Apparently his repertoire was even more limited than hers, because he simply stood there in utter shock for long seconds while she did everything she could think of, short of ripping his clothes off and seducing him right where he stood. She did things with her lips and tongue she hadn’t realized the human mouth was physically capable of doing.
A long, deep shudder ran through his whole body…
Then a groan tore loose, like a tree in the dead of winter, splitting down the center with a thunderous snap. Quite suddenly her feet were no longer touching the floor and Gadrial discovered that his repertoire was considerably more inventive than hers, after all. Her senses swam as he crushed her close, nearly breaking bones as he pulled her against a chest that was hard as granite.
She didn’t care.
Every inventive touch of his lips, his tongue, and his hands on her body wreathed Gadrial in wildfire and smoke. When they finally came up for air, she was shaking violently. And so, she realized with a sense of marvelous satisfaction, was he. They stared into one another’s eyes. His were wide and shocked.
“Does that clarify things a little, Jas Olderhan?” Her voice was soft and husky, and he swallowed once. Then-
“Yes,” he whispered. “Yes, I do believe that does, Magister Gadrial.”
“Good. Now if you’d be so kind as to put me down, we can both get on with what we were doing when you started to make a decision without all the facts.”
“What?” He blinked, then realized he still held her nestled tight against him with both feet off the floor. A sheepish look stole across his face. “Ah…” Then he muttered, “Oh, what the hell…”
By the time he broke the second devastating kiss, Gadrial’s knees were such jelly that if he had put her down, she would very probably have collapsed. One corner of his mouth crooked into a satisfied little smile as he set her down at last. To her amazement, she didn’t collapse…probably because he still had one arm firm around her.
“Does that clarify things a little more?” he asked, and brushed one fingertip across her cheek as the sense of his words finally sank in. Her breath stuttered under that exquisitely gentle touch. Then she breathed out.
“Oh, yes…that clarifies things very nicely,” she allowed.
“Good.”
He held her a long, long moment longer, then took his arm back with manifest reluctance, led her back into their slidercar, and guided her back to her seat. She couldn’t have made it there unaided. And when he settled her solicitously into her seat and handed her the carrying case with her PC, she simply held it in limp hands, still reeling from the aftershock of that second fusion of lips and thundering heartbeats.
Jasak opened the case for her and put her PC back into her hands, then resumed his own seat.
Jathmar was staring in bafflement, but when Shaylar caught Gadrial’s stunned gaze, she grinned and winked. Gadrial found herself answering that grin with a sheepish smile.
She also spent the next quarter of an hour staring at the same line of Ternathian script, without once taking in the shape of the letters, let alone what the words meant.
She was too busy being deliriously delighted with the outcome of that little experiment in cross-cultural communications. Whatever happened when they reached Portalis and Garth Showma, Gadrial had made sure Sir Jasak Olderhan understood exactly how she felt. She wasn’t going to let anybody-neither the Commandery of Arcana nor Jasak Olderhan, himself-wreck what they could build, together.
Not without a down-and-dirty fight!
Chapter Eighteen
January 9
Shaylar sat beside the slider window and peered out with rising excitement. They were very near the end of their journey, at last, and she was eager to see the Union of Arcana’s capital city. The universe explorer in her had longed to stop and do surveys all along the way here, but as prisoners of war, even honored shardonai, they didn’t control the itinerary. And despite the length of their journey, they’d seen very little of Arcana’s cities.
They’d spent most of the journey through the outer universes flying on military dragons, which landed on military bases, not in civilian cities. Once they’d reached the inner universes, they’d boarded sliders, which passed through every crystal-controlled traffic junction at high speed. Some truly enormous towns for frontier universes had hung tantalizingly on the other side of the slider windows, but they’d been so busy passing through that there’d been no time to really study anything.
The only real Arcanan city they’d even spent an hour in was Theskair. While Shaylar had been amazed by that city-it had a population of almost two million-it was little more than a sleepy, backwater town compared with Portalis, according to Gadrial. Now that they were close enough to actually see Portalis in the distance, she knew the other woman had been right. The capital of New Arcana stunned the senses.
Tajvana was a large city, the largest Shaylar had ever visited. During the years she’d spent at the Portal Authority’s academy, she’d marveled at the city built on both sides of the Ylani Straits. But Portalis made Tajvana seem small.
Their final approach wasn’t made at ground level. The slider’s crystal control network lifted into the sky, running alongside a wide pedestrian bridge which floated nearly eighty feet above the earth, skimming well clear of the magnificent winter forest below. The vast expanse of trees was the estate where Jasak had grown up, and he hadn’t exaggerated his description of the lands. She could tell at a glance that she was looking at pristine, old-growth forest, truly untouched despite two centuries of settlement. Even with only winter-bare branches, it was breathtakingly lovely.
That soaring bridge should have been impossible. On Sharona, it would have been. The crystals that guided the sliders were embedded only now and again in the bridge rail, and the towers connected to the bridgeway from below were very nearly gossamer structures, like spider’s trailing lines that must surely sway to the touch of any breeze. Those slender couldn’t possibly be structural supports for the bridge, let alone the sliders floating past on either side.
“Why is the sliderway so high, here?” Jathmar asked as they hurtled silently over the treetops, and Jasak’s mouth crooked in a half smile that was part embarrassment.
“When the Union wanted to put in a slider path, several decades ago, my grandfather-who, just coincidentally, also happened to be named Sherstan-refused to allow the construction battalion to cut down any trees. He said that forest had been held in a pristine state for a century and a half and no transport clerk was going to cut the heart out of it with a slider right of way.”
He rolled his eyes. “Grandfather was fond of colorful exaggeration. All they wanted to do was cut down enough trees to entrench a control lattice, something on the order of fifty feet wide. But Sherstan was a stubborn old…gentleman,” he said carefully, causing Shaylar and Gadrial to glance at one another in amusement. “He told them,” Jasak continued, determinedly ignoring their suppressed laughter, “that if they were so set on building sliderways to hook Portalis to the rest of the multiverse, they could by Torkash run the sliders over the forest. Which is exactly what they did.
“So many people stopped their sliders along the route to take in the scenery that they ended up building the pedestrian bridge too and modding the guidance crystal spellware to ensure all the sliders keep moving. My family added the lifts later-” he pointed to the towers “-to allow people to walk around in the forest itself.”