distant stars.
That thought twisted, dredging up the memories stolen from Robert, the explanations offered by the man who sprawled beneath her. To the horizon, to the stars, and to a queen and a war she understood too little of. For an instant she saw that impossible monarch as a rival. Ambition blazed before the greater part of her pulled back, turning away from worlds beyond in order to deal with the one she belonged to. Whatever esoteric fate might lie tangled with Robert's plans, there was a war coming to her country, and if its first battle was here, in Dmitri's fine warm home, then she would win, and worry about the next as it came.
Dmitri struggled to reach his power again; Belinda could feel his indignity and astonishment that she'd cut him off from it. Part of her took pleasure in it, though part of her was filled with offence that he should think his magic was not hers to command. If Robert could shape her ability to touch the witchpower when she was a child, she should be able to control Dmitri's, or any man's. She caught his undamaged wrist and brought his hand to her face. Even in the midst of her anger and power, she felt the sting of his touch against the bruise he'd left there, though despite all the ways she'd forgone the stillness, she could not let herself wince in time with the pain. She whispered, “Heal this,” instead, and released the slightest trickle of Dmitri's own power.
Everything that he had surged toward that break point, a black wall of magic determined to overwhelm her own. Belinda steeled her core, meeting that onslaught with confidence that turned to a deep thrill as Dmitri's power splashed against hers and rolled back again. Warmth spilled through her, nestling in her belly, her breasts, between her thighs, and her pulse heightened as she acknowledged desire that had been forcibly put away in the last weeks of study. Dmitri was right: the witchpower was not sex, nor was sex power, but he was wrong as well, and all the things that helped her live in her flesh were things that fed the magic.
“Heal this,” she said again, and this time all the power that came to bear turned toward the talent she had no knack for. She could almost hear Dmitri's thoughts, could almost, in holding his magic, understand the science he said lay behind the healing. Blood and bone; those were things she knew, vessels and veins, but from his power's touch she caught glimpses of other things, too small to be seen, which healed and regenerated under his magic. They were the stuff of life, but then the healing retreated, taking with it any chance of comprehending and leaving her hungry for the intimacy of that touch again. Belinda reached for it, her power surrounding Dmitri's, and in doing so she brushed old intent and aspiration within him.
She'd not had the skill in Khazar to sense that focus, not in the way she could do so now. She had known then that he wanted her; now she could taste the ambition in that want, as though she were a means with which to obtain an end.
Staggering clarity told her that he, too, could be a method by which she might create her own purpose, rather than simply following the path laid out before her by Robert and Lorraine, or even Dmitri. Witchpower heat scalded her skin from within, coaxing that thought to fruition. Once, not long ago, she had been unable to turn her back on duty. Now she grasped eagerly at new possibilities flowering in her mind, then let them go again before they became whole concepts, for fear Dmitri might share her talent of stealing thoughts, and not wanting to share these.
The loose novice's robes were easy enough to shed, even holding Dmitri's throat; she rucked them over her head and flung them to the side, shaking them off her wrist as she changed hands to keep the witchlord pinned. His gaze went black as he looked on her, simple human desire unladen with complications. Belinda wet her lips and released a thread of his power as she nodded toward his injured wrist. “Heal that.”
She felt the surge a second time, felt tantalisingly close to comprehension as he mended cracked bone. Muscle flexed in his shoulders as he brought his attention back to her, minute warning that, healed, he might attempt to seize the upper hand. She hissed a warning, soft primal sound, and he stiffened, earning her quick grin. Stiff was how she wanted him, but not so much that he thought himself the master in their tete-a-tete. She leaned forward to put her mouth by his ear, shifting some of her weight on his collarbones, but leaving enough on his throat to remain a reminder that he would pay for foolishness. “Your power is mine to command, dark prince, and I am tired of teasing. I would have you please me now.”
His lashes tangled over dark eyes, a thin smile curving his mouth. “I am still clothed, my queen.”
Belinda bit his earlobe. “That should hardly stop you.”
Chagrined amusement ghosted through her on the trickle of power she allowed him access to. Then, behind the chagrin came new purpose, flavoured with the intention to overwhelm her. That near-awareness of knowledge flooded her again, though its focus seemed changed. No longer healing, but still exciting the blood, triggering changes-once again, she almost grasped the thought and the science behind what he did, and then sensation became something to ride on, making her heady and uncaring of how, so long as it was done. Heat swelled between her thighs without a touch, without caresses or soft words or hard hands, without any of those things she'd been trained to. Desire came on like a dream, intense, half-imagined, drumming an incessant beat that had no physical component and yet aroused her as thoroughly as any man's hand might.
She didn't know when clawed fingers left his throat in search of tugging open his breeches. It was witchpower, it seemed, which held him down: even freed from her grasp he stayed where he was, gaze heavy on hers even when she tilted her head back and rolled with pleasure. He remained still as she settled on him, more strength of will in that lack of motion than most men had, and it was her own sound of liquid delight that echoed in her ears as he filled her. His length curving inside her brought the finish to what magic had begun, sending spasms through her and the slightest sense of smugness through the witchpower link she shared with her lover. Had it been Javier, she might have laughed; with Dmitri it only stoked challenge and a need for further control.
It was only later, much later, as she dragged herself back to her convent cell, that she wondered if that, too, had been a lesson in her magic, or if it even mattered.
AKILINA DE COSTA, QUEEN OF ESSANDIA
7 April 1588 † Isidro, Essandia
Akilina Pankejeff, for that is how she still thinks of herself, and always will, hates vomiting.
Not that she is under the illusion that there are those who enjoy it, but the roiling of her belly, the beaded sweat on lip and forehead that turns to bitter chills, the anticipation of sickness, the terrible retching sound torn from her throat when bile surges upward; these are things she loathes. Even as a child she preferred standing in the frozen outdoors, sipping tiny breaths of icy air, to curling up and letting illness take its course. Her father, in the years before he died, called her a soldier when she would do this, and she'd taken pride in that, used it to shore herself up against a twisting belly.
Her father has been dead for more than twenty years, and no tall tales of soldiers prevent sourness from poisoning her stomach and coating her teeth as they have done every morning for the past three weeks.
For some reason she has always assumed that the sickness of pregnancy was something that affected other women, and would not dare to bother her. But it began literally the morning after she was wed, a hideous rising that sent her running for a chamber pot without a chance to defeat it. Rodrigo had pushed up on an elbow and watched her shudder and gag over the pot, his handsome features arranged with a degree of surprise. When, shuddering, she fell away and wiped her mouth, he rang a bell for a servant, then, with the same mild amusement he'd shown before their wedding, asked, “Am I as bad as all that, lady?”
Akilina raised a look full of daggers to the prince lounging in her bed, and his amusement turned to a full-out laugh. He rose, damnably lithe and well-formed for a man twice her age, and pulled on a robe that gave him a bit of decency as the maids came running. “My queen is indisposed,” he said with due formality. “Attend her.”
Admiration for his virility had spread through the capital city by noon, and, Akilina imagines now, as she did then, had reached the coast and the northern mountains alike by sunfall. She has spent weeks feeble with sickness while he has accepted congratulations and hearty smiles; it is not at all how she imagined her first month as a monarch. Still, she staggers to her window and looks out over Isidro, a hand over her still-flat stomach, and she smiles. Events have spun out more rapidly than she might have expected, but not badly. Pigeons have winged back and forth between herself and Irina, and the imperatrix is satisfied with Akilina's new position. More than satisfied: Ivanova is no longer a necessary bargaining chip, but the alliances with Essandia and therefore Gallin are now solid.
There is the matter of what is to be done about Aulun, from a Khazarian standpoint, but that is not Akilina's
