Princeps' fury (61 page)

“I still don’t understand,” Isana said gently.

“Septimus had all three, lady,” Raucus replied. “You showed me your will when you stayed my attack on the Icemen, and when you challenged me and wouldn’t back down. Even when you bloody well knew you should have.

“You showed me your heart when you fought me as you did—to the death, without flinching. When you lay bleeding with—” He shook his head, as though flinching from the image, but forced himself to continue. “With my sword in your guts. But your concern was for me. I felt it in you. It was no act, lady. You were willing to die to open my fool eyes. There was no scheme in that, no puppet strings. You meant what you said.”

“Yes,” Isana said simply.

“That’s two,” Raucus said. “But when I realized that you staged the whole thing to happen where the Icemen could see—and bloody
sense
everything that was going on, you showed me you had the brains as well. Sunset came alone into my personal chambers, after we’d seen to your wounds, and gave me his hand and his word that his folk would abide by the truce until we returned from battling the Vord.” Raucus shook his head, and a small note of what might have been wonder entered his voice. “And he meant it. It won’t resolve everything overnight. Maybe even not in my lifetime, but . . .”

“But it’s a start,” Isana said.

“It’s a start, Your Highness,” Raucus said. “Septimus, my friend, chose you. And chose well.” He bowed his head to her, and said, simply, “I am yours to command.”

CHAPTER 42

Once Lady Aquitaine and the Vord queen were gone with their retinues, the courtyard was strangely silent. Only a handful of Vord remained, along with a similarly reduced contingent of collared guards—and the prisoners, of course.

Of which, Amara was very much aware, she herself was currently the most endangered.

She shivered in the cold, her muscles aching from the effort, hardly able to do more than curl her body up as tightly as possible to keep from succumbing to the chills.

“You and your husband crippled my father,” Kalarus Brencis Minoris said in a quiet, deliberate tone. He walked toward her, the silver band of a discipline collar in his hand. “Not that there was a great deal of love lost between Father and me, but my life grew harder after the old slive was trapped in his bed. Do you have any idea how much damage you had to do to his spine to leave him broken like that?”

“H-h-he should have held still,” Amara said. “I’d have been glad to kill him.”

Brencis smiled. “My father always appreciated defiance from his women. I never really had the same tastes—but I’m beginning to see the appeal.” He crouched over Amara, the collar swaying in front of her eyes. “Rook was my first, you know. I think I was about thirteen. She was a couple of years older.” He shook his head. “I thought she liked me. But I realized later that she must have been acting under orders.” He bared his teeth, a hideous expression, completely disconnected from anything resembling a smile. “Just as she must have been doing tonight.”

Amara stared at him for a long, silent moment. Then she said, “It’s not really your fault you were raised by a monster, Brencis. M-maybe you never really had a chance. And I can’t bl-blame you for wanting to survive.” She smiled back at him. “So I’m going to give you one last chance to do the right thing before I k-kill you.”

Brencis stared at her for a second, uncertainty flickering in his eyes. Then he let out a short bark of a laugh. “Kill me? Countess,” he told her, “in a little while, I’m going to my bed. And you’re going to be happy to go with me.” He glanced idly around the courtyard. “Perhaps I’ll bring one of my girls, so that she can bathe you. We’ll see if we can broaden your horizons.”

She felt her body arch against her bonds, and was helpless to stop it. The pleasure wasn’t merely sexual—although it
was
that, too intensely so to believe. But atop that rapture were layers and layers of other sensations. The simple satisfaction of a hot drink on a cold morning. The heart-pounding excitement she felt when seeing Bernard for the first time in days or weeks. The joy of soaring up through dark, heavy clouds into the clear blue sky. The fierce pleasure of victory over intense competition in the Wind Trials, when she had been at the Academy. The bubbling laughter that followed after the third or fourth excellent joke she’d heard in an evening—and a thousand more, every single happiness, every single joy, every wonderful thing that had ever happened to her, every individual gratification of the body, mind, and heart, all blended into a single, sublime whole.

Brencis, the courtyard, the Vord, the Realm, even her husband—none of it mattered.

Nothing mattered but feeling
this
.

She knew she’d be weeping if she’d had thought enough for such inanities.

Someone was whispering to her. She didn’t know who. She didn’t care. The whispers didn’t matter. All that mattered was drowning in the pleasure.

She came back to herself, slowly, inside a warmly lit room. It looked like an inn room, a fairly lavish one. There were soft hangings on the walls, and an enormous bed. It was warm—blessedly warm, after the hideous cold of the courtyard. Her fingers and toes were tingling, so intensely that it would have hurt, if anything she felt could have been interpreted as anything but pure pleasure.

She was standing in a tub, and one of the barely clothed girls was taking off her travel-stained blouse. Amara stood in blissful disinterest. The girl began bathing her face and neck and shoulders, and Amara reveled in the warmth, the feeling of the soft washcloth against her skin, the scent of soap in the air.

She became aware of Brencis walking in a slow circle around the tub, unbuttoning his shirt as he went.

Despite his faults, she thought, he really was quite beautiful. She watched him, though the effort of moving her head simply became too much to sustain. She let her eyes follow him, tracking his movements through her lashes when the simple pleasure of feeling herself being cleaned of weeks of grime became almost too delicious to endure.

“Yes, my lord,” murmured the girl. Warm water cascaded over her head, and a gentler, softer-scented soap was applied to her hair. Amara just reveled in it.

“It’s too bad, really,” Brencis said. “I had hoped that you would put up more of a fight than this. But you were brittle, Countess. The ones who go this far under, this swiftly—they don’t come back. Do they, little Lyssa?”

“Yes, my lord,” Amara said drowsily. The soaking-wet leather was stubborn against her pleasure-numbed fingers. “I . . . it’s too tight, my lord.”

“Then be still,” Brencis said, his voice amused. “Very still.”

A dagger, its tip glittering with fascinating, wicked sharpness, appeared in his hand, and he knelt by her side. “Tell me, Countess,” he murmured. “Were you here on Gaius’s orders?”

“Yes, my lord,” Amara murmured. She watched as the knife’s tip, doubtless enhanced by Brencis’s furycraft, sliced effortlessly through the hem of the leather flying trousers over her ankle. He began cutting slowly upward, his knife opening the garment as readily as a boy might peel a fruit.

“And your husband,” Brencis said. “He isn’t dead, is he?”

“No, my lord,” Amara said sleepily. The knife slid over her calf. She wondered if she would feel it if such a sharp blade opened her flesh. She wondered if, in her current state, it would feel good.

Brencis laughed. “Ambitious of you. And what is to be the signal for him to begin? There doesn’t seem to be much left of you, but when we take him, I can at least make sure that you are the one to whisper in his ears when he is captured and recruit—”

Metal scraped on metal, and Brencis paused, frowning in puzzlement.

Amara looked down, to see that his knife had parted the leather over the top of her thigh—where the discipline collar her husband had bound to her, hours before, nestled tight against pale flesh.

Brencis’s eyes widened in stunned realization.

Amara called upon Cirrus, her hands lashing out. She caught Brencis by the wrist of the hand that held the knife, twisting toward his thumb, the motion taking him by surprise, so swiftly that he had no time to resist with his normal strength, much less with fury-enhanced power. The knife came free of his grasp, and Amara seized it with what seemed like lazy precision to her own accelerated senses before it could even begin to fall.

Brencis had seized upon his own wind furies by then, his hands beginning to rise to defend himself—but he had not been quick enough. Amara slapped his hand aside with one hand—

—and with a flick of her wrist, passed the fury-sharpened dagger through both of the arteries in his throat.

Blood flowed out in a torrent, a cloud. It splashed over Amara’s naked leg and torso, hot and hideous, as she stumbled, thrown off-balance by the speed of her own movements, and fell back out of the tub and out of the reach of Brencis’s hands.

The young Aleran lord arched his back, his hands thrashing out wildly. One of his clenched fists struck the wooden frame of the tub and shattered it, sending soapy water, the bubbles stained with spraying blood, rushing out over the floor. He twisted, flailing toward Amara, and one of his thrashing shoulders struck a dazed Lyssa in the stomach, flinging her back like a doll.

“The signal?” Amara hissed, her body singing, alight with rage and with the silver-white pleasure flowing from the metal collar bound about her thigh. “The signal is your
corpse
, traitor. You will never
touch
my husband.”

He tried to say something, perhaps, but no sound emerged—the dagger had parted his windpipe as well.

It was nearly impossible to strike down a furycrafter of Brencis’s power without employing comparable furycraft to accomplish it.

But only
nearly
.

The last scion of Kalarus crumpled to the floor of the inn, shrinking like a bladder being slowly emptied of water. His blood joined the perfumed water on the floor.

There had barely been a sound to betray the murder.

Amara stumbled back against the wall of the room, fighting the euphoria still being forced upon her by the collars. She wanted, very badly, to just sink to the floor and let the pleasure have its way with her once more—

—but the collar on her leg ceased sending its pulses of ecstasy through her at the very thought. She had, at her own insistence, been instructed otherwise. If she ignored those instructions, it would shortly begin inflicting hideous pain instead of bestowing rapture, and Amara felt little bubbles of entirely involuntary panic rippling through her at the very thought.