Ami shot me a dark look. “You’re just jealous of all those men I danced with, which you shouldn’t be.”
A deadly hit there, as I was. Black jealousy that corroded my thoughts and best intentions. Where Ami was concerned, I lacked all reason and emotional control. I became the half-savage beast I’d been when I first heard a minstrel sing about the youngest and most beautiful daughter of the High King. I reverted to that feral creature who longed to disembowel every man who laid hands on her satin skin and devoured her with their eyes as if they owned her.
“You could have danced with me,” Ami said, needling me, knowing exactly how to do it. “Then I wouldn’t have had to dance with anyone else.”
I didn’t bother pointing out that a man at arms didn’t dance with the Queen of Avonlidgh. Or that I couldn’t stay alert and protect her if we danced. Or that I’d never learned how. In Ami’s world, everyone learned to dance like they learned to walk. She forever forgot that we came from different worlds, whereas my burning shame forever reminded me of that unassailable fact.
I wouldn’t let her see that embarrassment, however. Better for her to think me uninterested in dancing than for her to glimpse the rough and desperate boy inside.
“Talk to me, Ash,” Ami commanded, all hint of flirtation vanished. “You know I hate it when you go all stoic White Monk on me.”
I swallowed a terse retort to that, searching for a diplomatic reply. “Wintering at Windroven is a romantic idea, but romance won’t last long if the volcano blows.” I cleared my throat of the choking fear of losing her in such a way. I lived with that fear daily, knowing full well I had no business thinking of her as mine in the first place. I’d lose her eventually—today, next month, or next year—but sooner rather than later. Making myself confront the eventuality of our parting had become a kind of daily, disciplined exercise for me. Like sword practice. I forced myself to exercise the muscles of loss, to contemplate that pain. I could survive it, I thought, as long as she was alive and happy.
That’s what I told myself. A constant mantra that did nothing to bring me peace.
As Queen of Avonlidgh, she’d have to marry for the good of the kingdom, and her future husband would hardly tolerate it if his beautiful new wife had a lover skulking in the shadows. Even if she didn’t marry any time soon, the quiet gossip regarding my unsavory background would eventually grow loud enough to make her advisers insist on action. Most likely of all, Ami would simply wise up and realize her fling with a coarse, scarred, and broken man had been a fun excursion—a bit of dabbling in the crude underbelly of sex might be freeing for a time—but she would go back to her own kind. Back to a noble prince like Hugh had been. The sort of man who truly deserved her.
I was prepared for any of those scenarios. I’d rehearsed them in my mind so often that I knew all my lines by heart, just waiting for her to give me the correct cue.
What I couldn’t bear was for her to be killed. Besides Annfwn, I’d found nothing and no one else that redeemed the cruelty and ugliness of the world. As long as Ami lived, so did my hope, fragile thing though it might be.
Ami was studying me now, her lovely blue eyes discerning too much. Since she’d given birth to the twins, she’d lost her ability to detect emotions—that gift belonged entirely to Stella, and the girl took it with her when she was born—but Ami retained some of that sensitivity by proximity. She also knew how to read and play me with Glorianna’s own ruthless mastery of women over men.
“Ash.” She spoke my name as she did during sex, and with that single scrape over my senses had my thoughts scattering on the cold winter winds.
“You like Windroven,” she purred, effortlessly bringing to mind the few short days we’d spent there. She’d been still recovering from childbirth, but had been determined to use the time to practice her oral skills. For all that she looked the image of Glorianna as maiden, she’d embraced the earthiest of the goddess’s personalities, exulting in the filthiest of sexual language, goading me into giving her more “cock-sucking lessons,” knowing in her vixen’s heart the hold she had on me.
I dispelled the images she evoked with a sharp shake of my head, resolutely staring at the road ahead. That’s where my focus needed to be. Protecting my charges. Not thinking about her lush mouth and—
“Stop that,” I said to myself as much as to her. “What I like doesn’t matter. It’s beyond foolish to plan to winter in a castle built into a waking volcano, whether you believe a hibernating dragon in the bowels of it is the cause or not. You’ve heard the stories from Nahanau—”
She cut me off with a toss of her glossy red-gold curls. When she’d worn her hair long, it had tumbled in waves around her slender dancer’s body, like silk made fire. Since she’d cut it to escape her Tala abductor—another scenario I revisited compulsively as continually checking a bad tooth—it bounced in perfect ringlets. Even knowing that it was her particular magic to be beautiful no matter what, I found myself continually astounded by it. She regularly reassured me that her hair would grow long again, remembering how I’d loved to fist my hands in the spectacular length and believing I missed it. She was right that I did miss it, but wrong that I minded. I loved her with hopeless and aching finality, no matter what the details. Even when she was being an obstinate idiot. As she was at the moment.
“Maybe Glorianna wants us to liberate the Windroven dragon, too.”
I ground my teeth, the old scar tissue in my jaw aching with it. Ami liked to pull out the goddess’s will to reinforce her arguments—a sometimes amusing, often annoying foible of hers. The problem was, the poetic description of Ami as Glorianna’s avatar might well be more than fancy. The goddess did seem to favor her, possibly to the point of speaking through her.
“You are playing games with Stella and Astar’s lives, too,” I finally said, my ultimate gambit to get her to listen to reason.
Her eyes flashed from twilight blue to cobalt. Even the goddess of love has her merciless aspect. “You don’t have to come if you’re afraid. Don’t let me keep you from important business elsewhere.”
And there we were. At one of many possible scenarios I’d imagined. Ami was finally dismissing me.
“Do you want me to go?” I asked carefully, keeping the frustrated rage and disappointment out of my voice. It still croaked badly, as it had ever since I burned away the brand that marked me a convict. I’d thought I’d braced myself against this eventuality, but judging by the sudden ache in my heart, I’d been sadly mistaken.
Ami bit her lip, fair face whiter than the snowflakes swirling around it. “Is that what you want?”
“What I want doesn’t matter, Your Highness. It’s up to you to keep or dismiss me.”
“Stop talking like that,” she snapped.