The Ippos King: Wraith Kings Book Three Read online

  An annoying spasm in Anhuset’s right eyelid made her rub at the spot. She did her best to ignore the sharp flare of irritation, turning away from the narrow view of the trio to resume her seat next to Megiddo’s bier. It was no business of hers what the margrave of High Salure got up to or with whom. She was here only as Brishen’s representative. Nothing more. A trill of feminine laughter taunted her. She clenched her jaw and hummed a Kai drinking song to herself to drown out the sound.

  She kept her seat when the smaller entrance door to the stable opened then shut. Only one set of footfalls headed toward her, barely discernible, especially for such a big man. His were the only steps, and Anhuset watched the stall entrance for his appearance with narrowed eyes, still annoyed by the unsettling pang lodged in her chest at the sight of him with the women. She declined to name the feeling though that same inner voice which called her a liar was more than happy to do so.

  Jealousy, it whispered in her mind.

  Anhuset growled low in her throat.

  The footsteps halted. “Tell me that’s you greeting my arrival with great joy, Anhuset.”

  She snorted, amused. “It’s me.”

  “Damn black as the bottom of an inkwell in here,” Serovek groused. “I’m probably about to walk into a horse.”

  Glad he chose not to bring his admirers with him into the stable, she repaid the kindness by reaching for the flint and steel in the small pouch belted at her waist so she could light the lamp she’d left unlit. The flare of the broad wick made her blink, eroding the finer edges of her vision with its brightness. She placed the lamp atop the stall’s midrail, scraping away the straw on the floor underneath it to create a small firebreak just in case it toppled.

  Serovek entered the stall, mouth turned up in a smile. He held up the cloth-wrapped package and the tankard. “Supper, if you’re willing to brave it.” He sat down beside her and slid the parcel and tankard toward her. “I promise there’s no potato in there.”

  It smelled delectable. Salt, roasted meat, the underlying sharpness of spicy peppers, and the rich dairy scent of hot butter. Despite her misgivings, her mouth watered, and she untied the cloth with eager fingers. A savory pie—one that didn’t squirm about under the crust—lay in the center of the kerchief, a spoon next to it.

  Serovek chuckled at her appreciative inhalation as she closed her eyes and breathed deep. “No doubt, this will be a boring meal for you. You don’t have the battle the contents to see who’s going to eat whom.”

  “Believe it or not,” she said, “but I’m not always eager for a scuffle, especially when it involves my supper.” She snatched up the spoon and dug into the pie. “You have my eternal gratitude, margrave,” she told Serovek after the first piquant spoonful.

  “I’m pleased you’re pleased,” he said before echoing her earlier pose to lean back against the stall divider. He closed his eyes and stretched out his long legs, crushing straw beneath him.

  Anhuset ate the pie and finished off the ale he brought in silence, glad that Serovek wasn’t a man who found it necessary to carry on a conversation during a meal. She rewrapped her empty pie plate and set it aside, along with the tankard. Belly full, she shifted her position, this time to recline against the bier so that she faced her companion who appeared to have fallen asleep while she supped. She took the opportunity to look her fill.

  As much as she was reluctant to admit it, only his strange, human eyes were truly repulsive to her. They darted here and there in their sockets, reminding her of mice caught in bone traps. She'd never understand how Brishen had grown used to seeing it with Ildiko. When, however, Serovek lowered his lids, hiding that particular hideousness, the beauty of his features bloomed before her. And her annoyance and fear bloomed right along with it.

  "What are you staring at, sha-Anhuset?" A thread of humor wove through his question, as if he could hear what she thought and found it amusing. He didn’t bother to open his eyes.

  She scowled, mortified at being caught gawking at him like some love-sick juvenile. "Your ugly face," she snapped.

  He opened his eyes this time, deep water blue with black pupils like whirlpools at their centers. His lips parted in a grin, revealing white teeth, square as a horse's. So utterly different from a Kai's own sharp ivories. He gestured to the bier behind her and the still Megiddo recumbent upon it. "He's far prettier than I am."

  Anhuset cocked an eyebrow. "And he's mostly dead. Doesn't say much for your looks, does it, Stallion?" She instantly regretted the harsh words. He hadn’t deserved them. He frightened her, twisted her into knots with emotions she couldn’t understand and didn’t welcome, and she’d gone on the attack.

  His eyebrows arched before his eyes slitted, and he raked her with a gaze that could have sliced flesh off bone. “It seems your teeth aren’t the only sharp things in your mouth,” he shot back.

  He gained his feet in one graceful motion, picked up the pie tin and tankard, and exited the stall without a word, leaving her to brood, with only the horses, a near-dead monk, and her own remorse to keep her company.

  Bound to her duty as guard, she didn’t chase after him. Bound to her pride, she didn’t call out to him to return so she could apologize. Recognizing her own ineptitude with the more subtle signals of social interactions, especially with humans, she’d likely muck that up too. She stood and began to pace the stall’s confines. “What is wrong with you, Anhuset?” she admonished herself. No one answered.

  She killed the lamp's flame, grateful for the returning darkness and had just settled back in her original spot when the stable door opened a second time.

  “Oh for gods’ sake, not again.” Serovek’s footsteps, slower and more careful now, drew closer. “If I end up pitchforking myself because I’m fumbling about blind here, I put the blame entirely on you, Anhuset.”

  She scrambled to relight the lamp when he reappeared in the stall, this time carrying a handful of mint. He gestured for her to hold out her hand and dropped a small bundle of the leaves into her palm. “That ale left a sour taste on the tongue. The mint will help get rid of it.” He popped a few leaves in his mouth and chewed before spitting the pulp into a corner of the stall. “I found it growing wild along the inn’s south wall. Even old crone Winter can’t kill the stuff.”

  “Thank you,” she said, pleased beyond reason he had come back, puzzled as to why. The mint was astringent on her palate but worked as he claimed.

  This time she didn’t change positions when he resumed his earlier spot, and they sat together hip to hip, her legs nearly equal in length to his. He’d be even taller if he didn’t possess the horseman’s bow. Anhuset wondered from which of his parents he’d inherited his impressive height and size. Not only was he tall, he was big, with a personality to match. No one would overlook him in a crowd.

  “You’re pensive tonight,” he said. “Missing Saggara already?”

  He’d given her an easy excuse, one she could embrace as a perfectly reasonable explanation for her ruminating. She might be clumsy with the interplay between them, but she wasn’t dishonest, and Saggara had only crossed her thoughts once and only in terms of what she had to do there once she returned.

  She forced herself to meet his inquisitive gaze. “I owe you an apology.” His blatant astonishment might have been amusing if it weren’t so irritating. “You needn’t look so shocked,” she huffed. “I overstepped the rules of civility with my insult earlier. You did nothing to deserve it.”

  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.

  Obviously, humans brewed a stronger ale than the Kai did. Surely, it explained why she was seriously considering cutting the laces on the placket of Serovek’s trousers with her claws, crawling onto his lap and learning whether or not he lived up to the reputation of his nickname.

  He didn’t try to stop her when she scooted even farther back. She pretended not to see the smirk turning his mouth up at the corners. Straw dust stirred up by her movements made her eyes itch, and she used that excuse to close them against the image of the Beladine Stallion once more reclined against the stable wall, all power, muscle, and grace.