“Agreed.”
He grabbed her hands—then hesitated. She was dressed in a patchwork of silk and cotton padding. Slippers. No gloves. Skin exposed to the elements.
As a species, the Dragon Kings feared the inability to continue procreating. Extinction by slow measures. No more babies. No powerful future generations. They certainly didn’t fear a bit of cold. But pain was still pain, even if their bodies quickly healed.
“You keep your mind trained on the town,” he said. “Find us minds. Guide the way.”
“And you?”
“Wind block.” She laughed with a mocking tone he didn’t understand. “What?”
“You’ll see,” she said, still smiling, but the tautness across her cheekbones had claimed the corners of her eyes. On the inside, she wasn’t laughing at all.
Tallis hefted his pack, checked his weapons, and headed toward the front of the bus. Other passengers started talking in that low buzz noise of gathering panic. The hairs along the back of his neck lifted. He’d heard that same buzz when Pashkah had stepped onto the altar. Worry, building on worry, building on worry . . .
The snow was going to be ball-bustlingly cold, but he didn’t want to be stuck in a group of freaked-out innocents when his sense of claustrophobia kicked in. The Pendray loved open spaces and sweeping Highlands. Tight little shuttles crammed with panicking humans was enough to spark a flare of red across his vision.
The bus driver said something he didn’t understand. Tallis glanced back at Kavya for explanation. “He says he’ll have it started any minute now.”
“Does that change your decision?”
She shook her head. “Out.”
He yanked on the lever to open the bus door and jogged down three steps. Wind smacked his face like a punch. Unlike any Tallis had ever known, this wind held nothing back. If he hadn’t been gripping Kavya’s hand, he’d have thought himself alone in a swirling maelstrom of pure ice.
She pressed her mouth against his ear. “Block that wind, Pendray. Dare you.”
Tallis grinned into the worst of the snow. “I’m doing a piss-poor job at it. I admit it. Lead on, goddess.”
Her fingers became five small vises. She wasn’t letting go, and neither was he.
“You find our direction,” he shouted. “I’ll guide against the worst of the here and now.” He caught his foot on a rock that poked out of what was already a half inch of snow.
Kavya rolled her eyes. “Like that?”
“Shut up.”
The next thirty minutes were longer than they should have been. Tallis was certain they’d walked for at least six days. The hairs in his nostrils were frozen. He knew he should breathe through his nose, to better protect his lungs, but he was panting. Pain gathered in his chest. The cold pounded a beat meant to rip him open from the inside out. He focused on keeping Kavya from harm as she focused her gift on the tiny speck that was Bhuntar. Sometimes the fool woman closed her eyes. Sometimes she talked to herself in the strangely singsong language of the Indranan.
He was equally strange in thinking he’d like to hear her talk to him with those melodic syllables. Warm and safe and close.
Frostbite must be reaching his brain.
She swayed. Tallis reached out to find soft skin caught in a deathlike chill. “Dragon damn, Kavya. You think not saying anything will keep it from happening?”
“Hmm?” Her eyes were glassy, although he couldn’t tell whether it was from concentration or the hazy sleepiness that preceded losing consciousness. “Damn you? What?”
Tallis wasted no time in opening his coat. The cold shocked his body like machine-gun fire. He hadn’t realized that being cold and being cold while wearing a big leather coat would be so different. He swept her into his arms and tucked as much of the wool lining around her limbs as he could. Too much of her skin remained exposed.
“Go,” he said near her ear. “Tell me the way. Pound it into my brain with a hammer if you can. Just show me the way and I’ll get you there.”
—
Kavya focused on two things: the collective warmth of hundreds of active minds in Bhuntar, and the very personal warmth of being held by Tallis. She couldn’t decide which was more seductive. She only knew that to have more of his warmth, she needed to get them to safety.
Passing images into his mind would’ve been simpler. Half out of reflex, she tried twice before giving it up as a lost cause. She didn’t want to risk losing the way. Instead she had to make her numb lips and stiff cheeks form words.
“Close,” she said, teeth chattering so badly that her temples hurt. Her eyes stung, and a headache burrowed into her skull, using her ears as convenient entrances. “Another two hundred meters. First building.”
“Dragon-damned,
Winding her arms around his middle, where the coat retained the heat of his body as it worked to its maximum potential, Kavya nestled close. She offered words to guide him. When was the last time she’d spoken so much to one person? To groups, sure. They needed a clear, sure tone to rise above the din of other voices. Otherwise she spoke with her mind. Another mind would speak back. Here it was the intimacy of how his chest rumbled when he replied, and how his breath was a welcome flash of damp heat against her temple. This was the intimacy of speaking with bodies—tongues and lips and the thousand other things that went into verbal communication.
Tallis followed the long line of what appeared to be a warehouse. At least for those moments, they were both protected from one direction the wind used to attack. Kavya rubbed her ears. The blizzard lived there in a perpetual cacophony. She would scrape it out if she could—grab one of Tallis’s seaxes and hand it to him with the command that he dig out the mind-numbing sound.
“Cross to that building with the high gable,” she said past numb lips. “People eating and drinking. There’s a fire. A couple is . . .”
Another chuckle rumbled out of his chest, where she pressed tighter with every step. Only his embrace kept her from shattering into chunks of ice. “A couple is what, goddess?”
“Naked together. Upstairs. There must be rooms.”
“Is that all? Naked?”
Even as he teased her, he crossed the wind-whipped street toward an inviting orange glow. A few more strides and she could make out windows lit from within. A tavern? A bed-and-breakfast? Dragon be, just
“Not just naked.” Her relief was so close and potent that she said aloud what she’d only ever thought. “They’re fucking.”
“Very nice.” Surprising admiration shone through Tallis’s wind-scoured voice. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“I have a lot in me. Your thick Pendray brain can’t hear much of it.”
He gave her bottom a quick pinch. “Then you’ll just have to show me instead. The Dragon Kings play charades. The world’s worst potential game show.”
Kavya giggled, made half hysterical by their intimate, dangerous trek. “The Tigony would refuse to play because it would be too debasing.”
“If they did, they’d charm the audience and win hands down.”
“Garnis, of course, wouldn’t show up.”
She could become addicted to the way he laughed, with the whole of his body, yet centered where her ear pressed against his sternum. She didn’t like admitting such vulnerable thoughts, but they remained front and center.
He laughed that way now.
“The producers wouldn’t even put out a chair for them,” he said. “The Sath would know everything because they’d have found out the questions in advance.”
