Return (Lady of Toryn trilogy) (9 page)

"I will meet you here in three days’ time. Dusk will be easiest for you to slip away unnoticed," the man said, taking no notice of her confusion. "Until then, Lady."

She could not respond, the shock rendering her brain incapable of simple thought. As she watched dumbly, the man turned and walked away, brushing past Drake Lockhart, who was standing at the head of the staircase.

Staring at her.

Her first urge was to say,
You won't believe what just happened.

But then she remembered that this was Drake, and that she hated him, and she also remembered what Skye had said earlier. She had virtually no idea which side she wanted to be fighting for.

She didn't have to tell Drake anything . . . at least not yet. The entire conversation had been in Toryn, so he probably hadn't understood a word of it anyway.

"Drake," she acknowledged him quietly, standing and pushing the door shut, cutting herself and her thoughts off from the rest of the world.

Chapter 5

Found Out

“Eeuuuch," Ashlyn said, wrinkling her nose at the dusty book Aik set in front of her. "That's disgusting. How can you put that in your mouth?"

He fixed her with a gray-eyed stare that would have been enough to turn Lord Angelo himself into stone. Ashlyn knew better, however, and she wasn't fooled for a moment. The wolf's gentle nature was apparent even in his most aggressive battles.

His race was non-confrontational, despite the persecution and violence they had suffered for centuries at the hands of humans. Through thei
r war with Lord Angelo and the quest to save the sun, Aik had maintained his cool attitude, fighting only when necessary, killing only when there was no other option. He was a warrior of peace.

So naturally Ashlyn felt totally safe sticking her tongue out at him. Which she now did. With relish.

He ignored the childish gesture and padded silently back into the stacks to resume his search for more disgustingly filthy old books.

Eyeing the leather-bound tome disdainfully, Ashlyn flipped it open with the tip of a fingernail, not wanting to touch any of the nasty bacteria that might have accumulated on its yellowed pages.

A STUDY OF THE TORYN CULTURE

by
Nanka Grulich

Hmmph. Not a Toryn name. How much could one foreign chick figure out about the ancient traditions of Toryn? Probably not much. Ashlyn glanced lower on the page, studying the table of contents and looking for something that might be helpful in her quest for information.

Chapter 1: Initiation into the Tribe

Initiation? Tribe? Ashlyn snorted gracelessly. Unless this girl had somehow squirmed into the affections of a specific clan lord, initiation was pretty much impossible. This whole book was probably a total crock. She flipped to that chapter and skimmed the first page, noting words like
traditional acceptance ceremony
,
sacred speaking words
and
probationary trial period
.

Eh. These were all things that the Lunai and other eastern clans embraced, but not the Li bloodline. Both she and her father were of the belief that if you weren't born a Toryn, then you would never
be
a Toryn.

She turned back to the table of contents.

Chapter 2: Learning the Status of Tribesmen

Oh man. There was no way she was going to last through this yawner. "This one's useless," she announced, slamming the book shut with a loud thump. A cloud of dust rose unceremoniously in front of her, and Ashlyn coughed. "I'm gonna go get a drink of water," she said, hoping that Aik would be able to hear her above his muttering.

Okay, so she'd somehow been wrangled into researching moldy old books with Aik. That wouldn't have been so bad in itself, but she'd been stuck in that smelly room for what seemed like hours already, and she wasn’t going to have any time to get ready for the Landslide Festival opening ceremonies tonight. It was a three-month festival that only came around once every ten years, and this time, it was being hosted in Cosmea.

Yeah, she was gonna be the leader of Toryn, but probably only for a week or two until they found someone better. That didn't mean she had to spend all her free time poking her nose in old tribal customs and boring herself to death. And Ashlyn would rather fight off a dozen of the angry alligator-like monsters that prowled the Cosmea borders than show up bleary-eyed and unfashionable to the Festival.

A girl had her limits, after all.

And all this researching hadn't afforded Ashlyn any time to ponder over what the strange man had said to her earlier at the Inn. As much as Skye irritated her, she knew his intentions were always honorable, and she also knew that there would have to be one heck of a good reason for him to join in on a war. He hadn't even bothered to pick sides in the fight against Lord Angelo until he knew that there was no other option.

But Devlyn offering her co-Leadership of Toryn? That didn't sound like the plan of a madman bent on world domination. It sounded more like someone who was in over his head and wanted some assistance in straightening the mess out. If Ashlyn could get in as co-Leader, at least temporarily, then this war wouldn't have to take place at all. She wanted that more than anything . . . but she wasn't entirely sure about this man she'd only just met.

After edging out of the library and climbing down the ladder leading up to Aik’s old house, Ashlyn jogged easily down the stairs, glad that all her fighting and training had kept her in shape well enough to navigate the endless climbing at Cosmea. She ducked into the small rooms around the weapon shop and continued, hardly stopping to wave at the owner as she stepped outside again.

It was there that she paused, peering over at the Eternal Flame with renewed interest, wondering why the hell Drake Lockhart would be sitting in front of it, staring dully into the flames while the rest of FLD helped the natives to prepare for the Festival.

Well, the staring dully part was pretty much a given. After all, Drake was about as interesting as a pile of pony dung. But Ashlyn's curiosity won out - maybe he'd had a fight with Trace, or maybe he was actually enjoying his solitude, which meant she had no problem heading down the stairs and over to where he was sitting.

"Hiya, Drake," she said snidely, plopping down next to him and using one hand to shield her eyes from the sun. "How's it goin'?"

"Have you already tired of researching with Aik?" he replied, evading her question with all the subtlety of a punch in the nose.

"Duh. He may be fifty-something years old, but I'm only twenty-three, and I'm pretty sure I have no business sticking my nose into a book that's at least twice my age." She pulled one knee up, propping her elbow on it as she stared openly at Drake.

Deep breath. Wow. He may have been a bastard, but she'd never get tired of looking at him. His scarlet eyes seemed to hold secrets that no one would ever uncover.

"So it's probably been a while since you've been back here to see the Eternal Flame, huh?"

He nodded. The flame reflections danced across the sunlit, angular planes of his face, shards of light upon light, as he glanced at her. "I have had no desire to travel since Lord Angelo‘s defeat."

She waited for a moment, wondering if he would continue, but in true Drake form, the cryptic sentence was all he was saying. It was hard to stay mad at Drake in the flesh, she realized, and wondered just how dangerous it would be to stay around him this time and have to say goodbye again afterwards.

"I know what you mean," she said finally. "I really wanted to settle down, too, find a place where I could just . . . relax for a while. Take the time to find out what I want to do with my life, who I want to be."

Ashlyn sighed, drawing her knee up closer so she could brace her chin against the heel of her newly-healed hand. "At least you've found peace, right? And you're what, eternally twenty-eight? That means I can hope to figure out my life sometime in the next four years, if you're any example to go by."

"I'm not," he said.

"Not what?"

"An example to go by," he said patiently. "I've done some things I'm not proud of."

"Oh." She paused, deliberating. He was expecting her to say something about his past, which even after all this time he obviously still hadn't come to terms with. But Ashlyn wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of sympathy.

"Yeah, I'm definitely not going to look to you for fashion advice, that's for sure. The vampire guise is kind of freaky, or at least it was for me until I got to know you. Maybe you should think about changing your look or something. You might be scaring off potential customers at your weapon shop."

Expecting at least half a smile, Ashlyn deliberately chose not to acknowledge what she thought he was really talking about - his years as one of Lord Angelo‘s Spartan assassins, his affair with an Angel, Lord Angelo‘s discovery of the betrayal…and more recently, the years he spent pining in a coffin after he thought he had killed his own lover, the Angel named Loritta.

Ashlyn was one of the few that didn't feel sorry for Drake and never had, and although it might have seemed callous, she suspected that eventually he would appreciate her flippant attitude towards his somewhat freakish past.

Her ridiculous ramble got what she'd been looking for. Drake threw her one of his rare grins, more genuine than anything she'd seen before because she knew it was real, and as always, it was like dawn breaking on his face. Ashlyn grinned back, pleased with herself.

"How did you know I owned the weapon shop?" he asked.

"Word gets around. Well, actually, it gets around by way of Restlyn, but I'm sure anyone else would have told me."

She remembered the cold, rainy night that she and the others had faced Lord Angelo and defeated him, the painfully void expression on Drake's face when he had discovered that Lord Angelo had been responsible for Loritta’s demise. She recalled in explicit detail the agony that rang in his voice when he realized out loud that someone else should have suffered the twenty years of nightmares.

Funny, how things worked out. She'd spent their entire journey trying to get through to Drake, and it had taken a revelation like that to give him a personality that was something like human. And maybe Trace to draw him out of his shell. Damn it.
Stop thinking about it, Ash.

"I'm glad you didn't go back to the mansion in the Eastern Canyon," Ashlyn said absently, toying with the end of her braid as she stared into the fire. "For years I had all sorts of stupid visions of you sleeping in that nasty coffin, gathering dust and cobwebs and gods know what else. I finally went there to make sure, just for some freaking peace of mind." She frowned as she encountered a particularly nasty snarl in her hair, and pulled her fingers through it, annoyed for the first time at the lack of care that she showed the thick locks.

"Restlyn asked for assistance with the tavern," Drake said, volunteering information that Ashlyn hadn't asked for. "It seemed natural to stay afterwards." He raised his head, eyes narrowing. "Is that the man who spoke to you at the inn?"

She didn't answer, busily remembering their parting after the fall of Lord Angelo and the destruction of the final power plant that had been draining magic from the sun. It had been uneventful, less dramatic than she would have liked. She'd grinned up at Drake, saucily asking if he had any stanes he was willing to part with. He'd pressed a
theft
stane into her hand, turned and walked away as if they had nothing at all to say to each other after living in close quarters, fighting side by side and nearly dying together for more than a month.

When she'd looked down at the stane, which transformed its wielder into a master pickpocket, she had burst out laughing. Drake may not have cracked jokes very often, but when he did it was well worth the wait.

If only she’d told him how she felt after defeating Lord Angelo. Instead she'd had to wait to see him at North Camp Inn…ridiculously happy without her.