He couldn't resist. “Not all of us.”
It was a good thing he never underestimated her martial prowess. He snatched up the silabat just in time to deflect her strike with the waster. Nearby, Magas gave a disgruntled whuffle.
Anhuset's narrow-eyed gaze flared bright in the dim stables. “I was talking about your horse.”
“Were you indeed?”
His mild taunt earned him a hard wallop to the hip from her waster. He dodged her open-palmed blow, went low and managed to kick one of her legs out from under her. She stumbled but recovered just as fast. After several feints and counter feints, as well as exchanged blows, they ended up on the stable floor amid a flurry of straw.
Anhuset straddled Serovek's torso, hard thighs clamped against his sides like a vise, her waster's edge pressed to his neck. She gave him a glimpse of her pointed teeth when her lips parted in a smirk. “Now what, margrave?”
“I die from lack of air,” he said on a soft wheeze. “My gods, woman, did you fall on me, or did Magas?”
She gave a scornful huff but shifted position to ease her weight on him. “Better now, dandelion?”
He inhaled a thin breath, still recovering from having his chest flattened. “Never let it be said the Kai are made of flower petals and wool rovings.”
“I don't know how you weak humans ever got this far.”
“We're cunning, feral, and afraid of dying.”
Anhuset arched an eyebrow. “If that was praise toward your kind, it's the worst I've ever heard.”
Serovek savored her considerable weight now that she was settled more on his midriff and pelvis. He glanced to the side at her waster. “Are we finished sparring, or are you planning to wallop me a few more times with your sword?” He didn't mind lying on the stable floor among a cloud of straw remnants, though a tickle in his nasal passages warned of a coming sneeze.
Anhuset tilted her head to one side, studying where the waster's blunt edge rode the ridge of his jugular. “Had this been a real sword and a real fight, I'd have cut your head off by now.”
Her eyes rounded when Serovek gently poked her ribs with the silabat's tip.
“True, but not before I skewered you like a roasted chicken with this handy stick of yours.”
Her chuff of laughter made him smile. He liked her laugh. From what he was learning about her, she was a solemn woman and her laughter rare. He'd once thought her humorless until she began trading quips and taunts with him. An endless cache of fascinating qualities lay behind those bright citrine eyes and dour expression, and he had every intention of discovering them.
Something in his face must have given away a hint of his thoughts. Anhuset's amusement faded, and the air around them pulsed with a different kind of tension. She pulled the waster away but didn't move from her spot atop him. A slender finger, tipped in a sharp black claw, speared a lock of his hair before twining it around her knuckle. “You're even uglier this close up.”
The blood coursing through his veins rushed toward his groin. He dropped the silabat to rest his hands on her hips. “And you're just as beautiful.”
Those firefly eyes narrowed. “I imagine that silver-tongued charm felled a battalion of women at the Beladine court.” She gave his hair a quick tug before unwinding it from her finger. “I still won't swive you, margrave.” She rolled off him and stood.
Serovek lay supine a moment longer, missing the feel of her weight and heat on him. “Ah, sha-Anhuset. You're a harsh woman,” he teased. “Breaking my heart as well as my back.”
“Don't tempt me, Lord Pangion. My threat to tear your arms off before this trip is over remains.” She held out a hand, which he took and gained his feet. The yellow shading in her gaze flickered, and Serovek had the sense her gaze passed over him. “You're nimble for such a big man,” she said, the faintest thread of admiration running through her voice. “Fast too.”
He brushed straw bits off his clothes and out of his hair before giving her a wry look. “So to sum up, I'm big, ugly, and annoying.”
Once more, the brief flash of pointed teeth in a smile that vanished as quickly as it appeared. “So sayeth you.”
Unlike her, he didn't hesitate in showing her his grin, widening it even more when her nose wrinkled at the sight of his own square ivories. She had made him laugh, made him lust, and most of all made him forget the nightmares that plagued his sleep.
He bowed to her. “You have my gratitude,” he said. “I'll be a walking bruise by daylight, but the sparring did what I couldn't do alone.”
She took the silabat he held out to her. “And what's that?”
“Quieted the sounds of Megiddo's screams in my head.” Just saying the words made him shudder inside, and he shoved down the echo of the monk's torture and the galla's laughter before it broke through the wall of silence he'd built with Anhuset's help.
She passed him to return the silabat and waster to their place among her baggage. “I've always believed there isn't anything a good brawl and a few bruises can't fix.”
“I'm sure a little Kai magic never hurt either.”
The sudden stiffness in her posture surprised him, and her expression turned wary. “I suppose,” she said in a noncommittal voice that was a telltale sign itself, as was her abrupt change in subject. “You should try and sleep before the dawn comes. Even an hour or two will help.”
This wasn't the first time she'd reacted in such a way to one of his casual remarks about the Kai's ability to control magic, and Serovek wondered at her reaction. That her people were born with such an inheritance was no secret. He'd warned his men countless times to be especially wary when dealing with Kai raiders crossing their borders. They were a physically tough people and hard to kill, and any magic they wielded, no matter how minor, made them even more so.
He tucked the observation away for later, when he could mull it over without the remnants of his recent nightmare clouding his thinking. Her suggestion to try and sleep before the following day's travel was a sound one. Still, the thought of returning to the stall where Megiddo rested didn't appeal to him, even now when the blue luminescence surrounding the bier had disappeared. “Maybe you should sleep instead. I'll keep watch until dawn.”
She scooped up his blankets and tossed them at him. “Remember, your night is my day. I'm wide-awake. If I need to sleep, I can do so while I ride. You're the leader of this expedition. You need your wits about you.” She lifted her chin to indicate the empty stall across from the one they currently occupied. “Sleep there if you need or go back to the inn. A soft bed awaits you if you want it, and distance from the monk.”
“I'm not Pluro Cermak,” he snapped, affronted by her allusion to a need for posher surroundings or a desire to avoid the monk. “Megiddo might be in a barn again, but I'll not leave him here alone.”
“He won't be alone, Lord Pangion.” Anhuset's more formal address didn't quite disguise the sympathy in her voice. “And I doubt anyone would compare you to his brother under any circumstance.”
He'd lashed out unfairly. The residual fury at discovering Megiddo's resting place in a ramshackle barn had ignited with Anhuset's suggestion. There'd been nothing beyond the remark other than practical advice. “Forgive me,” he said and offered her a second bow of the evening. “You didn't deserve my rancor.”
Anhuset's shoulders lifted in a shallow shrug. “It's of no matter. I suspect you and I will brawl with words as well as wasters and silabats on this trip. You didn't try to tear my arms off. There's nothing to forgive.”
Once more, she chased away his demons with her acerbic wit and made him laugh. Serovek left her with Megiddo and their gear to find a sleeping spot in a pile of mostly clean straw in the empty stall. Bedded down, with his back to his companions, he stared at the wall in front of him, counting the cracks marring its surface until his eyelids grew heavy. He was tipping over the edge of sleep when Anhuset's voice stopped him.
“Margrave?”
Some instinct, or maybe the tone in her voice, warned him to stay put and keep his back to her. “Hmm?”
“You're ugly, but your hair is soft.”
A gust of more laughter burst past his lips and out his nostrils. The woman wouldn't know how to deliver a compliment if her life depended on it. He wrapped the blankets more snugly about him. “Then I've found favor in your eyes with one thing.” he said. “Good night, Anhuset.”
Chapter Six
They never made such easy money in a night.
Anhuset quickly learned that the conversation between human males worked better than any dream elixir brewed by the most skilled Kai apothecary. It was vapid, shallow, and so utterly uninspired she was in danger of sliding from a light sleep atop her horse into a stupor of boredom.
The late morning sun offered little warmth but a great deal of punishing light, and she was glad for the deep shadows of her hood that kept the worst of the glare off her face. She kept a slitted gaze on the wagon rolling ahead of her, Megiddo's blanket-covered bier tied down to keep it from sliding across the wagon's platform. As usual, Serovek took the lead in their caravan, flanked by two of his men, Weson and Shear. She couldn't hear what they discussed over the inane bluster and gloating her companions swapped between them, each trying to outdo the other in their feats of prowess in a fight or between a bedmate's thighs.
Of the three who rode beside her, she knew Erostis best, having diced with him on those occasions she'd visited High Salure. An amiable man with a trickster's hand for rolling the bones and an accurate intuition for his opponent's weaknesses in a game, he'd lightened Anhuset's purse by several coins in gambling rounds. At the moment he lectured the more flamboyant Ardwin for his poor spending habits on wine and women.
“You keep buying a trio of whores for the evening, and you won't be able to afford scratching your ass before the week is out. And with the amount of drink I saw you put down last night, I doubt you had it in you to crawl on top of one them for a quick fuck. They never made such easy money in a night.”