Radiance (Wraith Kings Book 1) (15 page)

She fled, carrying with her his words before she shut and bolted the door between them.

“Thank you, sweet Ildiko.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

There were times when the day lasted forever and night never came.  For Brishen, this was one of those times.  He stared unblinking at the bolted door between his and Ildiko’s chambers until his eyes burned.  He’d caught it—the brief flinch of hurt tightening the skin around her eyes before it disappeared, and her pale features eased into an expression of concern.

Brishen thanked the gods he and Ildiko had begun this marriage with such unadorned honesty between them.  She’d taken his warning at face value and done exactly as he hoped by fleeing and bolting her door.  No cajoling or long explanations for why he wasn’t fit—or even safe—company at the moment.  She might not be able to discern emotion in his eyes, but she knew him well enough now to know his words weren’t empty ones.

Even through the thick walls and closed door, he heard her soft voice and Sinhue’s as they both prepared to sleep.  The words were indecipherable, but he found their cadence soothing.  They soon faded, leaving only a heavy quiet that leached from the walls to join the shadows that fled from the encroaching sunbeams and pooled at his feet.

Twenty-two years had passed since he witnessed his mother murder his sister, and the memory remained as clear as if it happened the previous night.  Secmis’s hands cupping Anaknet’s head, fingers like spider legs that curved around the tiny skull until her claw tips touched.  The baby’s fists curled in innocent sleep.  Partially concealed behind the nursery door and made mute with horror, Brishen watched as the queen gently held Anaknet’s head for a moment and gave one quick twist.

He shook his head to clear it of the memory.  He could block out the image but not the grotesque sound—a soft snick, barely more than a whisper that over time gained the volume of a thunderclap in his dreams and recollections.

Brishen never imagined he’d tell another person about Anaknet.  Only two other people knew what he’d seen and done those many years ago.  One died a decade earlier of old age; the other would cut out her own tongue before she surrendered her knowledge.  Both had been pivotal in helping him abscond with Anaknet’s mortem light and release her fragile soul before Secmis claimed it, and he remained forever grateful to them.  His old nursemaid and his cousin were braver than any ten Kai warriors combined.  Had Secmis discovered their roles in his plan...he shuddered at the thought.

Now Ildiko knew as well.  Brishen turned away from the door separating him from his wife.  She was like a skein of raw silk, strong as steel with a luster woven into her blood and bones.  She held him in her arms as he keened an old grief.  Like all Kai, he didn’t shed tears.  Ildiko; however, had shed them for him, and he’d caught the taste of salt and sorrow on his lips when she brushed her mouth across his in a gesture of comfort.

The need to embrace her, clasp her hard to every part of his body had almost overwhelmed him then.  She was solace enrobed in smooth flesh and scented hair.  He had kept his hands light on her back, knowing that to hold her the way he wanted, he might injure her in his enthusiasm.  Her very human body was far weaker than her character.

Such knowledge hadn’t stopped the lust rising inside him.  Warped by anger and simmering hatred for the queen, that lust poisoned the growing desire he had for his wife, turning it into an ugly thing.

When Ildiko appeared in his chamber, dressed in her nightrail and prepared to sleep with him as she did each day, he’d almost lunged at her, blinded by the desperation to sink into her, body and soul.  Every part of him ached with the need.  Brishen pummeled the temptation into submission, chilled to the core by images of a woman bloodied and broken by a man possessed.

He meant every bit of his thanks when she fled his chamber and bolted her door.  Solitude did nothing to cool his rage or his desire.  He paced.  He drank wine.  He called down every curse he knew on the queen and finally, he grabbed his cloak and quit the chamber where he was certain he could smell Ildiko’s flowery scent on his sheets.

Saggara was quiet.  Most of its inhabitants slept except for a few hooded guards who saluted Brishen as he strode through the corridors and into the brutal morning daylight.  The short walk to the redoubt and its deserted arena did little to soothe his restlessness.  He stripped down to his breeches and eagerly took up one of the practice swords set in racks that lined the arena walls.

Swords were not his preferred weapons, and straw men made laughable opponents, but he hacked away at them in a sun-blinded frenzy until straw hazed the air, and body parts lay strewn across the dirt floor.  Muscles quivering with fatigue, Brishen glanced up briefly, startled to see the sun had climbed almost directly overhead.  He’d been training in full battle mode for two hours, and the sweat streamed off his arms and legs in rivulets.  His lungs burned and his body ached, but his head was clear.  Mock combat had done its job.  The rage had subsided.  The lust was still there but mellowed into a desire that bubbled in his belly.  He still wanted Ildiko—fiercely, but to savor instead of conquer.

“You’ll be blind for good if you don’t cover up, cousin.”

Brishen turned and squinted at Anhuset.  She stood to one side, his discarded cloak draped over her arm.  She unlaced the hood from the cloak and tossed it to him.  “I’m amazed you can still see at all.”

He caught the hood but held off from pulling it over his head until he could rinse off the grime and bits of straw coating his skin.  The cold water shock from the nearby well banished any exhaustion.  Water from his dripping hair and breeches puddled at his feet.  While the hood offered relief from the punishing light, it weighed hot and stifling on his head and shoulders.

“You look like a half-drowned magefinder,” Anhuset said.

He scowled at her.  “Be glad I didn’t shake the water off, or you’d be as drenched as me.”  He used his cloak to wipe down his arms.  “What are you doing here?”

She shrugged.  “You know I’ve never been a good sleeper.  I thought I might come to the arena and train for a little while.  Imagine my surprise at finding you here.”  Her eyes narrowed to glowing slits within the shadows of her hood.  “Where’s the
hercegesé
?”

Brishen gazed at his cousin.  Anhuset.  Sharp, intuitive, she knew him better and longer than anyone.  Something about his demeanor alarmed her.  “Asleep in her bed, unlike either of us.”  He withstood her silent scrutiny.  She’d have her say, and his best course of action was to wait until she did.

“Unless your sword arm needs improving, there are better ways to spend a sleepless day.  I know a dozen women who’d be happy to cool the fire for you.”

He’d briefly entertained the thought.  Ildiko had once hinted she didn’t mind if he took a mistress, yet he wondered if that still held true.  Three days earlier they had lain together in his bed.  He hadn’t imagined the delicate shiver that raced down her body as he nuzzled her temple, and that shiver had not been fear.

“I wouldn’t survive the affections of a dozen Kai women, cousin.  Besides, only one can cool the fire.”

Anhuset’s lips twitched.  “And that one isn’t Kai.  What has Ildiko become to you?”

“The fire.”  He nodded once to her and started to leave the arena.

She called to him.  “Don’t you want to spar with me?”

Brishen shook his head and kept walking.  “No.  I miss my wife.”

“Are you sure you’re not trying to avoid me beating you into one big bruise?”

He waved away her taunt.  “That too.”  If he didn’t dawdle, he’d have a few hours to bring Ildiko back to his bed where she belonged and sleep the last daylight hours away with her by his side.

Anhuset wasn’t finished with him yet.  “Your Highness, when Lord Pangion arrives at Saggara this evening do you wish for us to escort him from the main road or from the gates of the redoubt?”

He halted, cursing under his breath.  Serovek.  The dinner.  He’d forgotten.  He pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.  The headache he suffered from the sun just grew worse.  Brishen was tempted to tell Anhuset to kindly escort their guest back home the moment he arrived.  Such an action though guaranteed a neighbor no longer amiable or forthcoming with information.

“Meet him and his party at the main road.”  He was glad for the hood which hid his smirk.  “Anhuset, you’ll attend the dinner and the dancing afterwards.”  The low snarl that met his command widened his smirk to a grin.  Brishen walked away, listening closely for the tell-tale snick of a sword unsheathed or the breath of air cleaved by a flying dagger.

He returned to the manor unscathed and found its occupants still deep in slumber.  His personal servant slept in a modest chamber nearby.  Brishen let him sleep, unwilling to rouse the man in the middle of the day just to bring him water for a bath.  A face cloth and the water in his wash basin and pitcher would have to do.  The sodden breeches were discarded and tossed in a heap in one corner.  He scrubbed away the dirt the well water dousing missed, donned a pair of the linen breeches he was truly starting to despise and made his way to the door between his chamber and Ildiko’s.

Sleeping naked next to her that one time had been a mistake.  Ildiko had caught him off guard by waking up before him.  Luckily, neither of them were prone to cuddle in their sleep, or she would have discovered very quickly that his deep affection for her was changing into something far beyond the platonic.  Trapped under the covers until she left to change in her room, Brishen had collapsed on the bed with a frustrated groan once he was alone and vowed they’d sleep separately after that.  His vow lasted less than a day.  He wanted her beside him.

 Were he his father, Brishen could turn the door thin as parchment and walk through it to retrieve his wife.  Were he his grandfather, he could pass through the solid wood, as ethereal as any wraith, but the magic was fading in the Kai with every generation born.  Brishen conserved the magic he possessed and limited the use of his power to a few chanted words that slid the bolt free on the other side.

He eased around the door and discovered a bleary-eyed Sinhue rising from her bed in the shallow alcove in one corner of the room.  He held a finger to his lips for silence.  She nodded and lay down, her back to him.

Ildiko sprawled in the middle of her bed.  Asleep on her stomach with half her face buried in the pillows, she presented him with a profile that shone as pale as the sheets in the darkness.  He once called her a hag of a woman.  Leached of color except for the bitter mollusk pink that surged under her skin in uneven patches when she was angry or embarrassed, he’d found her both ugly and peculiar to behold.  Had it only been a few months earlier that he bore such thoughts of her?

Looking at her now, Brishen wondered how he could have thought her unsightly.  Her eyes still brought him up short on occasion, especially when she teased him by crossing them toward her nose, but he’d ceased comparing them to parasites.  They were just eyes, different from his and fascinating in their own way with their colorful irises and black pupils that shrank or expanded depending on the light or her emotions.

Her eyes were hidden from him now, behind closed lids edged in bronze lashes.  Serovek had called her beautiful, and Brishen hadn’t missed the long stares cast upon her by the Gauri noblemen who attended her wedding.  He tried to see her as a Gauri man might but failed in the endeavor.  A sudden realization made him smile a little.

One of his wife’s greatest strengths, and a thing he most admired about her, was her ability to adapt to a situation and still remain steadfast in her own sense of worth and place.  Brishen no longer viewed her with the eyes of a Kai and couldn’t view her with the eyes of a human male, but that held no consequence now.  He saw her as she’d always seen herself—as simply Ildiko.  For her, it was enough; for him, a gift beyond price.

He reached down to thread her loose hair through his fingers.  She murmured in her sleep and rolled onto her back, exposing delicate collarbones and the outline of her breasts beneath her nightrail.  She lay before him, a study in shade and shadow-play.

She didn’t startle when he slid his arms beneath her and scooped her up from the bed.  Her eyes opened slowly, and she nestled against his chest.  “Is it evening already, Brishen?”

Brishen kissed the top of her head as he padded from her chamber to his and kicked the door closed behind him.  “No.  Still midday.  Unlike you, I no longer sleep well without you next to me.”

Ildiko patted his chest with one hand.  “Your fault.  You told me to go.”

He tightened his embrace.  “I did and was right to do so.”  He climbed into his bed still holding her.  The sheets were cool on his legs, Ildiko hot on his torso.

Her hand wandered along his shoulder and up his neck until she cupped his jaw.  Her dark pupils nearly swallowed the blue in her eyes.  “Secmis is a vile and evil woman, Brishen.”

He turned his face into her palm and planted a kiss in its curvature.  “Don’t bother with lavish compliments, wife,” he said.  “You’ll never endear my loathsome mother to me.”

Ildiko shook with sleepy laughter.  Her amusement faded, and in the room’s tenebrous shade her eyes glistened with sympathy and something else that ignited the desire simmering restlessly in Brishen’s veins.  “My noble prince,” she said.  “You are...”  She frowned, searching for the words.