He tilted his head to one side, studying her. “Then why did you say it?”
I was jealous. Embarrassment locked in her throat. Relief made her lightheaded when he answered for her.
“I think you still carry a lot of anger toward me from the ritual at Saruna Tor,” he said.
That made her pause. The grim memory of Saruna Tor remained a wound on her spirit she didn’t think would ever heal, and she hadn’t been one of those made eidolon there. Even when Serovek had practically begged her to be his executioner on that hill, guilt over stabbing him still burdened her. Anger toward him did not, nor did she remember it ever being so. “What are you talking about?”
A faraway expression settled over his features. “The moments after you stabbed me, you said ‘I will never forgive you for this.’ I carried those words into battle with me so that I might return and ask that you reconsider.”
She gasped, forgetting for a moment to keep her emotional guard up around him, avoid more of the invisible grappling hooks he tossed at her every time they crossed paths that drew her inexorably to him, half step by half step no matter how hard she fought against it. She looked away from his sudden, intense scrutiny, sympathizing in that moment with Pluro Cermak's skittish wife and the desire to bolt for safety.
“I might have meant them at the time, but I shouldn’t have said those words either.” Her fingers throbbed from how tightly she’d laced them together, and her throat ached with the effort to speak. “You saved me and the hercegesé from Beladine raiders and their mage hounds, took care of my wound, gained the information we needed to find Brishen and his abductors, and risked yourself and your men to help me rescue him. Putting a sword through your belly was no way to clear such a debt. I owe you more than I can ever repay in this lifetime or a dozen more beyond it.”
Complaint or confession. If asked which it was, she’d have a hard time deciding, and it might well have been a little of both, but somehow she felt lighter by speaking aloud of this shame, no matter how ridiculous it might appear to others, that had weighed her down these many months.
Serovek snorted, mouth tight with disapproval. “You shoulder an anvil of your own making.” His lips softened with a hint of a smile at her surprise. “I asked you in particular to run me through because I knew you to be strong enough to see the deed done and not falter. I laid a terrible task at your feet, and you took up the gauntlet. Don’t think I’m unaware of what I asked of you.” His gaze flitted from her face to her hair, slowing to travel the length of her body before returning to her face. “If we were keeping a tally of who is in debt to whom, every breathing person on this side of the Ruhrin ocean would owe their lives to those of us who rode against the galla. If we were keeping tally. We aren’t. And you owe me nothing. There’s no debt between us. There never was.”
“I like strong women, soft or not.” He’d said that while they stood on the balcony of his study, overlooking the steep slopes of the mountainside. Ribbons and swords, she thought. So different yet both made admirable in his eyes by the hand that wielded them. He was a man like no other, Kai or human, she’d ever met before.
“What was your wife’s name?” she asked in a soft voice, a reverence she could offer for what she suspected was still a lingering grief.
He bowed his head a fraction in acknowledgment of her change of subject. “Glaurin. Our union was arranged, but we’d been childhood friends so were familiar with each other when we married. She bore me a daughter we named Deliza.”
A child. The idea tied her confused emotions into tighter knots. Somehow, Anhuset had no trouble imagining Serovek as a loving father. “What happened to them?”
A shadow of sorrow descended over his features. “Plague.”
He didn’t have to say more. Anhuset remembered the plague outbreak from fourteen years earlier. It had swept through the human kingdoms, killing thousands. The Kai, afflicted by their own sicknesses, had suffered no effects of the disease that ravaged their neighbors. Gauri and Beladine alike had fallen like chaff beneath a thresher’s flail.
She grazed his arm with her claw tips, the barest touch. “I’m sorry.”
He stared down at her hand for a moment before covering it with one of his, palm callused and warm. “So am I.” They were both quiet a moment before he spoke again. “And you? No spouse or children?”
She’d taken lovers. Sometimes for a day, sometimes for a week or a month. Most had been sparks of warmth to ease loneliness, or a few hours of entertainment with no emotional attachment, sometimes even hazy memories captured only in the foggy aftermath of a day spent drinking far too much Peleta's Kiss. None had ever incited a longing for something more profound or long-term. Occasionally she observed Brishen and Ildiko together and wondered at the depth of their bond. She envied it, but no one so far had moved her in such a way to make her actively search for something similar.
As for children, they were strange, puzzling creatures. Usually loud, demanding, and bordering on feral. She’d rather keep a scarpatine as a pet.
Serovek didn't need to know all that. Anhuset had vomited up enough of her inner demons for one evening. “I’m uninterested in either one,” she said with a shrug. “Even if I were, I’m not considered a worthy catch by a Kai seeking to elevate himself through an advantageous union. Nor am I the easiest person to get along with most days, if you can imagine that.”
That elicited a chuckle from him. “Oh, I can imagine the second just fine.” Serovek’s wide grin coaxed an answering one from her. “I am, however, stunned by the first. You’re closely related to the Kai queen regnant and the regent. Surely, Brishen must be fighting off a line of suitors trying to take his valuable second from him.”
“Those connections don’t make me any more desirable. I’m gameza.”
She watched as he searched his internal cache of bast-Kai words for translation, but nothing came to mind. “What’s gameza?”
“Bastard. I’m the illegitimate daughter of the old king’s sister. My father, so I’m told, was a handsome stablehand as well hung as the horses he tended.” A reputation much like yours, margrave. She kept the thought to herself.
Serovek blinked, his grin still in place but softened by her revelation. “You’re always refreshingly blunt. It’s one of many things I admire about you.”
The damn blush crawled up her neck and into her face yet again. Anhuset prayed the stable’s near darkness would hide the reaction his compliments continued to spawn.
He crossed his long legs at the ankles and pondered his boots. “Let me guess. Your mother committed double sacrilege. Not only did she bear a child outside of a marriage sanctioned by the sovereign, she bore one of a man not even of royal blood, tainting the bloodlines.” He rolled his eyes, and Anhuset twitched.
She tilted her head to one side, considering his words and the contemptuous tone in which he uttered them. “Does human royalty feel the same way about gamezas?”
“In my experience, yes.” He shrugged. “Personally, I think a good shot of stablehand blood into some of those murky pools is exactly what’s needed. It seems like the Kai aristocracy suffers the same prideful blindness the human ones do.” He smiled at her quiet huff of laughter.
“I’m glad to be gameza,” she said. “Were I not, the regency would have fallen to me while Brishen fought the galla. I’m not fashioned for such a role. I’m a soldier first and foremost.”
“And one Brishen depends on at every level. As does his hercegesé. I’m sure Ildiko was grateful to have you with her while she held the Kai kingdom together.”
Anhuset suspected Ildiko would have managed just fine on her own were it necessary. The human hercegesé had assumed the role of regent in her husband’s stead, never once wavering, though Anhuset had seen the doubt and the fear Ildiko had tried her best to hide from everyone, including Brishen.
“The hercegesé surprised a lot of us, I think. I was simply her sword and shield.”
He studied her for a moment, brow stitched into a frown. “I don’t think you give yourself enough credit.” She didn’t get a chance to argue with him before he turned the subject back to her parentage. “Do you resent your mother for her indiscretion?”
It wasn’t an unreasonable question. The lot of a nobleman’s or noblewoman’s bastard was often a hard one, at least in Kai societies where family connections and alliances held more value than affection or emotion. To them, a bastard was valueless and often shunned for the sin of their parent’s carelessness.
Anhuset raised one eyebrow. “No. She birthed me and turned me over to nursemaids who didn’t know how to handle me.”
“To no one’s surprise I’m sure.”
She tipped her nose up and gave a sniff to show her disdain of his teasing. “I followed in her footsteps. Tried out a stablehand or two myself when I was older.”
It was his turn to arch an eyebrow. “Is that disappointment I hear in your voice?”
She waved a hand as if brushing away an annoying gnat. “Just because they cared for stallions didn’t mean they were stallions themselves.” Some small demon whispered temptation in her mind, and in that moment she gave in to it. She slanted Serovek a long look and lowered her voice, challenge implicit in every word. “The typical empty boasts shattered by unforgiving reality.”
Serovek straightened from the slouch he’d adopted. The deep blue of his strangely colored eyes had darkened so that she no longer saw the distinction between iris and pupil. He leaned toward her a fraction, his face still as if he sought to mesmerize hers with the power of his stare. “I’m not typical, firefly woman,” he practically purred at her. “Nor do I toss out empty boasts.”
The blush-heat that had settled on her neck and face now spread throughout her entire body at the name he gave her. That heat bore all the hallmarks of anticipation, fascination, and to her chagrin, lust. “You aren’t a stablehand either,” she said before rolling out of reach. If she didn’t put some physical distance between them now, she’d regret it.