Fifth Quarter (13 page)

"Thirteen days? You'll be out of my body in three, carrion eater!"

A subtle tension in her hands and face made it, if not easy, possible for him to tell when Bannon spoke; "What did your brother say?"

Vree tossed her head, eyes narrowed. "He just pointed out that it's going to be a long trip."

"What do mean, that's where we're staying?"

The inn looked like a smaller, dirtier version of Aralt's villa—without the surrounding orange groves. Tucked in a hollow just off the east side of the road, it stood in the center of either a very small village or a large cluster of outbuildings.

Gyhard turned his horse off the road with the exaggerated care of a man close to the end of his resources. "Surely you didn't think we'd just toss a bedroll on the ground for the night?"

"Why not?" Vree imitated his movement, although she strongly suspected the horse would follow its companion regardless.

"Two reasons. The first, because the horses have to be fed. In case you hadn't noticed, we're not carrying fodder. The second reason is that we can afford better and what's more," he gestured broadly at the inn, "we deserve better." As a grubby adolescent shambled out through the latticed doors of the main building and started toward them, he shook his head and added grimly, "Much better. But, unfortunately, this is all there is." He heaved himself out of the saddle, a day spent relearning to ride having robbed him of grace. When his weight came down on his legs, his knees buckled and only a death grip on the tooled leather cantle kept him from pitching face first into the churned dirt of the yard.

"Vree! What's he done to my body?"

"I don't know." She kicked both feet out of the stirrups, swung her left leg up and over the horse's head and slid to the ground. All the way to the ground. Growling profanity, she levered herself up on her arms, then, leg muscles screaming a protest, managed to stand.

"You got off the wrong side of the horse," Gyhard gasped. "I told you, always mount and dismount from the left."

Vree stared at him in disbelief, wiping grit off her chin. "What slaughtering difference does it make?" she snarled. "Both sides look the same."

"A valid point." He struggled to free his saddlebags, then staggered toward the door, shoving the reins at the waiting teenager. "Come on. I'll do the talking if you don't mind."

She couldn't help it, the look on his face was more than she could bear. Snickers turned to howls of laughter and soon she was holding her stomach, gasping for breath.

"What is so funny?" Gyhard demanded.

"Y-you. W-when you realized this…" Sagging against the wall, Vree waved a hand, unable to go on.

He'd asked for the best room in the house. They'd been shown to a corner of a common loft with narrow shuttered windows opening in two directions and thick straw pads rolled up at the base of the wall. For an extra crescent, the innkeeper threw in a pair of reasonably clean blankets each. Except for the patina of old grime, the place could've passed for one of the barracks back at the garrison.

Gyhard's scowl set her off again. Finally, the nervous energy died and she took a deep, steadying breath. "We've got to work the stiffness out, or we won't be able to walk tomorrow let alone ride."

"I assume they have a bathhouse…"

"Yeah, but would you care to sink your bare butt into it?" An eloquent wave took in the surrounding filth. Pushing herself away from the wall, she started to stretch the abused muscles in her legs.

After a moment, Gyhard began awkwardly imitating her, breath hissing through his teeth at the sudden intensifying of what had become a constant background pain.

Vree snickered and twisted him into the proper position. "What's the matter with you? You've done this a hundred times."

"No, he hasn't, Vree."

All at once it wasn't funny any more.

She woke from dreams not her own and found herself crouched in the center of the straw mat, the blankets thrown aside, a dagger in her hand, waiting for an enemy.

"Bannon?"

He shared her pounding heart, her sudden surge up out of sleep. "What's wrong?"

Both windows were open to catch the night breezes. Moonlight painted sharp-edged shadows down the length of the loft. The empty loft. She cocked her head and sifted the sounds of the night. No threat.

"Nothing. Nothing's wrong."

"Then why are we awake?" he muttered, settling back into her mind and trying to pull oblivion up over consciousness.

Why indeed? She sheathed the dagger and turned to look at the man lying beside her. Sleep smoothed away the small differences of expression and gesture, leaving only her brother's face and her brother's body. Her fingertips caressed the air above an angled cheekbone, traced the arc of an imperious brow, hovered over the sensuous curve of a full upper lip. Impossible not to react sometimes as though this were still her brother instead of, or maybe as well as, the presence in her head. How could she treat her brother's body as though it was
not
her brother's body?

Dangerous.

So,
what are you afraid of
?

Of being alone.

Pillowing her chin on folded arms, she stared out the window at the stars and tried to see them as a thousand campfires, Jiir's army bedded down across the sky. A rustle of leaves from the scraggly garden below lifted the hair on the back of her neck. She held her breath and closed her fingers around a familiar hilt.

No point in reminding the goddess to allow them to die together if the battle went against them—they were no longer able to die apart.

"Then we have to get the son-of-a-sow out of my body and me back in and the only way we're going to do that is if something distracts him."

"I am
not
going to sleep with you… him."

"Doesn't that hurt?"

Vree carefully turned to glare at her companion. Horses, she'd discovered during the last eight days, were not as smart as they looked and responded to any number of obscure physical cues. "Doesn't what hurt?"

"That expression." Gyhard smiled pleasantly at her. "You've got your jaw so tightly clenched I can see the muscles jumping."

"No."

"No?"

"No, it doesn't hurt," Vree snarled and went back to staring at the road through the definition of her horse's ears. "Why is sex your solution to everything?"

He ignored the question. "We're more than halfway to the Capital. Only five more days…"

"I
know
that."

Gyhard watched her profile and wished, not for the first time, that he could be privy to the private conversations that caused such a visible increase in tension. "Are you terribly disappointed that your attempt to dislodge me last night came to nothing?" he asked suddenly.

When the hand resting on her thigh folded itself into a white-knuckled fist, he assumed he'd made an accurate guess. Shifting his weight in the saddle, he shrugged apologetically. "I did warn you that I was too strong for you to shift—even when rudely awakened." He scratched at the day's stubble. "I'd like to point out that even should you decide to risk knocking me and young Bannon's body out cold, I have to be conscious to be moved. Or perhaps I should say, removed."

Vree swiveled her head to face him again, upper lip curled off her teeth. "Or perhaps you should say nothing at all."

"My apologies." He inclined his head graciously. "We'll be arriving in Kiaz shortly. I'll leave you to your…" The pause lingered long enough to be unmistakably deliberate. "… own thoughts until then."

Biting back her response, she forced herself to relax and tried to be less aware of the man riding at her side. How quickly the strange became the norm when only the strange remained. Over the last eight days, she'd almost grown used to her brother's thoughts mixed in with her own. She'd guarded against instinctively reacting to Gyhard as though he were Bannon, found herself reacting to Gyhard as Gyhard instead, and couldn't decide which was worse.

The feeling of exposure hadn't changed. Used to marching surrounded by thousands or slipping quietly over distance shrouded by night, to ride under the sun on the South Road as one of only two kept her in a constant state of semidread that had barely lessened as day followed day and it became obvious Emo had kept his teeth closed on what he knew.

"You can't shut me out, Vree, so unless you want to help him slaughter the prince, a member of the Imperial Family you swore to serve, you come up with a better way to get him out of my body."

Better than going to his bed. Better than… She clamped down on the image. "No."

She heard him sigh, which was strange as she breathed for them both. "Don't tell me you don't want to, Vree."

"I'm telling you I won't do it." How much did he know, sharing her mind? How much did he only guess after sharing her life for so long? She couldn't ask.

"Look, sister-mine…" His voice had gentled, and she didn't want to know why. "… it won't mean anything. You won't be sleeping with your brother. I'm here."

Although he wore her brother's body, the man who rode beside her was not her brother.
Although he wore her brother's body
. Her fingers grew sweaty on the reins. She had to do something or the prince would die. This was all they had left to try. She stared at a low line of distant hills rolling dusty brown along the bottom edge of a pale blue sky, listened to the hollow sound of hooves against stone and the roar of her blood in her ears. The wind lifted a strand of mane back over her hand and she stroked the coarse length over the ridge of callus on her palm. "What if he doesn't want to sleep with me?" she asked at last.

"Nothing." He'd always been able to find willing partners. A quick tumble here. A heated moment there. A trip to Teemo's when he had the cash. There'd been a simplicity to his couplings she'd always envied. "What do I do?"

"What do you usually do?"

He sounded like he thought she was kidding. Vree allowed herself the luxury of a smile. "I sleep with women, there's no chance of little soldiers then."

"Soon. Don't sweat it, Bannon. I'll deal with it. I've been dealing with it once a moon for years." Another time, his near panic at the possibility of sharing her flows would've been funny.

Kiaz, a prosperous trade town at the junction of the Pymba River and the South Road, boasted half a dozen inns, from three waterfront dives to a well-guarded facility that catered to the Empire's nobility. As the town had gained its prominence well within the security of Imperial borders, there were no walls and the streets were laid out in a planned grid to the west of the road, behind the inns and markets.