Prince of Passion (6 page)

She flinched. “Despite your criticism yesterday, I have not let my children run wild. Ky is pursuing an advanced degree in engineering, and Luac has been involved in all the ministries.”

“Including exports.”

She closed her eyes. “He wouldn’t know enough to find the order suspicious. If I hadn’t seen your questionable manifests, I wouldn’t have known either.”

“Maybe not.” With a tone was more brusque than reassuring, Icere turned her to face him. “He is your son, I understand. We do not want to alert anyone—not the Ni-Saya, not your ministers, not the unknown entity—about what we’ve found, not until we are ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“To end this.”

Chapter Five

Icere heard the fierce note in his own voice and winced. Under his hand, Rynn did the same, and he instantly gentled his grip. L’auraly did not force; that was not their way. Tease, coax, entice, seduce. Those were the skills he’d been taught.

“Saya.” She was small enough that, with his hand on her shoulder, he could brush his thumb along her collarbone. He touched the pressure point there and she shuddered. “We have to stop them.” He let his voice drop, vibrating through his touch. “We have no choice.”

Her eyes snapped open, fixing him with a sharp blue-silver stare. “Don’t use your tricks on me, l’auralyo. And we must
always
have a choice, or there is no reason to bother preventing this mind-control operation.”

She slipped out from under his hand and thrust the half-drunk cup of tea at his chest. “I think you need the reminder of home more than I do.”

He felt the stab of her words, but he had no time to bleed. “You must see the urgency.”

“Must I?” Her tone was astringent. “But as it happens, I do. None of the sheerships in orbit match the idents from your investigation, but I have quietly initiated searches of their past itineraries. If any of the shuttles in port for the festival belong to a ship with an unverifiable history, we will detain and question its crew and passengers. Given the discretion needed for the task—by which I mean we are codebreaking into their systems under cover of our automated weather updates—you can understand why the search will take some time.”

He paced away from her. “We don’t have time.”

“Until the malac release the liqueur, your enemies won’t have the compound they need,” she reminded him. “And until the storms abate, no one is leaving this planet if they want to survive.”

As if to underscore her words, outside the skies cracked apart, and the first torrent of the day unleashed to thrash against the window in a silver wave of rain.

He thrust his fingers into his hair and came up short against the tight braid.

She huffed out a breath that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. “I’ve been told letting one’s hair down promotes clearer recall.”

“There’s nothing I want to remember.” He set her cup on the table where he’d been working the night before, before she’d stolen all his tech.

Though he’d moved with what he thought was his habitual care, the shell shattered. The remaining tea flooded across the black rock surface in a thin wave.

The shell’s thicker oval rim, still between his fingers, broke, driving a shard into the meat of his palm. He muttered a curse he’d learned from a freighter crew he’d traveled with for awhile.

Rynn lifted a brow at him. “I wasn’t aware that was physically possible. But I suppose a l’auralyo would know more than I.”

He clamped his teeth tight around the rest of the invective and focused on his hand where blood welled.

As irrelevant and wasted as the tea.

“Come here.” She whipped off the towel she wrapped around herself and wrapped the damp towel around his wrist before tugging him toward the window. “The light is better.”

He dragged his heels, but she was surprisingly strong. “It’s fine.”

She probed his palm. “There’s a splinter still in there.”

“Ow.” His fingers curled against his will, brushing her hand.

“Hold still. Don’t be such a—”

“Don’t call me child again.”

She cast a sidelong glance at him then focused on his hand again. “Very well. But don’t move while I pull it out.”

“Or you’ll paralyze me again?”

“Another dose this soon would probably kill you. So no. But the shells can be an irritant, which is why it needs to come out.”

He stared down at her, bent over his hand. With her hair still knotted up in its fanciful loops and little shells, the back of her slender neck was exposed. Her dusky skin was paler there, as if she did not find much time to lie out under Saya-Terce’s rich sun.

He wondered what other parts of her had not been sun-kissed.

To distract himself from such wonderings and the soreness where she squeezed the flesh of his hand, he said, “I’m sorry I broke the cup. It was a matched set, wasn’t it?”

She grunted. “Every guest room has the cups, and they are all exactly the same. Children collect the empty shells off the beaches to earn enough credit for their flavored ices. Common crablings make the shells out of sand and crab spit and a remarkable lack of originality. We’ll throw the pieces overboard and someday those specks of sand will be shells again.” She eased the splinter out of his palm and held up the fingernail-long piece for him to admire before she flicked it onto the table with the other shards. “So it’s fine.”

She prodded his palm one last time, pinching out another stream of blood to clear the wound. The scarlet streamed down his wrist to stain the plush towel.

He winced. “Maybe I should throw myself over and see if I come back as something whole and useful.”

The words escaped him as the blood had: indelible and ugly.

She looked up, and her gaze pierced him more deeply than the splinter. He caught his breath at the intrusion as if she dived for the bottom of his soul. But she said only, “You are prettier than the shell, and more rare.” She released him abruptly. “We’ll keep you.”

His skin tingled at her sudden absence. Had she infused him with some of her toxin despite her disclaimer?

He wrapped the ruined towel around his hand and sank onto the couch. “In my studies, I never read that the inhabitants of Saya-Terce are venomous.”

She gave him a thin smile. “The inhabitants aren’t. But most rulers cultivate the skill in the metaphoric sense, as you would have discovered if you’d been given to your a’lurily.”

“I will never find my a’lurilya now.” He deliberately used the feminine form of the word, not the gender neutral she’d chosen. “And you are not a metaphor.”

After a moment, she sat on the opposite end of the couch, but her gaze was fixed out the window. The rain obscured the view of ocean, but the silvery wash made her eyes even more eerily pale. “Not exactly. I was intended as a symbol.”

She wrapped her fingers around her opposite wrist, tighter than she had held him, and pumped her hand into a fist a few times. “The original settlers of Saya-Terce were—not surprisingly—sea-faring peoples, who brought with them an uncomfortably mixed history of island indolence and ravaging piracy. My grandfather died in the war where my great-grandfather wrested control of Saya-Terce from its previous rather innocuous and beloved head of state. Times were unsettled, as were the people, and my great-grandfather needed a figurehead for his new government, a seal of legitimacy to justify his violent takeover. So he took an old island legend about a queen who arose from the sea…” When she splayed her fingers wide again, the indigo rings stood out in bright relief against the translucent webbing.

Icere pursed his lips to one side. “He wanted a mermaid?”

“He had me genetically modified.” She loosened her grip and the rings faded. She folded her hands in her lap, almost a l’auraly storytelling pose. “When I was much older, I learned he killed my father who opposed the dangerous procedure. Then he presented me to the people as a true child of Saya-Terce and their future queen.”

“With himself as regent, of course.” He studied her. “You poisoned him in his sleep?”

She slanted a glance at him. “What you must think of me. No, I adored the old despot. He was my only family, and I knew no better. He died peacefully in his sleep when I was still a girl with no help from me. Our atoll was invaded the very next day by his chief advisor. That one I killed.”

“Ah.” Icere leached the sound of judgment though it took all his years of training.

“An accident. He grabbed me—he realized, no doubt, I was still a useful figurehead—but I was in a panic. The tetrodotoxin was a slick across my skin. He was dead before he finished shouting victory. And I was unquestioned queen from that day forward.”

She spread her hands again as if to say
that is all
. But her hands were empty.

Icere let out a long, slow breath and did not inhale again until she did. “That is incredible.”

She inclined her head modestly.

“So you, more than most, understand why we cannot let our enemies control our future.”

Her lips quirked. “You don’t miss a beat, do you? Such exquisite control of yourself even when I speak of killing.”

The mockery in her voice stung. “I am what I was made to be. Even if I can never become it.”

She pushed to her feet. “I came to tell you, you have my assistance. I will not let anyone use the liqueur as a weapon. I will not let anyone use my son.” She gave him a hard look. “And I will not let anyone else use me.” She headed for the door to the deck. “I will let you know what my inquiries uncover.”

“Saya—Rynn, wait.”

She pulled open the door, and for a heartbeat, he thought they would drown. The rain swept in like a tidal wave. The wind ripped the breath from his body

He shouted again, but there was nothing to hear. He had not realized how well insulated the room was to stand against the punishment. And this was only the beginning of the festival storm.

He tried to follow her as she crossed the deck, but the rain flooded down his throat, choking him when he called her name. He stumbled back, and a capricious gust of wind, whipped the door closed, sealing him in. Only the pattering laugh of rain against the thick glass broke the silence.

Spray obscured and yet emphasized everything, like a holographic watercolor. At the edge of the deck, Rynn paused, steepled her hands, and arced into the waves.

Icere let out his held breath with a gasp, then coughed up a brackish mouthful of saltwater and rain. The space around the doorway was awash, so he quickly mopped up with most of the towels. No wonder the cabinet was so well stocked.

Then he threw down the towels with the rest of the freighter curse he’d cut off before. He had not come all this way to be sidelined by a venomous mermaid.

He stalked to the bedroom with its smaller window overlooking the ocean. Tucked among his things where only a thorough search would find it, he retrieved his tablet. He’d kept the old tech mostly for backup; now he was glad to have it.

He sent out his coded signal, knowing it would bounce through the sheerways until it was mostly untraceable. While he waited, he dug out his emergency kit and applied the skin sealant to his palm, hissing at the sting.

When he looked up, his sister Benedetta was watching from the screen, her brow creased with worry under the myriad tiny, dark braids that circled her head. “How bad?”

He blinked. “What?”

“I see the bottle of sealant. Are you hurt?”

“It’s nothing.” He held his palm out to the screen. “Hardly more than a scratch.”

“Hmm. And why is the qva’avaq roused? I see it shining under your skin.”

He fisted his hand, wishing he could as easily hide the heat he felt in his cheeks. “Also nothing.”

“Who is she?”

He wanted to say
no one
, but the denial stuck in his throat. “I need a favor regarding my project.” While the connection was as secure as he could make it, he saw no sense in flagging unnecessary interest.

Benedetta’s gaze sharpened. “We’ll come get you right now. I told you this search was…” She swallowed. “Ill-advised.”

Stupidly dangerous was what she had said. “I don’t need you to come for me. I’m going to send you a data packet I was working on. I need the
Asphodel
to finish crunching it.”

“What’s wrong with your tech?” Suspicion and worry added years to her face, and the illusion of time only made her relentless beauty more unyielding.

“It’s otherwise occupied at the moment.” Thanks to the equally beautiful, thieving Saya.

His sister would have been a queen in all but name, enthroned behind some adoring sovereign. Instead, she’d given herself to a mercenary sheership captain to save their planet—and ended up destroying their home to save the universe.

He understood why she’d done it. In fact, he’d helped. And he wasn’t going to let that sacrifice be wasted.

Not that Benedetta considered herself sacrificed. She loved her sheership captain. And Captain Corso Deynah had opened the
Asphodel
to Icere and his two younger sisters, for which Icere would be forever grateful.

But the
Asphodel
wasn’t his destiny.

Of course, right now he and his destiny were locked in his room by an irate queen.

He finished coding the packet and sent it. “Just return the findings when they’re done. I’m getting close.”

She peered into the screen. Through the immeasurable distances of the sheerways, her peridot-green gaze pinned him. “And then what,
auro’vio
?”

He grimaced at the l’auraly endearment. He had never been a
little spark
; his sisters had said it only to tease him. But instead of the remembered wrath, the old word made his throat tighten. “You shouldn’t use that language anymore,” he said gruffly.

“No one knows it besides us. And answer my question: what then? Will you come home to us?”

He thought of the piratical past of half the inhabitants of Saya-Terce. They could have been islanders of leisure, but no, they had preferred saltwater and blood. Did they seek the endless waves to wash away their rage? Or maybe they just liked the taste.

“It’s not over yet.”

Judging from the straight line of her mouth, clearly his sister did not find his non-answer satisfying. “I’ll send your thrice-cracked files, plus the last of the data Corso recovered from the downed raider ship. What’s left is as fragmented as the hull was, but maybe it’ll mean something to you.”