“You have no permission to touch me now,” she said through gritted teeth.
With desperate hope, he opened his hand. Though it had weighed so much moments before, the gold in his palm seemed like nothing now. A boy’s trinket. Yet he had risked her life and her quest with this worthless thing. “I would not have given it to her,” he rasped. “I never would have.”
“That matters?” Her hollow laugh told him it mattered not at all. Tears slipped over her cheeks. “I thought I finally knew what Vela wanted. I wouldn’t call Shim tamed, because he is free. But others would call him that, simply because I ride him. Even you said he was.”
Kavik had. And he would still say it. But he couldn’t speak past the pain in his throat.
Her fingers trembled as she continued. “I began to believe that was what Vela meant. Not a collar, but trust. Shim and I ride together. One day, though, I know we will part ways. He will return to his herd. But I thought . . . I thought if that was what it meant to tame you, then we might have so much longer.”
If that was taming, then Kavik would give anything to be tamed. “We will.”
“No.” Her simple response shattered his hope. On a sobbing breath, her hand dropped to her side, her blade falling away from his throat. “When I first began to ride him, he would throw me. He never meant to hurt me—he was just unused to the weight on his back. Sometimes I surprised him, or treated him like any other horse, and he needed to remind me that he was free, not just another animal to be tamed. But never did he turn on me. He never bit at me. He never kicked at me. He did hurt me, but he never meant to.”
And she had warned Kavik that he was hurting her. No wound from a blade could have matched the agony of the emptiness spreading through him now.
“He was never deliberately cruel,” she continued softly. “If he had been, I would have left him behind—because how could I have trusted him at my side if he might turn and kick me in the chest? So it is not that you might have touched another woman, because I knew you might try to throw me. I knew you didn’t want to soften toward me. But you meant to hurt me tonight.”
No. He hadn’t known it truly would. But it mattered not, because she’d warned him—and he’d been so determined to stand firm that he hadn’t listened. Hadn’t seen.
He’d had everything. She’d told him that, too. Her kiss. Her warmth at his side. Her heart. Now he had nothing.
Except he could make certain she wasn’t hurt again. “What of your quest? You have my trust. I will ride at your side.”
Or behind her. Anywhere she went. Even if she never spoke to him again, he would follow her until the end.
“You no longer have my trust, warrior. I’m not traveling that path anymore. So I pray that I was wrong, and that was not what Vela meant, because you are not worth the pain you would do to me.” Her eyes were dull as she turned away. Sheathing her sword, she picked up Shim’s saddle and moved out to the stable yard. “And there is another kind of tamed, one I didn’t begin to consider until I learned you were Karn’s son. It simply means to bring something wild into a home, and that wild thing takes a place within the household. Perhaps my task is to return you to your place in the citadel. I would need to kill Barin—and I have already made a vow to see him dead, so I was on that path. Or perhaps I am meant to tame the demon. That was what I first believed when I came to Blackmoor. Perhaps that was the road I was supposed to take.”
Both roads so dangerous that they’d already taken too many people Kavik had known. New determination filled him. “I will help you.”
She set the saddle upon Shim’s back. “You will not be able to keep up with me.”
Maybe not. His mount couldn’t match the stallion’s speed. But he could follow. Blood pounding, he raced back into the stables for the black gelding.
He was cinching the saddle when Selaq came into the stables. “I’m leaving these other horses with you.” They would slow him down, too, and he’d survived for most of his life with nothing more than a horse and his sword. “Do whatever you like with them.”
“Mala is leaving?” The innkeeper whispered the goddess’s name on a long sigh as Kavik led the gelding past her. “Then this is the moment you’ve lost everything.”
Ice seized Kavik’s gut. That had not been his friend’s voice. Those were not Selaq’s eyes, orbs pale as a milk moon against a blue sky.
Her frigid hand closed over Kavik’s arm and iron seemed to fill his legs, locking them in place. “Stand firm, beast. Stand firm while I twist the knife.”