“Leave the young to their pleasures!” he bawled, as if his elders were listening.
Laughter and bawdy calls answered him.
Ina watched him with lidded golden eyes, a knowing smile turning her full lips. While Sumahn finished off the flagon, she swept back her red-gold hair, and arched her back enticingly. She was his favorite, as she seemed to guess his desires, no matter how chaste or perverse, before he had thought of them himself.
“Wine!” he slurred.
Ina reached behind her. Sumahn watched her skin pull taut over her lithe curves and thought of sweet butter, a delicacy he had not tasted in a lifetime. He reached to caress that warm flesh, but Ina turned back and pressed a fresh flagon into his hand. He blinked stupidly, and she seemed to double before his eyes.
“You’ve brought your sister?” he quipped, finding it difficult to keep his chin from bouncing off his chest.
He abruptly squinted at the gallery above, trying to clear his focus. “Did you see that?” he asked, struggling with the words. “Just there … I thought … I thought I saw someone.”
“Drink, my love,” Ina said, voice as soft and sweet as the fruit wine she offered.
“But there was someone watching-”
She pushed a long, perfectly tapered finger against his lips. “Drink … and know peace.”
“I would rather drink and know pleasure,” he murmured, fixated on her breasts.
“Drink first,” Ina said, helping tip the flagon.
Sumahn relented. Wine flooded over his tongue, the heady vapor of its honeyed effervescence filling his mind, crowding out all concerns….
What concerns do I have? he thought, as a fresh round of laughter washed over him. If he had any, he drowned them in wine, distantly aware that when he had first tasted it he had gagged on the syrupy thickness of the Fauthian drink. Soon after, he and the others had come to relish it. Unlike other wines, which left a man reeling after a night of drinking, and the promise of a throbbing head the next morning, the fruit wine imbued him with a sense of bliss so deep and persuasive as to wipe away all cares. After many years of fighting and running under Ba’Sel’s inept command, the respite was not just welcome, but earned.
After draining half the flagon, Sumahn dropped it and lay panting through a grin. Ina’s golden eyes never left his, as she began kneading the muscles of his thigh. Her touch sent tingles racing over his skin, and he let his head flop back. Through slitted eyes, he stared into the spinning darkness overhead, feeling weightless, serene, protected. Even when the shape he had seen before slowly materialized into a man bearing a terribly long-bladed sword, his calm remained. Gurgling like a fool, he watched more Fauthians emerge from the gloom, all armed and all stern of face.
“I think your menfolk are jealous,” he managed.
By now, Ina’s hands had moved higher up his leg, her feathery touch arousing. “Our people do not know jealousy,” she purred against his chest. She straddled him, and her eyes seemed to swell before him, like pools of molten gold. “But we do know hunger, my love,” she said. Sumahn grinned at her, despite the unexpected urgency in her voice. “A deep hunger … a soul hunger. It brings us both pleasure and pain. The need is unlike anything you have ever experienced.”
“I have known such needs,” Sumahn argued breathlessly. He winced as her nails pricked his skin. “I know them now,” he added, catching her breasts in his hands.
Ina’s eyes grew wider as she bore down. He thought sure he felt warm trickles of blood springing from his flesh. But that could not be. Ina would do him no harm … unless she had conceived some new manner of pleasure. Sumahn put on a wolfish smirk.
Ina leaned down and breathed into his ear. “So hungry, my love.”
Before Sumahn could respond, the boom of a crashing door echoed through the gathering hall. The music cut off at once. A life of battle and danger overrode the effects of the fruit wine, and he tossed Ina aside, his hands searching for the weapons he no longer had. His fingers flashed over the half-empty flagon, curled around the neck, and gripped tight. With a shout, he lumbered from the bed of pillows.
Adu’lin stood in the wide entrance to the gathering hall, flanked on each side by two guards bearing wicked-looking swords, their blades half as long as a man was tall, slender and slightly curved.
“It is time,” Adu’lin said.
While his fellows looked on in bleary-eyed confusion, Sumahn staggered closer to the Fauthian leader. “Time for what?” He gave a halfhearted effort at brandishing the flagon, but felt foolish for doing so. This was their host, Adu’lin. He was no enemy.
Adu’lin smiled in his flat way. “It is time for you and your fellows to repay our generosity.”
Sumahn considered that … rather, he tried. In truth, he had no idea what Adu’lin was getting at. What he really wanted was to return to whatever games Ina had dreamed up.
With that in mind, he faced her with a leering smile. Ina gazed back, her face as smooth and emotionless as carved stone. “Something amiss, my love?”
She moved with such blinding speed that Sumahn could not react. In the next moment, he found himself sprawled on his back, the gathering hall spinning around him. His jaw felt crushed, and that made no more sense than the taste of blood in his mouth. He tried to talk, but sharp pain stilled his tongue. From far off, he heard dismayed shouts, followed by the sounds of men slamming against the hall’s floor.
What is happening? That thought flitted through Sumahn’s mind, an instant before Ina’s bare foot viciously slammed against his head. All that he knew became as black and formless as the darkest reaches of the firmament.
Chapter 23
Gripping the rope, Leitos swung across the crevasse. Over the wind in his ears, he heard an alarming creak. The cleft below him was no more than a dozen feet wide, but darker than the night, and seemingly bottomless. Halfway across, something snapped overhead, and the rope dropped several inches.
Then he was on the far side, beyond danger. He dropped to the ground with no small measure of relief, and put more distance between his feet and the edge of the gap. He swung the rope back, and Belina caught it.
“Move over there,” she said, pointing at a tree farther along the trail.
“Do you not trust me yet?”
Belina laughed. “If I trusted strangers so quickly, I would have been captured or killed long ago.”
“I think the limb this rope is attached to might have broken,” he cautioned.
“Move,” Belina said, serious again.
Leitos held up his hands in surrender, and did as she commanded. He supposed he could have just as easily run off-it had crossed his mind more than once in the hour since she freed him-but he wanted to see her evidence against the Fauthians.
She eyed mistrustfully. Leitos folded his arms and leaned against the tree she had pointed out, doing his best to seem uninterested in what she was doing.
“If you do anything-”
“You’ll gut me where I stand,” Leitos interrupted, chuckling.
“No,” she said sweetly, “I’ll strip you bare, tie you up, and dip you into a stagnant pool favored by fangfish. For the mud and slime, you’ll not see them come, but you will feel them. They have wicked teeth, those little fishes, and a fierce appetite. They’ll make a eunuch of you in moments. If I decide to leave you in the water, they’ll make bones of you quicker than it takes for you to perish.”
Leitos swallowed. She sounded as though meant it. “I won’t do anything,” he said, thinking maybe he should take the opportunity to run.
She gazed at him a moment longer then, seemingly satisfied that he was telling the truth, she swung across the cleft. The rope neither creaked nor dropped, and she landed lightly as a butterfly.
“From here on,” she said, “we need to move as if they are waiting for us.”