Prince of Passion (14 page)

If they survived to win the day, she would sink back to the deep fathoms that had always been her solace, and she would send her lover back to find his place among the stars.

Chapter Eleven

Though he was still dripping on the floor, Icere swallowed against the sudden dryness in his throat. He barely noticed Luac and Kylara leave at their mother’s bidding. He had eyes only for her.

In the light of the rising sun, she seemed even smaller than he knew her to be, more fragile. He needed to go to her, to put his hands on her and assure himself that she would not fade on him like some lovely dream.

But when he took a step toward her, she abruptly handed him the tablet and stepped away. “Send the message.”

Someone was trying to send a message, all right.

“Saya.” His words were rough, as if someone less practiced spoke with his voice. “We’ll call the
Asphodel
and have them wait in orbit. When the festival is over and the storms abate, we can let Omel and her crew escape without opposition. Let the
Asphodel
take them.”

“I’m relieved you have such faith in your friends. That gives me hope we will win the day.”

“Rynn—”

“No. As you said, if the raiders get offworld, we may lose them. And then we may lose the sheerways.”

“But you may lose this place too, your island.” His fingers tightened on the screen as the conflict within him tore at his convictions. For so long, he’d been focused on his hunt to stop the raiders; he couldn’t believe he’d want anything besides that. And yet he also knew—too well, too painfully—what it meant to face exile. “You might forfeit your throne.”

She gave him a smile as twisted and sharp as the edge of a malac shell. “Maybe I just won’t give it up. That would please my great-grandfather.” The smile vanished. “You came here with a purpose, l’auralyo. Don’t abandon it now, or you will have nothing to show for all your own loss, and you might as well have disappeared along with your crystal.”

He stiffened at the cruel reminder. And the implicit rejection. “I’d have nothing?” Letting the tablet fall to the chair where Luac had sat, he stalked her toward the window. Beyond, the water was still deep indigo, as if it held the last of the night. He stepped into her space. “I would have you.”

When she tilted her head to look up at him, her pale eyes glittered. “We shared an evening of pleasure. Don’t confuse the two.”

He stiffened, as if a malac had caught him between its crushing, edged lips. “For l’auraly, pleasure and possession are synonymous.”

“This is a vacation world. Pleasure lasts only until the storms end on the morning the ship comes to take you home.”

A faint mournful note in her words pierced him, but he wasn’t sure if it was for his own sake or hers. The l’auraly bond was forged in forever, deep as bedrock, strong as stone.

But she was the inexorable water that could wear him down and wash him away.

The l’auraly were no more—the legend of their ardent devotion to their one perfect lover diminished now to a one-night drunken encounter—and he couldn’t risk what little he had left. Besides, why would he think she’d even want the faded glory of what he might have been?

He stepped back without touching her. “I’ll summon the
Asphodel
as you request, Saya, but I have no home awaiting me, there or anywhere.”

As she turned from the window, shadows darkened her eyes. “Tell them to come quietly. The nearest sheerways node sees little traffic during the storms, but if they follow the atmospheric tides, they should be able to slip in unnoticed among the other orbiting ships.”

He bowed with stiff formality. He’d been taught his own wishes came second—just as he came second in the bedroom—and he struggled to make that control serve him now. “Anything else?”

“Your tech has been returned to your suite. Perhaps that would be the safest place for you when we confront the raiders. If they were to discover what you are, they would abandon the malac essence in a heartbeat and take you instead.”

He searched her face, trying to see past her brooding expression. Did she think she was doing him a favor, offering him a way to escape? Anger churned in his belly like the ache of a long hunger. “I did not come this far to hide in my room.”

Her jaw jutted with an argument, but he didn’t give her time to speak. “You need the
Asphodel
,” he warned. “Go interrogate the uninjured diver while I make the call, but do not move against Omel and her cohorts without me.”

She inhaled, fast and deep, and the violet rings in her skin flushed—annoyed as she was, no doubt, by his high-handed order—but she only nodded. For an instant, he was proud that she could put aside her feelings for the good of the sheerways. She was not the backwater tyrant her great-grandfather had wanted; she was her own woman.

Except apparently she could also put aside any feelings for him.

He stifled a renewed pang of denial. After all, if his qva’avaq key had been bid out, he would not have had any say in his potential a’lurily. At best he would have been allowed to meet with the top contenders to encourage them to increase their bids. For all the refinement of his upbringing that made him an object of desire, the harsh truth had been his people needed the credits more than they ever needed him.

After his sister and her sheership captain had destroyed the remaining qva’avaq, he had helped them embezzle the raiders’ intended payment for the attack against his world. Not the intended purpose of his education in technology and finance, but surprisingly useful nonetheless. That seized payment had endowed his people for the foreseeable future. Which only meant they didn’t even need whatever credits his key bid might have excited.

The legend of the l’auraly had already been fading. Now it was all but extinguished.

And here he stood, squared off with his first lover mere hours after what should have been his bonding ritual and the culmination of everything he was intended to be.

Could be worse, of course. He could be dead, drowned in the belly of a giant carnivorous aphrodisiac clam.

Somehow, the realization did not improve his mood.

“Summon the
Asphodel
,” she said softly. “This will be over soon.”

And here he had not believed his mood could dive any deeper.

They parted without another word. Back in his suite, he found all his tech laid out on the table as it had been the first night when she appeared at his door. Which had been barely one planetary rotation ago. How could he have chased back and forth across the sheerways for a sol-year, unchanged, and yet after one day—and one night—in her presence, he would never be the same again?

Morning sunlight sparkled on the waves outside his window, but already clouds massed on the horizon in preparation for the afternoon storms. While he waited for a secure link to the
Asphodel
, he made himself a quick meal from fruit and some salty, starchy root chips he found stocked near the tea Rynn had made for him, though he didn’t brew a pot. He’d had enough of Saya-Terce’s various liquids.

Though he did not hurry through his meal, the link still hadn’t connected by the time he finished; testament to the relentless power of the festival-season storms. He boosted the gain, running the signal on the back of the intra-system communications array, and recited a l’auraly calming mantra as he paced. How long had it been since he practiced the finer arts of his training?

And why should it matter when l’auraly no longer existed?

The defeated thought brought his pacing to a halt beside the knife he’d used to cut the fruit.

The legend of the l’auraly was dead.

But he wasn’t.

Fastidiously, he disinfected the blade and carried it to the window where the light was good, grabbing a towel from the cabinet beside the door to the deck. He crouched, his left leg straightened ahead of him, and set the blade to his inner thigh.

The shallow wound running parallel to the muscle tissue bled only a little. When he sopped away the crimson, the cut gaped, revealing raw tissue…and a glimmer of shining crystal within.

As hiding places went, the surgically inserted, scan-neutral pouch wasn’t exactly spacious or convenient, but he didn’t have much anyway. Wincing at the sting, he eased the bracelet out of his flesh.

The fine links of the bracelet had been carved simply and with exquisite precision to waste none of the qva’avaq and, more importantly, to preserve the key’s connection with the crystal sunk into his body. Flawed crystals had killed many over the centuries. Matched crystal sets—with two or more resonating stones that sang to each other across time and space—had always been exceedingly rare, but when he and his sisters had been promised as l’auraly, the lone vein of qva’avaq had been all but exhausted.

He didn’t bother cleaning the bracelet; the qva’avaq had an affinity for bodily fluids and would hungrily absorb the smears of blood. Instead, he rubbed the links between his thumb and forefinger, counting out each curve as he’d done ever since he’d survived the ritual that made him l’auralyo, the perfect echo of another’s pleasure.

Saya-Rynn had said the raiders did not need to discover what he was.

But she did.

The tablet he’d left on the table chimed as it finally forged a secure connection through the storm, and he limped across the room with the towel clamped to his thigh. He settled on the couch and lifted the screen to key in his code.

Benedetta appeared, her brow already furrowed over her peridot eyes since he’d sent the connection request with an emergency signature. “What’s wrong?”

“Our old friends are here. We need the
Asphodel
.”

“We’re already en route. Changed course after your first message.”

He nodded. Of course she had. “I’m sending you the suggested course for a discreet arrival.”

Her slender fingers danced on the lower section of the screen in a flicker of qva’avaq silver. “Received and forwarded to navigation. Corso here counter-suggests—and I quote—guns blazing.”

Despite himself, Icere grinned. “Kiss your mercenary sheership captain for me. I know how much he likes that.”

Her lips quirked. “Troublemaker.”

His grin faded. “Not enough of one, I think.”

She looked him over and her gem-sharp gaze fixed on his hand holding the tablet. He realized she must be able to see the bracelet he’d clamped there.

“Icere—”

He shifted his grip so that links fell out of her view. “Don’t scold. It’s unbecoming in a well-trained woman like yourself.”

She actually stuck her tongue out at him, and for a moment, his idyllic childhood was once more alive. Until she reminded him, “I am not just that. Not anymore. And you’ve put yourself in a dangerous place.” She didn’t mean a world invaded by a domination-seeking entity of unknown origin.

“I suppose now that is my only place to be,” he said quietly.

Her jaw worked. “This is nothing we were prepared for.”

Unaccountably, he laughed. “Yes, uncharted waters.”

She shook her head, clearly bewildered. “Don’t do anything rash. Corso says, at least not until we get there. Precise ETA on its way to you now.”

The tablet chimed at him, but he did not switch over to check it. His ship would come in; he’d make sure of that.

“See you soon, sister.”

“
Auro stari, qva stari
, brother.”

Stand in light, stand on stone.
A traditional l’auraly blessing. She shouldn’t have said it, not even on a secure transmission, especially when it would help him little on this watery world of violet-clouded storms. And yet he was strangely heartened by the words.

He gave her the open-handed l’auraly gesture of thanks, even though she would see the qva’avaq bracelet, then cut the signal. He forwarded the last message to Rynn, knowing she would set their plan in motion.

He had just a little time to make his own plans. Once, he had dreamed of the princess who would come for him. Pirates had taken those dreams instead. But if he was a free agent now, then he could do whatever he wished. And he didn’t want a princess.

He wanted a queen.

***

Rynn washed her hands three times in seawater and still the toxic tingle did not abate nor did the violet rings between her fingers fade. She was tired and hungry and furious, and now she was leaking poison from her pores.

She had lost her temper—or had at least given a very good impression of such; she wasn’t precisely sure which it had been—when the detained diver had proved unwilling to discuss the calamity on the malac field. He’d held his silence even when faced with the evidence of his bio matter snagged on the fibers of the broken stave. Pushing her security detail aside, she’d grabbed the diver and been far too happy to see him blanch with terror.

A reputation as a killer had its uses, as her great-grandfather would have smugly reminded her.

With the incentive of his increasingly blunted ability to breathe, the diver confessed that he’d been paid to cause a disturbance during the harvest and to make sure a liqueur sachet would be otherwise forgotten. While he had not been specifically told to endanger the Ni-Saya, he had decided that would cause the most upheaval. And, it turned out, he had a simmering resentment toward Luac over an unreturned infatuation.

The security team quickly and quietly traced the diver’s credit trail back to an account that shared too many details with the ni-malac balm sale and Marsil Omel to be coincidental. The diver confirmed he’d met Omel on the barge.

“She said such pleasures should be available to all,” he gasped as his lungs labored under the tetrodotoxin paralysis, “not just to those who can pay.”

“We all pay for our pleasures,” Rynn said. “And our sins. Now tell me something I don’t already know.”

With the barge physician poised to begin supportive therapies to save his miserable life, the diver admitted he’d secretly flash-recorded Omel’s tech signals “in case something happened” and he needed a blackmail backup.

Rynn mused, “Does having your lungs slowly collapse count as ‘something’?”

The physician cleared her throat. “Excuse me, Saya. But I need to get him on a bypass if we are going to preserve brain function.”