Impossible Things
Authors: Kate Johnson
Tags: #General, #Romance, #Fantasy, #Warlord, #Fiction
Copyright © 2014 Kate Johnson
Published 2014 by Choc Lit Limited
Penrose House, Crawley Drive, Camberley, Surrey GU15 2AB, UK
The right of Kate Johnson to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the UK such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 9HE
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78189-062-2
I would like to dedicate this book to whatever I’d been eating the night before I had that really weird dream about the devil, because he positively insisted I wrote a book about him.
Thanks must go to:
Natalie James, who explained to me not only how to break someone’s arm in the most painful manner, but also how to fix it. I do hope it’s knowledge I won’t need again.
Christina Courtenay, who gave me the recipe for pepparkakor and even sent the pomerans to go in it.
Jan Jones, who gave me ‘crocogator’. Well, not literally. I’d never get it in the bathtub.
My brilliant cover designer, who not only has exquisite taste in vampires but somehow knew exactly what the perfect cover for this book would look like before I did.
My wonderful editor, who not only made this book much better but let me keep ‘splendiferousness’ in it.
Everyone else at Choc Lit, who thought this book was a good idea even when it was still called The One About The Warlord, The Blind Slave, And The Dog Called Brutus.
Everyone in the Romantic Novelists’ Association, as ever. You guys keep me sane. That is, as sane as I am.
She lay motionless on the bed, a skeleton in a red silk dress with a tangle of matted dreadlocks obscuring her bony face. Kael couldn’t quite believe that anything so thin could still be alive.
‘Do you know why you’re here?’ he asked for the third time.
For the third time she answered, ‘To please you, my lord.’
He couldn’t think of anything less pleasing. She was utterly terrified of him and wasn’t even trying to hide it. Hadn’t once lifted her gaze from the floor or the richly embroidered bedspread. She’d stumbled into the room on her crippled leg and declined his offer of a seat, simply collapsing onto the bed like a bag of bones. Even the barest of touches had her flinching away from him in horror.
Kael had never taken an unwilling woman in his life, was famous for it in fact. Or perhaps infamous was a better word. The skin of the last man on his crew to have attempted raping a woman was still stretched across the prow of his ship.
Krull the Warlord. He didn’t mind having a reputation as a pirate, a thief, a killer and a right evil bastard, but he was damned if he was going to be that most cowardly of things, a rapist.
He tried being friendly. ‘My name is Kael. To Samara I’m Krull the Warlord, but my name is Kaelnar. My friends call me Kael. What do your friends call you?’
She shook her head. Probably didn’t have any friends. Samara had called her ‘the little witch’ and ‘the little cripple’. The second one was self-explanatory, given the malformed shin of her right leg. But it was the first that intrigued him.
‘Why does Samara call you a witch?’ he asked.
The slave was silent for a long moment, then she held out her left hand, palm up, and said in a voice that was like a death rattle, ‘I’m good with herbs, my lord.’
‘You heal people?’
She nodded. The fluttering in Kael’s chest that had started when he first saw her grew stronger.
‘And do you just heal with herbs, or can you do it by touch?’
She frowned, wrinkling skin that was already stretched tight over her skull.
‘Can you sense an injury by touching a person?’ he said, trying to remember how Karnos had described it to him. ‘Can you feel what’s wrong with someone and make it right, fix a problem inside them, without opening them up?’
Her frown turned to puzzlement. ‘No, my lord. I don’t … no.’
He sighed. Well, that was to be expected if she had no crystals. Out here in the New Lands so few people had even heard of the Chosen that he wasn’t surprised she didn’t understand about the crystals. No wonder Samara thought she was a witch, with the Healer’s mark on her palm.
But the mark on her right arm … that wasn’t the mark of a witch. That was the mark of a Warrior. And women weren’t Warriors. He’d never heard of a female Warrior, outside of fairytales.
‘Choose any of them, my lord,’ Samara had said languidly, gesturing to the dead-eyed girls draped around her throne like decorations, ‘to warm your bed. As many as you like.’
And Kael had ignored them all and pointed to the girl by the fire, the girl with the inky black marks on her skin. ‘Her. Send her to me.’ And Samara had been unable to disguise her astonishment.
He strode over to the bed and lifted her arm. She went rigid, and he could feel the tremors under her skin.
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he repeated for the millionth time since she’d been thrown into the room.
She nodded stiffly. She clearly didn’t believe him.
‘I just want to see this mark. On your arm. How long have you had it?’
She licked her dry, peeling lips, eyes still on the bedspread. ‘I don’t know. Five winters?’
He tried to work out how old that would have made her, but it was impossible. He couldn’t guess whether she was fifteen or thirty. ‘And the other? On your palm?’
‘Seven?’
‘How did you get them?’ he asked, because it wasn’t unknown for deluded twits to tattoo themselves in hopes of being mistaken for Chosen.
‘They’re tattoos,’ she whispered. ‘I was foolish.’
He sighed and dropped her arm. ‘Right. Why did you get them?’
‘I was foolish,’ she replied, fingers nervously pleating the red silk.
You’re not the only one
. How had he thought this wretched creature might be one of the Chosen? Probably she was some runaway who thought tattoos were cool and had got herself kidnapped into slavery. A terrible story, but not his problem. He couldn’t go around saving every slave in the New Lands. He’d fought slavers before, but on his own terms, with his own army, and most crucially, with the sanction of the Emperor. He wasn’t about to start a war over here, all because of some skinny wretch who’d tattooed herself.
He ran his hand through his hair, annoyed with himself and even more annoyed with her, which was irrational since it wasn’t her fault she was a skeletal wreck of a human being.
Maybe he could make things a bit better for her, though. Salve his conscience a tiny bit.
‘What happened to your leg?’ he asked. He could see her malformed shin bone where the red silk of the dress had ridden up. Instead of a smooth, straight line, the bone stuck out, as if it had been snapped in two and simply left like that for the skin to heal back over. A compound fracture, which he’d seen before, but never just left like this.
Her face twisted in what looked like shame. ‘I was clumsy.’
‘Didn’t anyone help you? Didn’t you try to help yourself?’
She shook her head. ‘No. I was foolish.’
And his patience snapped, because ‘foolish’ probably wasn’t even her word, it was Samara’s, and she was so broken she couldn’t even think for herself. ‘Will you stop saying that? And will you swiving look at me when I’m talking to you?’
So saying, he grabbed her chin and tipped her face up so she was forced to look at him. Her lids fluttered in surprise and fear, her breath quickened and her eyes darted about in confusion. They flickered in the direction of his face, but she didn’t seem to see him.
She didn’t seem to see anything.
Kael stared, but her gaze never rested anywhere. Her eyes remained unfocused. They were a clear, pale blue, with no signs of blindness, and yet—
And yet. She was blind.
‘Merciful gods,’ Kael breathed.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, which irritated him, because she shouldn’t be apologising about it. He let go of her hair and stepped back, watched her calm herself, fingers smoothing the crumpled silk of her dress. Her lids dropped again, as if to hide her useless eyes. Kael waved his fingers at her, even stuck his tongue out at her, but she paid him no attention.
His gaze dropped to her crippled leg again. A blind girl could trip and fall so easily. Become an object of ridicule. No one would help her set her broken leg, and he doubted she’d have the strength, let alone the guts, to try it herself.
Slaves were valuable. Mistreating them was like buying a horse just so you could flog it to death. There was no point. Why had Samara let this happen? She didn’t seem stupid. Maybe she was mad.
‘Were you really clumsy?’ he said, and she nodded. Kael sighed, knelt on the bed and took her arm in his. The patterns looked so real. Half to himself, he said, ‘But why would a blind girl tattoo herself?’
‘I wasn’t always blind,’ she rasped.
He looked up at her eyes again. There was no sign of injury to them. ‘How did it happen?’
‘I—’ she flinched again. ‘I was foolish.’
Kael regarded her face for a long time. He wondered how many times he’d have to ask her before she stopped parroting the same answer. If she ever would. If the flickers of guilt and shame he’d seen earlier had just been the shallow emotions of a misbehaving animal expecting a reprimand.
Her face was pale, cheekbones protruding hard under those useless eyes. Her lips were cracked, her hair in matted locks hanging to her bony shoulders. He wondered if she’d always been like this. If before the blinding and the beatings and the starvation she’d once been a normal person. If she’d ever been free.
And suddenly he was angry. At whoever had broken this girl into a brainless animal, but also at the girl for allowing it. Didn’t she fight? Didn’t she rebel? Had she never attempted to keep her own dignity, her own mind? Maybe she didn’t deserve to be treated like a human being. Maybe she’d never been one.
He ran his hand over her uninjured leg, and she flinched. Her body said no. But when he again asked, ‘Why did you come here?’ she still replied without hesitating, ‘I came to please you.’
‘Well, you ain’t pleasing me much sitting there quivering.’ Not even sure if he meant it, he continued, ‘If you wanted to please me you’d take your clothes off and open your legs.’
A long heartbeat, then she rose to her feet and pulled the dress over her head. Kael stared, amazed and repulsed at the same time. She was quite hideously thin, every one of her ribs standing out in sharp relief, her breasts almost non-existent, her hipbones protruding like knives.
But she lay down on the bed, her legs apart, and waited.
What would happen if he sent her back untouched? Would Samara
check
?
Kael ran his tongue over his teeth and regarded her. Hell, he’d been with uglier women.
Giving her one last chance, he said, ‘Are you willing, girl?’
She nodded frantically. ‘Yes, my lord. I’ll—I’ll do anything.’
Maybe she’d get a reward for it. Food, clothing, somewhere warm to sleep. He might actually be doing her a favour.
Kaelnar Vapensigsson, you can be a real evil bastard
.
‘Will you, indeed,’ he said softly, and let his jerkin fall to the floor. His shirt followed as he toed off his boots, and he watched her tremble as she listened to the rustle of clothing. She could say no at any time. He’d given her the opportunity to say no.
Naked, he slid into bed beside her. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said, touching her shoulder. ‘I won’t hurt you.’
She nodded rigidly, and Kael stroked her face. Her body was stiff. She was terrified.
‘Is it your first time?’ he asked gently. She quivered in response. ‘Are you frightened of what’s to come?’
She gave a bare nod, and Kael cupped the small swell of her breast. ‘Relax,’ he told her. ‘It will be better if you relax.’
He kissed her neck – at least she’d washed before she came – and stroked her skin, trying to calm her. If he gave her this, some warmth and pleasure, even if it was only for one night, he might be able to leave Samara’s compound without tarnishing his soul any more.
Murmuring soothingly, he slipped his hand between her legs, and she suddenly jackknifed against him, shoving with her scrawny arms, jerking her knee up and very nearly spearing his vitals with it. The rigid, supine slave beneath him flashed into a spitting wildcat, made strong with anger, propelling him off her bony body and onto the floor, where he landed hard and lay for a moment, stunned.
On the bed, she’d frozen too. Kael shoved himself to his feet and glared at her, not caring whether she could see him or not.
‘Now
you change your mind?’ he growled, and she cowered, scrambling back and falling off the far side of the bed. ‘You said you were willing, girl!’
She hauled herself to her feet, shaking so violently he thought she might break another bone. Kael rounded the bed and grasped her by the arms, shaking her.
‘What is wrong with you?’ he shouted. ‘Why couldn’t you say no when I asked you? Why can’t you say anything you haven’t been told to? Are you simple, girl? Are you mad? Or are you just a bloody prick tease?’
Her teeth were chattering. He nearly expected her to faint.
‘Oh for gods’ sakes,’ he spat, shoving her away from him and throwing the silk dress after her. ‘Get out of my sight.’
She stumbled, clutching the dress to herself, and began to feel her way around the bed. Kael, all patience lost, roared, ‘Get out!’ and she fled, tripping and crashing into things, scurrying through the door with the dress still grasped in her hands.
Kael kicked the door shut after she’d gone and glowered at it, furious. At Samara, at the girl, and now at himself.
Wrenching the door open, he strode across the hall and into the common room where his men were getting drunk with Samara’s pleasure slaves. Naked and angry, he grabbed the two nearest girls and hauled them into his room.
Out from the darkness of sleep a huge red cat loomed.
The wall was covered with fangs and claws, beaks, crowns. Fearsome animals, and yet they didn’t frighten her. Flames burned low in the huge fireplace. The bed was soft and warm.
Something tickled her cheek, but when she turned her face to rub at it, her gaze fell on the man sleeping beside her. A handsome man, a strong man. A man who opened his eyes and smiled at her.
She smiled back, and then he reached for his sword and plunged it into her belly.
She woke up screaming.
