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I kissed the corner of his jaw. “We will change that soon, my Wesley. You will see our home.”
“Ours, huh?”
I nodded, slumping deeply to drop my chin on his shoulder. “Yes. We have rooms in the palace, almost as nice as the prince’s. There are furs and silks that I will wrap you in. A bed much, much larger than the one we shared on Zathkar.”
“And everything’s poisonous or pointy or, you know, generally carnivorous?” He fiddled with his glasses. I straightened up, searching his eyes, sure he felt fear.
But then, he was smiling. Though I did not understand him precisely, through my mark, and through the subtle sweep of his palm against the back of my hand, his tricky smile, I came to.
My grin mirrored his. “Indeed, my Wesley. And as a great warrior and a greater mage, we may explore it all.”
He settled back against me, my arms wrapped around his waist, and his arms atop mine. “Cool,” he whispered.
And that was the last thing he said before we landed and all the humans who had come to Thorzan with him, all those who had chosen to stay, swarmed the landing pad to welcome us home.
CHAPTER37
WES
Icould barely breathe.
They were all still there. Well, almost all of them. Genevieve was gone for sure, but there were also people I didn’t recognize among the welcoming party.
“You’re still here,” I whispered to Hiroki when he leapt forward and hugged me tight.
He flushed bright pink and looked over his shoulder at a huge full Thorzi standing at the edge of the platform. “Well, the place does have some nice things to recommend it. Don’t you think?”
I reached back and grabbed Jax’s hand, squeezing it tight. “I do.”
After that, there was a lot of hugging, and people giving me the “look at you, you’re not dead” pat down, before Jax motioned for Marex and his people to come off the ship.
A hush seemed to fall over the platform as the humans looked on in confused interest, and the Thorzi were stunned.
Kaelum put a hand on Marex’s shoulder and announced aloud, “This is my friend Marex. He and his kin are here to speak to the king on the matter of the traitor Crux, who has been fomenting the trouble between our people to serve himself.”
It wasn’t hard to see the suspicion on many Thorzi faces. Or, well, I assumed that flat-eyed stare was suspicion. On the other hand, there was also a lot of nodding and muttering to each other, and the few things my interpreter implant picked up were more angry with Crux than with the Zathki.
It seemed some things had changed on Thorzan in our absence, and it hadn’t been in Crux’s favor.
The full Thorzi Hiroki had been talking about stepped forward, dropping into a position that looked like a bow in front of Kaelum. “You are needed in your father’s throne room, my prince. Things are moving quickly, and if you move faster, you may find more support for the Zathki than you expect.”
Kaelum frowned at him, his jaw clenching. “What has Crux done?”
The Thorzi shook his head, shrugging. “I am not entirely certain, Prince Kaelum, but there is word that Crux has fled upon word of Jax’s retrieval.”
Kaelum snorted at that. “As he should. He fired upon Jax and Wesley, believing it was me on the ship, as well as all these innocent humans.”
“Motherfucker,” Ree whispered beside me, her eyes narrowed in anger. “Are you two okay?”
“We’re good,” I assured her. “Thanks to Jax’s skill and help from the Zathki.”
A few seconds later, we’d been crowded onto a giant stone pad thing, just like the first time we’d arrived on the planet, but this time, it took us to something completely different than a cold, clinical lab.
The palace was a giant stone structure built into the side of a cliff, waterfall on one side, and architecture that blew my mind. The artists I’d worked with on games over the years would have salivated over the breathtaking views, the brilliant shades of the red stone cliff and waterfall so blue I almost thought it couldn’t be actual water.
The room we ended up in was just as impossible and alien. There was a huge set of double doors leading in, but the enormous room was also open to the sky, where you could see stone disks whizzing by on paths to who knew where.
My first thought was that it was terrible for security, but they were a culture of warriors. I imagined they thought if the king couldn’t watch his own back, he didn’t much deserve to be king.
