Fires of the Desert (Children of the Desert Book 4) (34 page)

She didn’t flinch. Her stare remained steady as she said, “I’m not yours, Deiq.”

He drew in a long breath, seeing the remaining chasm of her ignorance in that statement, then found himself laughing. It started out without any humor and turned into a howling tumble of mirth that pushed him deep into his chair, head back and chest heaving, tears leaking from his eyes.

When he wound down, he found her watching him with an expression of bewildered alarm, as though she was thinking he’d just lost his mind. Not entirely sure he hadn’t, he wiped his face clear and thought about how to explain.

“Never mind,” he said at last, giving up for now, and stood up.

She tracked his movements warily, clearly ready to defend herself against attack. He shook his head and moved, deliberately slow, to kneel before her. She let him wind his fingers though hers, but the caution stayed in her eyes, a distance that caught another barb through his gut. He sighed and dropped his forehead to rest on her knees, letting himself be still for a moment.

“Am I a monster, Alyea?” he said at last, without moving. He read the sudden tension in her hands as though he’d looked at her face. “Is that how you see me now?”

After a long time, her hands relaxed, and he sat back on his heels to meet her gaze. Her eyes filled with tears.

“I can’t see you as a monster,” she said, her voice low, “without naming myself the same way. I’ve killed....”

“To save yourself,” he interrupted as her voice faltered. “For survival.”

“Pieas—”

“Blood trial,” he reminded her, tightening his grip on her hands. “Alyea, you can’t look at the killing you’ve done under the rules for what a northern noblewoman’s allowed to do. You’re a desert lord. It’s
different
for you. You don’t have anyone protecting your family, your honor, or your life except
you.”

Her gaze held no relief. “Kippin said he’d have let me kill Tevin if you hadn’t rescued me, to break me the rest of the way to his will,” she said. “I would have done it. I would have been—”

She shuddered, closing her eyes. He could feel the violent wave of rage and bloodlust swamp through her. It very nearly set him off into a defensive frenzy himself. His vision hazed white around the edges for a long, dangerous moment until he managed to yank his hands free of hers and lean back, panting hard.

“Don’t—do that,” he husked, digging his fingers into the rock underneath his knees; felt it creak and crumble under the pressure. He drew two fast, hard breaths and forced himself to lift his hands to his knees before he tore out handfuls of solid rock and scared her even further.

“Don’t do
what?”
Her fury abruptly shifted into alarmed confusion again, which was far easier to deal with.

“Anger,” he said thinly. He closed his eyes, opened them again, not at all sure whether they were still entirely human-normal. But Alyea showed no reaction as he looked at her, so he dared to hope he’d maintained that, at least. “It hurts.”

“Me being angry
hurts
you?” she said, incredulous, then sucked in a hard breath of her own. “Oh, gods,” she breathed, eyes wide. He could almost see information clicking together in her head. “That’s how Tank—”

“Stop,” he said harshly, and grabbed one of her knees in a hard grip, locking his finger pressure just shy of the damage point.
“Stop,
Alyea. Please. I’m not...feeling well right now. It’s too easy for me to hurt you, if you talk about—some things. Please. Don’t.”

He shut his eyes, knowing that they were starting to slide out of human-normal this time and unable to reverse the change.

She breathed through her teeth for a while without speaking. Slowly, his pulse stopped thundering in his ears and his eyes went back to something that wouldn’t terrify her to see.

“You’re hurt,” she said at last.

No point pretending. She’d see the lie. “Yes.”

“And you need to—feed.”

An infinitesimal hesitation, but he’d been listening for it. Despair wracked through him again. He released her knee and leaned his forehead there instead. “Never mind,” he said. “I’ll manage.”

“Don’t be an ass,” she said, her voice regaining its strength and tartness at last.

He couldn’t resist. “You’re not
mine,
remember?” he returned, and sat up, leaning away from her. “I’m not relying on you—”

Her hand shot out and cracked him across the face, a movement that shocked both of them into a moment of frozen-eyed goggling at one another. He couldn’t believe he’d allowed her to do that; she clearly couldn’t believe she’d actually hit him.

As the moment stretched out, Deiq realized he was waiting for reflex to drive him forward, expecting the killing rage to crest and throw everything out of control. The utter stillness inside him threw him, instead, off balance as though he’d leaned into a stiff wind and found nothing but a gentle breeze.

I have a choice,
he thought, hazed, disbelieving; and promptly burst into tears at the realization.

Alyea stared, eyes round and shocked, clearly assuming he was reacting to her piddly little slap. He rolled sideways and stretched out on the cold stone, gasping for breath and letting the weight of centuries lift from his mind.

I have a
choice
. A choice! Oh, gods....

At last, his breathing calmed and his throat worked again. He said, “Alyea.”

She shifted but didn’t move from where she sat, and made a worried, inquiring noise in the back of her throat.

“Come here. Please.” He left his arms splayed out, palms open and up, and his eyes closed.

She approached, steps hesitant, and stood near his feet. He could feel her readiness to bolt, to defend herself, still sizzling through her, and marveled at his own lack of reaction to that aggravation.

Not opening his eyes, he moved a hand to pat his stomach lightly. “Please. Sit?”

After a taut moment, she settled her weight gingerly on his midsection. He scooted his knees up to give her something to lean against, and put his hands behind his head. Eyes still shut, he stayed quiet for a time, thinking.

“The teyanain,” he said at last, “are more manipulative than you can possibly imagine.”

He opened his eyes then, and regarded her soberly. Her posture and expression spoke volumes about her nervous discomfort with the situation.

“Everyone I’ve spoken to,” she said in return, “claims you are the best liar in the world. That you don’t even know when you’re lying, sometimes, because you’ve done it so long. That everything you say is, in some way, a lie.”

“Mmph. I do lie a lot. That’s true.” He resisted a bubble of laughter that rose into his throat, turned it into a cough. She probably wouldn’t understand the logistical irony of the statement. “So do the teyanain. Especially Lord Evkit. What’s he told you?”

She tilted her head and looked away.

“A lot of lies,” she said thinly. “So have you.”

“Welcome to being a desert lord,” he returned, and set his hands gently on her calves.

“Isn’t
someone
going to tell me the truth?” she demanded, glaring down at him. “This is impossible!”

“Truth depends on where you’re standing,” he told her. “The Northern Church—you hate the priests, right? You thought that tower was the embodiment of evil, and you wanted it ripped down. And that
is
true. A lot of evil went on within those walls. But it was evil by a few who rose to power, and a very damn few at that; what’s the bigger evil, Alyea: that they tortured people to death for their own pleasure, or that they were
allowed
to do it for so long? The king knew about it. His advisors knew about it. Nobody stopped it.”

Which was, in itself, another lie; the southlands had tried repeatedly to take Rosin Weatherweaver out, and had failed—until Tanavin. But that side of the story would only complicate the point he was trying to make.

“Pieas Sessin,” he went on, switching to a slightly safer topic. “He was a wastrel, and a fool, and he committed a number of serious crimes before you killed him. And yet, he was allowed. Eredion knew what he was doing. Sessin Family knew what he was doing. Nobody
stopped
him.”

He watched the tiny shifts in her face as she thought that over.

“It happens throughout humanity,” he said, keeping his voice mild. “I’ve seen it more times than stars exist in the sky, Alyea. The only time a man points a finger at another and cries
liar
or
beast
is when that man is inconvenienced by that lie or that action.”

Her eyes held the intent, distant look of pieces connecting in her head once more, and she nodded slowly.

“I’ve been called a master of lies for more years than you can imagine,” Deiq said, pacing his words with care. “But truth shifts like quicksand, Alyea, and what’s true in one generation is false in another. And what matters over a thousand years isn’t
truth.
It’s making something that lasts, something that endures, whatever lies have to build it. I could care less about truth, if a lie will save five thousand lives where the truth would destroy ten thousand. And for one ordinary human—even one desert lord—” He stopped, letting her work it out from there.

Slowly, her gaze came back down to meet his. He saw her finally register the deliberately vulnerable position he’d put himself into, and realize the lack of tension in his body. She blinked and leaned back hard against his knees.

“Why did you cry?” she said abruptly, her gaze locking on his.

He answered obliquely: “Because I didn’t have to.”

She frowned.

“I’m not human,” he went on before she could say anything, and wrapped his hands around her ankles, rubbing his thumbs lightly over the bone-bulges. She shivered, and he felt heat race through her, saw her eyes dilate; his own pulse skipped up into a higher rhythm.

Reluctantly, he took his hands away and put them behind his head again, to avoid distracting them. This was important, strange and unlikely a place and circumstance as it seemed; whether Evkit had understood this would happen or not Deiq didn’t know for sure. Quite possibly he’d expected Deiq to rip Alyea apart in reflexive blood-rage over her “infidelity”, or over some other matter. There was no tracking the plans of a teyanin, and Evkit least of all.

“I’m not human,” he said again, bringing his attention back to Alyea. “Have you ever put your hand to a candle-flame and jerked back before you knew you were moving? That’s reflex. It’s instinct. It’s what your body does before your mind cuts in to stop it. Humans can train themselves past that. Aqeyva masters could hold their hand still in that flame and not get burned—maybe.”

He paused, watching her absorb what he’d said like a towel soaking up water, then went on.

“An asp-jacau has no hope in any of the hells of holding still if someone puts a flame to its paw. It wouldn’t understand that there might even be a reason to try. Some things, for ha’reye, for ha’ra’hain, are as instinctive as pulling a paw away from a flame. Especially when desert lords are involved. Eredion told you—desert lords were created to
serve
us.”

He paused again, waiting until the wrinkles around her eyes eased.

“When you slapped me,” he said, “I should have killed you.”

Her whole body jerked, her weight lifting away as though to bolt.

He stayed still, his hands clenched against each other behind his head to stop himself from grabbing after her.

“And there’s
your
reflex,” he said in the fractional hesitation between startle and action.

She stared at him, wild-eyed, her rump resting against his knees.

He listened to her heartbeat thudding high and panicked in his ears, and shut his eyes to avoid seeing her naked fear, which should have been triggering his predator instinct at such an intimate distance—and wasn’t.

Slowly, she slid back down, settling on his stomach again.

“For some reason,” he said, not opening his eyes, “you don’t trigger the reflexes in me that you ought to. And I don’t trigger the reflexes in you that a desert lord ought to have after the blood trials.”

She let out a harsh bark of laughter, with soggy edges. He opened his eyes and found hers damp. She shook her head to his inquiring eyebrow-tilt, and he let it go.

He brought his hands around to her ankles again, this time with deliberate intent. Her reaction hitched his own breath hard in his chest.

“Not human,” she said, almost a gasp, and stared down at him.

“No.”

“You
look—”
She made a gesture with one hand, her expression wretched. “You look
human.”

He flattened his hands, closed his eyes, and let himself slide into other-vision, then opened his eyes again. Alyea leaned back against his knees, an entirely different shiver working through her body. He watched the energy-patterns flaring around her, read her emotions and the flickers of her topical thoughts: argent and emerald, crimson and azure and crystalline yellows weaving and meshing and dissolving more rapidly than even his eye could trace.

He read fear, horror—along with astonishment, awe, even a hint of arousal. The usual reaction from humans, and the usual reflected image, slightly less accurate than a mirror once filtered through human perceptions: eyes black on black, no white left at all, with an odd golden stippling that came and went erratically. His skin darkened to match, the former bronze hue washing out to a darker grey laced with a thready silver pattern; lips and ears lost the ruddy human hue, acquiring a darker copper shade.

If he let the change go on for long, other areas of his body would start reshaping themselves; he hadn’t allowed that in hundreds of years, and felt no desire to do so now. It would be far too difficult and time consuming—even painful—to return to this exact form.

He shut his eyes, forced them back to human-normal, and looked up at her again. Her face had gone an off-grey shade, and her teeth had sunk into her lower lip hard enough to draw blood. He looked at the drops smearing her lip and chin, knowing it was a small pain she probably didn’t even feel at the moment.

“Not human,” he said, and closed his hands around her ankles again, lightly enough to allow her to pull away. “And not one human in a hundred years sees what I just showed you and lives another breath.”