The Empire (The Lover's Opalus) (11 page)

“The Empire gave her to him.”

“Ina had the right to refuse.”

“She
would not
. Valor, you know this. She is the Spirit of Loyalty and Hesitation. Whatever they commanded, she would do without question.”

“For the Empire.”

“For the Empire.”

“Which is what you or I would do as well. Which is why they gave her to him. Hate her, covet him, but know the truth. They both do what is best for us all.”

* * * *

Raeche straddled her husband’s lower back. She pressed her fingers into the tension-filled flesh of his back, shoulders and arms.

“We could command him to show her to us.”

Lanus shoulders bunched in a shrug. “There is nothing he could show us that would put us at ease. Dahouina would appear unharmed and would die before she shamed her house and acknowledged Praytor’s behavior. We would not rescue her from him until she produces an undisputed heir.”

“She is a good girl.” The Empress frowned.

Responding as if he had seen the expression, the Emperor soothed, “Good girls have their uses, none of which make them good Empires.”

She could almost hear the smile in his voice though she could not see it. Raeche felt warmth race across her skin. “I confess to expecting a different thing when we embarked on this trip.”
 

He said nothing.
 

“I did,” she responded. “I am not such a fool that I do not know of the whispers. Treasonous though it may be, many believed that once you favored me with your eyes, your time and your smile, I would seek another.”

When he did not respond, she prodded. “It is what you thought.”

Continuing to massage him through his silence, she told him, “I have never believed this. There is none who could offer me a greater war than you, Emperor. There is none that could offer you a greater fight than me.”

“Yet you are surprised.”

“Yes. Surprised that though you favor me with your attention and refuse the dance, I still crave you, Lanus. Still.” She dropped a kiss on his shoulder blade. “I enjoy the fight but do not require it. When I witness you with Rucha I am very proud. Proud in a way I am sure my mother never was but perhaps should have been.”

“Annikah’s purpose in the Empire was to deliver you safely to me,” Lanus assured her. “Nothing more.”

Raeche did not take offense. Instead, she intensified her ministrations. “Do you think Praytor or the Innov noticed you on the hunt?”

The Emperor laughed and his body rumbled beneath her. “If they did, you would have achieved your goal.”

“Maybe,” Raeche agreed, unashamed. “This game was your idea.”

“Indeed.”

“I did enjoy it,” she said.

That Light she had taken Lanus’s eyes through Spirit. He had been sent into the hunt blind, with nothing but her voice in Spirit to guide him. Raeche had not navigated well. She had been distracted by new sights as well as the sounds of a place so far South she had only heard stories of it. So busy was she studying the obstacles that she did not guide Lanus and he stumbled into them. So diminished was her detail when she attempted to guide him that Lanus argued with her about her direction and startled away the maftins that were to be dinner. She was so amused by his folly that she barely noticed when Lanus gave up on his hunt to use Spirit to reach for her, to stroke her hair, to blow cool air across her ears, to kiss her throat. He had half-heartedly finished his hunt but had come back to her to laugh about nearly felling a tree on his own head when blindly swinging his ax. To make love to her.

She scored his back with her nails before rubbing again.

Lanus moaned.

Her hands stilled on him and she frowned. She leaned forward, stretching her torso over his back, the warmth of their bodies combining. He turned his head to the side a bit when her lips neared his ear. Before she spoke, she kissed his cheek just there. “What troubles you?”

“Nothing,” he answered in a muted tone.

“Did I displease you?” She kissed him again and rubbed her chest against his back, reveling in the smoothness of skin over unrelenting muscle.

“No,” he responded in the same tone.

“Then…”

“Finish,” he commanded softly.

Raeche sat up and stared at his handsome profile. She ran her fingers through his long blond locks before bringing them down to circle over his shoulders again. Lanus made another sound and his eyes closed.

The Empress smiled. He liked this. He liked this massage very much. “Have you ever had a massage before, Lanus?”

“No.”

She found that surprising but revised her opinion as she considered that Lanus did not always trust people at his back. That he trusted her was both pleasing and alarming.

“You are very good at this,” he acknowledged gruffly.

The Empress held up one of his hands, rolling his fingers between hers, working circles into the pads at the base down into the palm.

“You were taught?”

“No. I can see that you are tense in places. I do enjoy touching you…”

Beneath her, Lanus rolled over onto his back but kept her seated at his hips. He ran his hands over her arms. “Raeche, since we have come here, since we have been in each other’s company and not… not–”

“I have not attempted to visit physical harm onto you?” she offered helpfully.

“And I have not engaged the Spirit to deceive or manipulate you in any way,” Lanus murmured as he explored her body.

She felt his fingertips at the base of her spine and a shiver ran across her skin.

“I–I…” Lanus started.

“If you do not say it soon, I will give in to my desire to call you a fool, a weakling, a man unmanned by his wife.”

“Say any of those things, Raeche. Say what you must to ensure I stay who I am. Be an Empress. Be
the
Empress you are. Say these things one day to our daughter when she loses herself to love then thinks to put it before the Empire…as I have.”

The cruel humor driving Raeche died in that moment. She became still. Her palm rested over his heart. “If your lips, I do not kiss–”

Lanus covered her mouth with his hand. “Not yet, little dark one. Not yet.” Then he pulled her down to lie beside him, her head pillowed against his chest.

In that moment Raeche needed to reveal herself to Lanus, though she had long been laid bare for him. She needed to make a confession. “There have been many times, Emperor, that I have succeeded in leaving you to your own devices. Times when I have longed to bedevil you and yet have sat at my window watching the shadows of the forest. Yet even when we are parted, I think of you. I seek you with my Spirit.”

Her husband traced the curve of her throat with a light stroke of his fingertip.

Raeche shuddered before moving away from the touch. “As you have sought me out.”

“No–”

“Do not lie to me, Lanus. Even in the long rings when you were absent from my bed, you found a way to always be in my sight.”

Silence remained. He seemed to hold his breath.

“Is there truth in the songs, husband?”

Raeche had seen his face darken with rage but never, in all their rings together, with embarrassment.

“Is it true that you are forlorn when too long without my company? Do you seek danger in the South to see if I will come?”

“You did come.”

Raeche found herself smiling. It was as much of a confession as she could hope to get. The Spirit of Confidence rode her–which had never led to peace. Though she longed to stop the words in her throat, they had formed in her heart and were released. “Is your Spirit mine or the Empire’s?”

“We are the Empire.”

She wished to be still. Instead she pressed. “When we were born we were destined to become the Empire. We are now the Empire. When Rucha comes of age we will no longer be the Empire. We are also Lanus and Raeche. We are the Empire, my love, and we are not. Five hundred rings ago, when Trubius and Alblana descended from the throne, they parted and never saw each other again. What will happen when we descend?”

“You will not escape me,” he answered coolly. One of his hands flexed around her wrist.

Raeche’s eyes rolled close for a few seconds. Then she smiled. “I will escape you, Lanus. As a man, I will expect you to drag me back and remind me why I have no desire to escape.”

His body stirred against hers.

“You must answer me,” she urged, though her own body answered his. She found herself lying atop her husband. She kissed his throat. “What will you want from me when I am no longer the Empire, you are no longer the Empire, and you have no need to prove that you wield the Spirit of Might as well as the Spirit of Cleverness?”

“You will always belong to me, Raeche. There will never be another for you or another for me.”

“Prove it to me then,” Raeche dared him.

The Emperor relinquished his hold on her, then stood. A slight and enigmatic smile curved his mouth.

“Prove it to me,” she repeated.

“I will, little dark one. We will say the Amu’Wey.” He moistened his lips and waited for her response. It was almost immediate.

Raeche came to stand before him. She craned her neck to look into his eyes. Her next declaration was true, though she had not known it until that moment. “I have wanted the vow for some time, for as long as I can remember.”

Lanus seemed surprised.

Raeche’s face crumpled a bit as she was assailed by a thought. “Perhaps not that long, but you know I have wanted it”

His lips grazed her forehead. His green eyes darkened with concern as he watched her hesitate.

Raeche stirred, then pushed herself up so she could be eye to eye with her husband. “Lanus, I have only ever belonged in two places in my life. One of them is here, or wherever I find myself in your arms. Saying the Amu’Wey will ensure that that is where I will always be.”

“And the other?”

“The other was at a vanity–”

“You are very lovely,” he offered.

“You misunderstand. It was not just any vanity, but one the likes of which I have never seen again. It belonged to my mother. She locked it behind a closet door and forbade it to me. I saw it, touched it, sat at it but once when I was nine. On it were a mirror, a brush, and a sword, all made of bone, carved with images of the Death of the Aurus. The carvings were both gruesome and beautiful.” She remembered her hand hovering over the objects, craving their cold touch, unable to choose but one.

“You felt at peace there.”

“Not at peace, Emperor.” Embarrassment heated the back of her neck. “I am not certain that peace would ever put me at peace. You never make me feel peace, yet I yearn for you. Do you understand?”

Lanus nodded. “Then you shared Spirit with it.”

“Yes.”

“What was special about the vanity and the objects?”

“It is the only mystery of my life, Emperor. All I know is that my mother sent it away.”

Raeche presented her husband with her hand. She was not as skilled with the Spirit of the Empath as Taritana, or even her daughter, so she did not have to cover her skin. This memory she would share.

Lanus took her hand.

* * * *

On the eve of Raeche’s ninth birthday, after Dark had settled on the Eastern shore, the future Empress sat up in her large bed alert as if it were long Light. Once the idea had sprung to life in her mind, she had thought of nothing else and had appetite for neither food nor sleep. The thought had been like the tiniest of eggs, now it coiled as a full-grown timra within her. Restless scales scraped her insides raw.

On the eve of her ninth birthday, the girl padded through the halls in her bare feet. The palace hummed with activity. No one paid attention to her other than to stop and bend and tell her how very pretty she was.

Before long she found herself in her mother’s chamber, staring at the woman’s locked closet. She had been barred from this room for much of her life. The obstacle of a lock seemed natural to Raeche. As did her attempts at breaking into it. Annikah had caught her several times, warning her enigmatically that once she was able to get in she would know her future and her past, and it might destroy her.

Raeche had not understood the warning because she had been in her mother’s room once with the closet unlocked, the double doors flung open. There sat her vanity. Made of white translucent birgdahn horn, pale blue blax pulp and woven blax bark, the elegant piece of furniture had fascinated little Raeche. It seemed out of place. In her short life, Raeche had never seen anything like it. When she stared at it and squinted, it seemed to glow.

Though common toiletries sat upon it, quality and intricacy made them uncommon. Her brush and mirror were both carved from white bone, daedal patterns covering them. Her mother had never let her get close enough to make the patterns out. Still, it never lost its intense allure.

That Dark, the child–who had been storing her Spirit, something her teachers could neither do nor understand–waved a hand across the seam of the double doors and they swung silently open. Her eyes widened. She had not hoped to accomplish even this quietly.