King's Dragon (Crown of Stars 1)

She struggled, trying to get to her feet, and once he saw that she was trying to get up, he helped her. Only helped her, never pushed her, just guided, once her feet set off of her own choice for the kitchen.

It was gloriously, marvelously warm. Steam rose, or so it seemed to her, until she saw that he had made a bath, hauled the water and heated the water by himself. The tub sat in front of the roaring fire in the hearth. She just stood there while he unwrapped her filthy blanket, while he helped her out of her filthy clothing, carefully removing each piece. He handled these things fastidiously, with his gloves on, but once she was naked he stripped the gloves from his hands and rolled up his sleeves and helped her into the warm water.

The warmth hurt, like a hundred prickling tiny needles, elf-shot, stabbing her all at once. She wept dry tears. He scrubbed her with a stiff brush, chafing her skin, and that hurt even more, but she did not have the energy to protest.

With the pain came warmth, flooding down through her skin. Heat streaked off the fire. The hot water seeped into her flesh, into her bones. Periodically he would rise and fetch more hot water from the kettle for the bath; twice he disappeared outside with the buckets and filled up the huge kettle with water so cold it hissed as he poured it in.

He took a clean, soft cloth and washed her, her hair, her face, her hands and chest and abdomen, her hips and her thighs, her calves and her feet. While he washed her he sang, low, in his beautiful voice, a sinuous line of chant, only notes, no words. She was sinking with lassitude, with warmth. But she was still numb.

He took her by the hands and lifted her from the water. With a soft cloth he dried her. He wrapped her in a blanket of a fine plush weave and stood back from her.

He said nothing. He simply watched her. He did not smile, or frown. He had almost no expression, or at least no expression she could understand, on his face. But she had long since passed the point where she might have gone back out with the pigs. Da always said, “There’s no use swearing vows if you don’t mean to keep them.”

She turned and walked down the narrow corridor to his cell. Two lamps burned, their light twin fires. The brazier glowed red with heat. The Dariyan lesson book of magic lay open on the table. She did not even glance at it but went to the bed and sat on its edge.

He followed her. Now he closed the door behind him and stood, leaning against it, to stare at her. His sleeves were still rolled up, revealing his pale, muscled forearms and their fine down of light hair.

“Will you teach me Jinna?” he asked. His voice was still soft, and his words sounded more like a question asked out of curiosity than like a charge driven to win the battle. Indeed, he almost sounded surprised.

She nodded. That was all. That was everything.

“Ah,” he said. Then he was silent.

She finally looked up, because his silence was so odd. He was studying her. His expression was disturbing the more because he looked nakedly hungry.

“You don’t even know what you are, do you?” he asked. “A treasure-house, as it says in the holy book. ‘My bride is a garden locked, a treasure-house barred. I have come to the garden, my bride, and I have eaten my honey. I have drunk my wine. Eat, friends, and drink until you are drunk with love.’”

Unbidden, the next stanza rose in her mind as clearly as if she heard the words spoken aloud: I sleep, but my heart is awake. Come, beloved, I will open the door.

But she sat, as still as the bitter cold air outside, and watched while he undressed in front of her. Her flesh might be warm, now, might even be awake, but her heart had frozen straight through. She simply watched, unable to feel anything, until at last he was naked. Then she blushed and looked modestly away. That made him laugh.

In an instant he was beside her. He held her with one hand supporting her back and lowered her onto the luxurious softness of the featherbed. Stripping the blanket from her, he covered them both with the feather quilt.

“You’re still cold,” he whispered, running his hands down her arms and up her abdomen to her breasts.

“Liath, say something to me.”

This close, he was overpowering. She gathered up enough courage to meet his gaze. What she saw there cracked some of the ice off her numbness. Tears stung at her eyes. She turned her head away and shut her eyes and lay rigid in his arms. But she did not otherwise move or try to escape.

“I know what you want,” she said softly. “But it’s locked away. It’s locked away, and you’ll never get it.”

“We aren’t speaking of the book anymore, are we, my beauty?” He was a little amused, a little angry, but he shifted, embracing her, and he sighed, and suddenly his skin, against hers, went from cool to warm to hot. He said, under his breath, so quiet she barely heard him, “‘You who sit in my garden, my bride, let me also hear your voice.’”

His voice trembled, he was so overwhelmed by feeling, not just passion, what others called lust, but something stronger, something more frightening. He wanted not just her body, not just the book. He wanted her. There were deeper things still, things she only now realized might exist, the child of two sorcerers, deaf to magic but hiding something so far inside herself that even she could not see it.

But he could. If Liath had feared him before, it was nothing to the fear she felt now. He had enough training, enough knowledge, to see. He had sight, that allowed him to see past the seeming. For now, right now, as Hugh shifted against her, caressing her, she saw what the truth must be.

Da had been running all those years to protect her. To hide her. Whoever—or whatever—had killed her mother now wanted her. She was the prize, the treasure. Only she did not know why.

Hugh sighed, his breath warm and sweet against her cheek. She kept her eyes clenched shut.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said softly. “I’ll not be rough with you, not here. Not ever, here.”

He knew what he was doing.

She found the city, standing fast in her memory. She set foot on the white shore against which lake water lapped in slow ripples as even as her heartbeat, and she ascended the spiraling avenue paved with marble, its seams so perfectly joined that it appeared as one smooth flat endless surface, twisting ever tighter as it approached the height. And as she climbed, as she passed through each higher gate, seven in all, she locked them each one behind her until she came to the summit.

She found the frozen tower of her heart and barred it with vines and thorns and spears of iron. Inside she went by the single door and up a ladder to the highest room, to the chamber of doors that Da had given her; this chamber only he had envisioned for her, four doors, north, south, east, and west, and a fifth door, set impossibly in the center of the room, which was locked even to her. Each door she locked with a brass key, locking herself in. Only in the door that opened to the north did she limn the shade of a door, a secret door that led into wilderness. There she laid a little path through trials great and small, through forests trackless and ways mysterious, to obscure it from view, so that only one who truly knew her heart might find this way in. Into that wilderness, into the trackless, tangled wild lands, she threw the key. If any man sought that key, let him look at his own peril.