that you’re staring face-to-face with the prospect, will you marry her still?”
“There’s little choice. She’ll be my wife within the week whether I like it or not.” Nikandr smiled. “Though I may have delayed it by a day or two.”
“And how might you have done that?”
“I should be up at the palotza now, signing the wedding documents.”
“You’ve said how prickly the Duke of Vostroma can be.”
Nikandr nodded, and his smile widened. “ Da, he can be that…”
Rehada regarded him, the firelight and the shadows accentuating the features of her face. “You aren’t bound to her yet. You could go where you will.”
At this Nikandr’s smile faded. “You’re not so naive as that.”
“If anyone is naive, it is you. You tell me every time you come how much you love the wind. Surely you have enough money to buy a ship. You could take to the winds, travel the world…”
“I’m not Aramahn.”
“Meaning what, that you cannot bear to be parted from your precious family?”
“I may voice displeasure from time to time, but they are my life. They are my love.”
“If I had one rachma from every man that’s spoken those words…”
“You’d what, take to the winds?”
“I’ve done my traveling. I’ve found my place.”
Nikandr drew breath from the shisha as if it had somehow insulted him. “And I haven’t?” he said while forcing the smoke from his lungs.
Rehada raised her brow and tilted her mouth in a quirky smile. “ You’re the one running from your marriage.”
“I’m not running,” Nikandr said. Rehada was prodding him, but the effects of the smoke had already taken the edge from his anger and his feelings of being trapped on the Hill. Without willing it to, his mouth twisted into a smile that was a mirror image of hers. “Well, I suppose I am pulling at the tether a bit.”
“Why do you never speak of her?” Rehada asked. “Tell me what she’s like.”
As he downed half of his vodka, the lemon-infused liquor searing his mouth, throat, and finally his stomach, he turned to Rehada and admired the graceful curve of her eyebrows, her long eyelashes and full lips. The orange tourmaline held in the circlet glowed ever so softly. He knew good and well the sort of hezhan that gem granted, and he couldn’t wait for the heat of her to fill him, for the touch of her red hot skin, so unlike Atiana Vostroma’s, which was certain to be white as bone and cold as winter’s chill.
Rehada, perhaps feeling the effects of the smoke as well, smiled mischievously and poked Nikandr in the ribs with a slippered foot. “What is she like?”
Nikandr shrugged and leaned into the pillows, knowing he’d already smoked too much for his own good. Part of him wanted to answer Rehada’s question-the part that always wanted to please her-but he didn’t really know what Atiana was like. He couldn’t remember a single time he’d spoken to her when she wasn’t with Mileva and Ishkyna. He knew them only as a single, three-headed beast.
“You’re impossible.” Rehada threw the shisha tube aside and straddled him. Her muscled legs tightened against his waist as her long black hair fell across his chest. She didn’t grind her pelvis like a dock whore would, nor did she lean in and kiss him, though her dark eyes spoke of the desire. Instead she smiled. With the low-burning fire lending her already dark skin a ruddy glow, she was breathtaking. She lowered herself, her breasts pressing against his chest, her cheek brushing his. “Tell me something about her,” she said, her hot breath tickling his ear. She raised herself and regarded him. The gem upon her brow glowed brighter. Nikandr felt his loins and chest heat, and despite himself he began to harden. “Unless you’d rather return home to be alone with your thoughts.”
“I didn’t come to talk about my fiancee.”
“Then why did you come?” “To be with you.” She poked him in the center of his chest. “The truth…” Despite himself, he laughed. “Is that so hard to believe?”
“I know your moods, Nikandr, better than she ever will.”
He paused, wondering if she were right. “A man arrived on a ship today, one we thought lost to the Maharraht. His name is Ashan.”
Surprisingly, Rehada stiffened. “Ashan?”
“Ashan Kida al Ahrumea. He arrived with a curious boy on one of my father’s ships, a ship snatched from the jaws of the Maharraht.”
Rehada stared down at him seriously, saying nothing.
Nikandr chuckled and threw his arms behind his head. “ Now who’s avoiding questions?”
“I should hold your answers hostage until I get mine.”
“But you’re not petty, like me.”
“Few people are…” Before Nikandr could reply, she continued. “I met Ashan once, years ago.”
“The kapitan of the Kroya said he was very powerful. He summoned the winds for days straight to save the ship.”
She nodded. “He is arqesh.”
Nikandr jerked back involuntarily. “He has mastered all five hezhan?”
Rehada stared down with a look that made it clear he had disappointed her. “He has also come to terms with this life and the one that has come before and the one that will come next. He has traveled the world and seen every one of its mysteries. Among all the islands, there are only six like Ashan.”
“You’re saying you would expect no less from a man like him?”
“I’m saying Ashan is closer to vashaqiram than I will ever be, and that I have no right to judge him.”
Vashaqiram was the state of mind all Aramahn searched for. It was complete calm, understanding, forgiveness, and many more things Nikandr did not yet comprehend. It was why they roamed the world as they did, moving constantly from place to place.
Rehada had taken on a look of introspection, one he’d rarely seen from her. She often talked of having given up her quest of wandering the world, of having learned enough to be comfortable on Khalakovo. But he knew better. She too often became like this when faced with tales of travel to the other archipelagos or to the Motherland, Yrstanla.
Rehada’s expression darkened. “Why do you come to me late at night to ask me of a wanderer?”
“I saw him only today, mere hours ago, and I wondered-”
She rolled off of him and set her glass of vodka aside. “There was a time when you came here for me…”
Nikandr stared, confused. “I only thought you might-”
“Your thoughts…” She stood, her face cross. “I see where your thoughts are, son of Iaros. They are not here, nor are they on an arqesh. They are on the Hill, a place you should be now.” She glanced meaningfully at the entrance to her home, waiting for Nikandr to take her meaning.
“I would stay, Rehada.”
“Your wife wouldn’t think so well of that.”
“She’s not my wife.”
“A point she, I fear, would beg to differ.”
He nearly protested, but he had come here for solace, not to fight with a woman he paid for her company. He gathered his things and left without another word, but as Rehada shut the door behind him and the wind howled through the city streets, he found himself not just alone, but lonely-lonelier than he had ever been.
Nikandr treaded through the cavernous hallways of Radiskoye toward his room. The faint and familiar creaks of movement could be heard somewhere in the floors above-Radiskoye in slumber.
When he reached the second floor he paused, seeing light coming from beneath the door of his father’s drawing room. He went to it and opened the door, finding Father seated in a padded armchair, one leg crossed over the other. He was holding the wooden bowl of an ivory-tipped pipe with a stem as long as his forearm. He puffed on it, staring into the dying embers in the nearby fireplace. He looked weary and old, words rarely leveled against him.
An oil painting of Nikandr’s great-great-grandfather stared down from the mantel, his serious face cast with heavy shadows. Gold leaf decorated the room, especially along the wainscoting border and the carved wooden columns above the mantel. To say that it felt ostentatious, especially after the lush simplicity of Rehada’s home, was an understatement, and to Nikandr it felt foreign and familiar, both.
