Prince of Passion (8 page)

Though rarely in such accord, her children shook their heads in unison. “I think it would be best if we remained,” Ky said diplomatically. “For everyone.”

Rynn huffed. “I do not need a chaperone.”

Luac spun away, his short, angry strides taking him toward the window and the afternoon storm beyond. “You need a husband, and an atoll with no boat!”

While her son’s back was turned, Rynn had been hastily securing her chemise, but his words halted her.

“Ooh,” Ky breathed out. “Not wise, brother.”

Rynn ignored her and took a gliding step toward the rain-battered window. “Ni-Saya.”

At the soft note of command in her voice, Luac pivoted on his heel. Whatever he saw in her face made him pull his shoulders back.

She lifted her chin to keep her glare on him. “Do you really want to question my actions?”

He dipped his head just a fraction. “No, Saya.”

Someday he would, she knew, and he would be right to. Unless he had been working with the unidentified raiders and their patron, in which case… No, she would not believe that.

“And do you think that even if you left me on that atoll that you could keep me there?”

The obstinate flex of his jaw loosened as he lowered his head another notch. “Of course not, Saya.”

“I raised you and your sister in accordance with the scriptures of this world, but I also made sure you would have other options, so you would not be bound here. I hope you would grant me the same freedom.”

His recalcitrant expression collapsed, and he took a shuffling step toward her. “Maméh—”

She raised her hand. “It’s the malac. I feel it too. Tonight will be a good harvest.”

He grimaced. “The malac. Of course. I’m sorry, Mother. I wasn’t thinking.”

Ky bustled forward to sling her arm through her brother’s elbow. “No, you weren’t, Lu-Lu.” She tugged at him. “Maybe we should wait in the outer office, shall we?”

He followed his sister but cast one last look back, his eyes shadowed.

When the door closed behind them, Rynn let out a slow breath, then turned.

And bumped into Icere’s chest.

His arms closed around her in a steadying embrace. “Are you all right?”

She hadn’t heard him get up off the floor, but he must have been standing behind her the whole time. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because you are so tense I can feel you shaking.”

“Stop touching me and it won’t bother you.”

“You don’t bother me. At least not that way.” He spun her slowly in his embrace so that she was facing away from him. His hands explored her shoulders, finding the knots on either side of her neck. She flinched.

“We’ll have to do something more about that later,” he murmured. “But for now…” He worked his thumbs into the knots.

She couldn’t stop her head from tilting forward to give him access, but she kept her voice acerbic. “Get me through this festival without raiders attacking, and the stress will be gone too. Or maybe I should just find that deserted island and hide.”

“I can’t picture you hiding.”

“You don’t know what I want,” she mocked.

He dug in his thumbs a little harder than she thought strictly necessary. “Your husband, the man you executed for ecological treason, did you love him?”

She flinched again though his touch had softened. “He wasn’t my husband. There was no formal arrangement between us.”

“So you did love him.”

She shrugged, knocking his hands off her shoulders. But he only moved to her upper arms, his kneading fingers smoothing out the tension. “I didn’t have that many choices. I needed someone who would not seek to revive my great-grandfather’s wars. I needed someone who believed in modernizing Saya-Terce. I wanted someone who wasn’t afraid of a legend in the flesh.” She looked at Icere’s hands trailing down her arms. “Maybe he should have been more afraid.”

He turned her again to face him and took her hands in his. He raised her fingertips to his lips. Her dusky skin looked darker against the roused silver of his qva’avaq, and the warmth of his breath made her shiver again, but the feeling was almost liquid this time.

“I am not afraid of you either,” he said against her skin. He flicked his tongue between the webs of her fingers.

She jolted at the burst of desire low in her belly. “I am Saya. Do as I say and all will be well.”

He smiled at her reaction. “Then I suppose you will have to tell me what you want.”

“I can’t.” She swallowed, as if the bitterness of the word could kill the yearning. “I can’t want.”

“We are all creatures of wanting.”

“Of course a l’auralyo would say that.”

“Because it is true.” He turned their joined hands upright in that vulnerable l’auraly gesture that exposed their wrists, his glimmering silver, hers more faintly marked with the indigo rings of death.

Did he not see the danger? She pulled free of his grasp. “Go. Witness the liqueur harvest that brought you here. Find out who thinks they can rule the sheerways with pleasure alone.”

“Not alone,” he corrected. He backed away and gave her the archaic bow her great-grandfather had revived. “This isn’t over.”

“Go,” she said again. She didn’t want to play his l’auraly word games, not when her own wordless desires could drown a world. Or perhaps a universe.

Chapter Seven

Icere eased himself onto one of the benches in the middle of the diving observatory, leaving the seats at the curving banks of windows to the eager festival-goers streaming in behind him. He kept his spine straight, not wanting to jostle his aching head. Although the Saya had treated the bruise on his brow with a compression coolant that had lessened the damage, he still felt the impact. But he’d been willing to give the Ni-Saya that one hit, considering.

He glanced toward the far end of the observatory where the evening’s divers were gathering. Luac, looking very much the warrior prince in his tight black wetsuit with bright orange piping, glared back before returning to the careful examination of his gear.

Icere resisted the urge to rub his head. Perhaps he should have found an excuse to not attend the first harvest of the festival, even though Luac had stiffly invited him when he and the Saya had rejoined her children after the altercation without any further acknowledgment of what had happened. But if he were a raider seeking a replacement for the destroyed qva’avaq, he would not be content to wait; he would want to see the harvest of this potential new weapon.

He studied the other festival-goers, capturing images for later perusal as he pretended to fiddle with his vid. It was a fairly homogenous crew despite the array of skin tones and ages: reasonably wealthy, relaxed, anticipatory. But which of them were merely excited about experiencing the effects of fresh malac liqueur, and which might be here with darker intent?

The last guests stepped into the observatory, and a soft chime indicated the closing of the portal. The observatory docent pointed the late-comers to empty seats and spoke into the comm. “Thank you all for coming to the first harvest of this year’s Malac Festival. Please prepare for descent. A descent into pleasure!”

Most of the guests had crowded to the windows, leaving the center benches only partly occupied, but a slender body slumped into the seat beside Icere, closer than necessary.

He slanted a glance at Rynn’s daughter. “Are you going to punch me too?”

“Maybe I should kiss you instead.”

He resettled his vid tech and in the process subtly closed off his body language, although her tone was more flat than flirtatious. “I do not think that would be any more wise than your brother’s behavior.”

Kylara raised one delicate brow in a deliberate way that reminded him very much of the Saya. “Certainly no more foolish than my mother.”

He matched her arched brow. “You think the Saya is foolish?”

She pursed her lips. “Perhaps I misspoke. Shall I say instead led astray?”

He abandoned his mirroring and snorted in indelicate amusement. “And you think your mother can be led anymore than she can be fooled?”

The princess abruptly grinned at him. “Point to the outworlder.”

The observatory shifted and began to slide away from the barge. The deck lights, already blurred from the relentless rain, faded completely, and so did the drumming sound as the observatory slid below the waves. The docent began what was obviously a long-familiar speech about the malac mating fields, the discovery of the aphrodisiac properties of the liqueur, and so on.

Kylara patted Icere’s hand, and he was glad he’d donned his full gray vestments including his gloves before joining the evening party. “You look as worried as my mother. The diving observatories are perfectly safe from even the largest malac, as long as you stay inside.”

The observatory was little more than a large oval plasteel room, its transparent walls seemingly too thin to hold back an ocean. As if the fragile-looking walls weren’t bad enough, the floor and ceiling were equally see-through. Worst of all, the floor at the far end of the oblong, where the evening’s divers including Luac were gathered, was actually open to the ocean, the water held at bay only by the air pressure.

To distract himself, Icere focused on the princess’s comment. “I wondered why the Saya didn’t accompany us. It is the first harvest, after all.”

Kylara lifted one bare shoulder, exposed by the asymmetrical cut of her flowing dress. “She turned rutting bivalves into a destination event recognized across the sheerways and changed the fortunes of this planet. But I don’t think she always likes what that means.” She tilted her head. “And mostly, I think she feels badly for the malac.”

The observatory sank into the darkness, and the plasteel groaned. From the opening in the floor, a gout of water burbled. One of the guests in the seats nearby shrieked, and then laughed nervously. Luac went over to the group and spoke, too quietly for Icere to hear from across the space. The guests laughed again, once more relaxed.

Luac went back to his gear and his three fellow divers, a couple of whom Icere recognized from the cantina when he’d first arrived. With their gear—the hollow tube of the pulser and long, bracing staves, not to mention the wickedly curved knives strapped to their thighs—they looked like pirates ready to rampage.

Kylara followed his glance. “Luac’s not a bad sort. Don’t blame him for beating you.”

“I don’t,” Icere said. Mostly because he didn’t consider himself beaten. As if he’d thrash a boy—no matter how deserving—in front of the mother he planned to seduce.

“You can understand how walking in on you and the Saya shocked us.”

He slanted a glance at her. “Next time, knock harder. Then go away when no one answers.”

“Next time?” She rolled her amused blue eyes. “She is our mother. She is always here for us. Always here for everything. Because where would she go? She
is
this world.”

“Maybe it’s time she was someone else’s world.”

This time, Kylara peered at him with more of her brother’s dark-eyed suspicion. “What, you came here to court her?”

“I came here for the festival.” Which was true enough.

So why did it feel like a lie?

He drew another breath, although he had no idea what he intended to say, but then the observatory came to a smooth halt. A soft musical score that had played behind the docent’s talk fell silent, and the lights came on in the malac field.

The gasp that went around the observatory sucked half the air from the room, or so it felt to Icere as he came to his feet along with the rest of the guests.

He’d caught only a brief, confused glance of the malac that had charged Luac’s trimaran, and it had been obscured by spray. Here in the crystalline depths, with the strategically anchored lighting adding a surreal glow to the scene, the creatures were like something from a nightmare.

As a child, he’d watched his share of old Earth vids, and he remembered seeing oceanscapes with oysters, mussels and clams. But those mild-mannered mollusks were obviously worlds away. The biggest of the bivalves in the illuminated field outside were almost half the size of the observatory. Even the smaller specimens were formidable looking, with their serrated shell lips and the tangle of muscular tentacles protruding from the rear of the shells.

These were no filter-feeding grazers. The malac were carnivorous killers, and they were going into their season of mating frenzy.

In the field, the creatures charged each other as the one had attacked the trimaran, pseudopod limbs flailing, bivalve mouths agape. In the clear water, they seemed almost airborne, lingering aloft as they thrashed at one another. The crack of their shells colliding was muted by the distance through the water, but it wasn’t hard to imagine what such a strike would do to a human even though only the smaller specimens took part in the displays.

A splash at the front of the observatory brought his head around. The first of the divers had slipped into the water. Icere swallowed hard.

Kylara laughed. “I forgot, Luac said you don’t like water.”

“Even less with malac in it.”

“But wait until you get a taste of the liqueur. Stay right here a moment.”

As if he had someplace else he could go in the submerged coffin. But he sank back into his seat. She went over to her brother at the waterlock and clasped his arm. While the other divers threw themselves into the watery hole, Kylara made her brother wait while she checked his equipment. He shook his head, fists on his hips, until she finally handed over the scrubber that would let him breathe underwater. He strapped the palm-sized mask over his nose and mouth and tied on the weights that would prevent him from floating in the buoyant salty water. Then he too was overboard, or underboard. He waved through the transparent floor at the guests, who waved back.

Kylara returned to the center seats. “He’s such a braggart. I worry he’ll forgot something as stupid as breathing.”

“Because swimming out to sex-crazed underwater monsters isn’t stupid.”

She grinned. “When you say it like that… Now, what were we talking about? Oh yes, sex-crazed.” She leaned toward him and touched her fingertip to his lower lip. He recoiled, but she caught his hand when he would have wiped away the warm droplet of water. “Taste it.”