Fine.Maybe ten more minutes. Then she would ride slow. She would be careful. She would?—
"Look at the human."
The voice came from behind her — loose-vowelled, amused, pitched to carry.
November did not turn. The fire suddenly seemed less warm.
"Look what the halvyn brought home to warm his bed."
Chair legs scraped. Two sets of boots crossed the stone floor toward her. The barkeep set his cloth down.
"That's enough, my lord. Go back to your table."
"I'm just being friendly."
"You're drunk. Go sit down."
"I'll sit when I'm done looking."
He came around the side of her chair into her field of vision. Broader than Rhaezon, less refined — dark grey-brown skin,scales surfacing at his jaw, green-gold at the edges of his eyes. He looked her up and down with slow, entitled attention.
November set the empty mug on the hearth and stood. The room tilted a quarter-turn before settling. "I'm leaving."
"You just got here."
He stepped into her path. His friend closed in from the other side — shorter, thicker, grinning like he had been promised a show. The barkeep came around the counter.
"My lord. I am asking you?—"
"And I am not listening."
The noble's hand closed around November's upper arm. He pulled. She planted her feet, but the pull still carried her, and her boots slid on the damp stone.
She had time to thinknovery clearly before her back hit his chest.
He sat down in the chair she had just vacated and brought her down with him, into his lap, the whole of her settled against the whole of him. The stranger's erection ground hard against her backside. One arm clamped across her waist. The other hand came up and closed over her breast through her wet shirt, squeezing, thumb dragging.
"Maybe you'd like to come warm my bed, too. Experience what a true full-blooded Drakon can do."
His friend laughed. The barkeep was shouting. November could not get her hands to do what she wanted them to do — the spirits, the cold, the speed of it — she pushed at the arm across her waist and it did not move and her mind went briefly, terribly blank.
"What does the halvyn see in you, human? Let's find out."
FIFTEEN
The light was out.
It was the first thing Rhaezon noticed as he pulled his kethral up short at the ridge line and stared at the darkened kitchen window. The one that glowed warm and amber on patrol nights when the rest of the house had gone dark. The place where November sat with a mug of tea in her hand, reading, humming, waiting until he returned.
He had never consciously realized this. He had never named it as the first thing his eyes searched for when he crested the ridge on the return. He had never admitted that the faint square of golden light in the vast dark face of the Vaethari Hold had become, over the past three weeks, the signal that the world was still correctly arranged. That she was still there. That nothing had gone wrong in his absence.
But that night the window was dark.
He told himself she'd gone to sleep. That was all. He had told her to sleep on patrol nights. She had ignored him every time, sitting in the kitchen with her tea, and he had pretended to be irritated by it while memorizing the exact picture she made in the deep stone window seat.
She had finally listened to him. Good.
The feeling that something was wrong did not go away.
