Return (Lady of Toryn trilogy) (22 page)

What?
             

Ashlyn
froze.

Not literally, of course, although that was going to be one option if she didn't get out of the wind and rain pretty soon.

"Devlyn?" she repeated stupidly.

Still shivering, she turned, staring at Kou as he sat motionle
ss in the boat. His dark eyes were completely unreadable.

Okay, for some reason it just wasn't processing.

"
Lord
Devlyn?" Ashlyn said, wondering why he hadn't denied it already. It just couldn't be possible. Kou was a ninja, captured on the airship and held hostage for days. He was…well, he was her friend.

He was Kou.

He was not Devlyn.

"Kou," she said, laboring to her feet. Her water-logged skirt made it difficult to move. "Tell me what's going on."

"You didn't tell her?" the younger ninja exclaimed. "You were supposed to-"

"No,
Tag. I didn't tell her." Kou's gaze was steady as he met Ashlyn's. "I didn't know if she would come after hearing what I had to say."

"
What
?" Ashlyn growled, getting angrier by the moment. If it was possible, her nausea was intensifying. "Okay, if somebody doesn't tell me what's going on
right the hell now
, I'm going to puke- and then I'm going to hit someone really, really hard, and I don't freaking care who it is!"

As sick as she felt, and as dark as the near-dawn night remained, she didn't miss the
meaningful look that the other ninjas shared. She glanced at Skye, but he seemed just as perplexed as she was.

"She has not
yet been exposed," Kou said at length. "She is exhausted, but healthy. A day to recuperate and she’ll be ready."

Exposed
? Ready? The heck? "I warned you," Ashlyn began furiously, but then her stomach heaved, and she clamped a hand over her mouth again. Great timing, she thought. The last thing she needed was to blow chunks all over her potential captors.

"All will be expl
ained in due time, Lady Li," Tag said. "For now I will assure you that Devlyn, although he is captain of the Toryn guard, is not and never will be Elder Lord of Toryn. Your father retains that title. And we are not your enemy." He vaulted crisply out of the boat, reached up with his right hand to remove his mask. As the cloth fell away, Ashlyn felt a jolt of recognition. He looked like Kou, close enough to be a brother.

"Tagawa Lunai, of the clan Lunai," he said, bowing lo
w. "I welcome you, Lady Li, and trust you bear no wounds from your ordeal."

She stared at him incredulously, absolutely amazed that he would revert to tradition at a time like this. "I…um…these wounds will heal," she said slowly, too shocked to respond with anything but the proper answer. "And you?"

"I am well." He held out a hand. "Allow me to escort you to your home, Lady Li."

Ashlyn glanced at Skye
. He looked absolutely homicidal, but she didn't want him to leave her alone with these people. "Will you escort my…companion with me as well?" she asked. Her words were stilted, but she hoped that perhaps they would attribute that to her sickly state instead of her surprise.

"Certainly, Lady."
His hand was still extended, and after some hesitation Ashlyn put her fingers in his, allowing him to guide her towards a horse waiting on the shore. He gave her a leg up, but kept the reins in his hands so that he could lead her. It was just as well. As violently as her stomach was churning, she didn't feel that she had the strength to guide the horse just now.

Ashlyn
glanced back at Kou, wondering what the heck was going on, but his stoic face betrayed nothing. Skye refused to meet her eyes.

This was just super,
Ashlyn thought dryly, curling her chilled fingers into the horse's warm mane. She didn't know whether she was being captured or invited to stay for tea. (Actually, tea right now would be
great
. She couldn't remember the last time she'd had real tea from her actual homeland. It was enough to make her stomach growl, despite its current discomfort.)

When they neared
Toryn, however, all thoughts of tea fled her mind.

The sun was almost up now, enabling her to see the giant stone wall that framed
Toryn, a city which had once been open to anyone who wished to enter. A gate of sturdy metal- iron, perhaps- was barred from the inside. Throngs of people stood outside the city demanding entrance, some even encamped at the base of the wall, some looking so hollow-eyed that she wondered what horrors they might have seen. But the gates remained shut.

Tag turned and held up a hand, signaling the rest of them to stop. "Cover yourself, Lady," he said, removing his cloak and handing it
up to her. "Now is not the time to reveal your presence."

Ashlyn
pulled the cloak around her shoulders and drew the hood up hesitantly. It had all seemed simple before- Devlyn was the declared enemy. If she defeated him, everything would go back to normal. Now she wasn't so sure.

People stared unabashedly at them as they rode up to the city gates.
Ashlyn kept her head down, her shuriken concealed within the folds of her cloak, but she could see out of the corner of her eye that both of the guards flanking Skye had drawn their katanas.

"My lord, we seek entrance," a man pleaded, running up to Tag and falling to his knees in the withered grass. He bowed, clasping his hands together fitfully as though he thought he might be punished for asking.

Ashlyn looked at the man, trying not to be obvious about it. He was dressed in Outlander clothing, similar to samurai in style, but he wore his hair short, without the traditional topknot. If the clothing was a little threadbare, it was clean, and the man did not look as if he were starving. At least she could take comfort in that.

"I do not have the authority to grant your family sanctuary," Tag answered in
Toryn. "You are safe outside these walls, for now. If we are attacked, I will ask Lord Devlyn to place you under his protection. You have my word."

The poor man looked absolutely miserable. "Thank you, my lord," he said dutifully.
"A thousand blessings on your clan."

"And yours." Tag led
Ashlyn forward again. At a gesture from him, a ninja standing atop the stone wall shouted to his comrades below, and the gates began to open.

They entered, and
Ashlyn nearly fainted with relief when she saw that the inside of Toryn was not changed, not in the least. The bridges stood solidly, every house just as she had left it- even her own. It was so heartbreakingly beautiful that it brought tears to her eyes. There was the bridge where she'd broken her nose at the age of seven, trying to prove to her father that the river was deep enough to dive in (lucky it hadn't been her
neck
). There was Heaven, the old bar where she'd conned her uncle into letting her try his sake (and she still didn't know how she'd pulled that one off).

And beyond it all, beyond her dad's house, beyo
nd even the pagoda where she had once faced the Elder Lords in battle for leadership of Toryn, was Na Michico.

Ashlyn slid off the horse
. This was her home, the land of her ancestors. It was an entire world apart from the rest of Kresmir. The ground beneath her feet was so familiar that she could have closed her eyes and danced a thousand steps without falter.

"Thank Drago
," she breathed. "I thought I'd never see it again."

Then she turned and threw up all over Tag's boots.

Chapter 11

Tainted Blood

"Ungh," Ashlyn groaned, mashing her cheek into her pillow. The air was cold, colder than she was accustomed to, anyway, and she'd managed to kick off her blanket at some point during the night. Keeping her eyes shut and refusing to acknowledge that she was waking up, she fumbled around in front of her, looking for the woolly blanket she had bought
from an old lady in Landi a year or so ago.

Instead of soft wool, though, her hand settled on something warm. And firm.

Er…wait a minute. It was all coming back now.

"You're finally awake," Skye said from beside her, amusement in his tone.

Ashlyn pried one eye open and looked at where her fingers had ended up. "Heh," she said weakly, removing her hand from Skye's thigh. "Um, sorry."

Mental note: no touching of Skye.
Ever again.

Skye
shrugged, apparently deciding to pretend like he hadn't noticed her shameless groping. "How are you feeling?"

Ashlyn rolled onto her back, blew out a breath. Her stomach was still roiling a little, but it wasn't horrible. "I'm better, I guess." Belatedly she noticed the presence of a soft pillow,
and glanced quizzically at Skye. Traditionally, Toryn slept on thin rugs on the floor.

"I couldn't stand seeing you bang your head on that useless mat anymore," he replied. "There are a few traditions around h
ere that I just don’t get."

"Me, too."
Ashlyn stared at the ceiling of her house-
her
house, she realized, looking much the same as she had left it. Well, the ceiling anyway.

She frowned, noticing also that she was wearing one of her old kimonos.
(It was actually a little tight across the chest area, which pleased her immensely, although she'd never admit it.)

"Did you bring me here?" she asked curiously.
Did you change my clothes too? Please say no.

Skye
shifted, his boots clunking on the solid wooden floor as he stretched his legs out in front of him. "Actually, you brought yourself here. Don't you remember?"

"Not really." She screwed up her eyebrows as she tried to recall. "I puked on Tag's boots, and then…um…"

"Then you announced to the world that you were done with being polite, and you were going to sleep." He shifted, looking irritated with the available seating options. "You dragged me in here, babbling on about how we weren't going to be out of each other's sight at any point, not even if you had to handcuff yourself to me during your baths."

"Oh,
gods."
Ashlyn rubbed at her forehead, trying to cover her embarrassment. "You're kidding me, right?"

Giving up on finding a comfortable spot, he settled back agains
t the wall and grinned. "Sorry." He ignored her indignant glare and continued, "Devlyn said you needed your rest. He must have been right, because you changed into…that…and conked out."

Ashlyn's first reaction was that he had just called her kimono
a
that.
Granted, it was pretty old and a little threadbare, but Ashlyn held strong in her belief that kimonos were sexier than lingerie. Her mother had always looked blindingly beautiful in hers. In Ashlyn's humble opinion, even a moth-eaten kimono should warrant more than a
that
from Skye. Particularly with her newfound bustline.

Her sec
ond reaction was: Ugh. Devlyn.             

Ashlyn grumbled an obscenity, sitting up and running a hand over her hair, which had come loose from its knot and now fell down her back in a tangled, sweaty mess. Okay, boobs aside, he probably hadn't glanced below her neck out of sheer hor
ror. Ick.

"I swear I didn't k
now that he was Devlyn, Skye. If I'd had any idea, I would have challenged him to the leadership duel and been done with it, but he lied to me. He said his name was Kou."

"I know." The
blond swordsman drew up one knee and rested his arm across it, leaning his head back against the wall. "What's done is done, Ash. We can't change it now."

"I kno
w, I know. But that doesn't mean I can't feel like a total moron for a lifetime or two." She pulled her knees up and propped her chin on the shelf they made.

The silence that followed was thick with tension, and it seemed to get worse with every unsaid word that passed between them.

"He seemed nice enough, though," she ventured finally. "I mean, here we are, unshackled, free to roam. No lopping of heads so far. That's a good sign, right?"

Skye
laughed; low, raspy and just a little gruff. Any other day- any other place- and that laugh would have been enough to turn her insides to jelly. Today it had no effect. Odd.

"You're trying to convince me to forgive
you for leading me here," he said. It was a statement of fact, not a question.

"Maybe."
She grinned weakly. "Is it working?"

A corner of his mouth quirked.
"Maybe."

"Good." She took a deep breath. "Then I'm sure you're getting used to the idea that I'm not a traitor, and I'm
not
trying to betray FLD in favor of Toryn. All I wanted was to come here- alone, actually, although that plan didn't work out so great- and try to resolve this without any bloodshed."

She lied back on her mat again and put a hand to her temple, feeling the first throb
s of a headache. "I think I picked up some kind of flu bug on the way, though. Man, I feel like crap. I hope you don't think I still make a habit of puking on my friends' shoes. That is
totally
a thing of the past- I got over that
years
ago- and- and Tag is the first time since…well, since you guys."