Five Lands Saga Box Set 1 (Five Lands Saga Box Sets), page 69
“I have to tell you something,” she said, pulling back to study him, her forest-green eyes soft, serious. “I lo—” she started, but he placed his fingers against her lips.
“Wait,” he said. “I need to say it first, because I never want you to think it some glib response. I’ve never said this to any woman before, I’ve never even felt it before, but I need you to know it. Te chanta riath,” he said in his native tongue. I love you. “Ria kres ti vichten pret.” You are my very heart.
She kissed him slowly, her lips lingering against his. “Te chanta riath, Jaeme,” she breathed. “Mar chant yethva telev.” With love unbreakable. It was a phrase from her favorite Mortichean ballad, one that she had recited for the group from memory as they shared stories around the campfire. Jaeme smiled and closed his eyes as he held her tightly to him, letting himself bask in the perfection of those words from her lips, of her feeling that way about him.
Daniella reached her arms around his neck again, her fingers tangling in his hair—though, he noticed, keeping away from his bruises—and kissed him deeply. Their bodies responded to each other, heat building between them, until they broke apart, out of breath. “I think Sayvil may be upset with me for exerting you so.” She gingerly touched the bandages at his shoulder.
Jaeme ran both his hands around her waist and up her back, playing at the laces of her dress. “I wouldn’t mind a bit more exertion.”
Daniella looked up at him with a coy smile. “If it’s a jog around the garden you want, you might need to take it up with—”
He kissed her again, and Daniella’s hands moved up the back of his shirt. He gasped at the warmth of her skin against his, and as they sank onto the bed, Jaeme paid no mind to the sharp pang in his shoulder. His hands ran over the soft skin of her arms, over the comparatively rough linen of the dress at her thighs. He barely comprehended the ache in his head as she removed his shirt, the pain of far lesser importance than any other sensation he was experiencing while tugging apart the linen cords tied against the small of her back. Daniella pressed against him, her knees on either side of his thighs. Time faded into nothing around them as he drank in the feel of her skin, the gentle tickle of her hair against his face and chest, the sounds of her breath as it merged with his own. Her lips were the antidote to every poison life had given him, the touch of her hands the balm to every wound. The rhythm in which they moved was at first tentative, disjointed, coalescing into something smooth and certain and utterly inescapable.
In the ballads, the knights were always declaring their willingness to die for love, often attempting to prove it in the most idiotic of ways. That always seemed silly to Jaeme, who wasn’t the type to welcome death, but who had little real fear of it. After all, he was a warrior. He had been in battle and put his life at risk numerous times for causes and people he didn’t even believe in, let alone love. But now, he realized what it was about love that the ballads always missed.
He would die for Dani in a heartbeat, no question, but it wasn’t enough. He had to do more.
She was the woman he would live for.
Twenty-one
With a golden strip of the midday sunlight shining through the partially-drawn curtains, Daniella woke feeling more rested than she had in months. No hideous nightmares or restless voices haunted her, as if Jaeme’s presence alone kept such things at bay.
Jaeme loved her, and she loved him. He accepted all she was, despite her past with Erich, despite her unknown powers, despite everything. As she shifted closer to him, breathing in the indefinable scent of his skin, she felt she was in a place where darkness could never reach her, not even the darkness that was her own.
He said what happened wasn’t her fault, and she desperately wanted to believe him.
His arm tightened around her as she moved, his eyes blinking blearily open. “Don’t even think about escape. You’d never make it to the door with that limp.”
She smiled. “Before you what? Try to drag me back with that chewed-up shoulder of yours? You’d probably just dislocate it again.”
“We do make an accident-prone pair, don’t we? Let’s make it through this with our heads firmly attached to our necks, and I’ll consider us fortunate.”
She stroked her hand lazily along his chest, being especially gentle over the angry red claw marks. She could hear the steady beat of his heart as it matched her own. “I consider us fortunate already.”
Jaeme tipped her chin back, his warm brown eyes gleaming with the same deep happiness she felt. “So do I.” His lips brushed against her forehead softly. “Of course,” he continued, the mischievous quality back in his voice, “I’d prefer it if we kept a few of our limbs, as well. It would make a repeat of last night far easier.”
She laughed and rolled onto her side, just as they heard a rapping at the door. “I’ve let you two lie abed long enough,” Sayvil said through the door. “It’s time to change your bandages.”
Jaeme grinned at Daniella, who blushed at the thought of last night’s humiliating moment when Sayvil had burst into the room with barely so much as a cursory knock, worriedly asking whether Jaeme had seen Daniella, only to have the question die half-asked when she spotted them. Jaeme, for his part, responded with utter innocence that yes, he had in fact seen Daniella. Quite of bit of her, actually. To which Sayvil groaned and left the room with a dramatic roll of her eyes, and Daniella had buried her burning face deeper into the blankets and giggled in equal parts embarrassment and amusement.
“All right,” Daniella called, extricating herself reluctantly from Jaeme’s warm embrace, and reaching for her dress, which lay bunched haphazardly on the thick rug beside the bed. Jaeme pulled on his trousers, wincing as he stretched out his shoulder. Once they were decently attired, Jaeme opened the door for Sayvil, as Daniella tied the curtains back to let the sunlight fully in.
“Glad to see you both more clothed,” Sayvil said. “Hopefully you haven’t put any strain on that shoulder, Jaeme.”
Jaeme smiled. “It’s fairly stiff, but not bad.”
“And your leg, Daniella?”
Apparently, it was business as usual. Daniella, still fighting a deep blush, was grateful for that much. “It burns a bit,” she admitted. “More than the cut on my arm. But I’ll be able to travel on it, if slowly . . .” her voice faltered, her sense of glowing contentedness darkening abruptly as she remembered. They would have to return to Ithale—and not Jaeme alone, in any case. She had been able to push aside the dreaded notion in the glow of candlelight. Today, however, the unavoidable would not be chased away.
She was afraid of what they would find there.
She turned her face away from Jaeme’s perceptive gaze. Sayvil added some more poultice to his wound and wrapped his shoulder with the fresh cloth strips that Greta had laundered.
“This shoulder will open right up again if you aren’t careful,” Sayvil said.
Jaeme grunted. “I’ll make sure to warn Diamis’ soldiers about that.”
“It wasn’t Diamis’ soldiers I was worried about,” Sayvil said. “Unless you’re bedding them as well.”
“If he is,” Daniella said, “I should hope I’d have heard about it.”
Sayvil tied the bandage off with one hard pull, and Jaeme winced, before flashing Daniella a grin. Daniella found herself returning it easier than she would have expected. It was a talent of Jaeme’s, making her feel better with one mischievous smile or wink, no matter the circumstances.
Sayvil turned her attention to the bandages on Daniella’s leg and arm next, and though Daniella would rather leave them be for the time being, she knew from experience that it was no use fighting Sayvil.
Once finished, despite his previous insistence he was never leaving the bed, Jaeme convinced Sayvil to let him venture downstairs. Daniella hoped this wasn’t a preamble to trying to board a ship to go after Kenton and the others—as much as Daniella wanted to be sure they were safe, it was true what she’d said. Jaeme was barely recovered.
Still, she knew that any number of terrible fates might have befallen them, and the thought made her feel ill.
In the common room they were greeted by townsfolk who were excited to see their duke’s nephew—whose heroism had been raised to staggering proportions in the last couple of days. Jaeme returned the greetings cheerfully, although Daniella could see how forced it was, how worried he was about the welfare of their companions. For her part, Daniella hung back a few steps in the interest of keeping rumors about Jaeme’s personal life to a minimum, but Jaeme would have none of it, instead pulling her close to him.
“Let them stare,” he said simply, when she pointed out the half-hidden whispers of those at nearby tables. “After a daring rescue of two beautiful maidens from the clutches of the terrible Nichtee king, I’m bound to have a great love affair with at least one of them.”
She shook her head in mock-disbelief. “Bards will already be singing about this by the time we get to Grisham, won’t they?”
“I’d prefer to stay out of it, just the same,” Sayvil said, twisting a long strand of her black hair around her finger. “The last thing I want is for my husband to hear about my adventures from some second-rate musician with Jaeme’s penchant for exaggeration.”
Greta served them up a hearty lunch, and Jaeme fielded more questions from the eager townsfolk—though he kept the details vague.
They’d just finished their lunch when the door to the inn opened, and in strode their three missing companions—alive and relatively unharmed, aside from Kenton, whose left eye and cheek were mottled with an angry purple bruise along with some yellow-gray marks on his neck.
Daniella let out a shriek of joy, running toward them as fast as her limp would allow and practically knocked a stunned Nikaenor off his feet by throwing her arms around him in an exuberant hug. Then she was hugging Perchaya, joined quickly thereafter by the normally-unflappable Sayvil.
When they finally pulled away, Daniella saw that even Kenton was smiling.
And for whatever reason, he didn’t seem the least bit annoyed to discover that Daniella hadn’t perished in the swamp. In fact, there was a strange expression on his face when he looked her over.
Could it be relief?
He was interrupted by Sayvil, who hovered close to Kenton, surveying his wounds.
Nikaenor’s jaw was slack, his expression frozen in incredulity. “How can you be alive? The swamp—”
Jaeme slapped him on the back. “The swamp was nothing. Waiting around for you all to join us was much more trying.” He eyed Nikaenor and then looked around at the townspeople, who were staring. “Did you get . . .”
Nikaenor nodded and patted his pack. “It was incredible,” he murmured, looking from Jaeme to Sayvil. “You’ll see, both of you.”
They both looked somewhat unsure about that.
Perchaya pulled a leather pack from her back and held it out to Jaeme. “I think you left this behind.”
“How careless of me.” Jaeme pulled her into a fond hug. “Thank you.”
“We found yours, too,” Kenton said, practically shoving Daniella’s satchel at her. Daniella couldn’t help beaming and holding it tightly to her. There were supplies in there, sure, but sentimental things, too—the book Jaeme had given her in Berlaith, especially.
“What happened in Ithale?” Sayvil asked, before Daniella could open her mouth to say thanks. “Kenton, your face looks terrible.”
Kenton smiled grimly. “Yes, well. General Dektrian sends his regards.” He, too, eyed those who were staring. “Do you have rooms where we might talk more privately?”
“No,” Sayvil said dryly. “We’ve been sleeping in the broom closet under the stairs.” She herded them all up said stairs, then, and they all went without argument, though Daniella did notice Nikaenor looking furtively back at Greta, who was bent double over an enormous pot of stew.
“We’ll have her bring some up to us,” Daniella said to him.
Nikaenor smiled gratefully, though not as widely or exuberantly as usual.
When they reached Sayvil’s room, all crowding in, Nikaenor finally managed to speak coherently again, bubbling with his non-stop questions. “Did you encounter the Nichtees? Were there hundreds of them? How in the Five Lands did you escape?”
Jaeme shared an amused glance with Daniella before replying, “Now that’s a great story. Don’t listen to the women, Nikaenor. They’ll have you believe that I didn’t have much to do with it.”
Sayvil cut in immediately with the story in detail, and Nikaenor launched into a tale of an epic battle with giant eels, and then Perchaya, more slowly and carefully, explained what had held them up in Ithale. She glossed quickly over the death of Nikaenor’s father, but Nikaenor—his enthusiasm now gone—stared at the floor.
Daniella’s heart broke for him. Gods, they were none of them going to escape this unscathed.
“What we need to figure out,” Kenton said, “is how Erich found us in the first place.”
They all looked at each other somberly, except for Nikaenor, who was still studying his shoes.
“We’d barely been ashore a few hours,” Kenton said. “Erich knew we were coming to Ithale before we got onto a ship.” His eyes rested on Daniella, and she felt a familiar panic rising in her chest.
“It wasn’t me,” she said. “I’m not communicating with my father, and if he could control me, he would never have let me escape—from Peldenar or from Ithale.”
She could see the hesitation on Kenton’s face, and for once, he didn’t insist that she must be a traitor, simply because of what had been done to her against her will.
“What about the rest of you?” he asked. “Some of you wrote home.” He eyed the others, who had all previously admitted to doing so.
Jaeme shrugged. “I only write to my uncle, and Diamis has no foothold in Mortiche. My letters wouldn’t be intercepted—not between Pendarth and Grisham.”
“I wrote to Reisa,” Perchaya said. “But I didn’t tell her we were coming to Foroclae, let alone Ithale. She couldn’t have known.”
All eyes turned to Sayvil, who shrugged. “Quinn’s with the resistance. No way is he giving information to Diamis.”
“Unless he’s a mole,” Kenton said.
Daniella watched as Sayvil’s spine went straight as the hair on an angry cat. “I think I know my husband, and—”
“And his letters might have been intercepted,” Perchaya cut in. She turned to Kenton. “Right?”
“Right,” Kenton said. “That seems the most likely.” He glared around the room. “No more letters. Do you see what’s at stake?”
“But you can’t prove it’s the letters at all,” Daniella said. “Can you?”
Kenton glowered at her, then nodded almost imperceptibly. A grudging admission that, in fact, he couldn’t.
“Maybe Lukos kept some of Nikaenor’s blood,” Sayvil said, folding her arms. “We can’t be sure he didn’t. They might have been watching us as we went from port to port, following us until we disembarked in Ithale.”
Kenton shook his head. “They found us in Bothran. Lukos knew where we’d be before he got hold of Nikaenor’s blood.”
That was true. Daniella remembered watching Lukos stalk the others down the street. As if he was there for Jaeme, Saara, and Nikaenor, not the rest of them.
“But Sayvil arrived with us,” Daniella said. “What about Saara? Could he have someone spying on her somehow? She knew we were headed for Foroclae.”
“But not Ithale, specifically,” Kenton said. “And who knew she was going to be in Bothran?”
Nikaenor shook his head. “No one. At least I don’t think so.”
“Other people knew about your curse, though,” Perchaya said to Nikaenor. “Could Diamis have gotten your blood before somehow, perhaps had a spy steal a handkerchief or a sliver you plucked?”
Daniella shivered. The idea that someone might be watching them through so little blood made it impossible to know who the leak might be.
“I don’t think he has Nikaenor’s blood,” Kenton said. “If he did, he could have killed us all by now.”
“I don’t know,” Nikaenor said. “You may be overestimating my ability to kill things.”
Jaeme snorted. “You seem to have done all right with the eels.”
But Nikaenor did have a point. He’d attacked Jaeme and the others in Bothran, and he hadn’t been terribly effective at it, even in his fish form.
“He has to be tracking one of us,” Kenton said.
Jaeme turned steely eyes on Kenton. “Maybe it’s you.”
Kenton dismissed the idea out of hand. “If he had my blood, we’d all be finished.”
“Maybe,” Jaeme said. “But the same goes for any of us except for Daniella and Perchaya, since they can’t be controlled.” Then his brow furrowed. “Can you prove that ring prevents Perchaya from being watched? We know that Diamis has her blood, and maybe that ring only protects her from—”
“It isn’t Perchaya,” Kenton said, as if his very word on the subject could make it so.
Perchaya cleared her throat, glancing nervously around at all of them. “I think our conclusion is we have no idea who it is,” she said. “So we all need to be extra careful. No more letter writing. Myself included.” She looked pleadingly at Jaeme, who Daniella had to admit was the least likely to comply. “We’re headed to Grisham anyway. You’ll see your uncle soon enough.”
Jaeme shrugged. “He already knows we’re coming, and Diamis’ soldiers can’t follow us there, even if my letters were somehow intercepted.” He still glared at Kenton, and Daniella reached over to take his hand. Perchaya gave her a knowing smile.
They certainly had a lot to talk about, once they got away from the others. And Daniella, for her part, couldn’t wait.
