Cursed by Fire (6 page)

He wanted to turn her down. He had far more pressing things to attend to. But the sad truth was that he was hungry and he was dirty and he was in need of proper clothing. It was true he could have bought all those things now, if the weight of his new purse were anything to judge by, but he had other provisions to think about and there was no knowing how far his new coin would stretch. The journey across the desert promised to be an arduous one and he needed to be careful. He might be immortal, but he would feel every moment of the suffering being stranded in the desert would heap upon him, and he’d had his fill of burning and suffering.

Thinking of that made him look at the lowering sun once more. He had maybe two hours before it set entirely, by the look of it. Two hours to get fed and get out of reach of anyone else.

“Very well, lovely grandina,” he said, touching his fist to his heart. “But I cannot stay long, for I have a long journey ahead of me.”

“A journey?” she asked with some amount of incredulity. Then she waved off the reaction. “Rest assured, we will eat within the hour,” she guaranteed him. “Then you are free to do whatever it is you will. Come. Follow us to the fortress.” She turned away from him and, lifting her skirt in one hand, she began to walk away. When she turned back to see if he was following and saw him
standing still, she laughed at him. “Come. I promise I will not bite you,” she said, holding out her hand blindly, as if she knew someone was going to take it for her. And surely someone did. The jenden was there to grasp it like a well-trained gormlet. She waited until Dethan took his first step, and then, with an expression of pure satisfaction, she let Grannish lead her away.

Dethan followed the coach and four in the mud, but he didn’t really need to. As with many cities, the castle fortress was at its center. However, this was poor planning, in his opinion, because the city was situated up against a mountainous section of land. It would have been wiser to build the castle fortress into the mountainside, giving it the high ground and letting the city in its entirety act as a buffer against any invaders. However, the entrance to the eight hells was located on that rock mountain face and the city had been built a more comforting distance away from it. Hexis had no doubt been built so the idea of the mouth of the hells being at the city’s back would quell any raiders trying to commandeer it.

After all, who really wanted ownership to a mouth of the hells? The city had probably once been ruled by barbarians, worshippers of Xaxis. But it was clear the rulers, from what Dethan had seen, were not of that hulking, warmongering, crude bent. If Selinda was an example of the leadership here, it was elegant, refined, and had impeccable manners.

It was exactly the kind of leadership and the kind of city he would have attacked and overthrown in his time.
Perhaps this would be his first target once he had his wealth and an army. Then that would make the royal family—make Selinda—his captive.

He jolted. It was horrifyingly, outstandingly shocking to his whole system and psyche when the very idea of it made him hard with anticipation and excitement, his cock drawing tight to nearly full attention. Why would such a thing—why would
anything
—excite him? The physical needs of his body had long ago been burned out of him, and even before then he had not found delicate women at all appealing. To be honest, he had been a little bit afraid of them. Afraid of hurting them.

Then again, she wasn’t exactly delicate. She had stood up to the jenden with a quiet sort of ferocity. She was very well acquainted with her own power, and perhaps that was what he found appealing.

And then there was her beauty. She was well formed, a tall woman with an unbelievably erect posture. She had been wearing something, some sort of restrictive garment that had pulled her waist in tightly, making it narrow and small yet allowing the swell of her hips to curve freely, provocatively. He wondered what the point of such a garment was. Maybe she had a deformity of the spine that required the garment to keep her from slouching forward.

No. He noticed other women wearing similar garments as they traveled into the finer parts of the city, the part where the mud was less because there was a series of grated holes in the streets that appeared to allow water to run off rather than sit in the dirt and be churned into mud. The runoff no doubt let out into the poorer sections of town, he thought with a shake of his head. He had never seen the point of allowing one part of a city to fall into disrepair and poverty while another part flourished with wealth and fine things. The poor of one’s city were just as needed as the wealthy when war broke
out, and they had to have reason and loyalty in order to fight their best. Burdening them only defeated their desire to defend their home. That made for bad soldiering. And one must always be prepared to use the members of the city for war. It was the only way to be certain the city remained properly defended.

The fact was the grandina’s beauty had captured his fancy, and it was a distraction he could not afford. At the same time … it was good to feel alive again. He had been so dead, burned again and again into a rotten carcass, and this was so different. So much like life again. Even if that life was conditional. But Weysa was watching him. He was certain of it, and she would not be kind if she thought he was being distracted from the purpose she had freed him for. If he wanted to remain free from the fires of the eight hells, he would pay homage to Weysa and no other.

It was this thinking that allowed his desires to wane long before they had reached the fortress. Fortress. He laughed to himself. It was hardly that. Open gates, people milling about so thickly inside and outside the low walls that the gates couldn’t possibly be shut in a hurry if necessary. It appeared that anyone would be able to walk right up to the house of the political seat, just as he was now doing.

He waited in the courtyard as the grandina alighted, her escort helping her down from the carriage. She immediately turned to one of the attendants standing nearby and reached to draw Dethan closer with an inviting hand gesture.

“Page,” she said to the attendant. “This man will be my guest. See to it he is washed, properly clothed, and brought immediately to the dinner table.” She turned to Dethan, raising a brow. “I am assuming this is what you would like. If you prefer to come to table as you are, you will still be welcome.”

“No, Grandina,” he said. “I accept your generous hospitality.”

Dethan saw her smile, and with a nod, she turned to go. The jenden reached to take her hand and lead her inside, but she withdrew from him, the rebuff marked. To say he was not pleased with the rejection was an understatement, but he seemed to stiffly keep his composure and moved away from the grandina as she entered her home.

“Follow me,” the page said.

Selinda was tired of pretending to enjoy the jenden’s company, so as soon as they were out of the general public eye, she withdrew from the attentions of her intended. It sickened her every time she thought of herself being bonded for the rest of her life to that grasping, twisted man. She was not deluded as to what kind of man the jenden was. The trouble was her father was completely fooled by the jenden and would hear nothing against him, not even from his own daughter. She had tried on countless occasions to open her father’s eyes, to make him see that all the jenden wanted was her father’s seat on the throne of Hexis. She did not underestimate the avarice that motivated Grannish. She feared for her father. Feared that shortly after she was forced to wed Grannish some horrible accident might befall her father, just as it had befallen her brothers and sisters. She had not always been heir. Now she was and wished for all the world that she wasn’t. She wished her brother Jorry was still alive. He had been so strong and so assured. He would never have allowed his sister to be sold to a man like Grannish.

But Jorry was gone now and her father thought he was securing his city by pledging her to Grannish.

She moved quickly through the halls of the fortress,
heading directly toward her rooms. Her days had been reduced to the untenable boredom of being waited on and kowtowed to by a man she despised. All of it a display when she knew, could feel in her soul, that he hated her almost as much as she hated him. He was cruel and there was something wrong inside him. And for the life of her, she could not understand why a man as bright as her father was could not see it for himself.

She sailed into her rooms and her pagettes came out of the woodwork like busy little bees, divesting her of her walking dress and bringing a tub of water for her to wash her hands and feet in, scrubbing away the mud of the city. The pagettes took her clothes away and would do the same with them, making them clean again for the next time she would wear them. Meanwhile, they brought in the fresh dress she requested and redressed her long, curling hair into a less severe upswept style that left a waterfall of curls tumbling down her back. She did not like to wear any part of her hair down when in the city. It seemed to just accumulate mud and dirt when it was left that way. But now that they would be within the confines of the fortress, she could wear it freely.

She also changed into an evening corset, a more formal corset that was longer, smoothing the lines of her body into a very correct and straight silhouette. The dress came next, a dove-gray velveteen that dropped straight to the ground, without the typical leather mud guarding that trimmed the bottom of all her day and walking gowns. She held out her hands and they were gloved. She arched her neck and it was bejeweled with a stunning minx-fire necklace, the red of it, it was said, redder than the deepest fires of the eight hells. Her teal-blue hat was replaced by one of gray, the veil on it longer than that on the previous one, the stiff netting covering the entire left side of her face. She had grown
quite used to seeing the world through the threads of a veil and would probably feel naked without it. It might be considered silly, she supposed. Everyone knew what was hiding beneath the camouflage. Everyone knew she was burned and scarred, and ugly because of it.

But … but that man. That strange and strong man who had defeated the brute in the shivov fight, who had taken a purse but not the humiliating kiss that Grannish had offered as a prize … In spite of his rejecting the kiss, he had somehow made her feel as though she were … beautiful.

He had no courtly manners, had no grasping desires. And if she allowed herself to think it, it was possible he had joined the shivov fight … 
for her
. Simply so she would not have to kiss a pig of a man.

“Foolish girl.” She tsked to her reflection. “Romanticizing a man covered in mud.”

But he had not been just any man. He was big, as tall as any man she’d ever seen, towering above them all. He’d had tremendous muscle definition underneath all that mud plastered to his skin. She found herself eager to see what was underneath the crust of it. As it was, two things had stood out to her. One, that he had eyes as green as the greenest clover in the fields. She had never seen such a green on a person before. Her people, they were dark of hair and dark of eye. She was one of the few in the city with eyes of blue, and she had them only because her mother had come from a land apart from this one. But her mother was dead. Her eldest brother, also blue of eye, was dead. Now only she remained, her youngest brother dark-eyed like their father, and if the trend continued, he too would soon be dead. It seemed she was cursed with fine health, she thought fatalistically.

The other thing she found startling about the man were his burns. She had never met anyone of such strength
and vitality before, and somehow it was as though his burns did not even exist for him. He had not let them hinder him. She couldn’t tell just how extensive his burning had been—she hoped to see more clearly once he was divested of all that mud—but somehow … with those eyes and that full head of dark hair, he was still amazingly handsome. More so than Grannish, that was certain. Grannish had a narrow sort of pinched look about him, as though he were constantly smelling something that was a little bit off.

Then again, compared to Grannish she would find anyone to be more handsome, possibly even that pig at the shivov fights. Her vision was colored by contempt for the jenden. Whether it was deserved or not, whether it was fair or not, she hardly even knew anymore. The whole business had made her weary and endlessly unhappy. She had come to realize her future was a bleak one unless something extraordinary happened. The future was bleak for them all unless something extraordinary happened.

She refused to dwell on that just then. She had found a diversion in this man and she was determined to use it to its fullest extent. She needed some activity, some excitement for her mind. Even if it was just an exercise in curiosity, it was a distraction from the painful responsibilities of her life.

“Hanit, color my lips. I wish for them to stand out.”

Hanit stood and blinked for a moment, looking as though she were unsure she had heard her mistress correctly. That made some sense of course. Hanit had been trained to play down anything and everything that might draw attention to her mistress’s face. Selinda could not have explained the desire even if the pagette had found the voice to question it. Instead Hanit went in search of a coloring pot and brush, appearing with them shortly and proceeding to paint her mistress’s lips the colors of
the setting sun, from blue to lavender to violet. Selinda’s mouth glistened with color.