The Edge of the Blade Read online

  “The fool,” Kral muttered, sliding his hand up my ribs. “He could keep his ill-advised vow to her and still return to civilization.”

  “Hey,” I objected.

  He smiled, all shark. “Don’t fret, tidbit. I like your barbarian ways just fine.” His hand closed over my breast and, ooh, yeah. I didn’t care about the civilization remark any more. “And you like mine, it’s clear to me.”

  His thumb rubbed over my nipple, tracing the sensitive circle of my areola, and I let it melt through me. The man had good hands and knew how to use them. I arched my neck in invitation and he took it, kissing me there.

  “Being invited to my bed is not an insult. Far from it—it’s a great honor,” he murmured against my skin. “I have only ever offered the privilege to three women. It means I give you the protection of my body, my name, and my treasury. You would want for nothing and have no responsibilities, except for this one, which you so greatly enjoy, as you’ve pointed out.”

  Rolling my nipple between fingers and thumb, he raked my neck with his teeth. Nice and sharp, those sensations. I fumbled at the blanket covering him, ready to have at him already, the bandages making me a bit clumsy, but the mjed had done its work and my hands didn’t hurt overmuch. “Enough conversation; let’s get this cock inside me, doing what it does best.”

  “There are rules, though.” He let me grasp his cock in my hand, eyes glittering in pleasure. He possessed plenty of control to enjoy himself without coming for some time, as I recalled. “No more fucking other men.”

  “Do you see other men in this bed?” I tightened my grip, finding the rhythm that got to him most, using the texture of the bandages to good effect, judging by the rocking of his hips.

  “At all,” he growled. “You belong to me and only me.”

  “Patently not true, because—”

  “Shut up, Jepp.” He effected the order by kissing me thoroughly. I considered it, as I savored the kiss, pinching his tender glans, for a little extra torment. Temporary exclusivity. I’d done it once or twice. Kral would be lover enough to keep me satisfied so that I wouldn’t need to look elsewhere. And he’d proved I wouldn’t have luck looking elsewhere if I didn’t take his deal. I tore my mouth away. “Until we’re done with each other.”

  His eyes narrowed, hand dipping into my trousers to—thank Danu!—part my folds. “What does ‘done’ mean?”

  “Done,” I gasped. “I get tired of you. You get tired of me. Or I have to sail home. We say good-bye and part ways full of delicious memories.”

  “What if you decide you’re done and I decide I’m not?” He pushed a finger inside me, stroking me just the way I liked it.

  “Either one of us gets veto power.”

  “What is that word?”

  Forgetting myself with Common Tongue. “Either of us can end it at any time.”

  “We can try that. No weeping from you, however, when I am the one to be done first.” He pushed his cock through the ring of my fingers. “I’ve missed those callused hands, little warrior.”

  “I missed having them on you. Inside me. Now.”

  “I’m happy to oblige. All that remains is your apology. Along with you asking me very nicely to fuck you the way you need it.”

  An apology for offending my honor and betraying my trust would go a long way.

  I did need it in a bad way. Enough that I could see my way to asking nicely. A bit of dirty talk never hurt, and I’d be sure to “ask” in such a way that he’d be in no doubt as to his marching orders. But an apology? Spare me the male ego. Still, I’d never been one to let the little deer go just to maybe bag a bigger one. “I apologize, Kral, for bruising your feelings.”

  He thrust his cock harder in my hands. “For offending my honor and betraying my trust.”

  “We had no agreement; therefore, I betrayed no trust, offended no honor,” I gritted through my teeth, his hand working wonders. Nearly there.

  “I am master of my own honor,” he growled back. “I say you offended me and I’ll have an apology for that.”

  “Then you’ll be waiting for the Northern Wastes to grow pink roses.”

  “You will apologize to me,” he demanded, pumping harder, face going rigid with desire and determination.

  “Fuck if I will,” I hissed, vising both hands on his thick length.

  He convulsed, remembering to swallow back the shout by sinking his teeth into the juncture of my neck and shoulder, spilling his seed over my hands as I milked him through it.

  Then he withdrew his hands and rolled onto his back on the mounded pillows, all sated male, and rolled his head to look at me. He smiled, his smug, thin-lipped one. “No fucking until you do.”

  “You bastard!” I hissed.

  He laughed, grabbing my wrists to hold me off him. If I’d thought to draw a blade, I’d have carved new holes in him that even Trond couldn’t sew up.

  “You satisfied me very nicely today, little rekjabrel. Enjoy the pleasure of having pleased me and earned your keep.”

  I managed to keep from trying to take a bite out of him. “Let me go, you ass.”

  “So you can draw one of your gnat killers on me? I don’t think so.”

  He wasn’t holding me tightly enough. And he called Harlan a fool. I sagged a little, giving in, adding a whimper for effect, and he chuckled.

  I exploded out, breaking his grip easily with the surprise, whipping out my twin daggers—which I hardly needed, as I’d made sure to catch him with both knee and elbow on recently stitched wounds, along with the heel of my foot to those balls he thought so big and manly—all as I flipped off his cursed bed and landed on my feet.

  Like a cat, indeed. Never offer one tuna, then snatch it away. You’ll get the claws every time.

  Kral wheezed, grasping his groin, his face a fascinating shade of pale green. “I should kill you for that,” he managed.

  “Ambassador, remember? I may be new to politics, but even I know it’s not worth starting a war over a bit of pussy.” I chuckled at my own joke. Made me feel a bit better for getting suckered into his bed again. Earned my keep, indeed.

  “Dasnaria would crush your Twelve Kingdoms.”

  I bared my teeth at him, filing away that bit of information. Was that plan in the works? “If we were wholly human, maybe. You’ve barely tasted what magic battles are like. It’s a game changer, and you might find your armored boys cracked like eggs. And it’s thirteen kingdoms, at least. Plus Nahanau, right, as they’re inside our barrier? Guess that means we get whatever treasure it was you kept hinting about to King Nakoa. Must be pretty good stuff for you to want it so badly!”

  Kral had a bit of breath back and produced a reasonable glare. “You were eavesdropping.”

  “Scout, remember? One of my favorite tools of the trade, eavesdropping.” Though I also knew he’d given that search as his ostensible reason for being in the islands in the first place when he spoke with Ursula. “Hope you did enjoy that little hand job, as it’s the last time I’m laying my hands on you in pleasure. Next time, I’ll cut it off.” I gave him a slicing smile, pouring all of my anticipation into it. “Don’t think I won’t, General.”

  “Oh, don’t go spiky on me, hystrix. Come back and play with me. We can debate the terms of your apology.”

  Clamping down on my self-control, I left without another word.

  The next morning, Kral sent out a man in full armor to test for the presence of the fish-birds. As Zynda had been arguing again that she could go look, I was just as happy for him to risk one of his men. She’d been asleep when I returned to our cabin—probably as exhausted as I was from watching over Dafne—so she’d been spared my rant about stubborn, pigheaded Dasnarians. In the bright light of morning, and, okay, maybe a teensy bit of a hangover, I didn’t feel like reviewing my poor choices of the evening before.

  It had been a long time since a guy had gotten me drunk in order to seduce me. Oldest trick in the book, and I fell for it like I was fifteen again. So, though Zyn
da gave me a number of inquiring sidelong glances, I kept my own counsel. At least practicing discretion made me feel more ambassadorial.

  The man reported the area within sight range free of fish-birds, thank all the goddesses, and Jens sent sailors flying up the masts, unfurling the sails to catch the wind with great snaps and billowing that sounded quite optimistic. All that wine red reminded me a bit too much of Kral’s bed, so I set to working out. Clear the mind and constitution. A bit brutal with the hangover, but a good penance for all that.

  By midafternoon, though Jens had reported we’d drifted off course by quite a bit during our downtime, the lookout’s shout announced that we approached the barrier. Zynda stood with me at the prow. I couldn’t see a damn thing but ocean, sky, and more ocean and sky, but she squinted, then nodded.

  “What do you see?” I asked her.

  “A kind of shimmer; see there?”

  I followed the line of her finger. No shimmer. And I had the best long-sight of most anyone I’d met. “No. What color?”

  She slid me a smile. “Magic colored.”

  Oh, great. “Don’t play enigmatic, Tala sorceress—just describe it.” I hadn’t seen the barrier before, that I knew of, as I hadn’t gone to Annfwn with Ursula. All those times in Branli, though, when she led the Hawks on Uorsin’s errand to find another crossing into Tala territory, I’d think I must be coming closer to the barrier, only to find myself going the opposite direction of where I’d planned to . . . Surely I’d seen it then and not known it for what it was. Galling.

  “I understand it looks different to Tala eyes than to a mossback’s,” Zynda explained, not at all daunted. “To me it looks like a great curtain of magic, stretching from the depths as high as I can see.”

  “It looks like a mirror, Ambassador,” Kral inserted, stepping up beside us, making the honorific sound as sensual as when he called me hystrix, whatever that meant.

  “Should you be on your feet?” I asked, with plenty of sweet mocking in return. “Wouldn’t want you passing out and falling overboard.”

  “Push me and you’ll go, too.”

  “I’ve heard non-Tala say it’s like a mirror,” Zynda inserted.

  “The first time we hit it,” Kral replied pointedly only to her, “we did so at full sail, damaging the prow enough that it took us days to repair.”

  “You’d think a big mirror would have shown you your own ship racing headfirst at your idiot self,” I commented drily.

  Kral set his jaw. Ha! Point to me. “It reflects the landscape only. To us it looked like more sea and sky.”

  “How is your lookout spotting it, then?” I searched the horizon, irritated with myself for not seeing a great curtain of magic. Something like that should be visible. It violated the laws of nature for it to hide from some people and not others. And there I went, thinking about it like a sentient being. Kral had me all kinds of inside out.

  Kral pointed at the crows circling the lookout high above. “They see it.”

  Great. Even a crow could spot what I couldn’t.

  “Animals should be able to pass freely through the barrier, though.” Zynda gave Kral a puzzled frown. “How did you discover this trick?”

  “Our crowmaster is quite accomplished. At my direction, he trained them to fly alongside the barrier, to guide us. Easy enough to teach them, he says, as that’s not much different than their usual duties. We Dasnarians are most inventive and clever.” He added that last with a snide smile for me.

  “Or your crows are,” I retorted. “I imagine repeatedly bashing your ship into an invisible mirror wall gave you considerable incentive to figure something out.”

  Zynda managed to keep a straight face long enough to turn it away from Kral, but I knew I’d amused her. Just as I knew I’d struck a nerve with Kral. I could just picture the scenario, him commanding his men to try again and again. Like me, he wouldn’t believe something existed that he couldn’t see until he’d nearly brained himself trying to bull his way through it. Or shark his way through. I didn’t know much about the toothy fish. Chomp his way through?

  Kral managed to swallow the tart response his sour expression transmitted anyway. “Incentive to keep us all from drowning, indeed. Now, tell your Tala friend to hold up your end of the bargain. We’ve shown you where the barrier is. Call in this enchantress queen to bring us through.”

  “I’m standing right here,” Zynda said in a mild tone that nevertheless raised the hairs on the back of my neck. King Rayfe had a knack for that, too. Like the soft growl of a predator in the shadows. Never paid to forget the power the Tala carried inside their mutable skins, no matter how genial or languid they appeared. Mountain cats looked like that, too.

  Kral wasn’t a total idiot, because he noted the implicit danger and—no doubt recalling the demonstration in the court at Ordnung when Zynda became a lethal tiger—gathered himself enough to bow slightly. “My apologies, sorceress. I am . . . out of sorts this morning. We await your next move.”

  “Accepted, General.” Zynda still sounded cool. “If you’ll give me room to consult with the Ambassador, we’ll determine our final strategy.”

  He didn’t like it, his bow stiff and more perfunctory, but Kral strode off.

  “What strategy?” I asked her. We already had a plan, the one Her Majesty gave us. Zynda might be worse with authority than I was, but we couldn’t not follow those orders.

  “Mostly I wanted to talk to you before I go. Do you think it’s wise to dally with him?”

  “I’m taunting, not dallying.”

  Her gaze went to my neck. “Did someone else leave that bite mark?”

  I clapped a hand over it. Danu! I’d forgotten. A definite weakness that I liked his mouth so well. When words weren’t coming out of it. “I blame Danu,” I snarled.

  Zynda tilted her head, a long, slow blink of her deep blue eyes. “Isn’t love Glorianna’s realm?”

  “Yes, though there’s no love lost between me and Kral.”

  “Just a burning passion you seem to be unable to resist.”

  “I could resist if I wanted to, which I have enough incentive to do now, as the man makes every cursed thing so difficult. Sex is a simple thing. Why can’t he see that?”

  “And you blame Danu because . . . ?” she prodded.

  “She’s supposed to guide me. Clear-eyed wisdom and all that. Clearly she’s not transmitting any of it to me, because I keep stumbling back into the same thrice-damned mistakes.”

  Zynda flattened her quick smile into a somber line. “I suspect the point is not for the goddesses to rescue us from our own mistakes, but for us to follow the example of the virtues they embody and learn to do better.”

  “Had to figure there would be a catch,” I muttered, mostly to myself. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Have you settled on a shape?”

  “I’m going with a porpoise—good for long distances, less risk of fish-birds, as I can outswim them more easily than outfly. And a porpoise is smart enough for me to keep most of my sentience. Just in case I need to reassess along the way.”

  “And you’re sure you can find this spot again?”

  “Another good reason for that form; they have excellent homing instincts. I’ll go and be back with Andi as soon as I can.”

  “Getting word to Her Majesty about Dafne’s abduction takes precedence.”

  “If only I could be in two places at once.”

  “Use some of that Tala magic. What about shifting into two versions of yourself? That’s what I’d want to be able to do. You should practice that.”

  She laughed, which was much better than the worried frown. “Be careful, Jepp. Maybe try to antagonize Kral a little less. I have a bad feeling.”

  “Is prognostication among your gifts?”

  Shifting uneasily, she looked away. “They were among Salena’s, though personally I never get more than vague concerns.”

  “Even I get those. Whiskey helps.”

  She didn’t laugh again, bu
t she smiled. “Don’t make me worry about you.”

  “I could say the same to you.”

  “I’ll deliver the messages. I won’t fail you.”

  “Never crossed my mind that you could.”

  She hugged me and I held on to her fiercely. Ridiculous to feel abandoned. I’d been far more on my own before in my life. Funny, though, how taking this journey with her and Dafne had forged a friendship among us unlike any I’d had before. We had little in common, the three of us. Neither of them shared my profession, as all of my sisters and brothers in arms had. Who’d have predicted that a librarian and a shape-shifting sorceress would become so much a part of my heart?

  The one Kral would say I didn’t possess.

  Perhaps it would be best for Zynda to go and take that softness with her. I needed to be my cagiest, hardest-shelled self to defend against Kral’s determined attacks.

  “Good-bye,” I told her. “May Danu guide you wisely, may Glorianna keep watch over you, and may your goddess Moranu protect you as the best and brightest of her children.”

  Zynda smiled through unshed tears. “I’ll appeal to Moranu to protect you also.”

  “I’m no shape-shifter.”

  “No, but scouts and spies keep to the shadows, which are Her domain. And you may be wearing more skins in the future than you realize. Good fortune to you.”

  With that, she released me and climbed up on the rail. To my surprise, she gave me the Hawks’ salute, fist over heart, then leapt, transforming midair to neatly cleave the waves and disappear.

  “I don’t like this,” I said to the unblemished waves. They had no reply to that. No one ever did.

  6

  The fish-bird swarm found us again by sunset.

  I’d been standing at the rail, watching Glorianna’s vivid aged face, fraternal twin to rosy dawn, sink into the ocean beyond the barrier I still couldn’t see. If it acted like a mirror, how could I see the sun set beyond it? Magic made no sense at all.

  Shipmaster Jens had set us on a gently curving course that followed the barrier for a while in one direction before he brought the Hákyrling about to retrace in the opposite direction. The redundant pattern kept us more or less in the same place as best as could be managed without dropping anchor—something I’d been informed we couldn’t do at that depth.