Blood Warrior

CHAPTER SIX

Tallis watched the women walk away, but he saw them as enemies rather than individuals making sensible choices. In the midst of his rage, he’d considered them distractions who imperiled Kavya. Now they were liabilities, and he was glad to be rid of them. Yet the turnabout of opinion after Kavya had just risked her life to save theirs was a biting betrayal.

He shook his head. The rage was still there. His berserker side tended to see things in black and white. There were good and bad situations. Good and bad people. He must still be holding on to that fury, because he should know better without needing a reminder.

“They’re traitors,” Chandrani said softly.

The bodyguard had rarely spoken opinions aloud. He assumed more virulent thoughts were stored in her mind, or shared with Kavya. Tallis appreciated that she at least thought to include him in her assessment.

“They have free will.” Kavya sounded tired and, more tellingly, she sounded disappointed. Grief bowed her posture and tightened the lines around her eyes. She was a woman in mourning, but remorse was not for killers. Tallis had firsthand experience with that fact.

She was so Dragon-damned beguiling that she kept distracting him from his goal.

“They would’ve been a hindrance,” he said tersely. “We need to move.”

Chandrani nodded, although she still assessed Tallis as she would a rabid coyote. She pulled her curved saber from a scabbard wrapped at her waist and set out, descending the mountain toward a river far below. “If you strike me again or harm Kavya,” she said over her shoulder, “you will never sleep again. You’d awaken missing your legs from the knee down.”

“Noted.”

Kavya didn’t follow. She stood facing Tallis, chin raised high. He wished he could read her eyes. As his gift ebbed, so did his heightened awareness. What would he see in those amber depths? Misery? Regret? Or worse, something akin to Pashkah’s sly triumph? Regardless of his personal grudge, he didn’t want to learn she was her murderous brother’s beatific partner.

“Are you back?” she asked.

“Back?”

She reached up, hesitated, then cupped his cheeks in her icy palms. He would’ve thought her skin warmed by exertion, but perhaps shock ruled the day.

“Are you Tallis? Or will I have a berserker at my back for the rest of the night?”

“You shouldn’t want either.”

“I just want to know who or what I’m dealing with.” She paused and tilted her head. “Wait, why wouldn’t I want the other side of you? You and your gift saved my life.”

“Unpredictability.”

“I saw that, yes. But something deeper. Your voice . . . you didn’t mean that.”

Tallis made a halfhearted attempt to shake free of her gentle hold, but she held fast. A foreign part of him liked the idea that his skin was warming hers. “Finally able to read my mind, goddess?”

“You’ll know when I can,” she said with a tart scowl. “Tell me.”

“Or?”

“Or I’ll ask Chandrani to forgo waiting for you to sleep. How would you use your gift without your legs?”

He placed his hands over hers. Now she was the one gently trapped. “She does everything you say?”

“She has a mind of her own, but she’s devoted that mind to my safety.”

“Must be nice. A trained Amazon at your beck and call. Why didn’t she find you in the tent?”

Kavya pinched her lips together. Her eyes darted aside. “I . . . I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it.”

“Talk.” The derision he felt toward her kind spiked. His rational anger was returning. “You don’t talk. You’re unnatural.”

“And you’ve nearly evaded my question. Don’t believe that will ever happen. Other than the obvious, what do I have to fear from the berserker?”

Tallis tightened his fingers around hers until she winced. He pulled her fists to his chest. “I was able to evade your brother’s psychic attacks because nothing logical remains when I go that deep. Just . . .” He swallowed. What was this? He’d never been ashamed of his gift before. Something about this woman made him want to be more than a thoughtless Pendray cliché. “I work by instinct and take on an animal’s compulsion to survive at all costs. And . . . to reproduce at all costs.”

Confusion marred her soft brow. “We’re a dying race. We can’t reproduce.”

He pulled her closer. Their mouths could touch if he wanted that connection. Or if she did. “That doesn’t stop the animal from trying. A primal part of me wants you any way I can get you.”

Kavya inhaled. The steady rhythm of her pulse at her wrists pumped with new force. She wasn’t a fluttering butterfly beneath his fingers; she was a drummer pounding on a timpani.

“You’d force me? My people have a long, disgusting history of forcing women. I’d never known it was part of the Pendray tradition.”

“We fuck like animals, but not by force.” He grinned at her look of blatant shock—nostrils flaring, lips parting. “In that way it seems we barbarians have one over your high-handed ways. Anyone who tried to assault a Pendray woman would be pursued to the ends of the earth by her family.”

She snatched her hands free despite how firmly he’d imprisoned the wrists abraded by hemp. “I wouldn’t know anything about that either. Family means danger.”

“So I’ve seen.”

“You . . . you bit him.”

“I did. I like my seaxes too much to risk them against a Dragon-forged sword.”

She straightened her shoulders. “Thank you.”

Her gratitude was a surprise. So was the moment she slowly lifted one flowing sleeve to his mouth and used the fabric to stroke his skin. The blood was sticky against the silk, grabbing at it. He must look like the beast he’d unleashed.

Again, that galling sense of shame. He forced it aside, as the last of his primitive temper cooled. He wanted her discredited. That was a given now. Why was he having anything more to do with her? He could take her to the Council to stand trial. But what had she done? There was no proof that she’d broken laws worthy of imprisonment in the high Fortress of the Chasm.

Staying with her had nothing to do with the way she cleaned his face.

Nothing.

Tallis batted her hands away. “Don’t try tricks that have worked in the past, goddess. I’ve learned them, and I don’t appreciate being condescended to.”

Without waiting for her reply—too stricken by the hurt on her face—he followed the woman in armor. She was a third of the way down the mountainside. The Beas River carved a wide ravine that ran from the highest reaches of the Pir Panjal down to the Punjab Basin. They might camp soon, down among the river-fed trees. Or Tallis might leave soon. He continued moving for the sake of moving.

What if she really had meant to present those Leaders? What if they’d been ready to work toward ending the Indranan civil war?

Tallis was left to his thoughts. Yes, the Sun had fallen. Her reputation among her kind would never be restored. But what if his personal revenge had led to Pashkah’s discovery of her presence—and to those murdered men? Would Kavya have been able to protect them had she been readying herself behind the altar, preparing to greet the cult with genuinely hopeful news?

No. She would be dead.

That knowledge was as clear as the river below, and just as chilly. No matter Tallis’s actions, she never would’ve taken to that altar except to kneel and die. Pashkah would’ve been nauseatingly satisfied and incomprehensibly powerful.

Tallis had saved her life. After all, he hadn’t wanted the Sun dead. Only ruined. That sense of having accomplished his mission returned, yet it felt oddly hollow. He breathed deeply and exhaled so much tension. The morning would see his senses clear and his life restored.

That sealed it. He wouldn’t camp with the Sun and her bodyguard. Instead he would leave them on the low mountain pass with her shredded reputation as company.

But the animal lurking deep in his soul protested Tallis’s decision.

—

Kavya reached the river’s edge in time to see Tallis turn to the south and keep walking. Where is he going? she silently asked Chandrani.

He didn’t say. Just finished his descent. Didn’t even look my way.

“After all that?” Kavya’s wrath surged into something powerful and unknown. She’d been angry before, but this was anger born of insult. “Travel on. Put distance between us and the valley. Make what camp you can. I’ll be back soon.”

With long strides, she strove to catch up to Tallis. The wind whipped through her silk sari, chilling her bone-deep. She had intended to don a heavier sari for the evening’s announcement, one without the turquoise of the North or the cobalt of the South, and without her customary gold.

Plain black. Neutral. For a people united.

No longer. She was going to freeze to death, but not before she wrecked Tallis of Pendray.

“You ruined everything, and now you’re leaving? What in the Dragon’s name sort of man are you?”

He didn’t stop. His pace remained even, as if he hadn’t heard her at all—or worse, as if he would just ignore her indignation. She wasn’t used to being ignored. Arrogance or not, she wouldn’t let go of the right to speak her mind and be heard.

“Do you know what will happen now? You said you wanted to discredit me, that you didn’t want me martyred, but my brother knows me now. Knows my face and the patterns of my mind. There was no time to disguise my appearance. I can’t read you. I couldn’t read Chandrani because of your blow to her temple. In the chaos, I had no one else to draw from. I was bare-faced and he saw me. He saw all that he’ll need to hunt me down.”

Jogging the last few steps, she placed her feet carefully. Her ceremonial slippers wouldn’t last long on the slippery, muddy shoal. She grabbed his arm with more force than she thought she possessed.

Tallis jerked in a semicircle and clutched her neck—one fluid motion. “Do you court harm? Is that it?”

He squeezed until every fingertip found a pressure point. Black spots flitted against a night sky that wasn’t dark enough to compete with the oncoming loss of consciousness. Indranan were helpless when unconscious. They were susceptible to mental influences, or might let a Mask slip. Kavya hadn’t slept soundly or for long durations in years. For that reason and many others, she traveled with trusted people like Chandrani, just as they traveled with her. Kavya’s youth hadn’t offered any assurances. Sometimes she wondered how many of her memories were her own and how many had been left behind by predators who’d used her sleeping mind as a playground.

He tightened. She gagged.

And she kneed him in the crotch.

Tallis let go and stumbled back, cursing. “Is practicing that move a hobby among females?”

“Some old ways are still the best.” She rubbed her neck. Her voice was roughened. “Now answer this Dragon-damned question: What do you think will happen to the Sun Cult or whatever you outsiders call it if I’m murdered by my brother? Martyrdom isn’t the right word for it. I’d be sainted.”

“That won’t happen. Girls like those turncoats would make sure of it.”

“Turncoats, eh?” She threaded her fingers together at her waist and aligned her knuckles. Mountains and valleys. Calm. Breathe. “Does that mean you disagreed with their choice? Interesting.”

Tallis stood. She didn’t miss the way he shook his left leg, subtly, as if to protect his pride while easing the sting she’d inflicted. “Let’s pretend your brother parted your head from that delicious little body of yours. Then what? Just another case of sibling-on-sibling violence. There would always be the suspicions that you’d colluded in that bloodbath. The lure and the heavy. And then—an alliance broken down.”

Her teeth began to chatter just when she wanted to appear unrelenting. “ ‘Delicious little body’ is even more telling than calling those girls turncoats.”

“I already told you that I want you.”

They stared at each other. Tallis’s expression was generally so open as to be off-putting. He behaved with too many human mannerisms. But with that sentence, he closed off every readable emotion.

“Another slip.” She touched his cheek where night shadows made a stripe of dried blood look like dirt. “You’d meant to say something about animals or beasts or Pendray berserkers. You don’t want me.”

He took both shoulders in hand and pinched. His kiss crashed down on her. Lips were enemies—fighting, not working together for pleasure. Kavya found pleasure anyway. She was jarred soul-deep by the aggression of his embrace, with his arms crossed behind her back. She was thrilled by the shock. Telepaths were rarely shocked, which had made that afternoon all the more terrifying.

Some surprises weren’t terrifying until after the fact, when thought returned and she would regret enjoying his mouth on hers.

Later.

With more assurance, she took what he offered and made demands of her own. Tongue against roughly pebbled tongue. He nipped with his teeth—a reminder of the force contained within his lean fighter’s body. He was a beast in a man’s skin.

We fuck like animals.

She shuddered and accepted how he pulled her more tightly against his chest. He was warm. She needed his warmth. She needed this strangely numbing balm of pleasure. The eager tension of passion overruled every other emotion. All she knew was that Tallis held her.

He angled his head to claim better access to her mouth, then trailed hot, openmouthed kisses down her neck. He licked one of the parallel cuts, then the other. The heat of his tongue was replaced almost instantly by the cold whip of the wind. She shivered beneath that hot cold, hot cold. Every movement, whether feathering or forceful, said he would take her if she lay down on the ground.

It would hurt.

It would be madness.

It would be marvelous.

She moaned, but she couldn’t believe the sound came from her throat. He matched her primal desire with a growl of his own. He cupped the back of her head and returned to her mouth. The press of his lips and the welcome invasion of his tongue felt like he’d come home to her.

No.

She struggled. He wouldn’t let go. She pressed her hands against his chest and pushed. He kissed her deeper. Panic replaced pleasure. She struggled, fought—

Then bit his tongue.

He reared back. “Dragon damn it, woman.”

“I thought your kind never forced anyone. Besides, you’re not the only one who can bite.”

He wiped his mouth and grinned. “So I’ve learned. Adding some variety to our real-life encounters?”

“We’re back to you being a Pendray in the throes of some delusion. We’ve never met before this afternoon.”

“Oh no,” he said, tightness replacing his brief humor. “Don’t play coy now, goddess.”

“I rather liked when you used my real name. At least then I was a person, not some figment of a lost mind.”

“You made me lose my mind. That’s why I’m here, you witch.”

He stalked in a tight circle, then returned to face her. His skin was scented with blood. This man, for all his infuriating delusions, had saved her from Pashkah. That explained why she put up with his erratic moods and accusations. It couldn’t be because she hoped for more of what he’d done in the tent—binding her, tempting her. It couldn’t be because of moments like these, charged with expectation that balanced between ferocity and passion.

Moments that left her guessing.

She wanted all of it, but just a taste. She wanted it from a man who wouldn’t probe her thoughts while doing so, who couldn’t manipulate her while she took what she wanted from his body and he took what he wanted from hers.

She’d remained untouched for just that reason. Indranan men could not be trusted.

“Explain yourself,” she said. “Please. I might be able to alleviate whatever madness has led you to these extremes.”

“There’s nothing you could say that I’d believe.”

“Try me.”

Nothing passed between their minds. Kavya could only read the grim shadows that accentuated his straight nose, his tightly pursed lips, and the hollows of his eyes.

He bared his teeth before appearing to come to a decision. “You’re a manipulative seductress. For as long as I can remember, you’ve used dreams as a portal into my mind. You’ve directed my actions for decades, using every method possible—including visions of the Great Dragon so convincing that I’d swear I’ve looked our Creator in the eye. These kisses aren’t new to me, goddess. They’re as familiar as the pace of my feet on the ground. They’re a base attempt to divert me from the truth.”

Despite her confusion and the impulse to defend herself, Kavya refrained. “What truth is that?”

“You’re a liar and a user. Your plan for the future of our people is the worst sort of insult. Unite the Dragon Kings through selective murder? It’s a beautiful idea cloaked in blood. No more. I’m walking away. Everything between us ends tonight.”

With a voice barely strong enough to be heard, she cast a parting sentence toward his back as he walked away. “If I can reach you in dream, Tallis, why can’t I read your mind?”