The Tears of the Rose (17 page)

I blushed, sorry I'd pursued the conversation, wishing I could close my legs. “No. No—I mean . . .” I sighed. “You understand how it works, I'm sure. Hugh didn't have to be so close to me, like that.”

He stopped, his hand still half on the bandage, fingertips brushing the skin in the hollow of my inner thigh, stroking me a little, though I thought he didn't realize it. That hot, dark thing in him ran strong, and he smelled of sweet smoke.
This is how lust looks
. He swallowed visibly, his lean and bristled throat moving with it. “Did your husband never sit between your thighs like this, hold your knees open and place his mouth on you?”

“Glorianna no!”

My face flamed hot. My ladies had sometimes giggled over such things, but I thought they were mad stories. Jokes. But the White Monk wasn't joking.

Embarrassment found refuge in offended outrage, and I jerked away, standing and pulling my nightgown into place. “I grant that you didn't know Prince Hugh, but he was a fine, noble man who
loved
me. He would never have treated me like a . . .” I floundered, grasping for the right word.
Trollop. Whore. Slut.
All so ugly.

“Like a real woman,” the White Monk finished, as if that were the only possible, natural ending to my sentence.

Where were my clothes? I hated that his words echoed some of my disloyal thoughts, that Hugh had treated me as a precious doll and not . . .
like a real woman.
“That is
not
what I meant!”

“Perhaps not, but only because you haven't experienced what is real. What truly passes between a man and a woman when they're not spinning sugar-coated fantasies for each other.”

“And what do you know of it?” I flung at him. “You're consecrated to Glorianna's service.” Too late it came back to me that he was a fraud, a criminal masquerading as a priest. The words hung between us, a challenge.

He inclined his head. “Do you imagine that all of Glorianna's priests remain faithful only to her?”

“Do you suggest that any real priest of Glorianna's would dare fail her?”

Shaking his head, he pulled the pale cowl around his face, hiding the scars, which seemed even deeper now, crevasses of shadow, the green as dim as stagnant water. “Just when I start to find you interesting, I am reminded what a fool you are.”

“I don't care if you find me interesting,” I snapped.

“Nor should you.” He seemed inexpressibly weary. “But I crave a boon from you, Princess. Will you promise me that you won't tell anyone what I did for you here?”

For a heated moment I thought he meant how I reacted to his touch. But no.

“The healing? Why didn't you make it contingent on keeping your secret?”

He kept his head bowed. “Because I would have done it for you, regardless.”

“Why?”

“Why indeed?” The smoky scent froze brittle at the edges. “I'll send in Marin with your clothes.”

Graves and his men did not comment on the delay. I wasn't sure what Marin and the White Monk, my team of minders and defenders, had said to them. We met the soldiers in the woods, well away from the cabin, the three of us from the stable having gone the long way around, sneaking out the back.

We rode along three abreast, Marin on my left and the White Monk to my right, the soldiers leading the way and bringing up the rear. I held a string of yarn in my right hand that trailed between me and the White Monk, tied around his wrist. He'd handed it to me after he helped me mount.

“Yank this if anything happens.” He mounted his own horse, making sure there was some slack in the yarn. “But do me a favor and try not to wake me if you don't have to.”

“Wake you?” I echoed, sounding like an idiot. “Do you plan to sleep?”

“No planning about it.” His voice sounded rough, rocks grinding together. “Sleep will grab me by the throat and take me under at any moment. I can't promise I'll awake in time if we're—should anything happen.”

If we're attacked,
I thought he meant to say. “Did you not sleep last night?”

“Magic exacts a price. Never forget that.”
Princess
. He didn't add the mocking title on the end, but I heard it there anyway. “And clasp the horse with your knees, hold yourself tight to it, so you don't bounce around so much.”

“What about your steed—what if he stops? Or tries to wander?”

The White Monk patted his horse's neck with affection. “Least of my worries. We have an understanding.”

True to his word, he soon fell into a deep sleep. We rode for hours, cutting through the woods, following what Graves called deer trails. Amazingly, my legs felt good, tingly but not painful. I wore several pairs of silk trousers under a top pair of wool, which made for a lovely cushion. The magic still zinged through me—flowing down to my ankles and up through my hips, a healing, energizing stream.

I practiced squeezing my thighs as I pressed against the saddle. This had the side effect of bringing my woman's mound hard against the leather, rubbing me in the same way Hugh's body had. Instead of abating, the desire continued to simmer in me. Likely an ongoing effect of the magic. I'd certainly never daydreamed about being intimate with a man before. At least not like this, in such a nonromantic way. The thoughts bubbling up in my mind weren't of sweet kisses and whispered love poems.

No.

Instead . . . instead this fantasy kept building in my head of the White Monk and his strong, heated grip on my skin. I imagined him tossing me to the stable floor, tearing my clothes away, and pinning me with his weight. Those penetrating eyes would flay me with their ferocity and he would put his mouth on me, devouring me as a wild animal might.

I thrust the images away, appalled at myself, and concentrated on a cycle of prayers to Glorianna. But the fantasies simply roared in again, and I found myself grinding against the saddle, imagining the White Monk ravishing me with hard hands and ravenous mouth.

They were my own thoughts, and no one—certainly never
he
—would know. But Glorianna saw me, and Hugh, looking down and protecting me from above—he would see how quickly I turned from his memory and indulged in prurient longings for the most inappropriate of men.

He would never have imagined it of me.

And that bothered me, too. Why hadn't Hugh seen me as a real woman? It made me angry, enough that I dreamed up the conversation where I'd demand that he explain himself to me. But he was dead and gone, which only made me angrier, which then faded into guilt.

We stopped at a hunter's shelter for the midday meal. The White Monk never stirred, despite the relative commotion among the men of dismounting and discussion of whose job it was this time to dispense rations. Marin heaved herself down and trudged into the woods to answer the call of nature.

Uncertain if I should wake him, I nevertheless thought the White Monk probably needed to eat. I wound the yarn around my hand, giving it a gentle tug.

He didn't move, head bowed, face hidden away. I pulled harder.

Still nothing.

Some defender he'd be. With increasing irritation, I gave the yarn a hard yank.

He exploded into action. In a blur of movement, he'd thrust back the hood and cowl, a long blade in his hand, scarred face set in harsh lines as he took in the situation in a moment—and settled a black scowl on me.

“Explain yourself,” he demanded.

“I thought”—I clamped my teeth together to keep them from clacking together, he'd frightened me that much—“you might want to eat.”

His gaze assessed me with something barely short of contempt. “Did I say to wake me if there was a picnic?”

“Fine.” I tossed the yarn at him. “Stay here, then.”

I swung off my horse and tramped through the snow to the little shelter, feeling as if I could eat a side of beef.

“You're moving very nicely, Ami,” he called after me, once again his taunting self. My face heated as I remembered how intimately he'd seen me. He could never know of those horrible, tempting fantasies that plagued me so.

16

W
e stopped well after dark, sleeping in an abandoned cabin.

Graves built a fire, though the White Monk argued against it, saying the Tala might detect our approach.

“There's not a soul lives out here,” Graves scoffed. “We're in the depth of the Wild Lands. We'll be at Odfell's Pass come midday tomorrow.”

We slept all in one room that night, Marin putting her bulk between me and the men, as if they might molest me otherwise. The White Monk lay between me and the door, like a faithful dog protecting me from intruders in the night. I avoided him and we hadn't exchanged further words. It was surely my own imagination that I felt something more than that silly string of yarn thrummed between us, the lowest strings of a harp, sounding an inaudible vibration long after the chord faded away.

I'd never experienced anything quite like it. A strange and mysterious thing, magic was. I wanted to ask the White Monk so many questions—why could he do magic? where did he learn?—but I had promised not to reveal his secret. In my heart, anyway, since he hadn't stuck around to hear the actual words.

And I really did want to be better about how I treated people. He'd done me an enormous service. I owed him at least my silence.

The next day, he seemed replenished. We still didn't speak, but we had nothing to discuss. That is, not that could be spoken of with the others about. Mount, ride. The landscape grew steeper, with great boulders and very tall, straight trees. They formed infinite pillars into the distance, the evergreen canopy high above, and it hurt my eyes the way they seemed to fold into one another and multiply.

As the morning progressed, a feeling of uneasiness nibbled at me, then began taking greater bites of the peace of mind I tried to maintain. Shadowy shapes seemed to move in the corner of my eye, then vanished when I looked directly. The hair prickled on the nape of my neck, tingling as the White Monk's magic had.

Sometimes snow sifted down from the branches and the wood creaked when a hand of wind fisted through the limbs high against the wintery sky. It seemed other things moved there, too. Wrong things. My memory flashed onto those strange oily creatures that had invaded Ordnung when the Tala attacked and came after Andi. I tried to get a better look, but they were like the childhood monsters that disappeared when you lit a candle.

“What do you see?” the White Monk asked, riding close, speaking for my ears only.

He said it in a serious tone, not as if I were being a silly girl, but as if I might see something he didn't. Still, I hesitated to say anything. “I . . . I'm not sure.”

“Don't think. Describe.”

That helped. “Shadows? Like a cloud when it crosses the sun, that kind of chill when it touches my skin. Flashes of . . . something out of a nightmare. Like the kind you have when you're a kid and it's mainly that you don't quite understand what it is you're afraid of.” I shivered.

He only nodded and pushed aside the hood and cowl, head bare to the cold while he studied the landscape. “I can't feel it,” he said finally. “I thought I might.”

I opened my mouth to ask what he meant, but his horse sprang ahead into a trot until the White Monk reached Graves. They halted our procession, Graves squinting up at the trees and then back at me. They fell into a discussion, heads close so none of the rest of us could hear. Finally Graves shook his head and we moved forward again. The path grew steeper and narrowed, so we rode two abreast, Marin falling behind us.

The White Monk rode at my side, looking grim, his blade drawn, resting on his thigh. “Do you have a dagger?” he asked in a conversational tone.

“Me? Glorianna, no. I'd likely prick myself as anyone else.” He didn't say anything to my standard joke. I suppose it wasn't funny to a man like him. “Why, what's going on?”

“Graves is a bold soldier, but he was a poor choice for this. He wasn't part of the Siege at Windroven, nor the last attempt at Odfell's Pass. Neither he nor his men mixed with Ursula's Hawks on the journey from Avonlidgh, so he knows nothing of what they encountered. Fools.” His frustration filled the air, grit from a whetting stone.

“But you did?”

He laughed, under his breath and without sound. “I do my research.”

“And what did you find out?”

“To take the unseen seriously. And that the Tala aren't the same as humans.”

Oh. “Is that who you think I'm seeing?”

He lifted one shoulder. “I wish I knew. If we could combine my knowledge with your senses, we might get somewhere.” Absurdly, given how much tension he radiated, he grinned at me, that scar hitching the lip on one side, eyes bright. He looked . . . happy, of all things. “Guess we'll have to figure it out as we go, huh?”

I didn't know how to reply to that. Such an odd man, that this was fun for him.

“But you expect them to attack—that's what you told Graves.”

“I think they're aware we're here, and we have the advantage because you can sense them. We should use that advantage.”

“Maybe we should go back.”

“Is that what you want to do?”

No. Even though fear nibbled at the edges of my mind, I didn't want to give up, just because I saw some shadows. They hadn't made any overt threats. Besides, Andi had invited me.

“Why can I see them?”

He sighed out a long breath of a person practicing patience. “It's in your blood, Ami. Your sister is the witch queen of the Tala—did you think you had nothing of that in you?”

I had thought that. Until Lady Zevondeth showed me how to work the spell by using my blood. Maybe that's why she wanted to keep our blood in her little vials. Like keeping keys that fit certain locks. “I can't work magic,” I reasoned, thinking it through, “but my mother's blood gives me certain access, a kind of sensitivity.”

“Yes. That's right.”

“So why did you think you would?”

“What do you mean?” He seemed to be surveying the woods, but I sensed the evasion, a shifting silver thread.

“You said you hoped you'd feel it.” The realization dawned on me. “Are you—is that why you can do what you do?”

I'd tried to be oblique, but he flicked me an irritated, burning glance, then returned his attention to the woods and shadows. “If I were, if I could live in paradise, why would I be living this life of exile in the Twelve Kingdoms?”

“I don't understand why everyone thinks Annfwn is so wonderful. If it's really paradise, why haven't I heard more about it?”

“Consider your upbringing.”

“How so?”

“You were raised in a bubble. Your father, far more than most parents, controlled what you knew of the world—as who he is, he had total control of your world, and made sure you only knew what he wanted you to, until you married and left home. After that . . .”

“What?”

“You went from one bubble to another.”

“You talk about me as if I'm some hothouse rose.” I meant to score a point, but he considered that thoughtfully.

“An apt analogy. Beautiful. Precious. Protected. Meant only to be touched and seen by a privileged few.”

Like Hugh had treated me, too. And worthless outside of that. He didn't say it, but I smelled the weedy accusation beneath. It rankled, but I couldn't argue with it. We fell silent. Snow began to fall, as if forming from the fog between the trees, fat flakes that landed on my horse's hide and lay quivering before melting into nothing.

With a whoosh, a clump of snow landed off to the side and I started, my nerves twanging. The conversation, though uncomfortable, had been at least distracting.

“So what didn't my father want me to know?”

The White Monk glanced my way, a quick assessment, and went along. “Only you can be the judge of that, but consider who he is. He placed his seat—the High Throne that was the trophy of his Great War—at the back door to Annfwn, as close as he could get to it without violating his pledge to your mother. Between his forces and the landscape, no one goes in or out of Annfwn without his knowledge. He cut it off from the rest of the kingdoms. If he couldn't have it, no one would.”

It made a weird sense. I remembered minstrels thrown out of court for singing the “wrong” songs. I was framing my next question when something that wasn't the wind soughed through the trees, strumming my nerves so they sang in response.

The soldiers ahead halted. We were against a steep wall on one side, a drop-off on the other, and the curve of the path kept us from seeing where Graves led the group.

Odd grunting noises floated down, disturbing in their formlessness.

The White Monk slid off his horse, holding a silencing finger to his lips, and gestured to Marin to go back down the trail. The soldier next to her shook his head—but obeyed the rule of silence—and pointed emphatically to show his desire to go forward. His fellows agreed, showing their impatience to help in the restless stamping of their horses' hooves, an urgent cadence pressing them forward.

But we blocked their way.

The White Monk held up his hands in a gesture for me to dismount. So pressed together were we on the narrow trail that it forced our bodies into contact. Despite my tense nerves—or maybe because of them—that frenzied desire for him, complete with dark fantasies, leapt through me. I stepped away as fast as possible, but took the hand he held out, following him past the horses, smashing myself against the snowy stones to ease past the soldiers' mounts.

We reached the clear space just past them and the White Monk pressed his blade into my hand. “Use it if you have to,” he said. Moving fast, he returned to our horses and, as near as I could see, moved his ahead of mine, nodding for Marin to slide hers behind his, pressed tight against the cliff wall. She'd been too stout to slide past as we had.

Freed, the soldiers trotted past in single file. Too fast, and perilously close to the cliff's edge, for one horse's hoof slid off the uneven rocks, unbalancing them both. For a heart-stopping moment, they hung there, teetering on the brink. Then, with twin shrieks of terror, they fell together, horse and soldier, plummeting down to the far canyon below.

I cried out with them, taking an involuntary step forward, as if I could somehow catch them. The White Monk clamped me against him, hand over my mouth. I sobbed, tearlessly, of course. He pressed his cheek against mine. Not in remonstration, I realized, but in mute sympathy. Dampness made them slide together and I looked at him to see silent tears running down his face. Marin had her hands clamped over her eyes, as if she, too, wished she could unsee what had just occurred.

The White Monk released me and urged us down the trail to a place where we would be less likely to be knocked off into the crevasse.

We waited. I opened my mouth once to ask what the plan was, but the White Monk made that gesture of silence again. I didn't see why. By his own estimation, the Tala already knew we were here. We'd been talking until the attack, so it made no sense for us not to talk at all now.

Still, I followed along.
Do you trust me?
he'd asked, and for no good reason, I did.

After a while, the White Monk stood and, taking his blade from me and motioning for us to stay put, crept up the trail again. I nearly protested. We hadn't heard any sounds, not even those odd, soft grunts, for quite some time. He returned fairly quickly.

“They're all gone,” he told us without preamble, crouching in front of me, “even the horses. You need to make a decision.”

“What does ‘gone' mean? Dead? Did they all go over the edge of the cliff, too?”

He shook his head. “Vanished. The snow is scuffed, but there's no sign of the men or the horses. No bodies. Just gone.”

I assimilated that, feeling the weight of things. “You think we should go back.”

“Is that what you want to do?” His unnatural eyes were intent but deliberately neutral. I couldn't read what he thought was the right decision. But I smelled his anxiety, his driving desire to go forward, as hot as midsummer sunshine. “This is your mission. You're the one who was invited.”

“Then why did you spirit me away from the fight? Maybe the Tala wouldn't have . . . done what they did, if they'd seen me with the soldiers.”

He blew out a breath and studied his gloved hands, knotted between his knees. “I don't think it works that way.”

“How does it work?”

“I think we're dealing with the equivalent of . . . guard dogs, if you will. They respond to certain cues. Smarter than dogs, but not exactly rational beings you can reason with, either.”

“How do you know so much?”

He gave me a wry look through his unkempt brows. “Let's say I've studied a lot.”

“So the princess will be allowed to pass, but no one else—is that how it works?” Marin nodded. “Then, if you go on, I'll head down the trail to the last cabin and wait for you there.”

“Can you do that?” I kind of gaped at her. I didn't think I could walk that far, and going by myself would be daunting.

“I've done that much and more, missy,” she answered, not unkindly. “I'd rather do that than be scooped off the mountainside by yon magical guard dogs.”

“We could all go back.” The White Monk regarded me with that neutral expression. “There's no shame in a retreat when facing unfavorable odds.”

I didn't like that he'd laid the decision so firmly in my hands. He was doing it on purpose, too. Making me take responsibility. Testing my resolve? Taking me seriously.