The Secret Texts Read online

  How?

  An idea came to her. She’d have to get Hasmal and Ian on her side, though she suspected from his reaction to Ry’s name that Ian wouldn’t like her proposal. Then she’d need subterfuge and negotiating skill and a bit of Hasmal’s magic and more than a touch of luck to make it work. She found herself wondering if her years of diplomatic studies would serve her as well as even a day’s worth of real experience. She closed her eyes and breathed in the ash-scented air, and hoped she’d learned as much as she thought she had.

  Chapter 6

  After three days in which Ry had become more and more certain that Kait was dead, the tiny flashes of energy that linked him to her suddenly reappeared. He couldn’t guess what had happened to her to make her disappear, and he wouldn’t try. He was satisfied to discover that she was still alive, and better yet, that she was close. Incredibly close.

  When the Peregrine marooned her, he’d seen through her eyes that she was not alone, but he didn’t know if any of those who had been with her had survived. He wished he could get another glimpse through her eyes, so that he could see what he was heading into, but she was wary, holding her magical shields as tight around herself as a woman would hold her cloak in a blizzard. Only flickers broke through to guide him to her; he suspected that she hid herself as much from the dangers around her as from him, but he couldn’t touch her mind, so he wasn’t sure.

  At the moment when the tug he felt from her ceased to be “ahead” and became “beside,” he was standing at the prow of the Wind Treasure, anxiously watching the coastline that ran by off the port side of the ship. He wouldn’t have been able to explain to the captain or any of his friends how he knew that the ocean had brought him as close to her as it could, but he did know. So he shouted, “Here! This is the place. Go inland here!”

  The captain sailed through smoke-laced fog into the bay and dropped anchor.

  For the first time, Ry saw the place where Kait hid. Rain-washed ruins dotted the burned hills and cliffs that rose out of the bay on all three sides. Not a single tree, not a single blade of grass or scrawny shrub, offered reprieve from the sea of black ash that covered the ground. In his travels, Ry had seen the aftermath of a volcanic eruption; what he saw before him reminded him of that.

  He stared at the bleak panorama and smiled slowly. Kait’s city of the Ancients lay before him. Such cities existed in Ibera, as well. But an Ancients’ city that had not been known for at least a hundred years—that had not been pillaged and plundered by a century’s treasure-seekers—a city like that could exist nowhere but in the Novtierras. This city had been visited by one ship alone. Even after the fire, it would house wonders; ruins that had survived the Wizards’ War and the Thousand Years of Darkness would survive fire.

  Hidden within those ruined buildings lay pieces of knowledge lost to humankind for the last thousand years, pieces of knowledge that had waited for him and his men. With such treasures in hand, he could return to Calimekka in triumph, reconcile with his Family and the Wolves, and reinstate his friends. He could force his Family to accept his Galweigh parata.

  Once he rescued Kait, he would have time to explore, but first he had to get her to safety. She waited somewhere within those burned hills. She was so near, he could almost smell her. The passion—the obsession—that had driven him to pursue her across half a world, through storm and disaster, across uncharted ocean to unmapped land, burned higher than ever. His blood, his bones, his very soul sang with her nearness.

  “Kait,” he whispered, “be safe. We’re almost together.”

  A hand dropped onto his shoulder and he jumped. “The men want to go ashore to search the ruins.” The captain stood behind him, and Ry hadn’t even heard the man approach. Ry didn’t think anyone had ever successfully approached him without his being aware of it before. His mind was too taken by Kait and too full of excitement. He needed to reach her, to have her—then he thought he would be able to concentrate again.

  “No. I go ashore alone first,” he said, and heard the growl in his voice. That growl worried him. He was near Shift, close to becoming the beast. The one time Kait had seen him, they had met Karnee to Karnee, in a back alley in Halles over the bodies of seven murderers. This time he wanted to be human. He wanted to be with her as human—to first taste her mouth in human form, to have the pleasure of undressing her, of hearing her whisper his name in the silken tones of her human voice. . . .

  He breathed deeply, and fought to find the peace that would calm his racing pulse. He didn’t try to cage his excitement by sheer force of will, for such an attempt would only set the Karnee part of him to beating wildly against the bars of its cage, and when it broke free, it would run out of control and take him with it. Instead, he acknowledged his desire, his hunger, the pumping of his lungs, and the shiver in his spine, and said to them, Later. Later, he would fulfill all his hopes and desires.

  “I’ll go ashore alone,” he repeated. “I don’t want to frighten Kait away—if I take men with me, she might flee.”

  “And if she isn’t alone?”

  Ry was staring back at that hideous burned shoreline again, at those blackened hills. “I can take care of anyone she might have with her.”

  As two sailors readied one of the longboats for him, Yanth strode up to him, for the first time in a long time wearing sailors’ roughspun rather than dramatic silk and leather. “The captain said you intended to go ashore alone.”

  “I’m going alone.”

  “You aren’t. I know you think you’ll find your true love there, but you have no idea what else you’ll find. And I won’t chance you getting yourself killed. I owe you better than that.”

  Ry glared at him. “You owe me the loyalty of respecting my wishes. I wish to go ashore alone.”

  “No.” Yanth rested a hand on the hilt of his sword and smiled, but the smile was without warmth. “Friends never owe each other complicity in suicide. Do you hear me? I’ll follow you ashore, and I’ll guard your back.”

  Ry turned away from Yanth and gripped the rail. “There’s only one first time,” he said. “This is it for us. The first time we’ll see each other as a man and a woman. The first time we’ll touch. The first time we’ll . . .” He closed his eyes, conjuring up the image of Kait standing atop a tower, her long black hair blowing in the breeze. He’d conjured that image of her to show his lieutenants. It was still the way he saw her—chin lifted, eyes fierce, the blue silk of her dress barely able to contain her vitality, her passion, her beauty. After coming so far, he refused to share their first moments together with anyone.

  “We knew you’d fight having all of us going,” Yanth was saying, “so we made a concession for you. We drew straws, and I won the draw.” He smiled and said softly, “I cheated in order to win, but you needn’t tell the others that. I suspect that they cheated, too. I had to win, though. I trust my skills at sword and knife more than theirs, and I was determined that if only one of us went with you, I would be the best. So. You may not want me, but you’ll by the gods have me.”

  Yanth had cheated, had he? Probably broke his straw, palmed the longer part of it, then glared down the rest of them when they’d challenged him—Yanth would do that. Well, Ry could cheat, too. He could keep the peace, get off the ship without argument, and then do what he wanted to do anyway.

  So Ry sighed and said, “You’ll get in my way if I don’t agree, won’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then get in.”

  They rowed ashore in silence, and dragged the boat up onto the beach. Five cairns above the tide line marked five graves. One of them was new. Ry glanced at the graves and said, “You’d best stay with the boat, so that something doesn’t come along and take it. I want to make sure we have a way to get back.”

  “You’re a liar.” A half-smile twisted across Yanth’s face, then vanished. “If something takes the damned boat, our friends can row here in one of the other ones. If you get killed while I’m here watching the boat, though, we
can’t undo that. Can we?”

  Ry sniffed; though the atmosphere was redolent of charcoal and raw wet earth, one swirl of clean air blew from somewhere back of the hills, carrying the faint and wistful promise of green and growing things. And . . . he breathed deeper . . . and the mouthwatering smell of food cooking. The cookfire scents mingled with the burned-charcoal stink and so were almost hidden, but when he closed his eyes he could catch the faintest whiff of boiling greens spiced with pepper and rath, and meat braising slowly on a stake, the juices dripping into the flames. The scent lay in the same direction as the strengthening tug of the magic that drew him toward Kait. And she had loosened her shields a little. She felt receptive.

  He smiled slowly. Perhaps she wanted this moment as much as he did. He turned to Yanth. “Well enough. You can come with me, then. If you can keep up.”

  He took off up the hill at a dead run, dodging between the gutted ruins of the dead city, putting them between him and Yanth. He was Karnee, faster and more agile than any human, and with inhuman stamina. By the time Ry dropped over the first rise and caught a stronger draft of the cook-scents, Yanth floundered far behind.

  Yanth would follow his tracks, of course. But by the time he caught up, Ry would have found Kait. And a well-hidden place to be alone with her.

  He ran easily through the ruins and leaped over a muddied, swollen stream, all his senses focused toward Kait. He ran along the face of a cliff and around a corner to find a perfect half-sphere of unburned forest awaiting him. And in the center of the half-sphere a ruin less ruined than most. And in the doorway of the ruin, a woman of average height and lean build, her hair black as a jungle river, her dark eyes flashing, her white teeth bared in an unsettling smile. Kait. As he had seen her in his mind, and in his magic, but never in person.

  She was—as he had dreamed, imagined, hoped—alone. His heart thrummed against the inside of his chest like an animal caught in a trap, and he slowed to a walk. There could be only one first time. He wanted this moment to be something that both of them would look back on in years to come—for the rest of their lives together—and remember with joy. With passion. He wanted perfection.

  He stopped outside the circle of greenery. Standing in the muddy ash, he said, “Vetromè elada, Kait,” addressing her with the intimate greeting reserved for lovers, though the two of them had never truly met.

  Vetromè elada. It meant, Our souls kiss.

  Kait had known he was coming. She was braced; she told herself she was ready. But when Ry Sabir moved into view and she saw him as a man for the first time, she almost wept. He was beautiful—golden-haired, tall and lean and tightly muscled. His pale eyes transported her into the past, into the alley in Halles where they had met as Karnee. His scent caught her by surprise, as it had the first time she crossed paths with him. That scent was a drug to her, shooting straight past logic and upbringing and all her knowledge of her Family’s rules and her place within the Family and her determination to do what was right, driving into her heart and her gut. She smelled the animal hunger in him, the nearness to Shift; she breathed his desire and felt matching desire flood her veins.

  He spoke to her, and his voice was the voice of her dreams, rich and deep and smooth on the surface, with a raw edge that lay beneath, just at the limits of her perception. He said, Vetromè elada. If she could have picked the words that came from his mouth, she would have picked those words. Our souls kiss. Her mind, her body, and her spirit all told her he was the man she had dreamed of, the one she had hoped to find, and the one she had believed did not exist. He was the love she had believed she would never have. He was everything she had ever wanted.

  And she was going to betray him.

  She had to—for the Reborn, for her Family, and for her friends, she had to. She said, “You are Sabir, and I am Galweigh. We are enemies. Our souls can never touch.” She lied, and knew it was a lie when the words were forming in her mind, before they ever passed her lips, and determined that she would make the lie a truth because the lie was right and good, and her desire was wrong. She put distaste in her voice. Loathing. She found the distaste and the loathing easily, but though he wouldn’t know it, they had nothing to do with him. She had never hated herself as much as she did at that moment. She hated her weakness, her desire, and her hunger for him; she hated the fact that she could want a Sabir with the overwhelming desire that raged through her body . . . and she hated herself because she was cold enough, hard enough, callous enough that she could betray him, when all she wanted to do in the world was run to him and lose herself in his embrace.

  She saw his pain reflected in his eyes, and noted his body’s change in posture. He denied what she said with rigid shoulders and clenched fists before he denied what she said with his words. He told her, “I came for you,” and in those words he put his longing, and his passion.

  Tears burned in the corners of her eyes. She hungered for him as much as he hungered for her; their obsessions were equal, if not identical. “I know. I wish—” she said, the words blurting out before she could stop them. But she got control. She had not survived to adulthood—Karnee in a world where Karnee meant death—by giving in to her impulses. She straightened her shoulders and swung her hair out of her face and glared at him, forcing herself to remember that he was Sabir, and that her family had died at the hands of Sabirs. She remembered the burning bodies, she remembered Sabir soldiers standing around the pyre laughing to each other, and she forced herself to put him with those men in her mind. “What I wish doesn’t matter. I knew you were coming. I knew from that night in Halles that you would be coming for me.”

  “You want me as much as I want you,” he said.

  He took a step forward, toward her green haven, and she lifted her chin and crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t want you,” she told him. “The Karnee part of me doesn’t control me, and I don’t want you.”

  She saw the ghost of a smile flicker at the corners of his lips; she realized that she had as much as admitted that the Karnee part of her did want him.

  He took another step toward her, and a third.

  She did want him, gods forgive her. She didn’t want to hurt him. She didn’t want to make him her enemy.

  He said, “You’re more beautiful in real life than you were in my visions.”

  She licked her lips. “You are, too,” she whispered.

  The rational part of her mind looked at the two of them standing there and screamed insanity. The other part of her—the part that accepted magic, however unwillingly—knew that what was happening between them fell within the realms of wizardry. She had felt lust, and this was not it. She had felt love, too, if only for her family . . . and this was not love, either. The world had narrowed down to her and him, and to the blood pounding in her ears and the tingling in her skin and the sudden hollowness in her gut.

  He came to her then, hurrying, and for an instant she forgot herself in her hunger for his touch. For an instant, she forgot what she was about to do to him.

  He rested his hands on her shoulders and she exhaled once. She could never have found the words to describe the perfection of his touch, the rightness of their bodies together. She would have been lost there, and all of her ideals and aspirations with her.

  But the knife materialized out of nothingness at Ry’s throat, and behind the knife, Hasmal. She pressed the palm of one hand flat against his chest and said, “Be still.”

  His eyes went wide, and he froze. She felt the tremor that jolted through his body.

  “Be still,” she said softly, “or you will die. This is not you and me, Ry. This is Galweigh and Sabir, and Wolves and Falcons; this is the way things have to be.”

  Ian stepped out of the other half of the shield Hasmal had spun for the two of them, sword drawn, smiling. Kait could see Ian’s hatred; she could smell it. Hasmal’s magic had hidden everything about them—scent and form and mass and movement and shadow, the sounds of breath and heartbeat and nervous movement—but it cou
ld never have worked so well if she had not offered herself as bait. They had been truly invisible only because Ry had all of his attention focused on her. They had become completely invisible to her only when she lost herself in her desire for him.

  “How—?” Ry started to ask, but Ian snarled, “Silence, you bastard,” and Hasmal, more calmly, said, “Down on your knees.”

  Kait saw the shock and dismay and the hurt in his eyes, and steeled herself to do what she had to do. She told him, “Don’t Shift. The blade is poisoned with refaille—you’ll die before you can complete your transformation.” She gritted her teeth and willed away the tears building in her eyes.

  We all decide what we will have in our lives, she thought. We decide what we will do; we decide what we will say. And when we decide, then we pay the price. He is the price I must pay to get the Mirror to the Reborn, to save my friends’ lives, to resurrect my parents, my bothers and sisters, and my Family.

  Ry kept his eyes on hers, and she made herself watch what Hasmal and Ian did to him. They forced him to his knees, and bound his hands and his ankles. She told them how to tie him so that the rope would hold even if he Shifted. She never looked away from him. She would not be a coward. She would watch the consequences of her action, the end result of her plan. She would not hide herself from the price she paid.

  He did not look away from her, either. With his eyes he told her I love you, even though you betrayed me; the look she gave him in return said, I love you, too, but love doesn’t matter.

  Something in the air caught her attention, and she turned away. She parted her lips and took in one slow, careful breath. Coming along the ridge . . . being careful to make no noise . . . yes. She said, “Someone followed him. He’s trying to circle behind us.” She could smell him—a man who let himself get upwind because he wasn’t used to thinking about people with senses more acute than his own.