The Sorcerer's Concubine (The Telepath and the Sorcerer Book 1) (3 page)

Even if he was kind enough, she was aware of a cold fact. She didn’t want to belong to any man who was willing to take a pile of valuable coins down to a place like this, on a night like this, and buy a woman for his own pleasure.

D
alarsha wrapped
her in a wool cloak and exchanged her slippers for sturdy boots. The door opened to the cold, wet darkness. Grau had a hand wrapped lightly around her shoulders, steering her toward a horse standing under the edge of the roof.

The door shut behind her. 

This was her life now.

The horse was untethered. She wondered if the saddle was enchanted to keep the horse in place and deter thieves. She had heard of this but it seemed like expensive magic. At least he was not too poor, then. Some men scrimped and saved for a Fanarlem girl but had little else to offer.

“I can pack that away,” he said, offering a hand to take her box.

“Thank you.”

“Wow, that’s heavy. What’s in here?” He opened the box, without asking. Revealing all of her rocks and nut husks and other odds and ends. “What are these?” he asked.

“Nothing, sir.”

He looked at her uncertainly and shut the box again. Her heart sank. Maybe he expected her to have a more romantic possession. Maybe he didn’t want to carry a box of rocks.

“The rain is very loud,” he said. “Can I lift you onto the horse?”

“Yes,” she said, relieved that at least he had not left the box behind.

He put his hands around her waist to lift her up. 

“Oof,” he said. “You’re heavy too.” Although he had no trouble putting her up on the saddle.

“Am I?” She had always felt fairly insubstantial.

“I guess you weigh a little less than a flesh and blood woman. Maybe. It’s not a bad thing, though. Wouldn’t want to lose you in a strong wind.” He swung up behind her. He took the reins, his arms close around her. His body was warm against her back. Often she was disturbed by the warmth of men, but on a night like this, it wasn’t so unwelcome. She couldn’t get cold the way real people did, but cold weather still didn’t feel good, especially wet cold like this. She could feel the damp in her wooden bones.

He took a white stone from his pocket and tapped it twice. It brightened like a lantern, and he held it up to cast the way ahead, but barely. They moved slowly down the streets, pelted by rain. Her hooded cloak protected her, but he also kept his head tipped forward over hers. She was deeply conscious of how his body pressed around her, the muscles of his thighs, the size of him. Fanarlem girls were all made the same, five feet tall, so their parts could be easily changed without worrying over size. Besides that, they became clumsier the larger their bodies were made. Grau was perhaps six feet, not unusually tall, but she had never been this close to a man—as close as an embrace. Very different from perching reluctantly on a man’s knee.

She wasn’t sure how long they traveled down the liquid shadows of those wet streets. She was so aware of him near her and so uncertain of what might come next, time seemed a tricky concept. They went far enough to leave the seedy district of the House of Perfumed Ribbons well behind them, now traveling on a tree-lined avenue near the river where wealthy merchants must live in the elegant stone houses. The river wove its way across the land to the port of Atlantis in the south, all the way to the Miralem lands in the north. Sometimes people called it the River of Money.

He stopped in front of a small but cozy-looking inn, two stories with a balcony and a tiled roof, where candles glowed in windows. A boy walked out from the stables into the rain to take the horse. He looked at Velsa.

“Success, huh?” he asked.

“I’d say so,” Grau replied.

Grau removed her box and some papers from his bag. Then he lifted her down and showed her to the steps, fishing out a key as he climbed. 

The room was small but they had it to themselves. There was a single large bed on a low frame. Seeing it twisted her insides. Also, a lounging bench with cushions, a writing desk, a fireplace. Grau put her box on the bed, took off his coat and hung it on a peg. He offered a hand to take her cloak.

“You aren’t wet, are you?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

“Please, call me Grau,” he said.

“All right…”

He shivered, ruffling his black hair, which was soaking wet as he didn’t have a hood. “I’ll get the fire going. Have a seat.”

She watched him move the logs around and stuff some paper beneath them. He put his hand close to the logs, blew out a quick jet of breath, and a flame sprouted.

Magic.
Just small magic, but magic all the same. She had never seen anyone work sorcery right before her eyes.

Once he was satisfied that the fire would burn steadily, he sat beside her with her box on his lap. “Where did you get these?” he asked.

Fates, how she was shaking! “Once a year…” She could hardly get her voice to go above a whisper. “…when the city is hot in the dead of summer and the mosquitos are out, so no one is coming to the House, we go to the mountains for a week. I always pick up interesting things I see, to remind me what it’s like out in the forest.”

“I would love to look at them closer.”

“Of—of course.”

He opened the box and at first, he just looked at all the contents long and hard without touching anything. Then, slowly, he held his hand over the box, as if he was sensing something inside. He picked up one of the rocks and turned it over. “A fossil,” he said, noticing the imprint of a shell inside the rock. “You have a good eye.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“It’s a remnant from a time when the mountains were an ocean,” he said. “A long time ago.”

“How?” She briefly shed her fear enough to question. She had always wondered how a shell could have ever been atop a mountain.

“No one knows,” he said. “But sorcerers who study these things report sensing the energy of ocean creatures in the mountains, and of course, we find things like this. Maybe ancient sorcerers moved the land around.”

He took a little glass out and squinted into it.

“What is that?” she asked.

“A magnifier. Here, take a look.”

The magnifier made the shell seem almost like the surface of another world. “Why do you carry that around?” she asked.

“For just this reason. Looking at things. Sorcerers use things in the natural world to create spells, but so much of it remains a mystery. The best way to find a new spell is to study how nature works. How all the components of our world fit together and work in harmony. Sometimes, if you apply those same combinations and processes to spell-work, you’ll get something new and wonderful.”

“So you’re a sorcerer?”

“I won’t really feel like a sorcerer until I discover a spell of my own.”

“I didn’t realize sorcerers had to discover a spell.”

“They don’t, but…it’s the best way to make a name for yourself. Either way, I can’t pursue sorcery as a profession until I improve my potion-making skills. That’s where the money is.”

“But for now, you’ll be joining the military?”

“Just the border patrol, for six months. I have three older brothers, and we’ve all been working for my father, but being the youngest I have the dregs of the inheritance. I need to do something with myself besides overseeing our shipments. This will get me out into the world.”

The fire was crackling and burning now, giving the room a warm glow. “And you bought me to accompany you during your military service? Is that common?”

“My father was a soldier once. He said if I was going into the border patrol, all the other men on the patrol would surely be seeking female company in town, and I might be tempted to join them,” he said. “But it’s perilous nowadays. Miralem women can sneak in over the border and use their telepathy to steal everything a man’s got. There are reports of men waking up from a stupor with their eyes cut out, and worse.”

Even in her sheltered life, Velsa heard plenty of talk about the Miralem people who lived in the northern regions. They were all born with telepathy, and the more talented among them could read and control minds.

“I suppose it’s their contribution to the war effort,” Grau continued.

“War? We aren’t at war, are we?”

“We could be, any minute. It’s all anyone talks about at home.” He shrugged. “So this was all his idea. You, I mean. I really don’t know that I’d visit brothels, but then, I also don’t know how long I’ll be traveling around. It could be years and years. It does get lonely.” He regarded her, his expression turning more serious. “I’ve always been told that Fanarlem don’t have emotions like real people do, but it isn’t true, is it? The way you look at me…”

“Of course we have emotions,” Velsa said, offended. “All the girls do.”

“It’s making me feel a little uncomfortable that I bought you.”

“I’ve heard people say that about us…” Velsa plucked at the hem of her sleeve. “Some men don’t like to buy such well-made Fanarlem with education. Too much like a real girl…but, I am still a Fanarlem.”

At this point, Velsa knew, she should assure him that she was happy to do anything he asked of her, that she was his willing servant because it would cleanse her tainted soul. But some rebellious part of her never liked to voice those sentiments, and she even now she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

“I understand that your karma is improved by obedience,” he said. “But I think I’d have a hard time asking you to do something you didn’t want to do.”

She glanced at him. She feared it almost came across as a glare, and looked at her hands again. “I would be happy to do anything you ask,” she said softly.

He shifted a little closer to her. “You really are astonishing magic,” he said. “When you consider that we ever figured out how to host a living soul inside a shell of wood and cloth, and make it so you can speak and move… You are so much more luminous than the sum of your parts.”

She had been prepared for this her whole life, in the sense that she was told it was coming. She was told what men would want to do to her and what they would want her to do to them, what she should say and not say. But he was entirely new to her. Every thought had left her head, except his body so near her, the soft brown of his eyes with the gleam of the fire in them, the ghost of stubble on his chin.

“Magic I could hold in my arms,” he said. “That’s what I imagined. I can sense the spells woven through you. Can you sense them?”

“Can
I s
ense them?” She hadn’t expected that question. “No.”

“You could, with some training,” he said. “It’s very interesting. I’ve never sensed so many layers of magic at once.”

Slowly, his hands moved to her shoulders. She didn’t move or protest. She wasn’t sure what she wanted, exactly. She had been so terrified with every other man at the House, but he didn’t behave like the other men. 

He put his hands on her over-robe and gently slid it off her shoulders, revealing the curve of her narrow waist hugged by her sash, a glimpse of bare thighs between stockings and under-robe. All the stitches at her joints were still concealed by her clothes. She had been told some men liked to see them and some did not.

Grau looked at her, and she could see he was intrigued. She had seen that look before, of course. Hunger in his eyes. Men went about their lives all day, conducting business and working, but if given a chance, they were like wolves.

She braced herself. This was the moment she had been created for. All she had to do was let him have what he wanted. Stare at the ceiling, Pia had told her breezily. Easy for Pia to say, when she’d spent time with Fanarlem men and apparently liked it, but real men seemed so different.

Grau met her eyes again, and he seemed concerned.

“You look scared,” he said.

She shook her head. 

It would be perilous to take his concern at face value and rebuff him. She could not forget that he had spent a tidy sum on her.

She unfastened her sash, letting her under-robe fall open, and then she slid the garment off entirely so now he would see the stitches at her wrists and elbows and shoulders, the curve of her small breasts under the thin fabric of her chemise. 

He put his hand on her arm. His motions were careful, as if he thought she was made of glass. She tried to stay calm. No one had ever really cared, or ever really would care, if she could play the bastir or make conversation. This was all that mattered. 

“You
are
scared,” he said, drawing back again. “You are a real woman, with feelings, and you’re frightened of me…”

“No.”

“I think this was a mistake.”

He might send her back.

A surge of desperation and unexpected horror ran down her body. She knew in this moment that she couldn’t bear the uncertainty of that place ever again.

“Grau, please, don’t think of it like that! You think I’d be any less scared with someone else? I
wanted
you to acquire me.”

His hand wrapped around his mouth, thinking. “You just aren’t anything like I expected you’d be. And now that I’m considering this entire situation, I must have been out of my mind. My father made it sound like I’d just go pick out a girl who would be as willing to spend her life with me as our servants are to scrub the dishes. But this is a very different circumstance, isn’t it? When I looked in your eyes I wasn’t thinking of any of that. I suppose I imagined I was rescuing you.”

“You were.” She put her hand on his chest. His heart beat under her fingers. She didn’t expect that, and almost jumped. “Grau…”

“Velsa…” He spoke her name so intimately. He took her hand and looked at it carefully, running his finger along the tops of her fingernails, which were crafted from finely carved slivers of horn. “I wanted to rescue you. Maybe it’s true about Fanarlem. That’s what I’ve always been told. But being here with you now… I can’t treat you that way. I won’t touch you.”

Until you’re ready.

She heard words unspoken. She knew he must assume the day would come when she would be ready. Even marriages were usually arranged, wives not necessarily any more willing than she was. She wondered how long he would wait.

She wondered if she wanted him to wait. Maybe it was better to get it over with.

And yet, she nodded, relief flooding through her.

“You look tired,” he said. “Maybe you should sleep.” He waved toward the bed. “It’s big enough for two. I’m going to look over some work papers before I turn in. I won’t bother you when I do.”