Beneath the Thirteen Moons (4 page)

“This has nothing to do with politics,” she managed to say. “I needed a Healer and I just happened to pick your door.”

He reached up and tied the thong of mosk-leather back around his head. “You expect me to believe that?”

Mahri felt the root’s Power ebb from within her. Blast it, she’d need his help if they were going to make it to the village. She needed to rest.

“Believe it!” she snapped. “I had no intention of kidnapping a Royal. I would’ve dropped you over the balcony of the Healer’s Tree if I’d have known it.”

Prince Korl stood, the thin material of his spider-silk sleeping clothes still wetly clinging to every part of his body. “If I remember rightly, that’s
precisely
what you did.”

Mahri tried not to smile at his words or pant at the ridges of his body. “I… I couldn’t think of anything else.” She shrugged. “Sorry.”

He steadily advanced toward her and she tried not to admire how quickly he’d gained his sea legs.

“Why exactly,” he asked, “did you need to kidnap a Healer? Couldn’t you have knocked on the door and asked for one or is that too easy for you?”

You patronizing, thought Mahri, arrogant, ignorant… Prince! How her lust for him turned to anger. “Tell me, Healer. Had I come to your door and asked you to travel in a rootrunner’s boat to a village in the swamps, to cure a virulent fever, what would’ve been your response?”

His mouth dropped open. He had even white teeth, she noted. Of course.

“You’re a smuggler?” he asked, with a hint of wicked admiration. He stepped back and eyed her up and down, as if seeing her for the first time.

Mahri fisted hands on hips. Why did people who lived in luxury think that those who didn’t made them somehow exciting? She had no false illusions about what he looked at. Her vest of snar-scales with its matching calf-high leggings exposed most of her dark, freckled skin. Although impervious to water and of rugged endurance, she couldn’t imagine that snar-scales would be the fabric of choice for most of the women at Court that he’d be used to seeing. He slept in spider-silk himself!

Mahri knew she had a nice face, heart-shaped, with slightly slanted olive-green eyes and freckles across the bridge of a narrow nose. She stood tall, lean, and too muscular; her biceps bulged from constant poling. Her dark golden-red hair refused to be tamed by the long braid down her back, constantly escaping its fetters and flying around her face. Her feet had never known shoes.

And although her lifemate, and recently that rascal Vissa, marveled at the expanse of her chest, she knew it would be too… much for a cultured Royal.

Yet when she stared defiantly at him the look on his face told her he liked what he saw.

Oh sure, thought Mahri, something different. A peasant water-rat that had dock-side language and fish clothes. If he’d passed her in the street, he’d sweep his robes aside to keep them from getting sullied. Well, she was just as good as any silk-attired, powdered-faced court lady, whether he knew it or not.

He stepped closer and she could smell him again. That indefinable scent that made her want to crawl into his skin.

With a gasp of surprise she sagged to the deck. The root in her veins had spent itself and the pain from her injuries, and the overdose, made her whimper. Jaja had hopped down when she collapsed and chattered up at Korl in accusation.

“I’ll take care of her,” he assured her pet.

Mahri gritted her teeth. “I don’t need taking care of,” she ground out.

Korl ignored her and picked her up, which set the boat to rocking and almost capsized them into the channel. Mahri would’ve vented her disgust at him but her traitorous body had already responded to his arms around her. She instinctively snuggled her face into his neck, remembering the sight of him shaking his hair. The muscles in his arms tightened shellhard but his skin felt soft and warm, radiating a spicy scent.

She melted into him and would have been horrified if he’d recoiled from her reaction. But he didn’t. Korl just froze with her in his arms, the boat gliding down the narrow channel, the soft swish of the current and their harsh breathing the only sound in the sudden stillness of the morning.

“I believe that you don’t know S’raya,” he whispered in her ear. “But I definitely don’t trust you.”

Mahri groaned inwardly at the sound of his voice when it gentled. The hair rose on the back of her neck at the feel of his breath against her ear. “Nor I, you.”

“But we need each other,” he continued. “Even if you’re telling the truth, S’raya will take advantage of my absence. She’s enlisted a Master Seer—I felt his filthy
Touch from that warrior’s ship—and she’d be stupid if she didn’t try to make her move now.”

“Mmhhm,” agreed Mahri, not knowing what he spoke of, not particularly caring as long as he continued to hold her and this feeling that shivered through her went on.

“I don’t suppose,” he mused, “That you’d return me to the city—get another Healer?”

She went rigid in his arms.

He sighed. “I didn’t think so.” He took the few careful steps over to the narwhal tent and gently laid her in it. Their eyes met, pale to dark, and his hands lingered on hers. “I know I’m right about one thing—you are a Master, aren’t you?”

Mahri shrugged.

“Why don’t you heal your own people?”

She bit her lip then sighed. “All the Power, all the zabba, but none of the knowledge.”

“Of course,” he replied, all arrogance. “A Wilding! Amazing though, that the Seer Tree Masters haven’t captured, er, discovered you before this.”

She feebly pushed his hands off her own. “Yes, amazing isn’t it?”

And how long, she wondered, is it going to take you to realize that I can’t ever bring you home? That I could never trust you enough? Even if you didn’t remember the location of the village, you could still describe
me
to them, a Wilding with non-Royal blood that can tolerate the root to a Master level. They’d hunt me down and kill me, for not only must they control the supply of root but those who can use it as well.

Then an alien voice sounded in Mahri’s mind,
something about the Prince of Changes… that he must rule and she had to help make that happen. Stop it, she told herself. It was only a dream.

Korl rose to his feet, fished some of her zabbaroot from her pouch that still lay down his hip. “The quicker we get to your village, the quicker I can heal your people and return to the Palace Tree, right?”

She nodded up at him again, watched in fascination as the tiny curls at the corners of his mouth fleshed out into a full smile. A shallow cleft appeared in his cheek, his nose tilted up even more, and small wrinkles radiated from the corners of his eyes. When would she stop noticing every little detail about him?

“I can help Heal you again,” he said, popping a small piece of root into his mouth. He hesitated a moment. “Or I can hurt you even more, force you to tell me the way out of this maze of a swamp, back to the city.”

Mahri felt her heart stop. A skilled Healer could inflict creative types of pain, with little damage to their victim. But only a Dark Seer would dare such a thing, and she’d thought—no she
knew
he wasn’t of that ilk. Besides, she’d endure whatever it took to save what was left of her family from the agonies of the plague. Again, she really had no choice.

“Hurt me,” she said, her gaze locked on his, challenging him to do it. His eyes flashed with sparks of Power and a quick rage. He leaned over her and she couldn’t be sure what he intended to do, yet still when he ran his hands over her body she responded, arching her back towards him, groaning at the shafts of pain that resulted from the movement. The anger faded from his face to be replaced with that indefinable something that existed between them.

And the pain ceased, to be replaced with the warmth of his touch. His large hands moved up her abdomen, across her ribs, slowly inched higher with the definite absence of a Healer’s dispassionate touch. A moan rose from the back of her throat. She thrust her breasts at him when she felt the warmth of his hands cover them and heard him gasp in response.

His fingers trembled up to her neck. He traced the strong curve of her jaw and the sweep of her nose then plunged his hands into her hair, jerking her face up to meet his. This time when their lips met, it wasn’t a slow, gentle touch. Hot, soft flesh met her own with a fierceness that left her weak, aware that she’d wanted to taste him in this way, but unable to match his strength. The root, and his touch, combined to sap what remaining stamina she had.

And he did hurt her. His mouth ground into hers with numbing force, his tongue plunged into her mouth again and again. Mahri tried to respond, frustrated that she couldn’t, for she wanted to hurt him back. It felt incredibly good.

Korl let her go so abruptly that her head snapped backwards. She would’ve taught him a new dockside curse but for the look on his face. A drowning man coming up for air. He sat back on his heels, let that mask of arrogance he constantly adopted fall back over his features.

“That shouldn’t have happened,” he said, avoiding her gaze. Korl rose to his feet, hands fisted at his sides. “And won’t again—I promise.”

Is that right? wondered Mahri. The High Born Prince shouldn’t have lowered himself to kiss a filthy water-rat? As if it weren’t already hard enough to resist him,
now he’d thrown a challenge like that at her! As her body gave in to exhaustion, she vowed to see how easy it would be to break the promise of a prince.

M
AHRI BECAME AWARE OF
K
ORL’S WHISTLED TUNE
and pretended to continue sleeping just so he wouldn’t stop. She’d never heard such a melody before, the rise and fall totally unlike a dockside chanty, the low tones of it making her shiver. The soft splash of his paddling blended with the rhythm of it, and although she felt the urgency of her task she hurt all over, and didn’t open her eyes until she felt a soft brush against her cheek.

She blinked when another gentle something fell across her brow, attempted to flick it away but her muscles were still too weak. Mahri lay still while clouds of white petals rained from the branches above, covering her with a blanket of soft perfume.

The whistling stopped. “What kind of flowers are those?” asked Korl.

“How should I know,” replied Mahri. “I’ve never seen anything like them before.”

She studied the vines overhead, the way they twisted and snaked from one tree to another, creating a tunnel out of the channel they drifted through. Thousands of large buds hung from every lavender vine, pulsing out balls of pure white which exploded into flowers that dropped their petals before they could hit the surface of the water.

The faded sunshine that filtered through the branches told Mahri that she’d slept most of the day, and since
the flowers didn’t seem to pose an immediate threat she concentrated instead on just standing up.

“Jaja,” she muttered. The little monk-fish scampered to her side, batting at the petals with obvious delight. “Root,” she told him. He splayed his empty webbed hands in front of her face.

Mahri frowned. “What d’you mean, you can’t find any?”

Jaja spun and pointed an accusing finger at the prince.

She looked at him and he raised an eyebrow. “You’re not getting anymore,” he said, and patted the bulging pouch that still hung at his hip. “I’ll get us to the village, you just show me the way.”

“Nobody gives me orders,” snapped Mahri, and with a surge of anger managed to lift her upper body off the deck, tumbling a pile of whiteness into her lap.

Korl regarded her as if she were some rude courtier. “I just gave you a command and expect you to follow it. If you won’t respect that coming from your prince, then consider it advice from your Healer.”

“I don’t need your advice. I don’t need anyone telling me what to do.”

He laid down the paddle and crossed his arms over his chest, catching petals of white in their crook. “Everyone’s got someone telling them what to do, even a prince. What makes you think you’re so special?”

He’s patronizing me, thought Mahri, like I’m some kind of spoiled brat. And her anger at this man who’d grown up with everything she lacked loosened her tongue. “I grew up on the water, had only my father to guide me until I was ten. Then even he left me and I was on my own. With no one to tell me what to do.”

Korl looked taken aback, his arms fell loosely to his sides, scattering his own bounty of flowers. “What about this village? Don’t you have family there?”

“My lifemate’s,” she murmured. “For a time, I did have someone who cared enough to try and tell me what to do.”

But not for long, Mahri thought. Not long enough to get used to that sensation, to appreciate it. So that when it was gone she could only feel relief at being free again. And a terrible guilt because of that feeling.

Korl’s face reddened and the curls at the edges of his mouth turned downward. “I’ve had plenty of people telling me what to do, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they cared. In the palace everyone has a hidden agenda.”

Mahri’s arms trembled and she sank back. This conversation had become dangerously intimate and she’d end it now. “I can’t even move. I just need enough zabbaroot to stand and pole.” She truly hated justifying her actions to anyone. She blew petals away from her mouth. “You have to save your Power for Healing the village. I’ll make sure we get there.” It was absurd, really, that he thought she’d put her trust in him. He’d never even been in the swamps much less navigated through their dangers.

Korl stood, put his hands against his lower back and arched it, his eyes closed against the falling whiteness. Mahri groaned. He looked like some god accepting homage from the heavens.

Quit trying to distract me, she thought.

He looked down at her and grinned, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. “If you chew anymore root you won’t make it to the village.”

Conceited… “I didn’t know you cared,” she snapped.

He came over and squatted down next to her. “You’re my only way out of this swamp—you bet I care.”

Mahri refused to be caught in his gaze and instead watched Jaja pile up mounds of petals then gleefully dive into them. Of course he doesn’t care, she chastised herself. You kidnapped him, put his life in danger, forced him to do your will. Worse, an ignorant little water-rat had done it!

Korl sighed and looked up over the bow. “Still, it’d be a shame if you didn’t see this.”

Mahri stared down the smooth line of his throat, to where the top of his spider-silk shirt had been torn open. She wondered idly if the rest of his chest was also speckled with dark-gold hair.

“Here, monk-fish,” he called, his chest rising and falling with each word. Mahri swallowed hard.

Jaja managed to look indignant at the way he’d been summoned but hopped to the man’s side anyway. Her pet accepted a small piece of root and held it over Mahri’s mouth. She opened and wondered why Korl hadn’t just given it to her himself, until she saw him swallow. Hard. With a grin she accepted the piece of tuber, wrapping her tongue around it, closing her mouth ever so slowly. He reached out and traced the outline of her lips with a finger that trembled. Mahri grinned wider and crunched the root.

He jerked back like he’d been struck, shook his head as if to clear it. Mahri tried to rise to her feet, accepted his hand when he offered it and stood close beside him, using his body to anchor herself. Their eyes met, almost on a level, and he looked away down the length of the
channel. She followed his gaze, acutely aware of the heat of his body.

She gasped and felt him grin in response. The lavender vines wove walls between the trees, a ceiling over the snaking passageway of the water. Those exploding buds grew tightly layered together and masses of white flowers flew from every direction. The farther they drifted down the channel, the thicker the cloud became. The stronger the perfume. Mahri filled her lungs and lifted her face, felt the barest breath of a touch from each downy-soft petal.

“It’s beautiful,” she sighed.

Korl’s voice sounded very close, compellingly deep with emotion. “Yes, beautiful,” he agreed. But when she turned to face him he wasn’t looking down the tunnel of white, but at her. “Beautiful,” he repeated, his voice gentled to a whisper but intense with desire.

His hand rose, with aching slowness, and he brushed her wayward hair from her cheek, his fingertips burning like fire against her skin. Mahri reflexively turning her head into his palm, cradling it there with a silent moan. She watched him through her lashes, through the white down that fell between them.

“I don’t even know you,” he said, his hand dropping to his side, the absence of his palm a cold ache on her skin.

“Nor I you.” And Mahri dropped her staff, set her own palms on his shoulders, the muscles hard beneath the pads of her fingers. The silk of his shirt bunched, then dropped with a sigh as she slid her hands toward his neck, reached beneath that pale-gold hair, curled it around her fingers. So incredibly soft.

His head lowered and her mouth rose to meet his of its own accord. “Yet,” he breathed, his lips so close she could feel their heat. “It feels like I’ve known you forever.”

Mahri inhaled, pulled his breath deep into her own lungs, relished the thought of that mingling even as she closed the gap between them, met the firm softness of his mouth. Dry warmth, wet heat, she strove toward him, aware of nothing but this furious need to taste, touch, crush him to her.

As if a rope had snapped she felt him move, his hands grip her lower back, pull her hard against him, smashing the falling petals between their joined bodies, releasing a fresh wave of perfume. Mahri ground her hips into his in response and he groaned, the sound rumbling through her own chest, making her smile beneath his mouth.

She arched her back and he followed, lowered her to a bed of flowers, ground his own hardness against her. He thrust his tongue into her mouth and she stroked it with her own, fevered, hungry for all of him. When he ripped away from her lips and tasted the skin on her cheek, trailed the hot fire of his mouth to her ear, she tried to follow, grazing the side of his face. In the madness of her desire she plunged her tongue into his ear, felt him shudder and impale her in the same way.

An inarticulate cry tore from her throat and he pulled back and stared at her. She could only pant as they gazed at one another, transfixed by the reflected mania of their desire.

“Who are you?” he demanded, looking at her as if he could see into her very soul, search it for an answer.

Mahri didn’t know what he meant, didn’t care. “It
doesn’t matter,” she whispered, and ran her hands beneath the silk shirt across his back. Smooth hardness, coiled strength.

“Ahh, but it does.” He smiled sadly, making the shallow dimple appear in his cheek. “Royals,” he recited, “do not consort with water-rats.”

Consort? Thought Mahri. He sounded so ridiculously pompous. “Not even to tumble?” she invited, still in the grip of her fired senses, ignoring his ridiculous words for the hunger that still emanated from his face.

His chin jut into air. “I do not ‘tumble.’” Korl sat back on his heels, shook the hair from his face. That mask of arrogant hauteur settled again over his features and he lectured her as if she were an ignorant child. “A Royal, especially a prince, has to keep the line pure. It’s our duty to strengthen the blood by producing children of master-level root tolerance.”

Mahri sat up, slapping away the petals that covered her. “By-the-thirteen-moons who said anything about having kids?” Desire faded and was being replaced by fury. She just
had
to be physically drawn to an up-tight, morally-conscious… snob!

“Are you denying it’s a possibility?”

Mahri made a strangled noise. “I’ve got more,” she ground out, “root-tolerance in my little finger than all your simpering courtiers put together.”

The man had the nerve to smile at her with feigned indulgence. “Aah, but you’re a Wilding, a freak of genetics that can’t be counted on to run true, like the original line of heredity.”

Mahri shook her head. What had happened? One minute they were on their way to oblivion, and the next…

“You take things entirely too seriously, Prince Korl.” And she made the word “prince” sound like a curse, and his handsome face fell into a frown. She paused a moment and thought, don’t be too hard on him, he’s only repeating what he’s been taught.

“It’s just that a prince can’t waste himself on—” he began.

This time she did curse, a vile word that made him blush clear up to his headband. “Don’t worry, oh-great-one, I barely sullied you!” she spat.

He froze, the arrogant mask dropped for a moment and Korl regarded her with lustfully curious speculation. “Really?”

Mahri choked, momentarily speechless, not knowing whether to laugh or scream. Then she stood utterly still, her mouth wide with horror. That he could make her forget all else…

“We’re not moving,” she cried, scrambling to her feet. “Why aren’t we moving?”

Mahri looked over the bow of her craft. The vines had spent most of their buds, only a few late-bloomers remained. And flowers now choked the channel, huge mounds of white petals that mired their boat and slowed the current to a crawl. She spun. Except for the depression where she and Korl had lain, the boat overflowed with the white mass, and she dropped to her knees, searching for her bone staff.

“This is all your fault,” she scolded.

“My fault?”

“Aya. Why couldn’t you’ve been old and ugly?”

Korl quit searching for the paddle and stared at her in astonishment. “But most apprentice’s are young.”

“But you didn’t have to be so handsome,” she exclaimed, turning an accusing look on him. They both balanced on hands and knees, almost nose-to-nose. He didn’t even have the good grace to look flattered, and Mahri could’ve bitten her tongue. His smirk told her he knew he was good-looking, enjoyed the fact that she thought so too. She gritted her teeth against the fury that boiled inside of her. He was so arrogant.

“And you,” he drawled, that deep voice pitched to send shivers up her spine, “didn’t have to be so provocatively… exotically… gorgeous.”

Mahri reeled as if he’d slapped her. One minute he made her furious and the next he made her want to melt against him—and there he goes, she thought. He’s doing it again. Making her forget everything but his existence.

“Jaja,” she called, her gaze still trapped in his. “Where are you?”

A muffled squeak for an answer, and Korl’s eyes released her, turned to watch the monk-fish’s progression across the deck by the petals that puffed up from his movements. Another muffled, fairly disgusted squeak, and a brown ball of scales exploded from the whiteness, landing unerringly on Mahri’s shoulder. With an almost human display of dignity, he brushed off any remaining petals from his scales.

Her hand touched bone and she pulled it from the fluff, stood and swung it with unnecessary force to beat the flowers out of her boat. Korl accomplished more with the paddle, and when the deck was relatively clear he looked up at her with a grin.

“Now what?”

Mahri opened her mouth to reply when something shook the boat, a tentative wiggle that didn’t come from any current. Korl’s grin faded and they both looked out across the expanse of white. Something fast, long—like a tentacle, yet not—speared through the water, snagged a mound of petals then disappeared with a quiet plop.

Mahri Saw into the water, down past the upper roots of the sea trees, her Vision dull with lack of root but able to discern the huge shape that lay around and underneath them. Her craft wobbled again.