Oria's Gambit Read online

  “So you’ve demonstrated,” she retorted. “But you don’t have to look like one. Come and sit. I’ll comb your hair.”

  “Are you sure you won’t—”

  “Not happening.” She turned crisply, hair crackling about her. “And I’m summoning Juli, so you might do something about that.”

  To his utter shock, something briefly grasped his cock, a shimmer of energy like a tiny bolt of lightning. “Arill!” he gasped, fighting not to spill his seed immediately like some oversexed adolescent.

  Oria turned and flashed him a coy smile. “No, Destrye. That was me.”

  As soon as Lonen disappeared into her private bathing room—even before sending for Juli—Oria pulled a fresh set of priestess robes from the clothespress, hastily changed her chemise, and scrambled into the far more modest clothing. No more temptation, for either of them. She picked up her mask, wanting the comfort of its obscuring help, too, but the way Lonen had asked that she not… Well, she’d apparently developed a soft spot for the Destrye king because she set the mask aside again. She seemed to have a great deal of difficulty refusing him his requests, no matter how far she strayed from her usual behavior. A dangerous sign.

  Especially that lapse in using grien on him. And sexually! Really, she couldn’t imagine what had gotten into her, except that it had been so satisfying to see the look on Lonen’s face. Plus she’d had to do something to vent all that sensual energy she’d absorbed. He deserved it, too, teasing her so mercilessly, making her lose all semblance of hwil. He’d so thoroughly seduced her that she’d been on the verge of dropping her chemise and demanding he show her how he pleasured himself.

  Don’t you do that, use your own hand, to pleasure yourself?

  The question burned in her brain. Was it true that everyone else did that? Something she really didn’t want to envision, the people she knew and loved, doing… No. Banishing that line of thought.

  She really shouldn’t have teased him, not the least because no one could know that she could use active grien that way. Stupid and impulsive. Of course Lonen wouldn’t know the difference, but he might slip up and say the wrong thing, betraying her secret. But making sure he knew enough not to meant having to explain in the first place and she really wasn’t at all sure that was wise. He might be insisting that their marriage was a real partnership, but only the day before he’d called her an enemy.

  He talked of wedding dances, but they truly danced along a very thin line, each of them on opposite sides of it. She needed to keep that firmly in mind—and not fall into his flirtatious games.

  She couldn’t imagine what had gotten into her.

  A scuffing sound alerted her to his approach. He emerged dressed in his Destrye clothing again. The animal skins had been dyed dark, as all the Destrye warriors seemed to wear. Was that for war or did they never dress in colors at all? Even his shirt woven of some plant material looked nearly black in the shadowed interior. At least the leather pants did more to conceal his flagrant manhood than the Báran silk trousers did. Though, judging by his relaxed and pleased expression, that might be because he’d relieved himself while in there. Something else she didn’t want to know.

  “You’re blushing,” he commented.

  “It’s warm in here.”

  “Especially for you with those layers of robes on.”

  As those layers formed at least a meager defense against his seductive ways, she had no intention of taking them off again. “Sit here if you want me to fix your hair.”

  Lonen sat in the chair before her, then leaned closer to examine the mirror, tapping it with a curious finger. “I’ve never seen such a thing. Like perfectly still lake water.”

  “Which I’ve never seen. It’s more glass, treated with a liquid metal on one side, so it reflects.”

  He sat back in the chair with an amused grunt, shifting his study of the mirror itself to her, his gray eyes intent on hers. She concentrated on pouring some oil into her palm, so her curiosity wouldn’t lead her to peeking into his thoughts. Careful not to touch his scalp, she brushed her oiled palms over his curls. They were softer than they looked, though coarser than her own hair. And intriguingly exotic. Still, it made no sense that it gave her pleasure to comb her fingers through them.

  “Juli is having food sent up so we can breakfast here in the garden. We do have meat for you. The council session might last a long time, so you’d be wise to eat heartily.”

  “Fattening me up?”

  He was too thin, it was true. Thinner than he’d been before and the guilt chewed at her, thinking of the Trom burning their crops. “I’d like to visit my mother beforehand, try to persuade her to attend. This is her plan as much as anyone’s. Hopefully once she sees we’re married, she’ll relent and accept the reality of it.”

  “It’s something she’ll be able to know, just by looking at us?”

  The man thought in questions. But he knew some of this already, so it wouldn’t be telling him something new. Still, each secret revealed seemed to open the windows to a dozen more, making it more and more difficult to determine where to draw her boundaries with him. That thin line. “With sgath, yes. That’s how I see with my mask on.”

  “What’s that like?” He asked it easily enough, but his eyes met hers in the mirror, that obstinate challenge in them.

  “I don’t know how to explain it. Don’t smirk. I was thinking how to describe it.” She rapped him on the scalp with the glass comb.

  “Ow.”

  “See? The sand is blowing in your tower now.”

  “Fair enough.” He grinned at her. “I’d like to blow more than sand in your tower, Oria.”

  “You’re incorrigible.”

  He sighed, trying to look sorrowful, but his playfully sexual thoughts tugged at her. “So my mother always says.”

  She resisted. “Is your mother alive?”

  “Uh-uh. Not letting you distract me with questions. You were thinking about how to describe seeing with sgath to me. Is that related to the moon, Sgatha?”

  “Yes. We believe Sgatha governs the flow of sgath.” She drew the comb gently through his tangled curls, then closed her eyes to see it with sgath. “It’s like … like everything radiates a kind of light. Your hair looks different than your skin, and my hands look a different color from those. Even the comb has a little glow.”

  “Juli said magic comes from life, but the comb isn’t alive.”

  Opening her eyes, she looked at him in the mirror. “It is, just not in the way you think of it. Everything has energy to it. This comb, like the mirror, are both made of sand, melted and transformed, but which used to be part of the ocean. They carry a kind of … memory of what they once were.”

  He frowned. “That makes no sense.”

  “I told you it was hard to explain.”

  “I know, I know—don’t get all huffy. Go on.”

  She pulled at the curls a little harder than she needed to, but he didn’t wince. “That’s all there is to tell.”

  “Liar,” he mocked, softly.

  “Ask me questions then, which you’re so brilliant at anyway.”

  He didn’t even have to pause to think. “So, everyone who wears a mask can see with this sgath?”

  “The priestesses,” she corrected. It wouldn’t do for him to insult a Báran priest by suggesting he used sgath. “The priests use grien.”

  “Governed by Grienon.”

  “There you go.”

  “And does grien work the same way?”

  Shifting sands here. “I don’t know, as I’m not a man.”

  He grinned, vividly picturing her standing in her chemise in the light. “Now that is a truth.”

  His curls reasonably tamed and oiled, she went to fetch the leather tie he’d left on the table by the bed. She handed it to him, not certain she could gather the springy stuff together well enough without risking touching his skin. He didn’t take it, however. Instead he picked up a long lock of her hair where it streamed over her shoul
der and coiled it around his finger. “What is it you’re not telling me?”

  “Besides centuries of secret temple knowledge? I can’t imagine.”

  He tugged on her hair. “Your sarcasm makes me makes me want to toss you on that bed until you’re too delirious with pleasure to think straight.”

  That made her head reel right there. “I had to marry a Destrye with an enormous idea of himself.”

  “That’s not the only thing that’s enormous. You’ll find out someday and then I’ll accept that apology when you tell me how wrong you were.”

  “Ha!” She tried to step back, but he held on, his eyes turning somber.

  “Oria—I can’t be your partner in this if you keep me blind and deaf. There’s something there, about sgath and grien that you’re not telling me.”

  She pulled at the leather tie, tugging it between her fingers as she’d been in the habit of doing since Lonen had left it behind. How was he reading into her? She’d faked hwil well enough to fool the High Priestess, she certainly should be able to hide a lie from a mind-dead foreigner. “I’m not keeping you blind and deaf. I can’t imagine what makes you think I am.”

  No longer soft, the gray of his eyes went flinty, looking more like the granite she’d first thought of when she saw him full of battle fury and spattered with blood at the city gates. “I don’t know what it is either, but it’s like there’s part of you in me now. Maybe you gave me some of your magic.”

  “That’s not possible.” Was it?

  “I really hate it when you tell me something’s impossible, Oria.”

  “Then you’re in for long years of misery, because someone has to be practical in this marriage.”

  “You said the magic ritual bound us together,” he flung back at her. “Magic. Connection. You. Me. I’m in you and you’re in me. And I know when you’re lying to me. Another ground rule for you—I also hate it when you lie to me.”

  She struggled with her rising anger and all the emotion he emanated. Too much input from him, on top of all that had gone the night before, no matter how much better she’d done. She might be faking hwil most of the time, but it still took a measure of equanimity to do that much. Not a state of mind being around Lonen helped her to achieve. Terrible timing, when she couldn’t afford any apparent lapse of hwil before confronting the council. Even as she wrestled both his emotional energy and hers, the marginal control she managed eroded like sand slipping through her fingers.

  She needed Chuffta and he wasn’t there.

  “I’m coming back. Stay steady.”

  Could it be some of the Destrye was in her? That would explain her uncharacteristically salacious behavior. But she had too much grien in her already—she couldn’t afford to have even more. Lonen waited her out, holding her leashed by the lock of her hair, implacable, though his thumb absently stroked over it.

  She took a steadying breath. “You don’t listen well. There are things you can’t know. That would be beyond dangerous to me to reveal to you.”

  He didn’t like it, his brows lowering and some of that dark anger brooding in the background of his thoughts. “I wouldn’t do anything to endanger you, Oria.”

  “You wouldn’t mean to, no.” She slapped the tie on the table, snagged a ribbon knife, and neatly cut of the lock of hair he held—then swiftly made good her escape. “But as both our peoples have amply demonstrated, we don’t have to set out with the intention of harming each other in order to do it in grand fashion.”

  “It’s hardly the same thing,” he nearly growled.

  She pointed at him. “Destrye.” Then tapped her breast. “Báran. It’s exactly the same thing.” She turned to go.

  “We’re not done talking, Oria.” Some of his frustrated anger snaked around her, adding to the uneven charge already building. Hopefully Chuffta would return soon. She desperately needed to vent.

  “You want to be my partner? Use that anger to help me get the council to ratify me as queen. That’s why we got married in the first place, not to loll in bed all morning and play sexy games. This is a marriage of state and so it will remain. We both have grave responsibilities to our peoples and you’d do well to remember that, King Lonen.”

  ~ 11 ~

  He nearly lunged after her. Stopped himself by dint of will that had carried him through battles that stronger men than he had fallen to. How had things between them deteriorated so swiftly? All he knew was he’d undone everything he’d built.

  No, she had cut the fragile ties of trust they’d been creating, snicking it to pieces with her little silver knife.

  She might as well have plunged it into his heart. Walking away from him with that chill in her gaze, leaving only a shining lock of her copper hair behind. Metal could be cold, too. He’d do well to remember that in dealing with her.

  Forcing himself to keep to a walk, he tucked the lock of hair in his pocket, and then his hands. An extra measure to ensure he didn’t forget himself and touch her. Or throttle her.

  He sauntered onto the terrace, scanning it. The brightly colored silk banners that provided shade hung lax in the still air, the brilliant blossoms of fabulous flowers likewise hanging off draping vines, trees and stalks. The ones that hadn’t dried to brown crisps drooped, wilting in the sun. A low drone hummed around him, like heat given sound. No, it came from insects buzzing around the blooms and small birds, moving so fast as they dipped from plant to plant that their wings became a blur. The jewelbirds.

  Not in the shade as a reasonable person would be, Oria instead stood in one of her habitual positions, over by the stone balustrade, gazing out at the city and the sere plains beyond. The sun glinted off her cape of hair, like the hammered copper drums of the Destrye.

  She dazzled him. Seduced and infuriated him. All thoughts led to the sorceress. She’d well and truly bewitched him and yet cared nothing for him except as a player in her plans.

  He was an idiot to have married her.

  “You only have to put up with me a few days more,” she said, still in that imperiously cool tone and not in the way he found irresistibly desirable either. “Then you can go home and be free of me.”

  He hadn’t meant to be thinking that so loudly. “Not true,” he countered with ill grace. “We will never be free of each other.”

  “You will be free of my immediate presence,” she amended, with such equanimity that he brought up some lurid thoughts about her, just to shake her up.

  “Stop that.”

  “Why should I? And don’t you dare lecture me on my responsibilities to my people. I came here for them. Married you, for them. You’re not the only one making sacrifices here.”

  “I never imagined I was,” she gritted through clenched teeth.

  There—not so cool and remote. You radiate emotional energy as fierce as the sun’s heat in summer. By Arill, he’d use that to thaw her, make her deal with him as a partner, if not her equal. Barbarian and mind-dead he might be, but irresponsible ruler he wasn’t. “I think you do imagine that,” he taunted her.

  Oria refused to look at him, but her fingers flexed on the railing. Apparently she did that a great deal because she’d worn the gritty stone smooth in places, always up in her lonely tower, secluded from the world.

  “Princess Oria, all alone in her quiet world, with her flowers, her jewelbirds, and her Familiar. Well, I have news for you. You’re no longer alone. You don’t get to be. I’m your husband and you will not shut me out. Not out of your ambitions. Not out of your emotions.” He leaned in, letting her feel all the heated desire she stirred in him. “And not out of your bed.”

  “Stop doing that!” She scanned the sky, looking for that pet lizard she liked so well, no doubt.

  “Why should I?” he repeated the question, ruthlessly pushing her.

  “Because.” She rounded on him at last, face flushed from fury, the heat, or both. “You want to know a secret? Fine. Here’s one for you. To receive a mask, we have to prove that we’ve achieved hwil.”

&n
bsp; “Like your golems and your blank masks,” he sneered. “Creatures devoid of feeling.”

  “If only,” she snapped back. “You wanted to know so badly what it is? Well ask some other priestess because I’ve never achieved hwil. That’s right, I faked it, with my mother’s help. And if they find out, they’ll take my mask away, and I will never become queen. So wrap your clever brain around that concept and stop trying to get to me emotionally.” Her breath caught, nearly a sob. “If you won’t do it for my sake, then do it for your people. Because you’re going to destroy us all for the sake of your cursed male pride.”

  “Oria.” He caught the sleeve of her robe as she turned away again. He was an ass. “Hey. I didn’t know. I can’t know these things unless you let me in on these secrets. That’s my whole point.”

  “Well now you do. There: one more in my vast array of flaws.” She wiped furiously at her cheeks. “You wanted into my feelings? Here I am, a whole boggy, bloody mess of them.”

  Oria’s sensitivity … both her blessing and her curse.

  “I don’t believe you’re flawed.”

  “What do you know of it, Destrye?” She demanded, all Báran princess at her imperious best.

  He held onto his patience by a thin thread, the sun hot on his oiled hair that she’d tended with such care. A mercurial woman, restless and changeable, his sorceress wife. “Obviously not a whole lot, since you refuse to explain it to me.”

  She didn’t reply, pressing her lips against whatever tart—or wounded—reply she’d had on the tip of her tongue. Then she gave a glad cry as Chuffta winged up, landing on the balustrade with a scrabble of talons on stone. Wings still spread, he balanced as he snaked his long neck against her throat, letting her embrace him, running slim fingers over his shining white scales.

  Lonen was in a hell of his own making that he’d be fighting sick jealousy over her love for the dragonlet. His fingers itched to grab his axe and chop something up. Oria, for example. In fact, maybe he should work off some of that energy. It could only help both of them.