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She snorted. “This one, like all stallions, requires it, but they do the job adequately if you ride them hard enough and keep a steady hand.” His sputtered laughter made her grin.
“Gods, firefly woman,” he said softly in bast-Kai, “how I have missed you.” He switched back to Common before their audience grew suspicious. “Did you really tell all and sundry I was your lover?”
“Practically shouted it from the rooftops.”
He pressed closer to the bars, and she did the same. “Well then, since the word is out...” He kissed her, his lips cold against hers but no less seductive for their chill or the fact a wall of steel separated them so that it was more the brush of a moth's wings across her mouth than the passionate play of lips and tongue she wanted from him and wanted to share with him.
When they parted, he let go of her hands to trace the juts of her cheekbones with his fingertips. His features were solemn, mouth drawn down with worry. “Why did you come? Surely Brishen didn't approve.”
Brishen had been very clear about his opinion of her journey. “This decision is yours, cousin. I have no say in it, therefore I don't sanction for or against it.”
“I didn't come as the Khaskem's second,” she told Serovek. “Only as Anhuset. I represent myself, not the kingdom of Bast-Haradis.”
His eyes closed for a moment. “Thank the gods,” he said and opened them again. “I figured Brishen would know how to handle this. I didn't want to be the spark that started a war between two kingdoms.” The grim lines in his face didn't ease. “Even so, you shouldn't be here.”
“Neither should you,” she said. “Yet here we are.” She eyed the guards and sorcerer askance before turning a telling look on Serovek, hoping he could read in her expression the message that he go along with the charade she was about to enact.
She relaxed her body, draping herself against the bars. Her voice, usually clipped turned breathy. “I have many things to say to you, my love.” Serovek's eyebrows shot to his hairline. “How I've thought of you and missed you.”
He looked just like the gate guards when she announced she was his lover, and Anhuset would have laughed out loud if she was doing this out of jest. But this was a serious game, one with stakes too high to lose.
She switched to bast-Kai, keeping the breathy tone of a lover's pillow talk but speaking fast before the guards put a stop to it. “I don't have time to explain,” she said. “If you want to walk out of this with your head still intact or your neck not stretched, don't argue or protest what I do or say. And if the king asks you if you'll marry me, you say yes. Understood?”
Jaw slack, he gave a single nod, and as Anhuset predicted one of the guards snapped out a warning. “Speak Common or you're done.”
She immediately complied. “Do you not feel the same, my darling?” When this was over, she was going to wash this false sweetness off her tongue with a dram of hot lye.
Serovek contributed wholeheartedly to her sham. “I can't begin to express how I feel at the moment, my dove, but I understand,” he cooed. Anhuset almost gagged.
“Time's up,” one of the guards said, and she turned to see the warden moving down the hall toward them, returned from his foray downstairs to his office.
“What are you up to, Anhuset?” They were both so close to the bars, Serovek whispered the question in her ear.
She looked back at him, memorizing his face and the play of shadows across its angles and hollows. “Saving your life.”
“Why?”
Anhuset stared at him for a moment, flummoxed by the question. Surely she didn't just hear doubt in his voice? This man of supreme self-confidence who'd been able to read her with stunning, frightening ease?
The warden motioned for her to join him, and the guards drew closer to physically drag her away from the cell if she didn't come of her own accord. She was out of time. She reached through the bars to slide an errant lock of his hair through her fingers before pulling away. “Is it not obvious, margrave?”
The two guards closest to her jumped back when she spun on her heels, their hands dropping to their sword pommels. Warning bolts of lighting passed over the sorcerer's hands. Anhuset raised her hands in surrender and walked away to join the warden waiting for her in the corridor. Serovek's gaze, piercing and intense, rested heavy on her back.
Chapter Eighteen
We die for those we love.
Serovek pacedthe breadth and length of his cell, wondering how many other prisoners before him had done the same, their enforced confinement weighing heavier and heavier on their minds and spirits with each passing day. He'd done well enough until now, using the task of chronicling the journey to the Jeden Order's monastery for the Archives as a way to occupy his mind and stave off boredom while he waited for the king to summon him to trial.
Some might consider it simply an exercise in futility. No doubt Rodan had ordered Dame Stalt to turn over everything he wrote and had his scribes alter key facts that turned a well-intentioned journey of mercy into a sinister plan of sedition fueled by treasonous ambition. Serovek, however, suspected Dame Stalt was a stickler for accuracy in historical records. She may have given the king what he asked for, but he wouldn't at all be surprised to learn there was at least two copies of Serovek's original recounting hidden away for posterity's sake somewhere in the mysterious depths of the Archives.
The writing had helped him hold onto his patience, and except for the confrontation with Bryzant, the anger over his imprisonment. One more day in this cell might be humiliating, but it was also one more day he didn't face the gallows or the chopping block. One more day that he could refine the argument he had prepared in his own defense when he would finally stand before Rodan and whatever tribunal the king called.
And then Anhuset showed up on the other side of the cell bars and destroyed his equanimity in an instant. His patience evaporated, his anger burned hot, and his worry threatened to consume him. For what purpose had she come? And what plan had she hatched? Her enigmatic warning that he not protest or argue whatever it was she said or did had set off every alarm, alarms that rose to deafening volumes inside him when she mentioned the king and marriage. He'd wanted to interrogate her, but their time was short, their audience composed of guards and sorcerer avid in their attention as they listened to them converse. Anhuset had given her warning in bast-Kai in a voice so at odds with her very character, he'd been taken aback at first. All to fool those listening who would assume the conversation between them was merely blandishments exchanged between lovers. They might not have believed the part about the lovers had she not announced it very publicly when she first arrived at Timsiora.
Serovek paused in his pacing and allowed himself a faint smile. How he would have loved to hear her make that declaration and see the faces of those who heard it. His smile faded and he resumed wearing a trench into the floor.
Two days had passed since she visited and no word from her or the king since then. Dame Stalt came to retrieve the last set of parchment from him and shared what she knew.
