
even bear to look at him. He was scarred yes, but he’d earned those
fairly battling
her
golems, and if he’d grown overly skinny,
that too was her fault. “Does it matter how I’m dressed—can you
even see through that thing?”

“Bero, leave us, please,” she said, instead
of answering.

The boy patted the spiral tail of Lonen’s
hair and bowed his way out. Lonen poured more wine and held out the
glass to her. “Wine? I’ve only the one glass and I drank from it,
but you could sip from the other side, if you’re concerned about
catching a disease from me.”

“N
o, but thank you for the
offer,” Oria managed to reply with reasonable politeness, proud of
her even tone in the face of all the violent emotion whirling off
him like sand thrown by a dust devil.

The Destrye king shrugged his bare shoulders,
took a swig of the wine and popped some honey-dipped cheese into
his mouth, chewing vigorously. His granite eyes stayed hard,
studying her, his dislike of her mixing with sexual desire that
carried an unsettling edge of fury.

As much as she’d come to appreciate the
rational, even noble aspects to his character, it wouldn’t pay to
forget that Lonen, though king now, was a warrior first, and from a
brutal, barbarian people. And his sexual nature affected her in
improbable ways. Seeing with sgath wasn’t the same as looking with
her eyes. In some ways, it showed more details to her mind’s
eye—the physical lines of the man, yes, also layered with his
shimmering personal vitality.

“You could take the mask off, if that’s
what’s stopping you,” he said. “It’s good wine. So is the food, if
you want some.”

“Thank you, I’ve eaten.” She sounded stiff,
even to herself. Better that, though, than an emotional meltdown.
“And my mask is a badge of office. I don’t remove it, except with
close family.” Something she’d told him already.

“We’re going to be family.” Lonen swirled
another hunk of cheese in the honey liberally, a gesture somehow
suggestive, then ate it. His strong throat, skin newly shaved below
his neat beard, moved as he swallowed, drawing her attention.
Though she fought that fascination, better to look there than at
the rest of him, so liberally displayed to her mind’s eye.

He sat with his knees wide, the white drying
cloth parting over one thigh, revealing shadows beneath. Strangely
she longed to touch him, though she knew doing so would only
overload her senses, causing devastating mental and even physical
pain that could send her into a faint at best. He enticed her
anyway, inciting a craving to caress that tanned skin, feel the
dark hair sprinkled over his arms and legs, denser on his chest,
then arrowing towards the cloth that could be so easily tugged
away.

She blushed at the uncharacteristically
prurient impulse, glad of the mask that hid it, though Chuffta
would know her thoughts.

“
And wouldn’t judge you for them,”
her
Familiar said in her mind.
“It’s good to want your mate. It’s
the natural order of things.”

There would be nothing natural about this
marriage. “We won’t be family like that,” she said aloud, to both
of them. “We discussed that already and you agreed to a marriage in
name only, King Lonen. I have good reasons for it.”

Irritation flickered out of him, but he
glanced down at the food tray, thick dark lashes hiding his eyes as
he picked through the offerings, at last choosing spray of grapes.
“But you haven’t explained them. Nor did you answer my question
about how well you can see in that mask. Even if we won’t share a
bed, we will share hopefully long lives bound together. We
shouldn’t have secrets between us.”

She laced her fingers together, holding
herself more rigid than she needed to. Oh, he had no idea of the
secrets she kept. Chief and most dangerous among them that she
could use male magic, the more active grien, along with sgath. Of
course Lonen wouldn’t know the difference as any of her people
would, but he might slip up and say the wrong thing. Or use the
information to deliberately betray her, if it became useful for him
to do so.

Execution could be a handy way to dispose of
an unwanted wife. If her own people did the deed for him, so much
more convenient.

Since she’d gained her mask, she’d gotten
much better at handling the emotional energy that she absorbed from
other people as passively as she did from all living things and the
deep source of magic below Bára. But dealing with it effectively
meant venting the accumulated energy as grien—something she needed
not only privacy, but quiet and concentration to accomplish. All of
which did not come easily around the larger-than-life Destrye with
his exuberant masculinity.

“
Let me help.”
Chuffta leaned his
angled cheek against the patch of skin behind her ear bared by her
upswept hair, where the mask did not cover. The derkesthai’s
buffering abilities took the jangling energy down several
notches.

“
Thank you.”
This time she kept her
reply to her Familiar private. The way Lonen’s flinty eyes went to
Chuffta, however, showed he suspected they conversed. Something he
didn’t at all like. She might be more efficient to catalog what he
did
like and consign the rest to beyond her control.

“We
will
have secrets between us,” she
corrected the Destrye. “For many reasons. Not all the secrets are
mine alone, and the temple guards hers closely. Only those who have
taken the mask may know them. Not only by sacred law, but because
of a … a need for maturity in ability to absorb the
information.”

A wry, humorless grin cracked his face, teeth
white in the dim, golden light and the darkness of his beard. “Did
you just say that I’m too stupid to understand the answers to my
questions?”

It sounded bad, put that way. Oria herself
had only recently proved herself a master of
hwil
, a state
of such perfect, inviolable peacefulness of mind and spirit that
she could be trusted with the dangerous secrets of manipulating
magic. Never mind that she’d lied to the priestesses and faked
hwil
well enough to pass their tests. Something else
impossible to explain to an outsider, much less this brusque
warrior.

Lonen could never hope to penetrate the
temple’s secrets. In fact, he’d be far safer and likely happier not
knowing the dark side of Báran magic.

She couldn’t tell him as much, however. They
might be virtual strangers, but it didn’t take long familiarity
with the man to know he wouldn’t take any explanation along those
lines at all well.

She deliberately laced her fingers together
again, mimicking a serenity she’d never feel, choosing her words
carefully. “Even though you’ll be my husband, you will still be
Destrye and I will be Báran. There are worlds of things we’ll never
know or understand about each other. We must resign ourselves to
that reality now.”