She smelled of parchment dust and wildflowers and the apple they’d shared as part of their supper earlier. Her gaze mapped every detail of his face as if to commit it to memory, and he wondered what she saw there that he could not in any mirror’s reflection. That flame she insisted still burned in the darkness? She leaned in and he met her halfway, capturing her lips, soft as a rose petal, before he teased her mouth open to accept the sweep of his tongue.
Siora moaned, a tiny sound of pleasure that drove the hot blood in his body straight into his cock. He grasped her hips and surged against her, rocking back and forth with her as they explored each other: mouths, cheeks, temples, and throats. Shoulders and backs, hips and legs.
She was a slight woman, built of bird bones and cobwebs. Fragile but strong. Incredibly so. She’d have to be to survive the life she’d lived. Friendless beggar, Flower of Spring, voice for the dead, prey of a cat’s-paw. If he was honest with himself—and he indulged in such moments sometimes—she’d fascinated him as much as she’d unnerved him from the moment he’d met her. She was asdifferent from Tanarima as the moon was to the sun, and yet the same, because she believed him to be something far more than he actually was, unswerving in her certainty despite evidence to the contrary.
He peeled her away from him, tipping her off his lap. She blinked at him, confused, a delectable temptation he would be wise to avoid yet nearly helpless to do so. “You see what isn’t there, Siora” he told her in his harshest tones, flinching inwardly at the way her features froze. “I’ve no more answers for your questions.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Siora had never considered herself a reckless sort, even when she shielded Estred from a stoning with her own body or helped a draga rescue an old woman by betraying an assassin. Doing the right thing wasn’t reckless, it was just that—the right thing. Kissing Gharek of Cabast, on the other hand, was reckless. There was no justification for it, no nobility attached to it unless one wanted to put desire on a pedestal. Neither right nor wrong but still incautious, and she regretted none of it, even when he set her aside and turned his back to her.
His words, designed to cut, had done their job at first, making her bleed inside with mortification but only for a breath or two. Her greatest talent might be conversing with the dead, but she was an excellent judge of people as well. It was why she’d never given up on the cat’s-paw, seeing under all that cold brutality a man worth her faith and patience, even if only for the sake of his daughter.
She remained awake the rest of the night, counting the number of shooting stars passing overhead and the breaths of the sleeping man beside her as she replayed that lovely kiss in her mind, dwelling on the ephemeral moment and wishing it had lasted far longer, gone further than just the kiss. While she’d never admit itto anyone, he’d always intrigued her. Dangerous men usually made her wary and eager to avoid them. Even Malachus, whose character was more merciful than Gharek’s despite being a draga, had made her glad to end their brief alliance and escape into the city’s labyrinth once she’d shown him where Asil was hidden. Gharek was the exception. Sometimes the draw of another couldn’t be explained, and he’d been a lodestone for her from the moment she met him in a Domoran alleyway, his daughter in her arms.
Her musings turned to the charm Asil gave her, one that was far more than the bits and scraps of thread and flowers woven into a disk. Siora wasn’t gifted with magic, but she could sense it, and the charm had practically breathed with the sorcery of earth when Asil had adorned her with the gift. The old woman herself had the feel of earth magic about her, Halani even more so. Siora wondered who had created it—mother or daughter? Whoever had done so carried the power of rock and soil, plant and all manner of living things in their fingers. Gharek might not have felt the charm’s power, but to Siora it was unmistakable. And valued. She and her companion could use every bit of protection given to them.
By the time sleep overtook her, Gharek was shaking her awake. “Time to go,” he said, and his shuttered expression warned he wasn’t in the mood for questions, explanations, or conversation in general. They were back on the road just before the sun crested the horizon, and Siora saw at the edge of the fields a thin seam of light in the window of a distant house. The farmer who worked these fields was awake. They’d chosen the right time to leave.
With hours and leagues ahead of them, and Gharek’s demeanor as dour as a thunderstorm, she stayed quiet. Only once did hespeak and that, a three-word command. “Take the reins.” While she guided Suti on the road, he read the grimoire Manaran had given them, the crackle of pages turned loud in her ear.
Curious as to what he discovered, she braved a question. “Have you found anything useful in that book?” He might bite her head off, but she was undeterred. She didn’t regret kissing him and refused to apologize, even if he stewed over it.
To her delight, he answered her without snarling, though a thin edge of ice lined his voice. “Several things, though not one that might break the Windcry’s ward. Then again, I’m not a sorcerer. Zaredis’s dog-mage might see something here I don’t. Or a combination of things.” He muttered something under his breath.
“What is it?”
His voice warmed a little more with each word. “This book is a codex of sorts. A guide to spells of different sorceries—the elements, potions, scrying, necromancy.” A lengthy pause followed and his tone shifted. “You realize, as a true shade speaker you’re a necromancer?”
Siora lurched in the saddle, hard enough to make the gelding stop, confused. Gharek signaled him with a tap of his heels and a click of his tongue to walk again and pick up the pace. “I’m not a necromancer,” she snapped, every warm thought she’d indulged in about him this morning driven out by his remark. “I don’t summon the dead, enslave the dead, or use them to foretell the future.”
“If this book is accurate, there’s more to necromancy than that. There’s a spell in here you might find of particular interest.”
He stretched his arm over her shoulder, nudging the book into her hand while he recaptured the reins with his other hand. He held the book open in one spot with his thumb. “Read this page.”
She almost refused. Her interest in the grimoire had turned to wary revulsion when she’d thumbed through its pages while Gharek had gone to pull water from the nearby well the previous night. She didn’t fear sorcery in general. There were clean and unclean magics, and not all were created equal. Her own shade-speaking might not be true sorcery, but she’d always had a sense of others who possessed the real thing. The fire witch in the cloister prison below Kraelag’s notorious Pit, the Savatar commander with his desperate gaze when he questioned her about the witch—a hint of magic had hung on him. Even Halani, kind and solemn, who thrummed with a power that made Siora think of spring and wildflowers and newly harvested fields. To her knowledge she hadn’t crossed paths yet with anyone who possessed death magic—if one didn’t count the thing swallowing up the dead as food.
Necromancy was an abomination of sorcery, not because it dealt in death but because it dealt in slavery. She’d seen the ruination of a soul imprisoned too long as a trap shadow by some necromancer who likely counted such enslavement as the least of his evils.
People had sometimes asked why she didn’t summon ghosts to tell the future. Her answer was always the same. “I’m a shade speaker, not a slaver. They come to me of their own accord.” This book, with its many invocations and incantations, protections and blessings, also contained summoning magic and bind spells that forced the dead into serving the will of the living.
“Necromancy is filthy magic,” she said. “You should tear that page from the book and burn it.”
Gharek’s “hmm” was noncommittal. “Don’t be so quick to judge or discount. According to the book, the spell known as Holdfasttraps a summoned ghost and binds it to the spellcaster to do their bidding until the caster chooses to set it free.”
She twisted in the saddle to give him a dark look. “Whyever wouldn’t I judge such a horrendous thing? Jumped-up slave mongers. Necromancy is the scourge of all sorcery.”
Undaunted by her outrage, he poked the hornet’s nest again. “But what if it could protect your father or the general’s brother from whatever is snacking on hapless spirits?”
His question gave her pause. Such a scenario had never before presented itself to her, and until now, it had been easy to take a stand when there was no scenario. Harder now to hold that line when someone she loved was in danger, and she struggled with the grim reality of compromise when needs must conflicted with morality. “Is this one of those bitter choices an honorable person must make to protect the vulnerable?”
For one lovely moment, his arms came fully around her and tightened. His low sigh was depressingly resigned. “Fair innocent, oceans of blood have been spilled thanks to the honorable intentions of those who seek to do good.”
“Our world is very dark in your eyes.”
“And surprisingly bright in yours,” he replied. The light brush of his cheek against her hair sent a shivery warmth through her.
She held on to the book and even read some of the spells in the section devoted to necromancy despite her reservations. The one called Holdfast was easy in terms of execution, impossible to invoke if one wasn’t gifted with the power of death magic. Zaredis’s magician had wielded a spell that stopped the ghost-eater for a short time, a ward that acted like a shield wall and took the entity by surprise so that it retreated. She doubted it would try the sameapproach or be taken unawares a second time. Rurian wasn’t a necromancer; if he was, Zaredis would have employed him to protect his brother instead of bargaining for the help of a lowly shade speaker. The straightforward Holdfast spell was useless to him no matter how great his particular power. Death called to death, and nothing else would do.