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“How is it that you can sit here calmly and talk with us?” Torchay added. “Why haven’t you lost your wits?”
Last year, Stone’s magic-driven urgency to reach Kallista had him half-leaping from boats or falling into convulsions. Fox had likely been much the same, for he remembered little of his journey to them.
“I don’t know.” Joh shifted in his too-soft chair, chains clacking together. “I believe that I did. I don’t remember much of the trip here. And my hands—” He held them up, showing injuries he might have acquired trying to dig through prison walls. Stone’s hands had borne similar marks when he’d been brought to Arikon and Kallista. “It could be I am rational now in her presence because I was marked not so long ago.”
“When?” Kallista glowered at Torchay to keep him quiet this time. “What happened?”
“Just over a week ago. The guards put us back in the cells after breakfast instead of herding us out into the courtyard because of some disturbance in the countryside. I was reading the Meditations of Orestes and praying. There was—I can only call it joy, but that isn’t a tenth of what I felt.” His expression glowed, making Kallista shiver with its overflow.
He shook himself, recovered his thoughts. “And next I knew, I found myself clawing at the walls. It took the prison governor a few days to learn of it, and several more days to bring me here. And a few more for you to arrive.”
“How long ago did it happen?” Torchay asked. “What day?”
Joh shook his head. “I lost so much time—”
“Guess.”
“It—it might have been—It was a Graceday. Maybe the twenty-sixth or-seventh of Terris?”
A chill ran down her back as she met Torchay’s gaze. “That disturbance in the countryside. Do you know what it was?”
“No.” Joh looked from one to the other of them, fear growing in his expression. “Why?”
“The rebels struck throughout Adara on Terris twenty-seventh, assassinating naitani and military officers. The day the One marked you.” Kallista took a deep breath.
She could not put it off longer. Likely should not have delayed this much. The interlude given her to enjoy simply being ilias and mother had ended. She could not stretch it longer by wishing. She was who she was and could not be other. The signs that Joh had truly been marked by the One were all there. It only required her touch to know.
CHAPTER FOUR
Kallista slid from her chair to her knees. “Give me your hand.”
“Captain, no.” Joh struggled to rise and Torchay clapped a hand on his shoulder, holding him in place. “Do not kneel before me.”
“If I fall, I’d rather be closer to the ground.” She raised an eyebrow. “Surely you remember what could happen when our hands touch.” He’d been there for both Stone’s and Obed’s first touch.
“I—yes.” He sank back into his velvet prison, his whole body tense with nervous anticipation. “What—”
“I don’t know what will happen. Perhaps nothing. My magic has not yet returned since the twins were born.”
“Twins?” Joh whispered in shock while she went on.
“It could be this will wake it. Or not.” She smiled, shifting to one side, off her knees. “I can promise, whatever happens, it won’t hurt.”
Joh did not seem to believe her.
“Torchay, let go of him,” she said.
He looked at her, expression bland. “I’d rather not. You lost the magic the same day I was marked. I want to know what the others know.”
“There’s plenty of time for that.”
“I’m tired of waiting.”
She didn’t think that was his only, or even his primary, reason for keeping his grip on the chained man, but she let it go. Arguing him down would take time she didn’t think they had. “Joh, give me your hand.”
With a faint rattle of the chains holding them together, Joh extended both hands and opened one out flat. He turned his head away slightly, nostrils flaring as if he faced something terrifying. Magic could terrify, she supposed, if one were not used to it. Hoping her smile looked reassuring, Kallista took his hand in hers. And nothing happened.
She wanted to scream in frustration. Her fingers tightened, squeezing his hand. She took his other hand in her empty one, silently shouting for the magic, Wake up! Do something!
And it slammed into her with a force that brought her high on her knees, bowing her backward in an impossible arc as she screamed with the near-forgotten pleasure of it.
The magic swept every inch of her, a storm scouring her end-to-end with delight, blasting open paths that had withered shut over the winter. Creating new ones.
Dragging her in its wake, the magic roared back into Joh. As Kallista tumbled toes to nose in the wave, there was a sort of wrenching, of something twisting aside or tearing open, and Joh cried out. Goddess, she’d forgotten.
She reached for him to soothe his pain and he was there, with her, riding the magic. She tasted his fear, breathed in his desperation, his need to make things right. She saw the colors of his soul, though she couldn’t have matched them to any tints she knew—colors of loyalty, passion, loneliness, honesty, deep and agonizing remorse….
Kallista felt the magic swelling. Something new. She caught Joh tight, wrapping him in her unseen embrace, whispering wordless, voiceless reassurance as the magic whipped across the skin-to-skin contact into Torchay.
He cried out, knees buckling, though Kallista thought he somehow managed to stay upright. The magic lashed them with pleasure, tearing sounds from three throats, but it had not finished with them. Kallista reached out as Torchay spun past, brought him into the web and knotted him there, adding his booming strength to the harmony they made as the magic swelled yet again.
It leapt across the gap to Obed, increasing the pleasure fourfold with the addition of the fourth. His shout drowned them all out and he fell to his knees. Kallista barely had time to bind him into their knotted chorus before the magic expanded again, spinning outward until she thought she would leave pieces of her soul scattered across all Adara.
She fought to keep the men whole. They were helpless and vulnerable without magic of their own and she shielded them with layers of herself.
Then the magic crashed into yet another, and Kallista tasted Fox. He was cold, worried and falling to his knees in snow as he shoved his fist in his mouth to stifle the shout of delight, but he was alive. Was he in danger? Kallista had no time to tell, barely enough time to pull him safely into the bonds, before the magic poured out of Fox and into Stone. Who fell full length on his face in the snow and shouted loud enough to wake the dead.
Laughing, Kallista scooped him up, wove him into place with the others, ready now as the magic rolled on to find Aisse. She was sleeping, somewhere dark and smoky but safe, seeming to think she dreamed when the magic first caught her up. She woke only as it spun them tighter in the ecstasy it made.
Kallista held on fiercely, twining their separate selves into a glorious whole—Torchay’s strength, Obed’s truth, Fox’s order, Stone’s joy, Aisse’s faith, Kallista’s will…Joh’s vision. All her marked ones were there.
The magic pushed them, pulled, whirled and tumbled them as it rose to explosive heights. Again and again, Kallista hauled it back, building the power and the pleasure with each check of its escape while it bounced again through each one of them. Her pleasure fed theirs, which fed back to her and into the magic which then spilled back through each of them to push the cycle higher still.
“Goddess!” Someone screamed it, or maybe all of them did. And the magic exploded out of Kallista’s control.
It blasted through them in a seven-fold sexual climax before it erupted into a cloud of glittering fallout visible to every naitan in Adara who might chance to look toward Arikon. Then it drifted slowly down, folding back into its separate homes.
Kallista blinked, alone inside her body again, and found herself seated on the floor, her arms draped across Joh’s naked legs, her face buried in his lap. Torchay sat slumped against her, weighing her down, and Obed lay curled on his side a short distance away. She shoved at Torchay and he shifted his weight off her, leaning bonelessly against the chair holding Joh.
“Beware of what you ask for,” Torchay mumbled through lips that didn’t seem to be working quite right.
“I asked for nothing.” Obed sounded bitter, his voice choked with some hidden emotion. He’d told her more than once that he wanted nothing to do with sex by magic.
Kallista wanted to go to him, to bring him closer, but she couldn’t move from her spot. She stretched out her leg, touched him with her bare toes, and he flinched away.
“I’ll kill him.” Torchay lifted a hand toward the sword hilt over his shoulder, then let it fall again. “Later. When I’ve rested up a bit.”
“Don’t kill him just yet, please.” Kallista rolled her head to one side and Joh gasped. The chains rattled and she realized his hands were tangled in her hair. He started to pull them back, but Kallista managed to close a hand over his wrist and prevent it.
“I hope Fox and Stone manage to get themselves out of the snow before they get frostbite,” she said, her mind not quite turning all its gears yet. They were alive. They were safe.
“What are they doin’ in the snow anyway?” Torchay raised his hand again, and this time managed to push his half-dry curls out of his face by means of lowering his head to meet his hand.
“Hunting, I think. That was the impression I got.” Her thumb made little circles on the skin inside Joh’s wrist. “I imagine they scared off whatever they were hunting and everything else within hearing distance.”
“Aye, likely.” Torchay opened an eye, then both of them, meeting Kallista’s gaze. “They seemed well, safe enough.”
She settled her cheek more comfortably against Joh’s thigh. “They did, didn’t they?” The box full of fear had vanished from her mind.
Torchay sighed, pushing away from the chair to sit unsupported. “Might as well not have bothered with bathing. Soon as I change my trousers, I’ll get the key from the lieutenant.” He shook his head at her. “Do you always have to pet the new ones?”
Was she? Kallista lifted her head a fraction and saw her hand stroking over Joh’s thigh, her other caressing his wrist. “I suppose I must.” She slanted a look at Torchay. “Did I not pet you enough when you were first marked?”
“We were busy escaping from Tsekrish, as I recall.” He leered playfully at her, a bit of Stone rubbed off on him, perhaps. “But if you want to make up for it, I won’t object.”
She lifted a hand weighted down with invisible rocks and pointed at the suite door. “Go get the key.”
“After I change.” He crawled to his hands and knees and used Joh’s chair to pull himself to his feet. In silence, Obed hauled himself upright and staggered after him. Kallista bit her lip, watching him go, then put her worry out of her mind. If Obed refused to share what troubled him, she couldn’t resolve it on her own.
If things didn’t get better, something would have to be done. She didn’t want to let him go. Besides her personal feelings, they needed the magic he carried, but if he couldn’t bear to stay, she would have to do it. That could wait, for now.
Her neck scarcely seemed strong enough to connect head to body, much less actually raise her head from its very comfortable spot, but she forced it to do so anyway. “Joh?”
His cheeks were wet with tears that squeezed from beneath his tight-closed eyelids. When she whispered his name, he raised a shoulder and wiped his face across it. “Sweet Goddess—” His voice rasped like stones grinding together, its former deep richness lost. “What was that?”
Kallista had to laugh, though it sounded little better than Joh’s croak. “The magic.”
“Saints and all the holy sinners—why didn’t the Tibran fall to his knees and beg you to keep him when I brought him as a prisoner to Arikon?”
“It’s never been like that before.” She had lazed on the floor long enough, but halfway to her feet, a wave of dizziness hit her. She managed to collapse on the arm of Joh’s chair, then slid down into the seat, more on top of him than beside him. “Sorry,” she mumbled, holding her head up with both hands.
“Head down.” He nudged at her elbows propped on her knees. “You shouldn’t have tried to stand so soon.”
“They did.” And she was the captain. Maybe she didn’t have the same strength as her men, but she’d always been able to match Torchay in sheer endurance.
“They weren’t holding that—that madness together. You were.” Joh urged her head toward his knees, moving his chains out of the way.
“It wasn’t like that before.” She let him push her where he wanted, unable to argue, until the dizziness began to fade. Then it felt too nice, even if she was bent nearly in half. And she could think again.
“What was different about it?”
“Before, it was only me and the one I was touching. Well, except with Obed, when Stone got in the way. But then it was only the three of us, because we were all touching. And it only happened when the marked one wasn’t with us when he was marked. Like you. It didn’t happen with Aisse and Torchay at all.” Kallista lifted her head again, and when the dizziness remained at bay, she sat up, resting her head against Joh’s shoulder in case it returned.
Joh cleared his throat. “Never everyone at once?”
She took a deep breath. “You smell good. They didn’t bring us scented soap.”
“Doubtless because I had more odors to scrub away and disguise.” The smile was audible in his voice.
“At the weddings,” she said, finally answering his question. “When we all took hands at the end, something like that happened, but not so…intense.”
“Ah.”
“And of course, we were all there together and holding hands. That was before Torchay and Aisse were marked, of course, which could be the difference. That they weren’t part of the magic then. But I think it happened this time because my magic has been asleep for so long. When your mark woke it, I think it needed to—to make sure we were all still together. All still bound.”
“What happens next?” Joh asked.
“I get the key to those shackles of yours.” Still tying up his trouser laces, Torchay came out of the far right-hand bedroom, the one he’d briefly shared with Kallista when they were here before.
Joh tensed when the red-haired bodyguard spoke, but the sergeant strode past them, paying more attention to his pants than to his naitan snuggled in the lap of the man who had almost killed her.
“What is he doing?” Joh did not understand.
“Getting the key.” The captain rolled her head off his shoulder. “Look at me. Let me see your eyes. Are you all right?”
“Quite well.” Obedient to her word, Joh looked at her, let her search his eyes with her lightning-bright gaze. “Other than feeling I’ve been beaten with washing paddles, wrung out and hung to dry.”
She snuggled in again, her hair soft and damp on his shoulder. Why? He had no right to questions, had no right to anything, but his mind buzzed with them. Joh tipped his head back in the chair and closed his eyes, trying to calm the buzz. It didn’t work. The captain’s presence distracted him, kept the questions coming, kept his mind twirling with a thousand contradictory thoughts.
“I don’t understand.” Joh’s words slipped out through clenched teeth. He couldn’t hold them back. “Why has Sergeant Omvir left you alone with me? Why am I still alive? I almost killed you, for the One’s sake.”
“If She forgave you, how can we do less?” Then Kallista shook her head, her dark hair sliding across his skin in a damp caress. “But it’s not that, Joh, not truly. It’s more. We know you now. We know.”
Something ran icy fingers down his spine where it pressed against the warm velvet of the chair. West magic was as much a gift from the One as East healing. He knew that. He believed it. Now, after his long study and thought in prison, even more after what just happened. But it still unnerved him when he saw it in action.
“We were all together in the magic.” The captain was still speaking. It was getting difficult to think of her as the captain, with her half-lying in his lap like this and him wearing little beside chains and a smile, especially since the magic. But he had no right to think anything at all.
“I know you now, Joh,” she went on. “They know you. And you know us. There’s no room for lies in the magic.”
He felt her face move against his skin and thought she might have smiled as she spoke again. “There is room for misunderstandings. Great, big, stinking enormous ones. But we do know for certain that you mean us no harm—and never did. And now, you’re bound to us so tight that no one will be able to take advantage of—of any confusion.”
“No.” The guard lieutenant’s voice rang through the chamber with such force, Joh flinched in spite of himself. Lieutenant Tylle had regulations written on her spine and nothing but contempt for those she guarded. Not that he deserved better.
“No, what?” The captain spoke casually, did not change her lounging posture, but the habit of command rang in her words.
Sergeant Omvir came to attention, looking decidedly unmilitary with his hair curling loose around his face. “Captain—”
“No. I will not allow you to remove the chains from my prisoner,” the lieutenant interrupted. “This man is an inmate at Katreinet Prison, despite his current…relocation. As long as he is outside the walls of the prison and not in a properly secured cell, he will be kept in chains.
“Now, if you are through with your…consultation—” The lieutenant’s expression betrayed her disgust at what she assumed had been their purpose—and truthfully, she was not far wrong, given what had happened. “I will take my prisoner back into my custody and return him to his cell.”
“No, Lieutenant Tylle, you will not.” Captain Varyl rose to her feet, backing the lieutenant away as she did so. The captain now was powered with the energy she’d seemed drained of only moments ago. “Do you forget who is captain here? This man is now in my care. He is—”
“Does a quick fuck substitute for transfer orders now?”
The captain stood motionless, shocked by the lieutenant’s insubordinate obscenity for only a moment. Then she backhanded the shorter woman across the face with a power that rocked her on her heels and sent her stumbling back. Omvir caught the captain around the waist and swung her back before she could follow up on the blow.
Joh struggled out of the chair to his feet, his chains setting up a furious rattle. What had just happened? Was the captain defending her own honor or—or his?
