I wrinkle my nose, confused. “Wait. Did you—did you hear her?”
“No. But that horse and I? We understand each other well enough without words.”
He weighs as much as two of you, Myst snorts at me. Tell him he walks on his own feet from now on.
I can’t help but smile, wondering how in the world the two of them got along well enough to team up to rescue me. Then, I look at Adan’s body, and grow serious.
“Basten, there’s something I have to tell you. King Joruun was the one who hired Adan and his men to bring me to Old Coros.”
Basten pulls back to search my eyes for an answer to a question he doesn’t understand. His eyebrows furrow. “King Joruun? Are you certain?” He hesitates. “What exactly did they say?”
“That the king wouldn’t want me, well, touched.” My voice bottoms out on the final word, as I feel the ghost of Maks’s hands between my legs. My throat goes bone-dry. My muscles seize up from the echo of past danger, and Basten must pick up on it with his heightened senses, because he lightly grips my chin with thumb and forefinger.
“Did they touch you?”
A whimper slips out before I can swallow it. My body shakes. Basten’s eyes darken like storm clouds, and he shakes his head as I hunt for words to explain.
“No—you don’t have to say it, Sabine. I can find out myself.” As carefully as picking up a bird with a broken wing, he leans close to smell my neck, then over my shoulder, to the palm of my hand. Then he turns to the dead bodies.
“That one,” he says, pointing to Maks. “He tried—but didn’t get far.”
I give the ghost of a nod.
His grip on my hand tightens possessively. “I’d ask Immortal Woudix to bring that bastard back from the dead, just so I could kill him all over again.” He takes a shuddering breath. A moment passes, then he says quietly, “They weren’t talking about King Joruun.”
It takes me a second to realize we aren’t talking about Maks anymore. “But who—”
“They meant King Rachillon.”
I stare at him. I’ve never heard the name.
He explains, “They were Volkish raiders, Sabine. A king might have hired them, but not ours. It was King Rachillon of Volkany.”
Bewildered, I stare blankly like he’s telling me a fae story that happened long ago to people far more important than me.
“King Rachillon?” I pronounce it as he did, Rah-shee-yan.
I’ve been so sequestered for the last twelve years that any news that might have dribbled across the Volkish border didn’t make it into the Convent of Immortal Iyre. The last I heard, Volkany didn’t even have a king. “I—I don’t understand. Why would the King of Volkany want me?”
It feels unreal to even say, like we’re operating within a dream.
Basten mutters to himself, “That’s a damn good question.”
He brought up Volkany in the Manywaters Inn. I wonder if he knows more than he’s saying—or at least suspects more—but his clenched jaw tells me his thoughts are locked inside his own head for the time being.
We leave the bodies in the cottage. Enough hungry creatures are in these woods to clean them up for us. Exhausted and dirty, we ride Myst through the woods, parallel to the river in case the raiding band has more members. The moon is high by the time Basten finally stops Myst so he can listen through the trees.
“There’s a waterfall close by,” he says. “Just over that rise. We’ll be safe there. The water will drown out our scents and sounds. Maybe we can even bathe.”
My muscles are wrung to the bone as we ride the final stretch. Soon, I hear the falls, and then glimpse the silver moonlight reflecting off its water. It’s a tall and narrow waterfall that tumbles off the edge of a shallow cave, crashing below onto rocks before reforming into a meandering valley stream.
Basten leads Myst into the shelter of the shallow cave. We begin stripping off our blood-soaked clothes, so we can wash. The waterfall’s roar fills the silence as our bared flesh catches the moonlight. Basten has seen me naked a thousand times, but suddenly I feel shy. When he extends a hand to help me over the rocks, I cross my arms over my chest.
“I can’t hide behind my hair anymore,” I say quietly, knowing he can hear me despite the waterfall.
Basten pauses, keeping his eyes pinned squarely on my face out of respect, pretending the night hides everything below shoulder level. “The raiders cut it off?”
I nod. “To disguise me. I don’t miss it—only the cover it gave me.”
He tucks another strand behind my ear. “I like you this way. You weren’t meant to be weighed down.”
Gingerly, I test out the falls by extending one foot, shrieking from the burst of cold—but it’s a welcome shock to my system. I dip my hand in the falling water, then my head, then fully stand under the crashing water and tip my head back, letting it scour me clean.
Basten joins me beneath the falls, scrubbing his scalp in the frigid onslaught. He turns his face skyward, letting the water pound his face. It has to hurt, but he doesn’t flinch.
The roaring water is too loud for us to talk much, but he sees me struggling to wash blood off my back and comes up behind me to help. His hands cup my shoulders as he guides me to stand beneath a water stream. His hands work to wash away the blood, kneading my tense muscles until they melt under his deft touch.
After bathing, we wash our clothes and lay them out to dry, then I bundle up in a blanket while he slings a towel around his waist and builds a fire in the lee of the cave. A light mist floats off the waterfall, making me shiver despite the crackling flames.
“Come here,” he barks, patting his knee. “You need to be closer to the fire.”
He gathers me in his lap, securing the blanket around me so I’m bundled up tight enough that a wolly worm couldn’t slip through. I don’t know which is more comforting, the blanket or Basten’s arms. I let myself relax against his chest, watching the fire, as my mind dulls to match the waterfall’s steady roar.
A long time passes in silence.
I don’t think either of us wants to break this moment. We’re safe. We’re clean. We’re together. One wrong word could topple this delicate house of cards, scatter us to the wind, when all I want is to be in his arms forever.
Somehow, his hand finds its way to mine, and it feels good to do something as simple as holding hands. The firelight flickers over his busted knuckles. I run my thumb lightly over his damaged skin, recalling how charged he was during the fight. How charged I was watching him. He made the fight look effortless—like a game. He brought down four powerful raiders in minutes.
What would he do to the Sisters who beat me?
On impulse, I bring his knuckles to my lips and softly kiss the scrapes.
A moan rumbles in his chest. “I like it when you do that.” His mouth is close enough to my ear to hear him over the waterfall’s roar.
“Do what?”
“Treat me like one of your animals. So damn tender.”
For a second, I wonder about kissing him on other places on his body. Bathing in the falls reawakened me, charged me again like during the fight. My breath feels shallow. My teeth keep hunting out my bottom lip, seeking the grounding bite of pain. The bath reinvigorated Basten, too—it’s more than evident. I don’t need heightened senses to perceive the attention of his stiff cock pressing against my ass through the blanket.