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“You didn’t know him, or you wouldn’t sound so . . . indifferent! ” I snapped.
His eyes flashed. “I am not indifferent, Cassie. The mage helped to bring me here, to get me away from the Senate. I owe him much that I will never be able to repay. But at least I can honor the sacrifice he made without belittling him.”
“I’m not belittling him!”
“Aren’t you?” Tomas held my eyes without flinching. “He was an old warrior. He had experience and courage and he knew his own mind. And he died for something he believed in—you. You do him no honor by questioning his judgment now.”
“His judgment got him killed! He should have stayed down.” And I should have searched for Myra on my own. I’d said that no one else was going to die because of me, yet here I was, adding another mark to my body count. “He shouldn’t have believed in me. No one should.”
“And why not?” Tomas looked genuinely confused.
I let out a half-bitter, half-hysterical laugh. “Because getting close to me is a one-way ticket to trouble. You ought to know.” Tomas had brought a lot of his problems on himself, but I had to wonder whether he would have made those same bad decisions if he had never met me.
Tomas shook his head. “You take too much on yourself, Cassie. Not everything is your fault, not every crisis is yours to solve.”
“I know that!” But however much I might like to think otherwise, I was to blame for what had happened to Mac. He’d been here because of me, he’d been vulnerable because of me, and ultimately, he’d died because of me.
“Do you?” I felt Tomas’ arm slip around me. “Then you’ve changed.” Warm lips ghosted against my hair. “Perhaps I see things clearer, because I’ve been a warrior longer.”
“I’m not a warrior at all.”
“I thought the same once. But when the Spaniards came to our village, I fought with the rest, to save the corn that would feed us through the winter. I lost many friends then, Cassie. The man who had been like a father to me was taken, and because he would not betray where we had hidden the harvest, they fed him to their dogs, piece by piece. Then they carried off the women and burned the village to the ground.”
He sounded so matter-of-fact about it that I stared. He smiled sadly. “I grieved for him by honoring what he fought for, by keeping our small group together and f
ree.”
He stopped and I knew why. It was one of the few things he’d told me about his life. Alejandro had eventually finished what the conquistadors had begun, by killing Tomas’ village in some sort of game. I’d never heard the whole story, only a few small fragments, but I didn’t want to make him relive it.
I decided to change the subject. “Louis-César said your mother was a noblewoman. How did you end up in a village?”
“After the conquest, no one was noble, no one commoner. You were either European or nothing. My mother had been a priestess of Inti, the sun god, and had taken a vow of chastity for life, but a conquistador took her as booty after the fall of Cuzco. She had expected to be treated with honor, according to the rules of war, but he knew nothing of our customs and would not have cared if he did. He was merely a farmer’s son from Extremadura out to make a fortune, and didn’t care much how he did it. She hated him.”
“How did she get away?”
“No one thought she could scale a wall ten feet high when seven months pregnant, and they failed to watch her closely. She got away, but she had no money, and her defilement made her an outcast from her former calling. Not that it mattered. The temple had been plundered and the land was ravaged by disease and war. She fled the capital, where the Spaniards were fighting among themselves, but found things no better in the countryside.” Tomas smiled bitterly. “They forgot, you cannot eat gold. Most of the farmers who had not died had run away. Famine was everywhere. Grain became more valuable than the riches the conquistadors had wanted so badly.”
“Yet your mother found a village that would take her in?”
“She hid in her family’s chullpa—a crypt where food and offerings were left for mummified ancestors—and one of the palace servants found her. He had long loved her, but the priestesses were considered the wives of Inti. Sleeping with one of them was a terrible crime. The punishment was to be stripped and chained to a wall, and left to starve to death.”
“So he had worshipped from afar?”
Tomas smiled. “Very afar. But he began looking for her as soon as he heard she had escaped. He persuaded her to go away with him to his family’s village. It was almost fifty miles from the capital, and so small that they hoped the Spanish would overlook it. They lived there together until I was eight, when she died of smallpox along with half the village.”
“I’m sorry.” It seemed there were no safe topics, after all. I fingered the eagle charm that I’d unconsciously picked up. I couldn’t volunteer to go back and get Tomas’ mother out of danger, before disease carried her away. I couldn’t even help my own mother without drastically changing time. For all my supposed power, I didn’t seem to be able to do much at all.
Tomas bent over to kiss me gently. His lips were soft and warm, and before I realized it, I was kissing him back. I’d wanted to do that for so long, it seemed as natural as breathing. Just touching him pushed away the memories of the attack, cleansing some part of me the bathwater hadn’t been able to reach. Tomas deepened the kiss until I could feel it all the way to my toes, like tendrils of sunshine were curling through me. He tasted like wine, dark and sweet and burning, and I felt like I could never get enough.
But after a moment, I pulled back. It wasn’t easy—the geis had recognized Tomas and the Pythia’s power agreed that he would do fine to complete the ritual. Their need overrode my aversion to even thinking about intimacy at the moment. I wanted to fill my mind with thoughts and sensations that didn’t involve horror and pain. I wanted him to touch me with those long, elegant hands, to have his mouth hot and demanding on mine. The look in his eyes was a caress itself, and an invitation. But the consequences for a few moments of passion would be severe.
Tomas let me go, an expression that I couldn’t name flashing across his face. “I’m sorry, Cassie. I know I am not the one you want.”
What could Tomas know about what I wanted? Most of the time, I didn’t know myself. “What I want isn’t the point,” I said, trying to ignore the way his hand was playing along my side from breast to hip, over and over in a lazy, sensual stroke. It made my heart speed up and breathing difficult, like someone had sucked all the oxygen out of the room. Oh, yeah, the geis liked him fine.
“What do you mean?” Tomas’ hand stilled on my hip. That was not a great help to my blood pressure. Despite the fact that I had moved back, we were less than a foot apart. I struggled not to look down and failed miserably. The blanket had slipped off the front half of Tomas’ body. Long legs shifted in the shadows, and between them was ample evidence of just how recovered he was.
“I can’t,” I said, trying to remember exactly why that was. My fingers traced a line down his high forehead to the tender eyelids that fluttered closed under my touch, to the proud nose and warm, full lips. It was a perfect profile, burnished bronze in the lamplight like the head on an ancient coin, but his appearance wasn’t what had attracted me to him. I’d loved his kindness, his strength and—I’d thought at the time—his honesty. Now I merely craved a warm body and soft skin next to mine, and a face that was familiar and caring.
