Impossible Things (26 page)

‘Yes, but I was trying not to notice,’ he said, and her smile widened.

He led her to the bath, which steamed fragrantly with the scent of sage, and handed her in as if she were stepping into a carriage. When she lay back she felt fine linen against her skin. He’d draped the bath with cloth for her.

She heard the rustle of cloth and smelled the clean hot skin that meant he’d at least partially undressed, and then he was beside the bath, taking her hand and washing her arm.

‘This bath smells of you,’ she said dreamily.

‘It’s the soap I use.’ He sounded stilted, unsure what to say. ‘Mags makes different kinds. I like this one.’

‘I like it too.’

The cloth he used dipped across the top of her chest to her other arm. Then he leaned her forward and washed her back. When he was done and she reclined against the linens like a queen, she reached out and stroked her hand up his arm, feeling the formidable muscles there tremble.

‘Is this all right?’ he asked. ‘Is this okay?’

‘It’s wonderful,’ Ishtaer breathed, and he leaned forward to kiss her gently, his bare chest against her arm, as the washcloth caressed her breasts. Ishtaer let out a ragged breath against his cheek, but she didn’t tell him to stop and he continued on, gently caressing her, cupping the slight weight in his hand and stroking his thumb over her nipple, all with the fine cloth between them.

And just as heat started to gather inside her he slid the cloth away under the water, over her stomach and her hips, sliding over her thigh. He washed her right leg, then the left, each time stroking up the inside of her thigh and stopping just before the top. By the time the cloth touched her hips and buttocks, Ishtaer was panting, wanting something she couldn’t name.

No man had ever touched her and made her enjoy it. No one had ever teased her, stroked her, excited her like this. She wanted his hands everywhere, not through the barrier of the cloth or the water but everywhere, touching her and inciting the fire under her skin.

When he finally slipped the cloth between her legs his arm was around her shoulders as she pressed her breasts against his chest, kissing him desperately. The fine linen caressed her tender flesh, and just when she didn’t think she could stand it any more, the cloth disappeared and his fingers were there, stroking her, exploring her, finding ways to touch her that had hot streaks of pleasure shooting through her veins.

‘Kael,’ she gasped against his mouth, and then he found a spot that made her arch against him and shudder, and he caressed it over and over until the heat and pressure inside her exploded and she cried out in shock and delight as pleasure shook her, convulsing in his arms.

Kael lifted her gently from the bath, her body still trembling with the aftershocks of her orgasm.
I did that
, he thought, pride making him grin like an idiot. Ishtaer clung to him as if he were a raft in a storm, and he kissed her forehead, her closed eyelids, the tip of her nose.

Gently he slid her down to stand on the hearthrug, steadying her as she stumbled. ‘Easy. I’ve got you.’

Ishtaer clung to him, her eyes opening huge and dazed. Unable to help himself, he kissed her, tasting her desire and wonderment, before reaching for the towel and carefully drying her.

She was flushed, and not just from the heat. Her hair clung to her in damp tendrils, her lips were red and swollen, her nipples hard and tight. His whole body ached with wanting her, but he told it to shut up and wait, and instead gently led her to the bed.

This time it wasn’t his hands that caressed her but his mouth, tasting that golden skin, his lips and tongue exploring the satin smoothness of her. He kissed her chest, made love to her breasts, and then rolled her gently over to map the muscles of her back.

There were scars here, old marks, the skin puckered and rough. He kissed those too, every inch of them, where someone had beaten her, whipped her, thrown her against hard ground and done unspeakable things to her. He’d seen their full extent when he washed her back and for a moment anger had eclipsed desire, before he’d renewed his promise to obliterate every bad thing that had been done to her.

He kissed her firm, round buttocks, enjoying the way her muscles quivered as he licked a path down her thigh, and ascertained that the back of her knee was ticklish.

‘Stop!’ she gasped, and he grinned.

‘Sorry. I’ll make it up to you,’ he said, flipping her over and licking his way up her other thigh until he was settled between her legs, tasting a sweetness he was pretty sure no one else had ever tried.

Her response was so gratifying, from the quiver of muscles under her skin to the gasp of his name as she shook and trembled and finally shuddered in pure pleasure, moaning what might have been his name spoken by someone with no breath left.

He kissed his way back up her body as she trembled and clutched at him, and when he licked into her mouth she made an animalistic sound as she tasted herself on him. Kael slid into her slick heat as if he’d done it a hundred times before, and she wrapped her arms and legs around him as he moved inside her.

‘Ishtaer,’ he said, and ran out of words.

‘Don’t stop,’ she breathed, and he didn’t, finding a rhythm that she matched and surging with her into heat and light and love so blinding he blacked out as the pleasure took him.

When he came back to himself he was lying heavy on Ishtaer and her face was buried in his neck, hot tears burning his skin.

The delight dropped away and horror overtook it. ‘Ishtaer? Ish! What’s wrong? What did I do? I’m sorry, Ishtaer, I’m sorry …’

‘No,’ she gasped. ‘No. I just – I didn’t know, I didn’t know …’

She lifted her head and took a deep breath. And thank all the gods, she was smiling at him.

‘I didn’t know it could be like that,’ she said, and relief overwhelmed Kael. He kissed her, long and deep, and fell into a contented sleep in the arms of the woman he loved.

Out from the darkness of sleep a huge red cat loomed.

It reared huge and fearsome, all fangs and claws, a crowned cat of blood red, but she wasn’t afraid. She lay on a soft bed, a man sleeping beside her. A handsome man, a strong man, who opened his eyes and had the face of the pirate king who’d laughed like a god as he whirled in a storm of slaughter until the deck ran red with blood.

‘Ishtaer?’ said the pirate king with Kael’s voice, and Ishtaer screamed and ran.

‘Where’d she go? Where’d she go?’

Trousers barely fastened, Kael raced barefoot along the corridor after Ishtaer, trying to work out what the hell had gone wrong. Last night they’d made love explosively and she’d fallen asleep smiling in his arms. This morning he’d woken up to find a madwoman screaming and bolting, stark naked, from the room.

So he ran after her.

A few shocked onlookers pointed dazedly and he ran on, in what he realised with a sinking heart was the direction of Ishtaer’s own room. Why had she run? What sudden change of heart had hit her this morning that hadn’t occurred last night? Had he been totally mistaken in her reaction to him? No, he couldn’t have been. Nobody could have misunderstood that bone-shaking pleasure.

He reached the door to her workroom at the same time as Brutus, the dog whipping in ahead of him, closely followed by Eirenn. Skidding inside, he saw the door to her bedroom slam so hard it banged back on its hinges, revealing Ishtaer huddled naked on the floor, shaking and sobbing.

‘Ish,’ he started across the room, but Brutus blocked his way, snarling and baring his very large teeth.

‘Brutus, back off, good dog,’ he said, but before he got any further someone slammed into him, bearing him to the ground with a painful thud and laying a cold steel blade against his throat.

‘What,’ Eirenn growled, ‘did you do to her?’

‘Me? Nothing! I didn’t do anything! Ishtaer, what is going
on
?’

‘She is sobbing her heart out after spending the night with you, that’s what’s going on,’ Eirenn said. His knees pressed painfully into Kael’s armpits, effectively trapping him.
Damn, I taught him that move
. ‘I’m only going to ask once more: What. Did. You. Do?’

‘I. Don’t. Know!’ Kael yelled in sheer frustration. ‘She was fine last night, she just woke up and screamed and ran. Eirenn, you saw her last night. Did she look like a woman doing something she didn’t want to?’

Eirenn’s face was thunderous. Kael had never seen him so angry. ‘No,’ he ground out.

‘And do you really think I’d do anything to hurt her? After all this time, do you really think that of me?’

Eirenn’s gaze flicked past him towards Ishtaer’s bedroom, where her sobs seemed to have subsided.

‘Well, something’s upset her, and you’re the one she spent the night with. What happened?’

‘I am not giving you a detailed account of what we did last night. Just let me up, all right? It’s not like her dog will let me past anyway.’

‘Wolf,’ came Ishtaer’s voice, and they both turned their heads towards it. Eirenn climbed reluctantly off him. ‘He really is a wolf.’

They looked at Brutus, crouched in the doorway like a coiled spring, lips peeled back over huge, sharp fangs.

‘That’s what I’ve been telling you,’ Eirenn said cautiously as Kael got to his feet.

‘But why are you telling us that now? Why suddenly … Ishtaer, did you have a vision?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and took in a ragged breath, ‘but not last night.’

Slowly she uncurled and, seeming to realise she was utterly naked, pulled her nightgown from the bed and over her head.

Then she faced them, and her eyes met his.

‘I can see you,’ she said quietly. ‘I can see everything.’

Kael stared at her. She stared back, her eyes the same pale blue they’d always been, now focused directly on him.

‘See?’ Eirenn said beside him. ‘As in … see?’

‘You’re wearing a blue shirt,’ Ishtaer told him, ‘and a brown jerkin, and brown trousers, and you have a red scarf around your neck. You have dark eyes and dark brown hair. Kael, you’re wearing green trousers. They make your skin look very pale. Your eyes are almost black. Your hair is as dark as you told me that time. Black, in this light.’

They both gazed at her in stupefaction.

‘And Brutus is grey and brown and white and most definitely not a dog. I think he must have come from the circus that was in town the night before we found him. He’s not quite fully grown yet. He’ll be huge when he is.’

‘But—but—’ Kael managed, and couldn’t think of another word.

‘And you,’ she addressed him calmly, ‘you are the pirate who stormed a merchant ship on the run from the Revenue and killed most of the crew. You threw the captain overboard, apparently without realising that he had in his pocket a crystal necklace belonging to the girl he’d kept locked in his cabin. You were surprised when she leapt overboard after it. She never found it, of course. It’s at the bottom of the ocean.’

His shock turned to horror with every word. She delivered it as if telling someone else’s story.

‘You won’t remember her, of course—’

—the rain lashed down on me as the pirates attacked, and I flew across the deck after the captain as he was thrown overboard with my necklace, my mother’s necklace in his pocket, and the pirate king laughed like a god as he whirled in a storm of slaughter until the deck ran red with blood, never stopping me as I leapt into the cold dark sea—

She’d never shown him the pirate king’s face. In Ishtaer’s memory he was an exaggeration, he was a nightmare, he was the devil. He was the devil and she chose the cold, dark sea.

‘I never saw your face,’ he said, as if that was some defence.

‘I suppose a pirate king sees people running from him every day,’ she said. ‘Even when it means drowning.’

‘Ever been in a sea battle? Half the damn crew leap overboard,’ Kael said. ‘It’s chaos.’

Ishtaer was silent a moment. Her gaze slid away from his.

There had been so many ships that season, raiding the Saranos and their failing economy, and there were often girls, stowaways or whores, and after all he was Krull the Warlord and he’d made a name for himself as a real evil bastard, so people often ran, and jumped, and took their chances … ‘Look, if I’d seen you, I’d have tried to help—’ he began desperately.

‘From the bed of one captain to another? All she wanted was those crystals, and to get away from the slaughter on the deck. The wood ran red with blood. She remembered the hot spray of it on her skin for years afterwards.’

‘Ishtaer—’

‘So she jumped, and swam, and if you’d followed her, if you’d really tried to
help
,’ her voice sharpened, ‘you might have stopped her being picked up by a slave ship. You might have taken that ship and slaughtered the slavers there, who kept people, men and women and children, chained on a deck so filthy and cramped that even the healthy joined the piles of stinking corpses.’

Her eyes met his again, the blue of spring skies, and she said, ‘I remembered the pirate king’s face. I never thought I’d see it again.’

Kael opened his mouth and no sound came out. He stared at her beautiful, beloved face, at the cold blankness there, and didn’t know what the hell to do.

‘I’d like you to leave now, please,’ she said. ‘Just go.’

‘But, Ishtaer,’ said Eirenn. Kael had completely forgotten he was there.

‘No. Just go. Both of you. I need … I need to have some time to think. Please.’

Eirenn grabbed his arm and tugged him out of the room, but not before Kael threw one last agonised glance over his shoulder at Ishtaer, standing there in her nightgown, a statue again.

Eirenn shut the door and glared at him.

‘I don’t need it from you too, kid.’

‘All right. First of all, stop calling me “kid”. I’m only a couple of years younger than you.’ At Kael’s frankly disbelieving look, he insisted, ‘I’ve been a first-year Tyro for five years. That’s not the issue. Did you really do those things she said?’

At least it wasn’t an outright accusation.

‘I’m a warlord and a pirate,’ Kael said. ‘I’ve done a lot of things. Emperor sanctioned me to raid ships carrying illegal cargo. That merchantman was running from the Revenue, and legal ships don’t do that.’

‘So you killed everyone on board?’

‘When they started firing on us we fired back.’ He leaned against the wall, head back, exhausted. How many short hours had it been since that blissful night with Ishtaer? It seemed like another lifetime.

‘Yeah, but slaughter—’

He rolled his head to fix Eirenn with a look. ‘You’ve never been in the middle of a pitched battle, lad, so I’m going to ignore that.’ He scrubbed his hands over his face. It wasn’t much of an excuse. None of it was.

None of it ever was, when it came to Ishtaer.

‘Do you remember her?’

‘I remember the ship we took in the storm.’ A fight like that, in the howling wind and rain, the ship bucking like a maddened bull, the adrenaline pumping like a jackhammer … How was he supposed to notice one girl in all that?
Excuses, Kael.
‘Five years – no, six now. The Saranos. Just before the war. There were a lot of ships.’

‘The Saranos war? But—how come Ishtaer wasn’t caught up in that?’

Because a war was kicking off, so the gods sent Ishtaer a Militis mark. And instead of being feted as a Warrior – dear gods, did you expect her to save them all? – she got thrown out of the relative safety of the Manor House, and when a stupid boy tried to rape her she used that gods-given strength and skill to kill him. And then she had to run.

He saw it as clearly as if she’d sent him another horrific vision, and the irony tasted like bile in his mouth.

He cleared his throat and said, ‘Reckon she left just before it kicked off.’ Days before I arrived. Days. ‘Let’s see – we were about ten days out of port, chasing down illegal Saranean exports. Can you believe that’s what started the whole swiving mess? Illegal exports. They refused to bide by any of the Empire’s rules, Empire sent in governors and peacekeepers, people rioted, Empire sent troops …’

‘And eventually they sent you.’

‘I’m a last resort. We’d only just got back to the Empire from the mess in Draxos when we were sent back out to the Islands. Whole conflict lasted a few weeks. Didn’t take much to subdue ’em. Do you know what did it? When we found the workhouses. People there had no idea what really went on in them. They were so disgusted with their own government they lay down arms and let the Empire take over. I remember we had a load of orphans from the workhouses on the ship. There were charities in the Empire to reunite them with their families or find them new ones.’

He remembered the huddle of shocked, frightened kids, none of them older than about twelve. The workhouse wouldn’t look after a kid past twelve. They were sent out to work, which for a lot of them was a step up.

None of them knew a thing about the Empire. Despite the Saranos being on a key trading route between the Empire and the New Lands, they’d been so insulated, so wilfully ignorant of the world outside. Hell, they hadn’t even known what the marks of the Chosen meant. They’d thought he and Verak were some kind of warlocks.

‘Did any of them succeed?’ Eirenn asked, and Kael opened eyes he hadn’t recalled closing.

‘I doubt it. War’s a swiving awful thing, lad. Probably Ishtaer’s story isn’t even all that unusual.’

Eirenn regarded him with intelligent eyes. ‘What is her story?’

‘Trust me, you don’t want to know. And I certainly ain’t telling you.’ He straightened away from the wall. ‘Right. Anyway. Rumour mill’s probably going at the speed of light after her naked dash this morning, so we should probably go and stop it.’

‘By saying what?’

‘Hey, you’re the storyteller, kid.’

‘Stop calling me kid.’

‘It’s a sign of affection,’ Kael said.

‘Yeah, right.’

But they hadn’t even reached the longhouse before Verak intercepted them, his face grey.

‘What?’ Kael said.

Verak held out a letter. It had the Emperor’s seal on it.

Kael grabbed it. A letter arriving three days after the Dark had to have been sent by Viator. And that meant it had to be urgent. More than urgent.

The letter was brief, and in the Emperor’s own hand.

‘Lady Samara has stolen my nephew. Come to the Empire immediately. My army is waiting.’

He stared at it in shock, reread it, and stared some more.

‘It can’t be,’ he said.

‘It is,’ said a voice, and a woman he hadn’t even noticed standing behind Verak stepped forward. Lady Aquilinia. ‘I saw it myself.’

‘And you didn’t stop it?’

‘I wasn’t there.’ She tapped her Seer’s mark. ‘My visions are extremely reliable. In any case, by the time I’d reached the Emperor so had Samara’s ransom demand.’

‘Fuck,’ said Kael.

‘Precisely. He wants you there as fast as possible.’

‘He does know what time of year it is?’

Aquilinia gave him a steady look. ‘Yes, he does, and he also knows what Samara may do with his nephew if he dallies too long. Where is your Seer? She should have some insights into Lady Samara for us.’

Kael winced, and so did Eirenn.

‘She’s, ah, not well.’

‘She is a Healer. She can get well,’ Aquilinia said crisply. ‘Her presence is imperative.’

He exchanged a look with Eirenn.

‘She can’t,’ Eirenn said.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ Verak asked. ‘What did you do, Kael?’

‘Why does everyone assume it’s my fault! Gods. Look, Ishtaer has just … she’s just had a bit of a bad time and she’s kind of … vulnerable, and I really don’t think this is going to be something she’ll be able to do—’

‘What won’t?’ asked a cool voice from behind him, Ishtaer’s voice, and he whirled around to see her standing there looking remarkably composed, Brutus at her side. Great. Two women he’d slept with, looking unimpressed with him. All he needed now was Mags and the nightmare would be complete. ‘What won’t be something I’ll be able to do?’

Her eyes scanned their faces. Kael wondered if she realised who Verak was.

‘Lady Ishtaer,’ Aquilinia said. ‘Do you remember me?’

Ishtaer glanced at the woman’s Seer mark and, as if just recalling a chance meeting said, ‘Lady Aquilinia. Of course.’ The two women exchanged curtseys as if they were meeting in the Imperial Court. ‘Are you here on business?’

‘Unfortunately I am. The Emperor has sent me to summon Lord Krull and his men to what I fear will amount to war. He has also specially requested your presence.’

‘Mine?’ Ishtaer’s brows went up. She seemed to be trying to read the other woman’s face, but Kael knew she was hopelessly out of practice and besides, he’d bet good money Aquilinia never let slip an expression she didn’t want to.