Back in the Deadhead Company's compound, I sent the stable-hands running, until Breva was cared for to my satisfaction. And couldn't resist brushing her down, while my thoughts returned to the mysterious assassin. A scorpia assassin, a cross-dresser who ignored the Tenets so brazenly, didn't scare me as much as it should have. It was too thrilling a combination of flaws. He was after me... a man was after me! If he wasn't as ugly as sin, I might have even looked forward to the eventual show-down.
The brush glided down Breva's shining mane again and again. How would Parneres fare in place of this man? I couldn't imagine him hunting the streets in disguise, with a blade up his sleeve. His amused eyes, his evasive, slightly sad manner didn't go well with a cutthroat. Plus, something in the way his cousin had slapped him and how this humiliation had diminished him— No, he wasn't an assassin. He was something else.
But what was he? I chewed my lips. The answer was all too obvious with his good looks. A bait. A seducer. A gatherer of pillow-talk. Or, in less flattering terms... nothing that was good for his soul, that's for sure. I had to do what I had promised and save him. And I was stalling. Oh, Parneres, why did you have to run away, my sweet, my beautiful, my... a sigh replaced the last word.
Maybe that was all he was, my sigh. My girly dream. I was a woman with two husbands now and a mother. And yet, I brushed the same strand of Breva's mane, remembering how his face shone on the night we had celebrated Kozima's delivery from Lydia. How I was sure we had a heart-bond on that night. The memories made my heart's ache fresh.
Breva neighed and nuzzled my shoulder sensing my longing. Her neighs were too soft to return me to the real world, but Miccola wasn't so subtle. Her exasperated voice shattered my reverie.
"There she is, hale and whole, your wife and Mistress!" Miccola hollered, spooking the horses.
She was holding Kozima by the elbow. His eyes widened in a helpless plea. Even shortened, the irrepressible curls sprung up in a wild nimbus above the sweating forehead. But at the sight of me, the harassed expression melted into one of pure joy.
While he was out of the house daily to manage the business, this was a rougher part of town, and he must have argued with the guards to let him in until Miccola rescued him. Or worse, they were too friendly, until Miccola rescued him. I made a mental note to find out and put the fear of Indara in any woman who dared to harass my husband.
"Your Grandissima, unless you want your young husband spending the night in our barracks, I suggest you escort him home at your earliest convenience," Miccola needled me. "The curfew is only an hour away."
I mumbled 'thank you', remembering how much she'd always praised Kozima. My eyes must have narrowed to slits, because Miccola let go off Kozima's arm. She blew out a sigh along with some more grumbling about the Empress' cats.
I didn't listen. Kozima didn't leave me for Anastasia's saree. He most certainly didn't look at Miccola with anything but apprehension. I thought about what I would say to him for three months in the birthing retreat. And none of it prepared me for my heart lurching at the first sight of him. The poets praised the new intensity of love a woman finds for men after giving a new life to the world. I was an average woman in that respect—it hit me like a horse's hoof.
"I'm sorry." He dry swallowed after his apology and went on mumbling: "You were due to return today, and the night was falling—"
I drank him in with my eyes. The only thing I could do, despite going weak at the knees with urge. I didn't want Kozima to sleep in the barracks. I really didn't.
"Let me take you home, Zish." My voice, it dropped so low.
His lips parted in a pretty little gasp in response to the huskiness of it.
"Yes, yes, please take him home, before you tear his pants off," Miccola grumbled and stood back to let us through.
I tugged him by the arm to follow me, quickly—the last thing I remembered from that twilight walk. All I could see in my mind was the light filtering from the windows of our house, like an exhausted sailor who pictures the beacon of the home port.
Kozima was as terrible at keeping pace with me as he had been at seventeen. His labored breathing bounced off the walls and echoed mournfully in the emptied hall of our house once we stepped over the threshold.
They had packed almost everything already. The carpets, the paintings, even the stupid vases—all was hiding in the crates stacked in one corner, bristling with hay between the boards. The space looked so much bigger without Kozima's knick-knacks. So, so empty. He was the one who made our home homey. He was the one who filled it to the brims with warmth.
My arm tightened around his waist, waiting for his chest to stop heaving from the exertion of hurrying up the streets, bridges and lanes.
"I would read about Char-Kermen as a boy," he whispered. "How it is the Queen of all Cities, the heart of the world. I would dream about the Tower of Light and how it alone would dwarf the whole of Palmyr! But I never thought I would actually see it."
His head came to rest on my shoulder.
"You'll love it there," I promised.
"I'll love it wherever you are," he promised in turn.
The lemon-and-almond scent he favored lately, mixed with sweat. His body pressed to mine in an unmistakable way.
"Ondrey and the baby?" he murmured.
"Both are healthy and our daughter is beautiful." I slipped my hand over his lips. "This is the last we'll talk of them, until I recall Ondrey to join us. Unless... Do you want us to talk more about them? In the Tenets, wasn't there a Naktymyad who had seven husbands? Can't recall her name? And those husbands, they all shared—"
"No," Kozima said flatly. "We won't talk about Ondrey or Ashvaghna and her seven husbands."
I sighed. It was worth a shot, but I guess it wasn't to be. Kozima simply didn't have the right temperament.
The bells of curfew started their toll outside the house. A servant struggled with the deadbolt on the gate to our house. Our home though, that was all inside the crates. So, acting on instinct, instead of climbing the staircase to the bedroom to see more empty rooms, I led Kozima to the courtyard. There, the blankets and pillows were still strewn across the tiles and on the bench. There was even an opened book on the pulpit. A smile curved my lips.
"Moods, Kozima? You didn't grow out of them?"
"Never," he said, backing away a step from me, our arms sliding along, until lightly clasped at the distance that teased, not separated. "Never, Ismar..."
"You're a bookish man, my sweet husband, yet when it comes to Indara's delights, you want to be outdoors. You're mystifying!"
Just as I lowered myself after him to the blankets and pillows, his eyes drifted past mine and higher on. "There's no mystery at all. What I love the most in the Knowable World are you and the sky."
With a gasp, I rolled the shirt up his chest and over his head, remembering how fragile he was next to Ondrey's steel. How eager to wrap the languid limbs around mine. How it felt to be joined through the middle with him. I had ached on the first night of passion with him once... now I ached through embracing Indara's gifts again, after the child emerged from my womb. That he was lithe, and the innate shyness of his demeanor made him the gentlest lover I had.
Nestling to his side, leaving invisible trails through his chest with my fingertips, I watched his head settle down with a sigh. He traveled back to the Knowable World now from his climb up the Indara's Peak. So was I, just barely. I rummaged for a pillow to slip under, then rested a burning cheek on top of the burning cheek.
In the moment's sweetness, I poured my feelings into his ear. "I was wrong, chichorino. I was grievously wrong. Your love was worth dying for. Was worth a millennium of torment on the bottom of the River Vash."
The smile gave me the tiniest kiss when it lifted the corner of his lip. "Worth a year of your life at any rate."
I lifted myself on one elbow, letting my hair frame his forehead like a curtain, mix with his, the same hue, the same bounce. His and mine daughter, she would be of Palmyr, even if she was fated to be born far to the South.
"More, much more." My lips went dry with a desire to kiss him, but I wanted to look upon him more. This parched feeling left my voice with a hoarse edge. "I will no longer search for Parneres."
I was the one who beheld the River Vash and came back, but he had the face of someone who beheld Nirvana.
"You will always have my love. So will my brother-husband and our firstborn," he said.
I was too sore, but my hand easily found the newly unsatisfied bits of him.
Anastasia accused me of charging in without thinking, leaving ash and destruction in my wake. So I didn't this time. I bit my tongue till I tasted copper, locking away the premonition.
The ugly face in the crowd, the queenly gift, and Anastasia's seduction meant that the Scorpia Cult stayed on my trail. And since they were hunting me, it meant Parneres' cousin was hunting me. No matter what I said or did, sooner or later, my path would cross with Parneres.
"I love you," I repeated. "I love you. I love you."
'Ina'amatus, ina'guarda, ina'Indara,' echoed my thoughts. 'Ina'amatus, ina'guarda, ina'Mythra. For Parneres, for Ondrey and for Kozima.' If Indara heard my prayer in Nirvana, They must have hidden a thousand smiles behind Their golden fans. But I went on, stubbornly. 'Blessed be the lovers, blessed be their nights and their days, blessed be their hopes and their lies, for their journeys are short and their roads are winding.'