Cursed by Ice (39 page)
Authors: Jacquelyn Frank
“I will do my best,” she said with a laugh. “Now, enough talk of children. She will be here soon enough and consume all our time. Make love to me,” she said beckoning to him.
He smiled at her, his heart feeling beyond light and his body hot with need for his wife. As he made love to her, turning her body every way he could, making sure to love every part of her, he thought of how very fortunate he was. He had never known such happiness. It eclipsed the memories of the curse he had left behind. He would never quite forget his curse though, and like Sarielle, he would always remember the lessons of it. But he was free of it.
The same could not be said for Jaykun.
Sometime later, after his wife had fallen asleep in the afterglow of their passion, he went looking for his brother. He found him where he usually could find him: Zandaria.
He would have preferred Jaykun stay with him in Kith … He had been separated from him for long enough. But Jaykun had wanted very little to do with his brother since his return. In fact, he had not appeared to have much in the way of feelings about anything. Except maybe bitterness and anger.
That was to be expected, Dethan had said. Although neither Garreth nor Dethan had responded to their freedom in such a way, Jaykun had been the brooding sort even before his punishment. As Dethan’s second in command, he had taken the business of war very seriously. Now he must be the leader of their armies, Dethan and Garreth playing second to him, his task even more serious.
But … Jaykun would not be able to handle his curse without letting his brothers in. Not that he was fragile in any way. Like his brothers, he was a formidable warrior in his own right. But Garreth felt that being able to confide in Dethan had made his curse a little more bearable.
Garreth entered the main hall of the castle of the former rulers of Zandaria and found Jaykun immediately.
He was sitting on the throne at one end of the room. The throne had been made for a man of much smaller stature, so his significant height didn’t exactly fit well on it. Still, he was reclined on the chair, one leg thrown over the arm of it. He was turning something over in his hands repeatedly. He glanced up when Garreth entered the hall.
“What are you doing here?” Jaykun asked, his tone unwelcoming.
“I came to see how you are.”
“I am the same today as I was yesterday. Still, both days were infinitely better than those of the past seasons.”
Garreth frowned. “I am glad you appreciate your change in circumstances.”
“Am I supposed to thank you for it?”
“I … No. I do not expect gratitude.”
“Good.”
“What is wrong with you?” Garreth asked him.
“You mean besides the fact that I am incinerated for hours every night? Besides the fact that both my brothers are free to love and live? Besides the fact that my wife, the woman I loved, and my children are all long dead?”
“Jaykun …”
Jaykun sighed and held up a hand. “I’m sorry. That is unfair of me. I was the one who dragged you up that mountain. You did not deserve the punishment you received.”
“I do not hold you responsible. It was my own choice.”
“You don’t?” He was honestly surprised. His posture straightened. “I thought surely you would. I know I blame myself. For all of it. I was the one who discovered the location of the fountain.”
“Jaykun, I was a man in charge of my own destiny. The choice was mine.”
“But you tried to turn us back several times. We did not listen.”
“It makes no sense to cast blame for the past. It is the past and should remain there. You have a future now. You must look to it.”
“I will try, brother. But … it will be hard. I loved Casiria … no matter what else happened.”
His wife, Garreth thought. He was grieving the loss of his wife. Jaykun had loved Casiria beyond all reason. He had been devoted to her and his children. Garreth had never thought Casiria was deserving of his brother’s affections, but Jaykun had been blind when it came to the woman. And he had loved his children with all the devotion Garreth would have for his daughter when she was born. He thought of what it would feel like to suddenly be without Sarielle and his child, and he understood why his brother was grieving.
“Your mind should turn toward your pact with Weysa,” Garreth said, trying to be helpful. “Leave the past behind and embrace your future as Weysa’s warrior.”
Jaykun nodded. “I will, but it will take some time. I will be ready by the break of spring. I promise.”
“Come back to Kith with me. Eat at my table. Be with us.”
“No. Thank you, brother, but I cannot watch you be with your loving family.” Jaykun looked at him apologetically. “In time I will, perhaps. But for now … I am too jealous of your life and your love.”
“I understand. But my door is open, should you change your mind.”
Jaykun nodded to him and Garreth headed back out of the castle.
Garreth once again found himself counting his blessings. He was grateful to have two of his three brothers free of the majority of their torment. He was grateful
for his release from his own curse. He was grateful for his life of comfort and his home.
But more than anything, he was grateful for his wife. Sarielle meant everything to him. She meant the world and then some. He was lucky to have her and to know the true measure of love with her.
He went back to his home, back to his wife, and climbed into bed with her. He pulled her sleeping body close, tucking her into the bend of his body. He brushed her hair back, baring her sleeping face to him. He settled his hand on her belly.
His curse was over. He was free. Free to love.
And never again would he do anything that he felt in his soul was wrong. He would never risk losing her.
Never.
Garreth snuggled in with his wife and fell asleep.
For all my fellow rescuers out there—your hard work saving lives makes all the difference. Know that you are very much appreciated for it.
B
Y
J
ACQUELYN
F
RANK
The Immortal Brothers
Cursed by Fire
Cursed by Ice
The World of Nightwalkers
Forbidden
Forever
Forsaken
Forged
Three Worlds
Seduce Me in Dreams
Seduce Me in Flames
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR
Jacquelyn Frank is the
New York Times
bestselling author of the Immortal Brothers series (
Cursed by Fire, Cursed by Ice
), World of Nightwalkers series (
Forbidden, Forever, Forsaken
, and
Forged
), the Three Worlds series (
Seduce Me in Dreams
and
Seduce Me in Flames
), the Nightwalkers series (
Adam, Jacob, Gideon, Elijah, Damien
, and
Noah
), the Shadowdwellers novels (
Ecstasy, Rapture
, and
Pleasure
), and the Gatherers novels (
Hunting Julian
and
Stealing Katherine
). She lives in North Carolina and has been writing romantic fiction ever since she picked up her first teen romance at age thirteen.
www.jacquelynfrank.com
@JacquelynFrank
Read on for an exciting sneak peek of the next book in
The
IMMORTAL BROTHERS series
B
OUND BY
S
IN
B
Y
J
ACQUELYN
F
RANK
By the time Jaykun awoke, the battle was over.
And dusk was approaching.
He sat up and a sharp pain lanced through him, taking his breath away. Still, he was much better off than he had been. And he had felt much worse before. Much worse. Garreth and Dethan were both missing from the tent, as was Shey. Tonkin was sitting close by however. No doubt keeping an eye on him.
“Where are my brothers?” he asked with a groan as he threw his legs over the side of the cot. Tonkin hastened to his feet and reached to help him, but Jaykun fended him off with a raised hand.
“They are helping bring the wounded off the field.”
“And the battle?”
“Won. All that’s left now is the city walls to breach. But I don’t imagine it will be much of a fight since they sent most of their men into the field.”
“Wise rulers would have held at least some for defending
the walls. But in the face of an army as massive as ours, they would have been much better served to open their gates and let us in peacefully. Now there is death on their doorstep and women without husbands and sons. Even some daughters.”
“People think fighting for their way of life is more important than their lives themselves.”
Jaykun straightened to his full height, although it took some doing. His whole body ached, as well as his throbbing chest. But his heart was beating and the bleeding had stopped. It was an improvement over hours earlier.
“Sor, where are you going?” Tonkin asked hesitantly. He knew that questioning Jaykun wasn’t a wise idea, but the brothers had told him to keep Jaykun down as long as possible.
“It is dusk. I have business elsewhere.”
Tonkin nodded. He had been around the brothers long enough to know what came with dusk. He stepped back and let Jaykun pass.
Jaykun walked out of the tent and into the camp. The whole of it was active, but it was a weary sort of activity. The bustle of men coming back from battle, tired and bloodied and some deeply wounded. But their day would not end until darkness forced it upon them. They were good men, dedicated soldiers. Jaykun was completely committed to them, as they were committed to him.
He didn’t have time to find his brothers, and there was no reason for him to. They would know what had happened to him.
He walked through the camp as quickly as his abused body allowed for. He had chosen a spot for this when they had encamped four days earlier. He had come there every night at dusk for each of those four nights … and would for every night following.
It was along a not-too-distant beach. Far enough away from the battlefield and the encampment to ensure he would not be seen. The beach was littered with seals, their large, sleek bodies sprawled out in the late-day sun, catching the last of its light on their shining fur. There were natural jetties bracketing the sheltered cove and they, too, were full of seals. There were even some morari to be found, their bodies just as sleek, if not on a much larger and bewhiskered scale, tusks long and ivory as they jutted out beneath their lips.
Jaykun had found a cove … a cave really, not too far down that beach and he headed right for it. The floor of the shale cave was submerged and that was fine. It didn’t matter. He walked to the rear of the shallow cave and slowly disrobed, placing all of his clothing on a shale outcropping. Once he was fully nude, he sat down in the water. Upon being seated, the water came up to the bottom of his ribs and lapped there quietly.
From there he watched the sinking sun in the west. When the first touch of dusk came, he began to feel it. Sometimes he thought this was the worst of it … when he went from feeling fully normal to …
It always started in his hands. It felt like a stinging sensation, and then it intensified. He put them under the water, as if it might somehow delay what was coming.
It did not.
In the center of his palm his skin began to blacken. Then, like the sharpest burning cinder, the center of his hands began to glow. That was because it
was
cinders. His entire body was burning from the inside out and even the water could not douse the ferocious burn. He began to glow hotly, like a star caught on land, and agony clawed through him again and again. But he gritted his teeth together and refused to shout out, even
though it took everything that he was to keep from doing so.
The water around him began to steam and boil, hissing as it lapped up against his fiercely burning body. The burn overtook him completely, every molecule of his body on fire. The water did not help or soothe.
Nothing could help.
This was his punishment and he must see it through, every night from dusk to juquil’s hour. There was nothing he could do to change it. Would never be able to change it. He must suffer it alone, far away from anyone who might be accidentally harmed by what he became.
But what he didn’t know was that he wasn’t alone. Curious eyes were watching him, growing wide as they watched him burn and the water around him bubble.
But Jaykun was far too overwhelmed with his pain to realize it.
At juquil’s hour the burning stopped. His body still glowed like the hottest ember in the fire, but now the water was able to douse those embers. It was still steaming hot around him, but it was better than the temperature of his body so he laid down in the water and let it cool and soothe him.
He began to heal almost as soon as the fire was out. It would not be an instantaneous process, but it would happen quickly. As soon as his vision had healed enough to allow for it, he got up, stumbled, and waded out into the colder, deeper water. The salt of it burned even as the cold of it soothed. He could hear the hoarse barking of the seals, even though he could not make them out in the darkness, other than to see dark round shapes lumped out on the rocks.
Slipping into the ocean, swimming into the calm waters of the cove, he let the water cool him completely.
The dead, burned skin sloughed off of his body and within an hour freshly healed muscle and pink skin could be seen in odd patches on his flesh. By the time two hours had passed there was no more blackened skin, only the scarring of the healing burns. Given several more hours, that scarring would disappear almost completely as well.
Jaykun swam back to the mouth of the cave and waded into it, looking for his clothes. He was nearly dressed when he thought he heard a splash that was somehow out of place in the rhythmic lapping of the waves. Probably a seal, he thought. But he was on his guard just the same. The last thing he needed was to be ambushed by a stray enemy contingent. Especially since he had foolishly left his weapons behind. But he had not been thinking very straight when he had left the camp. Still, the lapse was inexcusable.
He moved to the shore, stepping around the shale outcroppings with sure footing, the darkness meaning very little to him. He could not see in the dark any better than any man as a rule, but he did have a keener eyesight and sense than most and so was able to navigate pretty easily. It helped that the moon was coming full in a few days, so it shed a fairly bright light upon the beach.
Jaykun stepped from the sand and into the low, scrubby vegetation, picking his way back toward the camp. That was when he heard the shuffle of sound. The sound of brush being disturbed … but not by him. He turned about in the darkness, his eyes narrowing. He could sense that he wasn’t alone.
“Get him!”
The shout preceded the launch of dark bodies from out of the vegetation. They had been crouched down low, indiscernible from the shale rocks and long grasses. Three men in dark clothing. Moonlight gleamed off a
raised sword and Jaykun had to move swiftly to get out of its damage path. As it was the tip of it nicked his already abused skin, leaving a thin cut on his cheek in its wake.
But that was the last lucky shot they were going to get, he thought with rising anger. But even though his temper began to bubble, his movements were sure and calm, almost rote. He caught the hand wielding that sword and jerked on it, throwing the wielder onto the rushing rise of his knee. His enemy grunted as Jaykun belted the breath out of his body, and then Jaykun disarmed him, arming himself in that same fluid movement.
The sword he had acquired was heavy in the pommel, making it poorly balanced, but it was just right for smacking the butt of it into the temple of the second man. The third man rushed in, tackling Jaykun to the rocky sand. Jaykun rolled with the weight of the man until his enemy was beneath him. Jaykun straddled his chest and brought the pommel of the sword down hard on his nose, breaking it and stunning him all at once. Then Jaykun jammed the heel of his free palm up under the man’s chin, pushing his head back and opening his neck to the swipe of his blade.
Blood erupted from the man’s cut throat and splashed against Jaykun’s clothing. Not that he cared. He was more concerned with the two remaining men who had since thrown off the effects of his stunning blows and were now rushing him as a single force, tackling him back into the sand. He felt his shoulder wrench under the impact, but literally shrugged the sensation of it off. His heavy-bottomed sword, however, went flying from his hand. He was wrestling for control of the situation, trying to throw off the weight of two heavy bodies sitting on his chest and legs. He arched his back hard, twisted every way he could think of, but the fact was he was wrung out. After being run through the heart and then suffering
his nightly torment, there was almost nothing left inside of him. Oh, he was immortal, but he felt every single second of that immortality in one way or another. Tonight it was in the injuries he had been forced to sustain. They weakened him, made him vulnerable. And gods help him if by some rare chance one of these men was wielding a god-made weapon. All it would take was a simple beheading by one such weapon and that would be the end of him. Although, sometimes—some very low times—he wondered if that wouldn’t be for the better. It would certainly end the torment he suffered night after night. But who was to say he would be spared an entirely new torment if he should end up in the eight hells? At least alive there was some reprieve.
And so he fought. Oh, how he fought. He kicked and snarled, throwing both men off of himself, but they quickly pinned him down again. Still, he did not go down easy. The two men were panting hard for breath as they held him down, their faces battered from where he had managed to punch them, their bodies bruised likewise.
“Stay down
trega
!” the one nearest his head snarled at him, calling him what the Krizans had called the invaders to their lands. The Krizan on Jaykun’s chest was built for sheer brute strength. There was no grace to him, merely muscle and ferocity. His bottom canine teeth, like all Krizans, tusked up over his upper lip. They were capped in a silvery metal that gleamed in the moonlight. The Krizans liked to adorn their prominent teeth in all manner of ways, but the warriors preferred to keep them sharp or make them somehow more vicious. A Krizan was not above biting his enemy.
His nose was flat, his nostrils wide. He looked a great deal like one of the morari Jaykun had seen on the jetty. He had on a sealskin hat, the floppy ends of it hanging over his ears.
“So,
trega
, you fall to Lukan! You are perhaps not so formidable after all!” he said in his guttural, heavily accented voice. There was a common language that most people on the trade routes spoke, but not all spoke it well or clearly.
“I presume you are Lukan?” Jaykun said dryly. He had relaxed, saving his strength for the opening when it came.
“Lukan! Greatest of all the mighty Krizan warriors!”
“Your mighty warriors looked more like sleepy women out on that battlefield today,” Jaykun said.
The Krizan roared in outrage, spittle flying from his lips.
“The demon
trega
leaders use sorcery to win their battles! Evil trickery!”
“I hate to break it to you, but we don’t have any mages with us at present. The most dangerous thing we have along those lines are the mem healers. Not very dangerous at all I’m afraid.”
“You are a liar,
trega
! All
trega
are liars and demons!” He hissed past his over plump lips. “Now we will disembowel you and cut you into little pieces, painting a picture with you on the beach for the other
trega
to find in the morning.”
So, they didn’t realize he was the
trega
leader. That was perhaps a good thing, Jaykun thought. Otherwise they would have tried to kill him immediately, using him as some sort of trophy or whatever it was that the Krizans liked to do to the leaders of an enemy force.
“Why don’t you all just give up already? We’re going to come over your walls tomorrow, whether you like it or not. No one else has to die if you simply open the gates.”
“We would rather die than let
trega
like you into our cities where you will kill our children and defile our women.”
“Trust me, we don’t want anything to do with your women,” Jaykun said. To be blunt, Krizan women were twice as ugly as their hideous male counterparts.
“Again he lies,” the second warrior said. “Who wouldn’t want the beauty of a Krizan warrior woman? Kill him. His words irritate my ears.”
“Yes, do get on with it,” Jaykun said with a sigh.
His blasé tone enraged the Krizan warrior. He balled up his fist and punched it dead on into Jaykun’s face. And it hurt. There was no two ways about it. Krizan warriors were definitely strong, if not exactly bright.
The Krizan pulled a dagger from his boot and reared back to plunge it into Jaykun’s chest.
Oh no. Not that again, Jaykun vowed to himself. He freed a hand and reached to catch the downward plunge, his hand grabbing the meaty forearm of the warrior and stopping the dagger dead in the air. The warrior seemed as though he couldn’t believe his eyes for a second, couldn’t believe that Jaykun had the strength to countermand his strike.
