Prince of Storms (4 page)

DEEP
E
BB TINGED THE GREAT PLAZA LAVENDER
. No Tarig were abroad, nor any other sentient of the Ascendancy. Outside the regent's pavilion Tai adjusted his ceremonial sword in its sheath and scanned the emptiness between the canals and bridges, assuring himself, despite the guards, that it was safe to go to bed. The Tarig were in their warrens on the Palatine Hill, and the functionaries in their cells of the Magisterium. Still, Tai would not sleep just yet, not until Master Quinn did.

It had been forty days since the Tarig lost the Ascendancy. It was still a tense and confusing time. Add to that, Anzi's situation. To everyone's great relief she had managed to come back from the Rose, sent back by—Tai struggled to keep English names straight—
Stefan Polich
and
Caitlin Quinn
, who allowed her to enter the terrible pool at
Hanford
and come home. But then it became clear that before she had stepped into the Rose she had been somewhere else. With the Jinda ceb Horat. The Paion.

Tai entered the central chamber of the pavilion, noting that everyone had retired for the ebb. However, he heard the regent speaking behind the curtain to Anzi, so Titus Quinn did not sleep as yet and still might have need of him.

That was just as well. Tai had a long list of English words to memorize—
ocean
,
newsTide
,
moon
,
World Alliance
,
mSap
,
hamburger
—given him by John Hastings, the man of the Rose, the only survivor from Hel Ese's plot. John had repented of that crime; still, it was hard to forget what he had done.

A noise behind him. Zhiya stood at the open curtain of her sleeping area. Not dressed as a godder these days, she wore a padded jacket and laced trousers like a soldier. Although only the height of Tai's breastbone, she still looked formidable.

Zhiya nodded toward the master's suite. “Is he retired for the ebb?”

“Yes. You wish to see him?”

“Is she with him?”

“Of course.”

Zhiya smirked. “Of course. Where else would his wife be at this hour?” She nodded at him, a perfunctory good ebb, and closed her curtain.

Tai glanced at the regent's quarters. Zhiya wanted to know if Master Quinn and Ji Anzi were still sleeping together. Well, they would do what moved them. Tai hoped the regent was moved to pleasure his wife. She did not look unattractive, considering the shocking revelation that she had lived among the Jinda ceb Horat for five thousand days. Because of this, she was now older than her husband. Still attractive, yes, but not aged with the restraint of the Entire, where lives were long. Love, however, would overcome such things, would it not?

He glanced at the curtain. Surely it was past time for talking.

Quinn watched as Anzi sat at the writing desk working on her letter. It was very late, but he wished not to disturb her if, as now, she seemed to be finding the words that had eluded her. Propped up on the bed, pillows behind him, he enjoyed her company, even if she was preoccupied.

“Husband, how shall I say
regret
?
One is regretful
, or
I regret
? Is
I regret
too obvious, too direct?” She stared at her scroll, frowning, although when she finished it, how would she send it to the Jinda ceb?

“You know their ways, my love.” He had his own worries, worries he'd hoped to put aside so late in the ebb. With Anzi preoccupied, he considered the bizarre meeting with Geng De, and the boy navitar's threats. To weave the world. Could it be done? The future altered by design? Zhiya had warned him; her own mother swore it was true. But Jin Yi was half mad, like all navitars.

“But how to say it?” Anzi persisted, still worrying her verbs.

“I would say
unintended consequences
. If there were any.” Anzi had told him that she didn't know if her manner of departing the Jinda ceb had caused offense. She guessed that it had. She wanted to cement relations with the Jinda ceb when they arrived. It would not be helpful if she had offended them.

Over the last days he had been learning about Anzi's exile among the Jinda ceb Horat. They had saved her life by retrieving her from the void. But time passed differently in their universe, and she had endured a long and poignant separation from her world and from him. The story of her time among them had spooled out over the days since their reunion. For himself, the lapsed time was almost impossible to imagine—fourteen years. How much worse it must be for her…but she accepted it bravely. She would have perished, otherwise, like Su Bei.

There had hardly been enough time to let all this sink in. There were other adjustments, too: his wounds, healing slowly and perhaps imperfectly; holding the Tarig at bay. And always on his mind these last weeks, his brother's death, reported by Anzi. Killed by a man who was like an uncle to him. Lamar…God, how deeply the world had changed.

“Come to bed, Anzi.”

“Yes.” She continued to write.

And then there was the Rose and its politics, and the near impossibility of communicating with them. Unless the Jinda ceb, when they came, could help him. And if he could communicate with Earth, what could be said in a message, and to whom should it be directed? It seemed no matter how he tried to sort it that he was on his own.

“Anzi, leave off. Come to bed.”

“In a moment.” With her back to him, her emerald green silk robe brought out the startling white of her arms and neck. He watched her as she bowed her head over her work, exposing the nape of her neck. Anzi's hair was very short now, a concession she'd made to fit in better with the Jinda ceb among whom she had lived so long. It made her look especially beautiful, in the way of a handsome forty- or fifty-year-old woman. But time-in-years meant little. The Entire had no years, and who knew how to calculate the passage of time in the universe of the Jinda ceb?

“If one could do over what cannot be undone,” Anzi murmured, biting the tip of her stylus. She bent to her writing.

It was too much. He sprang from the bed. “No. You did it for the Rose.” They had been over and over what happened with her Jinda ceb teacher just before they sent her home. Who knew how the Jinda ceb really felt? “They're asking too much.”

Still seated, she looked up at him, stylus in hand. “They haven't asked anything of me. We haven't spoken. This is just in case.”

The thought came to him that by this late ebb letter she was avoiding being with him. She felt inadequate. Though he'd said
you are beautiful to me
a hundred times, she sometimes pointedly turned her face from him.

She turned back to the desk. He snapped up her scroll, holding it away from her.

Anger flashed in her eyes, he noted with satisfaction. At last a real emotion. The polite dance of what could be said, what could be trusted—it made him crazy.
You haven't changed in my sight.
But, as with the letter, was that too direct?

Relenting, he put the scroll in her hand, touching her wrist as he did so. Her skin was cool, and he suddenly wanted her.

She saw that in him. “Put out the light.”

“No need.”

She bent to the lamp to darken it, but he came between her and the light. He took her by the hand and led her to the sleeping platform, laying her down on the covers, taking the scroll from her.

“Bring down the curtain,” she whispered.

He lowered one of the cloths tied up near the post. Shadow fell over them. He pulled the robe from her shoulders, using his good arm, since the other barely responded. With his good left hand he traced the line of her neck, the hollow at her throat, her heavy, perfect breasts.

Voices outside. It sounded like Zhiya and Tai talking. Anzi propped herself up on her elbows. “Your work calls you.”

“It can wait.” He loosed the low slip she wore over her hips, and it fell into a puddle around her.

The voices continued. Anzi said, “Let me ask Tai.”

“Dressed like this?” He pushed her back, and she let him, sprawling beneath him.

But she turned her face away. “Perhaps Mei Ing comes to call.”

Mei Ing? The vacuous subprefect? “Let her wait, then.”

“But she would be a worthy wife, Titus. Your own age.”

“Mei Ing is of no interest to me. You are. Especially now, woman. Can you stop talking?”

She smiled, but her eyes were still earnest. “I am too old to bear children.”

That gave him pause. “Fourteen years, Anzi.”
Jinda ceb years
he wanted to say, as though that made the time passage of even less account. “Five thousand days. You are not too old. But if you were, have I ever said I wanted children?” God knew he had not done well in that arena and wasn't sure he would ever try it again.

Anzi pulled her robe around her and rolled over until she could sit up and face him. “I am happy to be second wife, truly.”

Happy would not be the word he would use to describe her. “You are my first wife. My only wife.”

“If not a wife, a concubine. She could soothe you.”

“No, Anzi.
Enough
.”

“But—”

He pulled her across the bed and stopped her words with his mouth. Grasping her close, he managed to pull off her robe and throw it from the bed. A faint perfume came to him from the folds of the vanished robe, and more, the musk of her. He ran his hand between her legs, hearing her caught breath softly in his ear. The pulse of his blood came into his skin, his belly, his sex.

“Titus,” she whispered.

Her hand came around him, bringing an unbearable and sweet pressure, an acute hunger.
Do not speak
, he urged her silently. And she didn't. He knelt between her raised knees. Pulling her hips forward, his full length went into her, and he paused, breathless.

He leaned back enough to look at her face. She was everything he wanted, everything. When she would have said something, he shook his head, whispering, “Silently.”

She moved on him, making their connection long and short, deep and shallow. He heard her gasping against his throat as he bent over her. “Shhh,” he said, forbidding her even that articulation. He meant to have their union in holy silence, and it made them all the more pent up with the waiting release. Leaning on his elbows, he began his own rhythm—with just enough strength at the elbows to hold him above her, and no weakness lower than that. The tent filled with the pulse of their lovemaking.

When she could bear it no more, she arched her back, shuddering, letting go, the only sound her contorted breaths. Then his own release, churning from him, silent too, as he had demanded of her.

They were still. Metered by the curtain, the lamp shed a glow on them, burnishing sweat-drenched skin. Outside, the pavilion had gone deeply quiet.

They lay unspeaking, afraid to break the compact: I won't say. And you won't hear. Without words, we are saved.