LITMIR.BIZ

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to his pants than to his naitan snuggled in the lap of the man who had almost killed her.

      “What is he doing?” Joh did not understand.

      “Getting the key.” The captain rolled her head off his shoulder. “Look at me. Let me see your eyes. Are you all right?”

      “Quite well.” Obedient to her word, Joh looked at her, let her search his eyes with her lightning-bright gaze. “Other than feeling I’ve been beaten with washing paddles, wrung out and hung to dry.”

      She snuggled in again, her hair soft and damp on his shoulder. Why? He had no right to questions, had no right to anything, but his mind buzzed with them. Joh tipped his head back in the chair and closed his eyes, trying to calm the buzz. It didn’t work. The captain’s presence distracted him, kept the questions coming, kept his mind twirling with a thousand contradictory thoughts.

      “I don’t understand.” Joh’s words slipped out through clenched teeth. He couldn’t hold them back. “Why has Sergeant Omvir left you alone with me? Why am I still alive? I almost killed you, for the One’s sake.”

      “If She forgave you, how can we do less?” Then Kallista shook her head, her dark hair sliding across his skin in a damp caress. “But it’s not that, Joh, not truly. It’s more. We know you now. We know.”

      Something ran icy fingers down his spine where it pressed against the warm velvet of the chair. West magic was as much a gift from the One as East healing. He knew that. He believed it. Now, after his long study and thought in prison, even more after what just happened. But it still unnerved him when he saw it in action.

      “We were all together in the magic.” The captain was still speaking. It was getting difficult to think of her as the captain, with her half-lying in his lap like this and him wearing little beside chains and a smile, especially since the magic. But he had no right to think anything at all.

      “I know you now, Joh,” she went on. “They know you. And you know us. There’s no room for lies in the magic.”

      He felt her face move against his skin and thought she might have smiled as she spoke again. “There is room for misunderstandings. Great, big, stinking enormous ones. But we do know for certain that you mean us no harm—and never did. And now, you’re bound to us so tight that no one will be able to take advantage of—of any confusion.”

      “No.” The guard lieutenant’s voice rang through the chamber with such force, Joh flinched in spite of himself. Lieutenant Tylle had regulations written on her spine and nothing but contempt for those she guarded. Not that he deserved better.

      “No, what?” The captain spoke casually, did not change her lounging posture, but the habit of command rang in her words.

      Sergeant Omvir came to attention, looking decidedly unmilitary with his hair curling loose around his face. “Captain—”

      “No. I will not allow you to remove the chains from my prisoner,” the lieutenant interrupted. “This man is an inmate at Katreinet Prison, despite his current…relocation. As long as he is outside the walls of the prison and not in a properly secured cell, he will be kept in chains.

      “Now, if you are through with your…consultation—” The lieutenant’s expression betrayed her disgust at what she assumed had been their purpose—and truthfully, she was not far wrong, given what had happened. “I will take my prisoner back into my custody and return him to his cell.”

      “No, Lieutenant Tylle, you will not.” Captain Varyl rose to her feet, backing the lieutenant away as she did so. The captain now was powered with the energy she’d seemed drained of only moments ago. “Do you forget who is captain here? This man is now in my care. He is—”

      “Does a quick fuck substitute for transfer orders now?”

      The captain stood motionless, shocked by the lieutenant’s insubordinate obscenity for only a moment. Then she backhanded the shorter woman across the face with a power that rocked her on her heels and sent her stumbling back. Omvir caught the captain around the waist and swung her back before she could follow up on the blow.

      Joh struggled out of the chair to his feet, his chains setting up a furious rattle. What had just happened? Was the captain defending her own honor or—or his?

      Surely not his. He had none. Though he had begun to hope he might be given the chance to regain some small part of it. Still he was not worth a quarrel. “I am ready to go, Lieutenant.”

      Tylle reached out to grab his arm and the captain blocked her. “And just how far do you think you’ll get, Joh?”

      What did she mean by—? Oh. He remembered then, how for weeks the Tibran couldn’t get more than twenty paces from her without collapsing in a fit. Joh sank back down, perching this time on the edge of the chair so he could stand more quickly if need be. He was well and truly bound to her. Trapped by his own will. If he had not offered himself to the One, he would not have been accepted, and now he could go nowhere but at her side until the link between them was fully forged. And she terrified him.

      Captain Varyl had pulled paper from a nearby desk and was scratching out a message with the poorly trimmed quill left on the desktop. A moment later, she thrust the message at Sergeant Omvir. “Take this to the Reinine. It’s a request for transfer orders.” Her eyes flicked toward the lieutenant. “Take it yourself, Torchay. Don’t hand it off to a servant. Obed can stand in as bodyguard. His skills are almost the equal of yours.”

      “Better, in some things,” the sergeant muttered, tucking away the note, then reaching up to gather back his hair. He tied it, rather than braiding it properly, but it helped make him look a bit more military. “Maybe we ought to see about getting Obed a set of blacks.”

      “I have my own blacks,” the dark man spoke, seeming to appear from nowhere, dressed in unrelieved black; a loose, foreign-looking robe over Adaran tunic and trews.

      The captain’s bodyguard looked him up and down. “So you do. But there’s nothing about them to show who you serve, is there?” He spun on his heel and departed, leaving Joh feeling caught in undercurrents he could not map.

      “Please, Lieutenant, sit.” The captain’s military mien faded a bit and she gestured at the chairs, playing hostess. “Obed, ring for refreshments, if you would.”

      “My presence here is for duty, Captain,” Lieutenant Tylle sneered. “Not pleasant diversion.”

      “Sit.” The steel in Captain Varyl’s voice had the lieutenant plopping down hard on one of the spindly armed chairs.

      “You think I know nothing of duty?” The captain snarled, bracing her hands on the wooden arms, her face inches from the guard lieutenant’s. “There is a rebellion in Adara. These rebels threaten to destroy everything we hold dear. But rather than stay and see my family—our pregnant ilias and my children—to safety, I obeyed my Reinine’s orders. I left my babies—twins, just ten weeks old.

      “Ninety days, lieutenant—that’s how old my little girls are. But I rode to Arikon with half our men because Serysta Reinine commanded it. Only two of the men in our ilian stayed with the babies—and one of them is blind. We did not know about the assassins’ attacks on the army and its naitani until we arrived. We did not know whether our iliasti still lived. But my Reinine commands and I obey.

      “We rode eight nights through the rain to get here. We have not had anything to eat since we arrived, but went straight into conference with the Reinine, then directly here to deal with Lieutenant Suteny’s godmark. And you dare snivel at me about duty?”

      “I—I—” The lieutenant gabbled, opening and closing her mouth, her face gone pale in the face of the captain’s anger.

      Joh glanced at the man with the tattoos on his face. Obed. Joh remembered him and the spectacle he had created with his first appearance in Arikon. Now Obed glared at the lieutenant, as angry with her as the captain was. Joh would find no help in calming the situation there. He had to do something. It would not go well

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