“Stop.” I gasp as I realize what’s happening. What we’re doing.
There’s no sheath. It’s a terrible time. And I can feel that bitch focusing her attention on us.
“Stop!” I scramble away from Thiago, hauling my trousers back up my legs.
The ley line falls into stillness.
The runes fade.
But I can’t hide my shuddering breath. That was so close. We nearly forgot, and I could almost sense the Mother of Night smiling.
Pleasure evaporates.
“Fuck.” Thiago scrapes a trembling hand over his mouth. “Fuck.”
“Not here.” I manage to catch his arm. “And not…. You can’t come inside me. Not today.”
The truth of everything my bargain might cost us flashes through his eyes. “You felt her?”
I don’t know what I felt. Maybe that was me? Or whatever part of me calls to the ley lines? Just…. “We have to be careful.”
We can’t risk a child.
I will not let some poor innocent suffer for my actions.
Thiago rests on his knuckles on the floor, his cock at half-mast as he considers me. “Not inside you.”
It’s as if a decision has been made.
Stuffing himself back inside his trousers, he gathers me up into his arms and strides for the door. “Fine. I can work with that. Now, let’s finish this discussion in our rooms.”
“What did you think?”
Thiago rolls onto his side in bed, his head propped on his palm. Muscle bulges in his shoulder, but though my eyes linger, I need at least an hour’s recovery. He carried me up here and spent hours wrecking me with his mouth and hands, and has been thoroughly focused upon ‘earning his apology’ as he puts it.
He won it long ago, though I didn’t have the heart to tell him that.
Or maybe I did and I was just being selfish, because I swear Thiago was put on this world by Maia herself to please females. In every way.
“About?”
“Clydain.”
“You don’t want to talk about what I said upstairs—”
“No. I do not. I need to think about what to do,” he growls out, “and unless we’re in a fully warded, impenetrable room, we’re not even going to think about your revelation.”
Not where others can pluck the words or even our thoughts from the air. That’s sobering.
Fine.
I trace my fingers over his biceps. These are my favorite moments. He likes to talk after sex. It’s almost as though he wears his ‘Prince of Evernight’ mantle outside our bedchamber doors, but the second we’re through them, he lets down his guard.
I’ve never been a part of something like this. I was always kept on the edges of my mother’s court, watching, listening, bursting with ideas that could help our kingdom, but to speak up would only ever earn a chastening look and an arched eyebrow.
“Do you think yourself queen, Iskvien?” Mother would mock. “Do you yearn to rule?”
And her courtiers would laugh, even as I buried my hopes and dreams.
But Thiago wants it all.
“You know your sister best,” he says.
“Andraste was surprised when you mentioned Clydain,” I reply, “though I’ll concede that so was I. Considering I wasn’t aware you were going to present such an offer.”
His mouth twists. “I wasn’t. It was a spur-of-the-moment thought when she brought up Eidyn. I wasn’t expecting the trade and I wanted to see what she’d do if I suggested Clydain.”
“Why did you send Lysander toward Clydain in the first place?”
“One of your mother’s border lords retains his allegiance with me, and sent word years ago that he’d seen Adaia riding from the Vervain Hallow to Clydain during the full moon.”
“It can’t have been her. My mother worships Selena and the full moon every month. She plies the court with wine and mead, and takes Edain to her chambers for several nights.”
Asturia is known for the bounty of its harvests and forests, and my mother is bound to the land as queen. Fertility rites are as important to my people as breathing, and if the queen is blessed by the goddess, then so the lands shall be.
“The things I do not need to know. I almost pity that poor bastard,” Thiago replies with a grimace. “But my spy swears he’s seen her riding through the forests there several times over the years. I think your mother locks her pretty little whore away in her chambers with food and wine, while she slips away in the middle of the night.”
That’s interesting. She never misses a full moon. But if she’s not truly within her chambers…. My gut starts churning. It would be the perfect means for Mother to do whatever she wanted, without a thousand watchful eyes upon her.
What is she up to?
I sit up. “But why?”
“I don’t know why. My informant can’t get close to Clydain. There’s a mist there that encircles the place and whenever he enters it, he wakes up miles away from where he entered with no recollection of what happened within the mist.”
Rumors of the place being haunted. A magical mist that wipes away memories.
“Fuck,” I whisper. “She is hiding something.”
“Wagons go into the mist according to my spy. He’s seen enormous piles of metal in the back of them. And caught a glimpse of strange lights flashing in the skies over the keep, from a distance. At first I didn’t think anything of it, but his reports kept coming and any secret conspiracy your mother is involved in needs to be investigated. And so I sent Lysander. It was the last time we saw him until today. He vanished, and the first we heard of him was when you said you’d seen him curse-twisted into bane form.”
“Lysander got through the mist.” The only one in Asturia with the power to lay such a powerful curse is my mother. “And she cursed him so he wouldn’t be able to report. But how did he escape her? Why would she not simply lock him away?”
Or kill him.
No, that one’s easy to guess. If she killed him, then she could no longer use him
