“You’ve done it!” Thalia said, wonder and pleasure in her voice.
Gabriel opened his eyes.
Here was another impossibility. He had drawn something. Not just a paper full of meaningless scrawl, but an actual tree that stood where two streams forked. He hadn’t even been aware that his hand holding the charcoal had moved, let alone created an actual picture.
With this small success, they decided to call it a night, and soon everyone was settled on their sleeping mats, the lantern doused, the room dark and quiet.
It was a hard night. He’d grown somewhat used to sleeping near Thalia, but never in a room. Having four walls and a roof enclosing them, instead of the limitless steppes and sky, changed things. He tried to remember when the last time was that he’d slept beside a woman, and couldn’t. With Felicia, he’d slipped from her bed, dressing quickly and quietly in the dark, and the dawn had found him sprawled in his own bunk.
In the monastery room, Gabriel could hear Thalia breathing as she slept. Those soft sounds from her were more intimate than the cries of pleasure Felicia had made as she and Gabriel had impersonally fucked. The result of having Thalia near him, even with Batu close by, was a damned long, uncomfortable night and too little sleep.
He was grateful for the morning, grateful to get back into the open spaces. They rode in a southerly direction, which Gabriel had said felt right. He hated trusting the lives of Thalia and Batu to something beyond his understanding, but they had little to go on besides impressions of the shamaness’s song. For hours, they rode, no one speaking much as Gabriel tried to concentrate on how the song had felt. It was bloody frustrating.
Just before noon, with no sign of the tree or the rivers, he became positive that he’d led them all down the wrong path. He was a man of tangibles, not a believer in impressions and feelings. Here was proof of that. They were wandering around Mongolia with no set destination. And somewhere out there were the Heirs, ready and eager to spill blood. Gabriel fumed.
Pulling up the reins on his horse, he grumbled, “Hell’s arse, this has been a waste of time.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Thalia counseled. “Let’s ride a little further, just over the next hill. After that, we can think about what we should do.” She nudged her horse on with Batu close behind.
Grudgingly, feeling like a fool, Gabriel put his heels to his horse. He let Thalia keep the lead as he scanned the land, looking for enemies or something that resembled his drawing. When Thalia and Batu reached the crest of the hill and then stopped abruptly, alarm prickled the back of his neck. Had his ridiculous ideas about how a song felt taken them straight into an ambush? He kicked his mare into a gallop and reached for his rifle.
Thalia looked over her shoulder at his approach, a smile touching the corners of her mouth. “You aren’t going to need that,” she said, eyeing the weapon. “Unless you plan on hunting cottonwoods.”
Puzzled, Gabriel brought his horse alongside hers, then followed her gaze into the valley ahead.
Nestled peacefully between the hills, a cottonwood tree stood on a grassy bank that lay where two small streams forked into their separate directions. Everything was quiet and undisturbed. Gabriel fumbled in his pocket, then produced the scrap of paper on which he’d drawn the night before. He held the picture up, stared at it, then looked back into the valley. The scenes were the same.
“The song has not misled us,” Batu said.
“Gabriel has not misled us,” Thalia corrected. “You shouldn’t doubt yourself,” she added, looking at him meaningfully.
Gabriel couldn’t speak. For the first time since beginning this strange mission, since being all the way back in Southampton, Gabriel felt part of something much larger than himself or another person. This other world that Thalia had shown him, he had seen it, but never felt it, never been inside of it, nor it inside of him. But through that song, the magical force that pulsed beneath the skin of the everyday joined with him, used him as a channel. The results were right there, drawn onto a scrap of paper. And in the valley with the forked rivers. Not until that very moment did Gabriel understand how very large and very powerful magic could be. He felt humbled, awed. Yet also, being a part of it, he felt expansive, strong.
“Bugger me,” he said quietly.
What followed was the strangest tracking mission Gabriel had ever undertaken. Since both Thalia and Batu insisted that the song spoke most clearly through Gabriel, at their behest he would continue to lead them toward their destination. And by “lead,” they meant: have him sit quietly and think about the shamaness’s song, each note following the next. Whatever bit of geography sprang into his mind he would describe or draw, and they would set off in search of it.
“This is a damned silly way to run a campaign,” he grumbled after they had left the cottonwood tree behind in search of a hill with three tall, rocky spires.
“That’s not what Lord Raglan said at the battle of the Alma,” Thalia answered, riding beside him.
Gabriel stared at her. “I knew men who saw action at the battle of the Alma, and not a one said any magic had been involved.”
“None that they were aware of,” she replied. She must have seen his look turn black, because she answered quickly, “Yes, the troops fought bravely, and the Alma wouldn’t have been won without them, but Lord Raglan had a little bit of assistance from Fatimah’s Guiding Hand, recovered in Constantinople the year before.”
“This Guiding Hand—the Heirs gave it to Raglan?”
“They did.”
“And the defeats that followed—what happened to the Light Brigade, the losses in the winter of ’55, the Malakoff, and the Redan—because the Blades took the Guiding Hand back?” He heard the cutting steel of his voice, but didn’t try to temper it.
She looked horrified. “God, no! The Blades would never take back a Source, knowing it could cost soldiers’ lives. They tried to get the Guiding Hand back long before it had been brought to the battlefield. It was, unfortunately, pure military mismanagement of the Source and of men that caused those defeats. Fatimah’s Guiding Hand was lost somewhere in the Crimea, and hasn’t been recovered.”
Gabriel shook his head and muttered, somewhat calmed. It was bloody well difficult to get his bearings, now that he knew about the Blades and the Heirs and the rest of their lot. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or troubled when, after riding the rest of the afternoon, the three rocky spires were sighted, glowing with the setting sun’s last rays.
Thalia, however, wasn’t troubled at all. When they came upon the pinnacles of rock, a smile lit her face and lit something inside of Gabriel, too. In his experience, women grew less beautiful the more time he spent with them. But somehow, being with Thalia disproved that. It wasn’t a theory he was happy to refute, not in this case.
They all dismounted and walked toward the spires. The rocks looked like three old men, watching the world pass by and finding it all rather lacking. It was eerie, having seen them so clearly in his mind, and then, there they were, no longer thought or sound but real stone.
“Well done, Gabriel,” Thalia cried, exultant, and took hold of his hand. Without any thought, his fingers wove with hers. They were palm to palm. He could feel her everywhere. Touching her like this felt impossibly right. It was wonderful—and unsettling.
And over quickly. She suddenly pulled away, frowning, her color high, or maybe the light from the setting sun was burnishing her skin. No. She was upset. Wonderful. Not only was the servant angry with him, so was the woman Batu served.
Damn it, he cursed to himself, what the hell did she want? Everything had been going right lovely between them, and now she was angry because they held hands. He couldn’t figure out the maze of the female mind. Just because he got along better with Thalia than he had with any other woman didn’t change the fact that she was a woman, with all the mental tangles and inconsistencies of her gender. It could drive a man out of his gourd.
“Night’s falling,” Gabriel said roughly. “We’ll make camp soon.”
She nodded and peered along the rolling hills. “I think there’s a sheltered spot about a mile south.”
“Can you and Batu find it on your own?”
Alarm flared in her eyes. “Yes, but where—?”
Gabriel quickly headed toward his horse and mounted up. “Good. I’ll find you. Need to do some reconnaissance, make sure those sodding Heirs aren’t on our trail.”
He didn’t wait for any response from her, just pulled hard on the reins to bring his horse about before kicking the mare into a canter. Gabriel focused hard on the landscape, looking for telltale signs that their enemies were close or following. He saw without seeing the oceanic beauty of the dry grassy plains, the isolated stands of scrub and trees, the smoke of a distant ger’s chimney rising in a white plume into the indigo sky. They had no meaning to him, beyond indicating whether or not the Heirs were nearby. All he cared about was ensuring the safety of their small riding party, the success of their mission. He couldn’t understand the changeability of women, and, at that moment, he told himself he didn’t bloody well care.
A Curious Means of Seeing
“I can’t see anything,” Gabriel muttered, stalking back to the campsite.
Thalia watched him as he threw himself down to the ground, moodily stretching out and staring up at the sky, his arms folded behind his head. She honestly didn’t want to stare at him—how he moved with an athletic energy, or the long, sinewy form of his body that she knew felt hard and solid with muscle. But what she wanted and what she actually did were sadly two different things, and she drank in the sight of him with a greediness that made her light-headed.
He had arrived at the campsite she and Batu had made in the sheltered glade, having found no sign of the Heirs. This didn’t console her much. She never doubted Gabriel’s abilities as a tracker, but the Heirs had no qualms about using Sources or other forms of magic to hide themselves. It was entirely possible that Lamb or Edgeworth would still be able to stalk them without a seasoned soldier such as Gabriel being aware of it. Even so, the Heirs presumably could only observe them remotely, and weren’t bodily nearby. That gave Thalia some reassurance.
Not a minute after Gabriel had arrived at the campsite, the news good but his mood black, he had grabbed something to eat then headed off into the darkness to commune with the shamaness’s song. Apparently, he hadn’t been successful. Thalia and Batu exchanged speaking glances, and Batu bent his head to his task of repairing a hole in a saddle blanket and said nothing. For that, she was grateful. Thalia had had enough of her old friend’s opinion on Gabriel. She didn’t need Batu’s thoughts crowding her own, which were already packed to capacity.
“Give yourself a chance,” she urged Gabriel.
He snorted. “This whole damned thing is a big, bloody waste of time.”
“That isn’t true,” she countered. “You’ve led us this far.”
“And where the hell are we?” he grumbled. “Haven’t seen a single blasted Source. Maybe that old witch from Karakorum wants the Source for herself, sent us on a fool’s errand.”
“She wouldn’t do that.”
Gabriel sat upright and, even in the deepening twilight, she could feel the heat of his golden eyes. “And you know this because you and she are bosom chums,” he snapped.
Thalia wouldn’t be baited. “You sound as though you’ve swallowed a bowl full of nettles.”
In response, he ran his hands through his hair, causing it to stand in rather charming tufts that lent him an uncharacteristically boyish appearance, contrasting with the golden beard that had come in during the last few days. Hard travel left little time for such personal niceties as shaving, though she found herself wistfully wishing she could watch him attend to this mundane task. Applying lather to the planes of his cheeks, the deliberate, methodical progress of the razor moving across his face, slowly revealing his skin with each stroke. Thalia grabbed another saddle blanket and pretended to inspect it for more tears to keep from reaching out and putting her palm to his face, feeling the hard bristle of his whiskers and the juxtaposition with his soft mouth.
“I’m not used to going on like this,” he said after a pause. She understood that the admission cost him, his acknowledgment that he was outside the realm of his expertise. “Knowing that the enemy is out there, but being unable to do anything about it. Picking out clues from the air to lead me toward something I don’t even understand. It’s not how things are done.”
“This isn’t the army,” she reminded him. “Once we find the Source, then you’ll be able to go back to that life.” A bright knife of pain gleamed through her, as she thought of the time when she and Captain Gabriel Huntley would part company to resume their usual lives. In just a few days, he had come to occupy a large part of her thoughts, of herself; her body even now demanded his touch, and it distressed her to think how quickly she’d carved out a space for him. Batu had noticed it, too. He’d said as much at the monastery of Erdene Zuu. Reminded her what she had suffered because of Sergei, the danger she was facing now of having it happen again. Thalia had insisted that she wouldn’t repeat her mistakes, confident that she could be much smarter where her heart was concerned. Yet each minute she spent with Gabriel threatened that confidence. She had taken his hand when they had discovered the three rocky spires, touched him because she needed to. Without thinking. And she had been furious with herself when she had discovered what she had done, pulling away from Gabriel, trying to imprison the wild creature of her heart in its cage.
Perhaps Batu was right, after all, damn him.
When Gabriel returned to the army, they would likely never see each other again, and she would be left with a self-inflicted emptiness. Time had helped her recover from Sergei, yet somehow Thalia sensed that it would take much longer, hurt that much more, when Gabriel took his leave. Her anger with Batu was anger with herself.
“Not going back,” Gabriel said.
Her heart leapt up, and she tried to wrestle it back down again. He would desert? “Not going back to what?” she asked, trying to sound unmoved.
Gabriel picked up some twigs at his feet and began snapping them into small pieces, his broad hands fast and efficient even at this task meant to waste time. “To the army. I’m done. Resigned my captaincy.” He snapped twigs as punctuation.
Thalia gaped, felt herself flounder. “When? Why?”
“Four months ago.” Snap. “Passed over too many times for promotion.” Snap. “Too much of a collier’s son,” he said, deepening the rough music of his accent. Snap, snap.
“So, your ambitions were thwarted.” Each broken twig danced along her nerves.
“Yes.” Snap. “No.”
She reached over and stilled his hands, causing him to look up sharply. She made herself ignore the answering warmth in her belly, and pulled her hands back. She should know by now that skin to skin contact with him felt much too good. “Which is it?”
“I did want to be a major,” he admitted. “But even if I’d become a general, I couldn’t see myself sitting in the officers’ club twenty, thirty years down the road, blowing steam and boasting about how many men’s lives I’d lost in a battle. So, I chucked it in.” He forced out a laugh. “Became another civilian.”
“When I met you in Urga, you said you were in…”—she cast her mind back, trying to recall—“the Thirty-third. But you weren’t.”
“Been serving Queen and country for fifteen years,” he answered. “Takes more than a few months to unlearn half a lifetime’s lessons. It wasn’t my aim to mislead anyone.”
“I don’t feel misled,” Thalia said quickly. “Just…surprised.” She tried to readjust her perception of Gabriel, knowing now that he was no longer a soldier. It didn’t seem right, somehow. Even in the short amount of time she had known him, she could see how much he thrived on challenge, how his every movement and word was as sharp as a bayonet. He wasn’t bloodthirsty, but he had the air of a warrior about him, something as inseparable from his identity as his hair or eye color.
Those golden eyes were watching her carefully now, waiting to see how she’d react. “In the army or no, I’m sticking with this mission.”
“I never thought otherwise,” she answered truthfully. It didn’t matter in what capacity he served, civilian or soldier, Gabriel Huntley was a man of honor. She’d met very few, outside of the Blades. “But, once the mission is over, what will you do?”
He began methodically arranging the pieces of twigs he’d broken, as if lining up troops. “The objective is to go back to England. Supposed to find work in Leeds. Settle down.”
Thalia’s mouth dried, even as she wondered at his strange use of the term objective, which sounded awfully military. “You mean, get married.”
He nodded without looking at her, not hearing the change in her tone. Batu did, though, and her loyal servant glanced at her with raised eyebrows. It was the look he always gave her when he was right and she contradicted him. Faintly smug and self-congratulatory, and also pitying. Thalia wanted to scream. Instead, she said to Gabriel as levelly as possible, “Your future bride must have been somewhat angry when you postponed domestic bliss and headed off to Outer Mongolia.” Then, she could not keep her words from turning hard and brittle. “Did you write to her during your voyage here? Does she know about the fight in Southampton?”
“I haven’t written to anybody,” Gabriel said.
That was something of a relief. “She might be worried about you.”
“She who?”
Thalia wondered how someone as perceptive as Gabriel could be so obtuse. “Your fiancée,” she said with enforced patience, when all she wanted to do was howl.
The thunderstruck look on Gabriel’s face nearly made Thalia laugh, but she was in no mood for laughter. She’d never seen him so thrown. “I’ve never proposed marriage to any woman.”
Relief hit Thalia so hard, she thought she might lose consciousness. But this was followed by dismay at the strength of her reaction. There were many ways that Gabriel was different from Sergei, though she hadn’t been able to stop the anger and fear that had risen inside of her at even the slightest hint of duplicity. She refused to look at Batu.
“Not yet,” she echoed. “But you will.” She had to make herself face the unpleasant truth as soon as possible, and, in so doing, protect herself from certain pain.
“At some point, when the mission dictates.” He threw a handful of twigs into the fire.
Again, he used oddly detached, military terminology for what should have been deeply personal. “You have someone in mind.”
Gabriel gave another hollow-sounding laugh. “Not at all. Been soldiering almost half my life. No time to meet ladies. At least,” he added, rueful, “not the kind one marries.”
“I don’t think I want to explore that last comment,” she said dryly.
A frustrated growl rumbled out of his throat. “I’m always saying things I oughtn’t in front of women. It’s going to be bloody disastrous if I go back to England and start scouting for a bride.”
That was exactly what Thalia needed to hear. Once their work together was finished, he would return home and find himself someone suitable. Not a tall, Mongolian-raised woman with ties to dangerous secret societies, but a sweet, biddable girl who would keep a neat home, presiding over the teapot and serenely watching their children play on the rug. Dear Lord, the prospect of Gabriel’s making children with some faceless simp of a female churned in Thalia’s stomach like rancid mutton. Yet it was a truth she had to face.
“I can’t instruct you on proper behavior when courting,” she said, “since I’m not precisely the model of genteel manners.”
“I’m glad you aren’t,” he answered with a candor that surprised her. “This mission wouldn’t go too smoothly if I had to watch what I was saying, or if you needed to be coddled.”
It was a compliment, of sorts. He didn’t strike her as the kind of man who doled them out with a liberal hand. Thalia started to rise, needing to stretch her legs and gain some distance from him. “For the sake of the mission, then, it’s a good thing I’m not a real lady.”
This time, he was the one who reached out, putting a hand on her thigh, which caused her to stop in the action of getting to her feet. “I didn’t say you weren’t a lady, just that you didn’t require cosseting or a bunch of other silly tripe. One doesn’t have to entail the other.”
Thalia could only stare at his hand on her leg, aware of the heat of his touch even through her del and trousers, a heat which rose up her thigh and settled immediately between her legs, and in her breasts, which suddenly felt heavy and sensitive. She hated her body’s traitorous response, which seemed to have no consideration for her head or heart.
He followed her eyes to his hand, then pulled back, but not without a slight lingering touch, an almost imperceptible increase of pressure from his fingertips, as if he was trying to imprint the feel of her into his skin before forcing himself away. Thalia sunk back to the ground, avoiding Batu’s too-knowing gaze. She didn’t think she could walk just then.
“I’ve no wish to talk about brides or manners or any other rot,” Gabriel said gruffly, curling his hands into fists and then pressing his knuckles into the dirt. “Not when I can’t figure out where to take us next.”
She wondered if her skin glowed where he had touched it. It certainly felt as if it should. Had any man ever affected her so strongly? No, none had, not even Sergei.
“We’ve had a long day and should get some rest,” she suggested. “Perhaps things will be clearer in the morning.”
“Perhaps,” he agreed, but she doubted if either of them believed her.
It was no better at dawn. Gabriel tried repeatedly to conjure up images of the landscape, but either too much time had passed since he had heard the song, or there were no more embedded clues within its fabric of sound. Both Thalia and Batu also tried to envision the geography of the song, but with no success.
“We must be close, though,” Thalia insisted with more conviction than she felt.
“But ‘close’ in Mongolia could mean a hundred miles or more,” said Gabriel, more than a little frustration in his voice. He was cleaning his short-barreled rifle unnecessarily, since Thalia had watched him painstakingly clean it the night before. He needed something to do, some way to be useful. She tried to imagine him behind a desk at a bank, or carrying sheaves of important documents in a leather case down a city street, but none of those images seemed at all appropriate. Not to her, anyway. Maybe he thought differently of himself.