I put my hands on his shoulders and he grabs my bare legs behind my knees, hefting me up onto his back, and everything goes dark. I throw my arms around his neck to keep from falling off backward. He loosens them a bit and bounces me higher. “If you put your legs around me, it will make you easier to carry,” he says.
I hook my ankles in front of him, and then pull the dragon scale out from between us, and light fills the stairwell once more. With me on his back, Golmarr continues down the never-ending staircase. I ease into him, my cheek beside his left ear, and try to absorb his body heat.
“See?” he says, walking down the waterfall stairs just as fast as he did without me on his back. “I’m strong. This isn’t any more difficult than a day’s hard work.”
“Why do you work if you’re a prince?” I ask. “Don’t you have servants to carry the hay to your horses?”
“I work because I like it. I love being with the horses. And I don’t live in a palace like you. My father’s house is big, and he has a cook and a housekeeper, but that is only since my mom died. Someone has to feed us and clean up after him.”
“But he is the king, right?” I ask, confused.
“He is the horse lord. He governs the land. Some call him king, but he isn’t a king the way your mother is a queen. He doesn’t sit on a throne, or have to always be on a dais so that he can look down on his people. And he never goes anywhere with an armed escort…unless you count me and my brothers as armed escorts,” he adds.
I think of his tall, strapping brothers and the way Golmarr fought the Mayanchi. I feel his muscular body against mine as he carries me down the stairs. “I would count you as an armed escort. No one would dare to touch your father with his sons by his side. Is your father not worried that one of his subjects will try to assassinate him?”
“No. My people honor him and love him because they respect him. They would never hurt him. When we leave our lands, though, he worries.” He bounces me up a little higher on his hips and keeps steadily splashing his way downward.
“Does he have more than one wife?”
Golmarr stops walking and frowns at me over his shoulder. “He has no wife. She died in childbirth. We don’t have multiple wives.”
“But I thought you said if your brother—Ingvar—married me, I would be his second wife.”
“I was teasing you, Sorrowlynn. He was never going to pick you, since he was already married. It was a joke.” He shakes his head. “And that is why you picked the fire dragon in the first place, isn’t it?”
“Partially,” I admit. He starts walking again, splashing his way downward.
“I’m sorry. After I teased you about it, I told you that only one Antharian heir has taken a second wife from your family before, and that is because his first wife died. I thought you would understand I was only teasing about multiple wives when I explained that.” He shakes his head and mumbles, “I guess I truly deserve to be down here with you.”
“But the Mountain Binding. The histories say that for it to remain in place, all Faodarian princesses have to offer to wed the heir of Anthar. If he’s already married, wouldn’t that make the binding obsolete?”
“Nowhere does the binding state that our heir has to marry yours, or that he has to be unwed. As long as the Faodarian virgin princess is offered, and we acknowledge it at the ceremony, and feed the dragon a lamb, the Mountain Binding retains its power whether or not we choose to wed her. No one from my clan was planning on marrying anyone from your kingdom.”
“Why?”
He shrugs, his shoulder muscles rolling beneath my arms. “Because we don’t like marrying genteel women.”
We walk in silence for a moment before I garner up the courage to ask, “So…who is Evay?”
Golmarr pauses for a heartbeat, and then continues walking. “Evay? How do you know about her?”
“You talked about her right before you passed out from the Mayanchi poison. You said that if you died, you wanted me to tell her that you would have married her if you made it back to Anthar.”
“I don’t remember that. Evay is—was—my sweetheart.”
When he doesn’t continue, I rest my chin on his shoulder. An uncomfortable surge of jealousy and hurt engulfs me, and I tighten my arms around Golmarr’s shoulders and for a moment savor the thought that right now, he is mine.
“Sometimes our lives turn out in ways we never imagined they would,” he says. “If we get out of here alive, I don’t think I can marry Evay—for the past few months, I thought I loved her, but now I’m not so certain. What are you going to do if we get out?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper. “All I know is I don’t want to go home.” If I return home I will get a beating worse than I have ever gotten before. But if we survive the cave, I will be penniless and homeless and have not even a pair of shoes to my name.
Golmarr stops walking. “Stay with me,” he says.
“What?”
“If we get out of here alive, stay with me. I will help you find a way to survive without returning to Faodara. I will protect you.”