“I always am.”
Colton did not bother to reply to that remark, clearly untrue, just shepherded his men off into the darkness. In a very short amount of time, Kirra and Romar were left alone.
CHAPTER
27
T
HEY were standing in the middle of the back lawn that sloped away from the mansion. It was almost too dark to see anything, and Kirra had her head turned away from Romar’s insistent gaze, but she could tell he was studying her as if all the lines and contours of her face were entirely visible.
“You were the last person I expected to see at tonight’s little escapade,” he said finally. “But I suppose I should know better by now. You appear every time danger threatens me. Soon I will come to rely on your intervention and I will prove so careless with my life that you will need to stand beside me at all times, just to keep me safe.”
She was tempted to pretend she had no idea what he was talking about, that she was not the person he thought she was, but it seemed pointless. He had recognized her the minute she raised her voice, disguised as it was. “How did you know me?” she asked instead.
“I think I will always know you. No matter what form you assume or what company you keep. The essential nature of your soul is imprinted on my heart. You will never be a stranger to me.”
At that she smiled and lifted her head. “Very pretty. Next time I will come to you as a spider or a snake, and we will see how quickly you recognize me.”
“Come to me in any guise,” he said, “as long as you come to me.”
He leaned forward as if to kiss her. She put her free hand up to push back hard against his chest. Her heart was pounding so heavily she had to struggle to take a breath. “Now that would be a scandal greater than even Senneth has stirred up,” she said, trying to laugh. “The regent of Ghosenhall is caught kissing a strange young man on the back lawn of Nocklyn Towers.”
“Then change for me,” he begged. “Be Kirra. Just for now. Just for this minute.”
“That’s foolish.”
“Be foolish for me.”
She shouldn’t. It was stupid. He would kiss her if she was Kirra. Even now she felt the pressure of his body as he strained forward, as he clearly showed his desire and his intention. It didn’t seem to matter to him that she was in this body, unfamiliar and not suited to his notions of romance. He knew her in whatever body she crafted.
Slowly, watching the expression in his eyes as she did it, she re-shaped her face, re-colored her hair, took on the curves and height and shell that defined Kirra. It made her feel strangely vulnerable, ridiculously feminine, to have her own gold curls tumbling down her back, feel her very own smile lifting the corners of her mouth. Even the dress she manufactured was one of her own, a red so dark it looked black in this poor light.
“So,” she said. “What do you think of me now?”
He kissed her so hard there was no air to breathe; his arms crushed her body, rearranged her ribs. She wanted to shove him away, she wanted to hold him tighter, she wanted that kiss to end the world. Suddenly he released her from his suffocating hold, but he did not let her go. Now his hands were on either side of her head, buried in her hair. Now he was kissing her all over her face, her cheeks, her eyes, her lips again. Between kisses he whispered her name.
She couldn’t think. She couldn’t tell him to stop. She felt her body turn liquid and her blood rejoice. It was as if she was changing into someone new, a wholly unfamiliar shape, a woman who had never existed until he kissed her. It was a transformation more complete than any she had ever wrought on herself, and she was not sure she would ever know how to turn back into the person she had been.
When he finally let her go, she gulped and fought for air. She turned away from him, not wanting him to see her face. She staggered and he caught her arm again, but she jerked her hand away and he allowed her to go free.
“You can’t blame me for falling in love with you,” he said. “If not for you, I wouldn’t even be alive.”
“I think maybe I’ll let you go next time,” she said, still turned away, still trying to recover her breathing.
He laughed softly. “There will be no more next time,” he said. “Nothing will make me risk myself again. I could not bear the thought of dying and thereby losing you.”
Now she did look at him, making herself stand straight, acting like a reasonable woman. She tried, she tried to remember his wife, the kind and devoted paragon. She could not bring the image into focus. She said, “You don’t have me. So you can’t lose me.”
“I want to have you,” he said.
“We are nothing but trouble for each other.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I look at you and I see heartache, and I don’t care. I think of you, and I know loving you will hurt everyone else I love, and I don’t care. You may end up hating me, and I may end up mourning you the rest of my life, and I don’t care. I want you too much. I want this moment, this night, anything you can give me. I love you. And all your shifting and all your laughing and all your protesting will not change that.”
She shook her head, not to contradict him, but to signify that she did not understand. “I am so restless,” she said. “I cannot stay in any one place for more than a few weeks, a few days. My friends are people like Senneth, who is as fidgety as I am, and Cammon, who is as strange. You have asked me why I have not married and that is one reason—there is no one I can bear to be with, settled cozily in one house, for all my days. So I have been used to thinking of myself as an inconstant and uncommitted woman.” She straightened a little, turned herself to face him full on. “But I know that I would only be able to have you in bits and pieces, during snatched moments in dark corners, a day here, a day there. And it is not enough for me. I would want to be with you during all those other days, too, for months at a time, for years. Don’t you think that’s ironic? That I would finally fall in love with a man I would always have to be leaving, and he is the one who makes me want to stay?”
“I will settle for the stolen hours, if they are all I can have,” he said. “I will settle for your smile across the room, your hand on my shoulder when I ask you to dance. I will take whatever you are able to spare me. There is nothing I can promise you, I know that—nothing I can give you, no offer I can make—except my love. Whenever you want it, for as long as you will have it. Even if I never see you again, I will love you the rest of my life.”
“I cannot bear that thought,” she said. “Not ever seeing you again. But there is so much about this I cannot endure.”
He had released her earlier, but now he lifted his hands again, rested them on her shoulders. “Can you bear for me to kiss you again?” he asked. “For I feel I must.”
She lifted her face. “I could not bear it if you did not.”
More gently this time, he took her in his arms, more gently laid his mouth against hers. She was aware of every inch of her skin, alive with sensation, aware of every place that his body met hers.
I have to have him,
she thought, but it was not so clear as that; there were no words in her head. Merely, she pressed against him more closely, lifted her arms to wrap them around his shoulders. Something bubbled through her, and she thought it might be happiness. Or recklessness or mischief or desire. Or all of them, wrapped in a swirl of magic.
For she was a shiftling, and she could make any ordinary object of the world change shape. Her dress she turned into a scrap of cotton and lace, letting it fall to the ground. Romar actually gasped as he felt her turn nude in his arms. His hands roved down her back, came up to cup the curve of her shoulders, but he still held her against him, more tightly now, as if to shield her from view.
“Can you do that for me?” he whispered in her ear.
She was laughing now. So it had been happiness after all. And a little mischief. And certainly desire. “I can,” she said. And then his clothes were gone, even his boots, just a few ribbons of silk and leather lost in the tall grass.
They were both naked, clinging together, kissing each other with a mad fervor under the thin, chilly moon and the startled constellations. They were close enough to the great house to hear occasional bursts of music, too far—or so Kirra hoped—for anyone out for an evening stroll to see them. Not that she cared. She cared about nothing but the feel of this man’s hands on her body, his skin against her skin. She kissed him with a sort of desperation, trying to get closer.
“Can you conjure up a blanket?” Romar whispered against her mouth, and again she laughed. She pulled him down with her to the grass, where her spread fingers manufactured a soft quilt from so many leaves of clover, and they lay together, body to body, heart against heart. The music from the house swelled and receded; the summer night lay against them like an exhalation of breath. They made love by starlight and swore promises by moonlight. Kirra thought she might never be so happy again.
THE soiree was long over by the time they returned to the house, moving separately and in stealth. In fact, most of the lower story of the mansion was in darkness, light trickling out only from the kitchen windows and the servants’ quarters.
“Do you think anyone missed us?” Romar asked.
“My friends might have noticed my absence, but they wouldn’t have been alarmed,” Kirra said.
“Why? Do you often slip away?”
She grinned. “It’s hard to keep track of any mystic,” she admitted. “All of us like to be alone from time to time. But they wouldn’t be alarmed because they know I can take care of myself.”
And because Cammon would know if I was in trouble,
she thought, but she didn’t add that. Best not to really dwell on what other emotions Cammon was able to pick up on when he tried. “What if someone was looking for you? Amalie, for instance? Or anyone else?”
“They will have to wait till morning to be reassured, I suppose. But Amalie would check with Colton before she became truly worried, and he could let her know I was safe.”
“Still, I think it is best that no one sees us returning together at this hour after a long unexplained absence,” she said. “You go in by the way we left. I’ll find another route.”
“No,” he said at once. “You go in the back door. I don’t want you circling the house at night, trying for other entrances. I’ll do that.”
She laughed and kissed him quickly on the mouth. She wondered how long such unnecessary protectiveness would seem charming. Not long, she thought. “I’ll use the same door,” she said, “but I’ll take a different shape. No one will notice me.”
He took a breath and she thought he was going to say something like
I hate to think we must spend our lives lying and pretending.
He might have thought it, but he didn’t say it aloud. “Then I will see you in the morning?”
“Perhaps not till the evening. Perhaps not until the ball.”
“You will dance with me, I hope.”
She couldn’t help laughing. Dancing would seem very tame after tonight. “My lord, I will be happy to.”
“Serra, I shall live for the moment.”
She kissed him again, then allowed herself to melt into a small familiar shape. Kitchen cat, calico-colored. Without a glance back at him, she trotted across the last margin of the lawn, wound her way through the garden, and nudged open the back door. She could hear voices down the hall as women worked in the kitchen, scrubbing the last pans and complaining about someone who hadn’t done her fair share of chores. Kirra was quickly through the ballroom and down the corridors leading to the main stair. Bounding up the steps, she listened for sounds of activity down the halls. Not many people seemed to be astir; it must be later than she had thought.
On the landing between the second and third stories, she paused and listened again. No footfalls; no voices; no one nearby. Smoothly and soundlessly she made her transformation back into Casserah, having to think about it a moment before she remembered exactly what she’d been wearing and how her hair had been styled. Great gods, but she was tired. She leaned against the cool stone wall for a moment, thinking about all the events this day had held, from the meeting with Halchon Gisseltess to the abandoned lovemaking on the back lawns. In between, more transformations than she could immediately remember. No wonder she was tired. No wonder she suddenly felt lost and exhausted and utterly alone.
She climbed the last flight of steps and turned into her own hallway. The Rider named Coeval was stationed outside Amalie’s door and gave her a curt nod when she put her hand on the doorknob. Her room was partially lit by a branch of candles near the bed. The alcove where Melly lay was entirely in shadow, but Kirra heard the maid stir as she shut the door.