“I’m thinking it’s time and past time I was in bed,” he continued, smiling down at her, and she smiled back, ears half-cocked.
“No doubt you’re right, Milord,” she agreed and tilted her head to one side. “Now that you mention it, you do look tired-and why shouldn’t you, after riding all day to get here?” She made shooing motions towards the internal stair to his bedchamber, waving both hands. “Go! I’m sure you’ll feel better in the morning.”
“No doubt you’ve the right of it,” he said, nodding to her, and headed for the stairs.
Brandark had excused himself after dinner and taken himself off to Balthar, where, no doubt, he was even then making the rounds of his favorite inns and taverns with his balalaika. It was unlikely he’d be back much before dawn-if then-and Bahzell’s lips twitched with amusement at the thought while he climbed the stairs. With his luck, Brandark would have composed a new verse to “The Lay of Bahzell Bloody Hand” by morning to “suitably” chronicle Tellian’s attempted assassination. He hadn’t added anything new to that accursed ditty in almost a year, after all, and nothing that good could last forever.
He chuckled to himself as he reached the landing, opened the door, stepped through it…and froze.
“Hello, Bahzell,” Leeana Hanathafressa said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Bahzell stood in the open doorway, head bent slightly-as it had to be to clear doorframes even in a Sothoii castle-and stared at her. She sat crosslegged on the foot of his bed in the leather breeches and doublet that couldn’t make her look even remotely masculine, however hard they tried, and cocked her own head slightly.
“Are you going to just stand there all night?” she asked gently, and he shook himself, stepped very slowly into the room, and closed the door behind him.
“Better,” she said with a small smile. “Why don’t you have a seat?”
She pointed at one of the chairs Baron Tellian had had manufactured to a hradani’s stature, and Bahzell sank into it, his eyes still fixed upon her. She looked back at him, one elegant eyebrow raised, and he shook himself.
“Lass-” he began, then corrected himself. “Mistress Leeana, I’m thinking as how you shouldn’t be here,” he said.
“No?” She considered him with a thoughtful eye, then shrugged. “Why not?” she asked simply.
“Why not?!” He stared at her for a moment. “Because-”
He broke off, and her smile grew a bit broader. Amusement danced in her green eyes, and yet that smile had an edge of tenderness that sang in his heart. It was a song he had no business listening to, however. He told himself that firmly, and his nostrils flared as he drew a deep breath of resolution. But she spoke before he could.
“Bahzell,” she said, “I’ll be twenty-one in two days. That’s legal age even for a Sothoii noblewoman, far less a war maid! In case it’s escaped your attention, that means I’m old enough to make my own mind up about where I ought or ought not to be.”
“Then I’m thinking you’ve gone daft,” Bahzell said with a certain asperity. “Or it might be as how what I’m really looking for is run clean mad!”
It came out sternly, rumbling up out of his massive chest, and he furrowed his brow, frowning at her with the ferocious sort of look which had turned strong men’s knees to water more times than he could count.
She laughed.
“Oh, no, Bahzell!” she shook her head. “I promise you, I’ve never been less daft in my entire life!”
“But-”
“No.” She said the single word gently, cutting him off, and shook her head again. “No. I’m not going anywhere, Milord Champion. Not from something I’ve waited for this long. And not unless you tell me-on a champion’s oath-that that’s what you truly want. Not what you think you should want, but what you do want.”
He opened his mouth…and froze.
He sat that way for several moments, then drew a deep breath, and his ears half-flattened as he looked at her.
“It’s not about wants, lass,” he said then, very softly. “It’s about right and about wrong. And it’s ashamed of myself I should be-and am-for what it is I’m thinking now.”
“Why?” she asked quietly. His eyebrows rose, but she went on in that same quiet tone. “I asked Dame Kaeritha one time about champions of Tomanak and about celibacy.” The faintest of blushes colored her cheekbones, but her green gaze never wavered. “And I remember one of the things she said to me, practically word for word. She said ‘All of the Gods of Light celebrate life, and I can’t think of anything much more “life-affirming” than the embracing of a loving, shared physical relationship.’ Was she wrong about that?”
Bahzell looked into those eyes for a long moment.
“No,” he said finally. “But it’s not so simple as all that, and well you know it. Like it or no, you’re still your father’s daughter, and human, while I’m not. And for all you may be of ‘legal age,’ you’re less than half my own.”
“And?” She raised an eyebrow at him, and for just a moment he had the absurd impression that she was the older of them. His eyes widened in consternation, and she laughed deep in her throat. “Bahzell, first, I was born and raised as a Sothoii noblewoman, the daughter of a baron. You do remember what that means? The betrothal that was proposed for me when I was less than fifteen years old to Rulth Blackhill…who was four years older then than you are now? ” She snorted. “You were right, Father never would have approved it, but the Council would have, and I can’t even begin to count the number of other fathers who would have approved it-or a marriage with an even greater differential than that, for that matter! So you’re not going to shock any Sothoii by pointing out the difference in our ages.”
“It’s not Sothoii as I’m thinking of,” he said. “No, and before you’ve said it, it’s not your war maids, either. It’s myself, lass. I’m too old for such as you.”
“You’re going to have to do better than that, Bahzell,” she said, and he’d never heard such mingled laughter and tenderness in a voice. “How long do hradani live?” she asked him.
“That’s neither here nor there.” He heard an edge of something very like desperation creeping into his own voice and gave himself a mental shake. “It’s not so very likely a champion of Tomanak is to live to die of old age, any road,” he told her, rallying gamely.
“And that should keep one of His champions from ever opening his life to love?” Leeana asked him gently. “Are His champions that cowardly, Bahzell? That unwilling to embrace the life they’re supposed to defend for everyone? Or are they supposed to defend it only for everyone else? ”
“I-” He paused, then raised his right hand, holding it out to her palm uppermost. “It’s not the thought of my dying before you as scares me, lass,” he said very, very quietly, “though well it should be. Aye, and it’s shamed I am that it isn’t.”
“You shouldn’t be,” she said softly. “And you still haven’t answered my question. How long do hradani live?” He looked at her, stubbornly-or perhaps desperately-silent, and she shrugged. “Two hundred years, that’s how long,” she told him, “and humans, even Sothoii, seldom live as long as one hundred. So when it comes down to it, love, you’re younger than I am.”
A strange, fiery icicle went through him as she called him “love,” but he shook his head.
“That’s not the way of it,” he said.
“Then Dame Kaeritha was still a child when you met her?” Leeana challenged. His ears flattened at the question, and her green eyes glinted. “Thirty years old she was, I believe. And how long had she been a champion of Tomanak? I believe she was all of two years older than I am now when He accepted her service as one of His swords, wasn’t she? And she’d been training for the Order for almost three years before that! Is the War God in the habit of taking the oaths of children, Bahzell?”
He stared at her, trying to find an answer to her unscrupulous question, and she smiled again. Then she rose, unfolding from the foot of his bed with the hard-trained grace of a war maid. She stood in front of him, so tall for a human woman, yet so delicate and petite-almost tiny-beside a Horse Stealer hradani, and the champion who’d glared unawed in the face of demons, monsters, creatures of the undead, and even an avatar of a Dark God himself felt himself tremble like a child.