“Asil’s doing, I think.” A smile entered Siora’s voice. “She is beloved by them all.” She gestured to the bag where the salve and clothes shared space. “You can have the other tunic if you want to change.”
No amount of small talk could dissipate the thrumming awareness growing between them or the slow heating of his blood as he gently applied the ointment to her back, painting the salve with light fingers over each mark. Several stretched from the top of her shoulders to the twin dimples indenting her lower back. Some of her hair had escaped its plait to fan along her backbone and the shadowy outline of her ribs on one side. Gharek gathered the stray locks in his palm, careful not to smear ointment on them, and twitched them over Siora’s shoulder. She offered him a fine view of her profile with its strong jaw, straight nose, and resolute chin.
“Thank you, Gharek,” she said softly, and his name on her lips was a more seductive caress than any touch he’d ever known from a woman.
She was small and beautifully made, inside and out. He bent to an unscratched part of her back. Flawless skin that tempted him to brush his lips there and learn her softness. Learn her taste. He’d known desire many times, but it had been long and long since he’d felt it coupled with affection.
Condemning and forgiving in equal parts, Siora had been a catalyst of change for him from the moment he’d met her, though he hadn’t known it at the time or truly recognized it until now. His fear for Estred inspired him to survive at all costs. His growing feelings for Siora tangled him in knots.
The realization made him scramble to his feet. “I’m finished. I spotted a well on the other side of this barn. There’s bound to bea bucket available. I’ll wash and return soon with a bucket for you.” If his blood ran any hotter in his veins, he’d have to do more than wash his hands. He’d need a full dunking.
His observations held true and he found the well with a bucket attached by rope and bar to a crank that lowered and raised it for water. He filled the first bucket and used it to wash the remnants of ointment off his hands, then washed his face and neck, as much to cool a passion as to rinse away the sweat and dust from the day’s earlier heat.
He dumped the remainder of the water and refilled the bucket before lugging it back to the lean-to for Siora to have a quick wash if she chose. He’d stand guard nearby, though there was no one to be seen for leagues in either direction.
He discovered her asleep, curled on her side as she usually slept, one hand tucked under her cheek while the other stretched out in front of her, palm flat against the spot where he’d lay down for the night. The book Manaran gave him lay beside that hand, partially open. He set the bucket to one side and approached their sleeping spot. She didn’t move, her breathing slow and deep. He took the book and checked the page she’d been reading before sleep claimed her.
His eyebrows rose. A list of necromantic spells, the start of a section that included fortune-telling, divination, and forms of spying using the skills and foreknowledge of an enslaved ghost. No wonder she wore a frown as she slept. Even before magic was outlawed, the dark art of raising the dead for a number of nefarious purposes was reviled by most, and necromancers operated in secret or risked being burned or torn apart by outraged villagers and townsmen.
Siora had insisted she was no necromancer, only a shade speaker, and believed there was a defining difference between the two. Gharek wasn’t so sure. Her explanation for why her touch made Kalun visible to others made sense. A living twin could be an anchor to the world for a dead one, a beacon to follow until the spirit chose to pass on. The same explanation might work for her father as well, but there were still holes in her reasoning. Most shade speakers were frauds, but the few who were authentic, like Siora, were connected to the spirit world in a way only those gifted—or cursed—with necromantic magic since birth could be. In his opinion the only true difference between a necromancer and a real shade speaker was that one sought to enslave the dead and the other did not.
He gently slid her hand closer to her body and sat down beside her, angling the book so the moonlight illuminated the page. He wished he could build a fire but doing so risked drawing the attention of whoever owned the field, and he wanted to avoid one more confrontation.
“Can you actually see the words?” Siora asked in a drowsy voice. “I gave up.”
He did the same, closing the book to set it beside him. Siora remained recumbent on her part of the horse blanket. Dappled in shadows, she reminded him of the night-blooming flowers in the garden he’d had planted in his courtyard for Estred. Her round eyes shone in the argent light and the frown was gone, replaced by a more pensive expression. “I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said.
“You didn’t. I was just dozing.” She continued to stare at him, an obvious question hovering on her lips.
“What?” He wondered what manner of question she plannedto flense him with this night. “I can tell you want to ask me something.”
She gnawed on her bottom lip as if deciding how to say what she wanted, and Gharek braced for the expected moment when she’d knock his feet out from under him. She didn’t disappoint.
“Do you hate your wife for abandoning Estred?”
He exhaled a long sigh and turned to stare out the door to the silver-plated fields beyond. Did this woman ever ask anything that was simple to answer? He could take the easy path, tell her it was none of her concern and put his back to her to sleep, but whatever urged him to peel back another layer of himself for her perusal in their earlier conversations wanted him to do the same thing now.
A memory of Tanarima, the charming, flirty daughter of a wool merchant, bloomed before him. She had enamored him from the moment he met her in the busy market of a village whose name he couldn’t recall. He was a lowly census counter for the Empire, but his profession required he travel, and for a girl whose entire world consisted of the confines of her small village, he seemed to her an exotic world traveler.
Those initial infatuations hadn’t survived, just as most didn’t, and the reality of marriage between very disparate personalities insured a tumultuous relationship. They were both relieved when he chose to join the Kraelian army for better pay, especially with a baby on the way. He would leave with his regiment for a troubled spot in the Empire but return in time to welcome his child into the world. Things never went as planned, and months stretched to years, and the daughter he’d sired had been born with the burden and stigma of disfigurement to a woman alone and overwhelmed by that reality.
Siora’s question resurrected more memories that were, to his surprise, no longer painful. They flitted across his mind’s eyes as if Tanarima and his marriage to her were the shades of another life belonging to another man. He chose to answer the question.
“Once,” he said. “Once, a lifetime ago, I hated her. Now I’m indifferent. And pitying. She was handed a hard fate by the gods. People would have blamed her for birthing a monster, shunned her, maybe even attacked her as they’ve attacked Estred. She was alone, and I was too far away to be of any use to her. I believe now she did what she thought was necessary.”
“Do you know where she is now?”
He shrugged. “Dead from fever not long after she left Estred with her sister. I don’t rejoice in her death, but I don’t sorrow either. She gave me Estred. It’s enough.” He met that deep gaze, wondering if shade speakers saw more clearly than others. “Why do you ask such questions?”
She sat up and mimicked his shrug. “To understand better.”
“There’s nothing to understand. I’m a father, a murderer, a fugitive, and an exile. And once more a cat’s-paw to a different master.” Summing up his character aloud made him wither a little inside, and the chilly blackness that always threatened to subsume him encroached further into his soul with grasping fingers. If he avoided the eater of ghosts long enough, there would be nothing left of him for it to take when it finally netted him for good.
Siora leaned toward him until she was so close he could see the way her long lashes curved and the remnant of a tiny scar marring the skin under her left cheekbone. “There’s more,” she said, raising a hesitant hand to touch his head and then his cheek. He didn’t pull away this time, caught in a trap of bewitchment morepowerful than that of any Midrigar monstrosity. “More beyond the blackness and the terror. A candle flame almost guttered but still there.”
He might have corrected her, mocked her for believing there was more to him than what he’d just told her. Instead, he gathered her into his arms, and she went, stupidly trusting, beautifully sensual.
Her arms slid over his shoulders. The weight of her clasped hands rested just below his nape. Her body fit neatly into the cove his made, her pelvis seated against his where she’d surely feel his desire for her nudge and seek. Her small breasts pressed against his chest as she embraced him.