Oria's Gambit Read online

  Leaving them to their little love fest, he went inside long enough to strip to his small clothes and grab his axe, then found another spot on her expansive terrace and set to running strengthening exercises. His muscles responded stiffly at first—the wages of too little exercise the past days of riding to Bára and negotiations and rituals—but gradually they warmed.

  His faithful battle axe felt good in his grip, reassuring, steady, and real. The opposite of magic in its inert iron. That was something that wasn’t alive in any way. A flaw in Oria’s assertions. He ran the drills with the axe in his right hand, then switched to the left. The wise warrior prepared for all eventualities.

  By the time he felt like he could operate out of a place of calm logic instead of unreasoning, jealous anger, he dripped sweat. He had to use Oria’s private bathing chamber to wash off again, which only made him think again about coming in his own fist earlier, dazzling images of Oria in his head.

  All thoughts led to the sorceress.

  At least able to behave like a civilized man again, he found Oria in the shade of her silk sail in the seats by her fire table, though it was only smooth creamy stone, no dancing violet flames. A good thing, as a number of plates of food and pitchers sat there instead. Juli had done her mistress’s hair up in the complex braids again, and Oria now wore a more elaborate set of the crimson priestess robes, kind of a cross between one of her royal gowns and the daily robes. Chuffta sat beside her, tail wrapped around her wrist like a series of bracelets. And, of course, Arill take her—she wore her cursed mask again.

  He fingered the lock of her hair in his pocket. She hadn’t intended it as a gift, obviously, but he’d keep it as such, having found a few pieces of cut ribbon to bind each end.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked, not sure how else to open the next phase of conversation.

  “I won’t fall apart in the next moments, at any rate.” She stroked Chuffta’s wing and the derkesthai gazed at him, green eyes full of intelligence, but no accusation that he could detect.

  “Master Chuffta,” he greeted the Familiar as Juli had, then offered one used by the Destrye. “Did you enjoy good hunting?”

  Chuffta blinked and dipped his chin, looking pleased indeed. Oria made a little sound of surprise.

  “What?”

  “He didn’t say anything to me, just communicated directly to you. He doesn’t usually do that.”

  Lonen sat, using a pair of glass picks to stab a piece of meat. Could be filling his griping stomach would help his mood immensely. “Probably Chuffta knows that he and I are in this together with you, so we might as well find ways to communicate with each other besides through you.”

  “Don’t start.” She sounded weary, but he couldn’t let her off this climbing rope while they still dangled so far above ground.

  “I’m not. I’m continuing. You and I have things to sort out before we walk into that council chamber, in order to be a cohesive fighting unit. If only to serve our grave responsibilities to our peoples.”

  She sighed, a rough, injured sound that grabbed at his heart. “I suppose I deserve that. But you push me, Lonen. You push and push and…” She finished on another empty breath, then filled a glass with juice, her hand shaking. Belatedly she seemed to realize she couldn’t drink with her mask on and sat there, holding it.

  “Here, let me help you take it off.” He rose and walked behind her.

  “You don’t have to—”

  “I might as well learn the tricks of it, right? Something I can do for you when it’s just the two of us, so you don’t have to call on Juli every time.”

  “Fine.” He imagined she rolled her eyes, which was better than the defeated attitude. “There’s a knife—”

  “I’ve already found the knots and can get them.” They were tucked in among the braids, cleverly hidden, but not that difficult to undo.

  “You interrupt me a lot.”

  He opened his mouth to retort, but realized that she had a point. “You’re right. I’m an impatient brute. I’ll try to do better.”

  She held the mask in place as he worked. “Not entirely impatient. You seem to be good with knots.”

  A peace offering? He’d take it. “I’ve worked with rope a lot. Climbing trees, cliffs, that kind of thing.”

  “City walls,” she said in a more pointed voice. So much for peace.

  “Weren’t you the one who said we needed to get past accusations and apologies over with?” He finished with the third set of ribbons and slipped the mask from her hands, setting it on the tile kept for it nearby. Uncovering the bowl next to it, he found one of her damp and freshly scented cloths inside and offered it to her.

  Eyes flashing up to him in surprise, she took the cloth, mopping her flushed face with it. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying, which meant the few tears he’d witnessed hadn’t been the end of it. Giving her a moment to compose herself, he sat again, spearing more meat.

  “You’re supposed to use them like this.” Oria picked up a pair and demonstrated holding them both in one hand, deftly plucking a grape from a platter.

  He studied her hold, emulated it and tried the same with a piece of meat. Easier to learn on that than on something slippery like a grape. On his second try he got it and Oria smiled at him. A real one, if sad. “You’re good with your hands in many ways.”

  Not the time to tease her with the sexual remark that sprang to mind at that. “I guess so? I’ve always liked doing things with my hands—wood carving and such.” He set down the eating picks and studied his hands. “I don’t like that they give you pain.”

  She took a breath. “It’s not pain, exactly.”

  “Okay.” He waited, restraining the questions that annoyed her so. Instead he piled a plate with a bunch of leaves, grass, and sticks—or whatever in Arill it all was—and handed it to her. When she stared at it with a blank expression, he nudged it a little. “Eat. Long council session, remember. You don’t eat enough.”

  “I feel guilty,” she admitted, balancing the plate on her knees, sharp under the silk, and poked at the greens. “I keep thinking what it takes to grow this and where we stole the water from.”

  “It seems to me that you spend too much time feeling guilty about things that aren’t your fault and you can’t control.”

  “For someone who claims to want to know me better and be my partner, you criticize me an awful lot.”

  “It’s not criticism—it’s good advice. You can’t lead your people to better lives if you’re not strong. There’s no sense in starving yourself to make up for the past.”

  “Is that why you’ve lost so much weight?” she retorted. “Because you’ve been eating so well, so you can be strong to lead your people?”

  “Point taken. But in truth it wasn’t guilt that stopped me so much as lack of opportunity and appetite for the options I had. Don’t apologize for that either. You eat and I’ll get us back on topic. It seems to me, as we were discussing earlier, that your sensitivity to emotional energy is also what gives you powerful magic. Juli called it your blessing and curse together.”

  “Juli talks too much,” she muttered, but she speared up some greens and chewed. When she swallowed, she pointed the glass picks at him. “And I’m not that powerful. I’m still figuring things out. The magic is strong sometimes, but it’s also hard to … direct.”

  He nodded thoughtfully, grabbing a platter of cheese and scooping some onto her plate. “So, you’re like a young warrior after a big growth spurt. You don’t know where your body is or how to make your size and strength work for you. You’re learning to swing the magical equivalent of a sword, but right now you’re your own worst enemy because you keep hitting your own self in the noggin with it.”

  She gave him a funny look. “That actually makes a weird kind of sense.”

  “I don’t know much about magic, but I do know something about training young men—well, people—in using their Arill-bestowed gifts. Just because she gave it to you, does
n’t mean you don’t have to practice diligently to hone those talents into something you can actually wield with confidence. Natural born talent only gets you ten percent there. Hard work and refining your skills is the rest of the battle.”

  She was quiet a moment, thankfully eating with more enthusiasm. “You’re never quite what I expect,” she finally said.

  He grunted a laugh. “Good. As you’re never what I expect either. We’re a perfect match.”

  “We’re not, though.” She gazed at him somberly, eyes dark with concern. “And the council will know it. Worse news is, my mother refuses to see me. Her attendants say she was so upset about my—our—marriage when I sent a message to her that she said all sorts of horrible things, then fell into a fugue state.”

  “I’m sorry.” He couldn’t imagine how that would be, though if those servants were his, he’d take them to task for passing along the ranting of a madwoman. That did no one any good. “You know that, whatever she said, she didn’t mean it. You said yourself she’s not in her right mind.”

  “I know that in my head.” Oria glanced at her Familiar and rolled her shoulders. “The point is, she won’t be helping.”

  “We’ll do it ourselves then.” He scooped some stuff onto her plate that looked unfortunately like maggots. Hopefully it wasn’t really, but if it was… well, good protein. Maybe he could eventually talk her into eating meat. That would help fill out those waifish hollows around her collarbones.

  “I don’t think I can do it.” She nearly whispered the words, then glanced down at Chuffta, who gazed up at her with an intent green gaze.

  Practicing being the better man, Lonen gave them a few minutes to converse, using the opportunity to devour more of the really excellent meat. Some kind of venison, maybe. And there were pieces of fowl with a spicy seasoning he really enjoyed.

  “Want to loop me in?” he finally asked and Oria looked over at him with a flush on her cheekbones.

  “Mostly Chuffta is telling me the same things you are, that I should share more with you and trust you to help me with the council.”

  Surprisingly honored, he dipped his chin at her Familiar. “Good man.”

  Oria rolled her eyes at them both and threw up her hands, which seemed a good sign indeed. Fiesty Oria would be far better at his side than the dejected one. “Fine. I can’t believe I’m going to do this. But I need to swear you to secrecy somehow. Vow to your goddess or something.”

  He considered her. The vow waited to be made, of course. Would have been already, had they married in Arill’s temple according to Destrye custom. By altering the words slightly, they could fit his and Oria’s unusual union. A risk, promising so much to her, and yet… he was already committed, wasn’t he? They both were.

  As he’d said to her the evening before, he’d already made the decision, and he wasn’t a man to go back on that. No matter his other flaws.

  He set his plate aside, going to one knee before her. In the old tradition, he picked up the hem of her silk robe, kissed it, then caught and held her gaze. “I swear by the magic that binds us, by the seed of me in you and the blossom of you in me, that I shall never betray you, my wife, whether by action or inaction.”

  She stared at him, lips parted, pink with the fruit she’d eaten. If only he could taste her, let her taste him, they’d be so much easier with each other. Of her own accord, she lifted a hand and carefully tucked one of his escaped curls into his tied-back hair. “Thank you,” she said, seeming both moved and chastened.

  Tempted to break the tension with a joke, he resisted the urge. This was an important moment between them. “We both have fealties, Oria, people to whom we owe our allegiance, but we can be united in that. Trust me to help you.”

  “All right,” she breathed. For a moment she seemed about to touch him, but she caught herself and shooed him away. “Go sit over there. You’re too close for me to keep my head straight.”

  He let himself grin at her then. It salved his admittedly too-large masculine pride that he affected her as much she did him. Doing as she asked, he added more food to her plate, then to his own. She shook her head at him. “This is more food than I’ve eaten in weeks.”

  “Good. Maybe you’ll start making up for senselessly depriving yourself. Now, tell me what I need to know.”

  Putting her eating picks together, she used them as a platform to lift the maggoty things to her mouth. They didn’t move, so maybe they’re weren’t insect larvae after all.

  “This is the thing. You asked me what the Trom said to me that day, why its touch didn’t kill me.” She gazed at him steadily, no waffling now, but studying his reactions, probably reading his emotions, too, so he kept his mind calm and still as the lakes of Dru. “It called me Princess Ponen, which my mother—during a fortuitous lucid period—explained is a very old word that means powerful potential.”

  She set her plate aside and scrubbed her palms over her knees, probably unaware that she left sweat marks from them. The memory bothered her far more than she wanted to let on.

  “What it turns out to mean for me is that I have both sgath and grien.” She lifted her chin, daring him to comment.

  “So you have the male kind of magic, too.”

  “Yes.” She waited, maybe for him to be horrified or something, but he kept to the placid lake image. No judgment from him. If that made her more powerful, all the better for the Destrye. “You have to understand,” she continued, her face very serious. “Sgath is passive. Priestesses absorb magic, we gather and pool it, then feed it to our priests. They make it active, using grien to build things.”

  “Or make earthquakes and fireballs to destroy things,” he noted wryly, then regretted breaking his own rule about not referencing past wrongs. She didn’t seem to notice, however.

  “Exactly. It’s … beyond unseemly for a woman to be able to wield grien. It’s anathema. If anyone finds out, they won’t just take my mask and deny me the throne, they’ll execute me.”

  Something hard and mean stirred in him at that. “They’d have to go through me.”

  She gazed at him in momentary astonishment. “I don’t think you—”

  “It’s not a matter of debate, and I’m sorry I interrupted you again, but I’m not going to argue about this. If any of those red-robed golem wannabes make a move to lay a finger on you, I’ll burn down Bára before I let that happen.” The anger felt good. She wanted him to channel it? There it was. “You’re mine now, Oria, which means I’ll protect you with the last breath in my body.”

  “What about your responsibility to the Destrye?” she challenged.

  “Don’t give me that. You’re my queen now and the best hope of saving my people. My loyalty is one and the same. I’ll wield my axe for you as I would for them.”

  “Some things can’t be resolved with brute strength.” Her eyes flashed as she said it and he began to see the sides of her she’d described. Both the sensitivity that allowed her to read his thoughts, feel his emotions, and even absorb some of those energies, and also the direct ferocity in her restless nature, the courage and willingness to fight.

  “I know that,” he replied calmly. “That’s why I came to you, after all.”

  “I thought you came to me with the intention of throttling me for supposedly breaking my word to you.” She said it with the same tone of challenge, but a hint of mischief lurked in her composed expression.

  “A good warrior is ready for all eventualities—back up plans are key.”

  “A salient point, as we need one for the council session, in case things go awry.”

  “Sound reasoning. Are the three of us the only ones who know about the grien in you?”

  Looking thoughtful, she scratched her Familiar’s breast, who seemed to be for all the world, smiling at him. A strange sight on a lizard’s face. “Chuffta will never tell. But there’s also my mother.”

  “Who loves you and would never put you in jeopardy, even if she’s upset about this marriage.”

&nbs
p; “Hopefully, unless she gets it in her head that she’s helping somehow, in her fugue state. She’s not the greatest danger, however.” Oria grimaced apologetically. “Yar might guess.”

  ~ 12 ~

  “Yar?”

  Lonen knew he must be gaping at her, but … “Yar? As in your brother who’s battling you for the throne and can be expected to use any and all weapons against you to win—that Yar?”

  “It’s not like there are others,” she bit out and stood, picking up her mask.

  He held out a hand for it and she sighed, coming to sit beside him, giving it to him. He studied the pattern of the braids, looking for places to weave the ribbons back in. Maybe he could learn to do the braids also, if she insisted on keeping them, so he could take her hair down as often as he liked, then help her get ready for public appearances, too.

  “As zealously as you guard this secret,” he said, “I’m assuming you did not confide in him.”

  “No. Not at all. In fact—I didn’t know I had grien magic until a confrontation with him.”

  “A confrontation?” He kept his voice neutral, focusing on making the ribbons tight enough to hold the mask on, but not make her uncomfortable. She must have washed her hair, too, while he was working off his mad, because she smelled of a different flower now. And he should have killed that officious twerp when he had the chance.

  “Don’t think I can’t detect those thoughts beneath that pretty mountain lake and musing about my hair. It’s honeysuckle and, yes, Yar and I had a fight and I attacked him with my grien magic. He ran away. It’s over. I defended myself and won, so you can forget about those revenge fantasies you’re brewing.”

  “The lakes of Dru are very beautiful, lovely to swim in during the hot summer months. I’ll take you to my favorite.” His favorite that still existed, as the first two were nothing but holes in the ground, but he wouldn’t burden her with that guilt as well.