The Scholomance (69 page)

“Oh sure, just
sleep,” she said.

“Aye.” He
scowled, as if the words came with a taste he’d like to spit back at her. “Sleep
beside me in my bed, and I swear to thee upon mine own eternal life that I will
take no advantage.”

“Ha!”

“And upon that
selfsame oath, I’ll press thee no further for the pleasures of thy flesh, if—” He
paced a little away from her, then came back, plainly fighting against his
better judgment. “If thou wilt threaten no more to lie with my brothers. Be
mine, only mine, and I shall wait upon thy will.”

She gave him a
narrow, suspicious stare.

He spread his
hands. “Compromise.”

It was a dangerous
promise and she knew it, but couldn’t quite see how. She believed all along
that his ultimate plan was a little more sinister than just having sex with her,
and here was as good as proof. The truth was in him somewhere, locked away down
deep with the rest of his secrets, and now she finally had a way in. She couldn’t
go mucking through his mind anywhere else but right in the same room with him
and she knew it. Wasn’t this her golden opportunity?

She didn’t trust
it.

“All right,” she
said. “For now.”

He went ahead of
her and opened the door. “Go where thou wilt shall be the whole of thy law,” he
told her, then frowned. “And obey the given command of the Masters.”

“Every Master,
or only you?” she asked.

He hesitated,
then bared his teeth again. “Every,” he said at last, and growled as he looked
away. “For now.”

He retreated to
his chambers then, striding down the risers as easily as if they were stairs
and not looking at her again. She heard him swear once, after he was lost to
sight, but that was all.

“For now,” Mara
murmured, and left him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

S
he tried to miss Devlin, but she didn’t. Neither
was she grateful that he was no longer there when she went out, popping
unexpectedly around corners when she was trying to pee, or yattering into her
ear for hours on end when she walked herself through the uncertain passages and
empty caverns of the Scholomance. He was just gone, and when she thought about
him at all, it was with a kind of satisfaction that she had managed to keep her
promise to him and get him out, mingled with faint outrage at the promise
Kazuul had extracted from her to do it. But she didn’t miss him, any more than
she’d missed Connie in the days, months, and eventually years after her best
friend’s disappearance. She had looked for her, in her own way, and then she
had boxed up her things and waited for their removal, and while she had also
flown halfway across the world, climbed mountains, and defied demons to try and
get her back, it remained true that the world had moved on and Mara had moved
with it. She had loved Connie while she was there—her first, her best, her only
friend—but she’d shed no tears once she was gone.

Horuseps was
right. She really did belong here.

Her days passed
now in much the same way as they had before, fruitlessly. The first night that
she had returned to Kazuul and approached his bed, she had not spoken to him at
all, but when she had slipped beneath his torn blankets, he came at once to
join her. She spent her sleeping hours staring fixedly into the body’s monitors
in the Panic Room, but he had touched her only once—his hand gently brushing
her hair back from her brow—and his mind never touched hers at all. It seemed
the promise of an immortal was not the fickle thing of Man after all; she was
entirely in his power and he took no advantage. It was unnerving.

When first-bell
rang to wake her, he had already repaired his table and laid out a Master’s
meal across two golden platters, poured wine into two golden cups. She ignored
it and his beckoning hand and went out to search for Connie, hungry.

By the time
last-bell sent her back to him at dawn, there was a second chair as well,
neither so tall nor as imposing as his own, but harmonious in design, a queenly
throne to sit opposite the king’s. She took her food and ate on the aerie,
sitting on the floor, her back to him.

Again, he lay
beside her as she slept, and again, he touched her only once, this time to
stroke her exposed arm before covering it over against the chill. And in the
evening, beside the platter set before her untouched chair, she found something
new: a gown to replace her much-worn robe. Neither acolyte-black nor
neophyte-white, but a soft, shimmering silver, and not nearly as scanty as one
might expect a frustrated demon to provide her. The neck was high, the hips
concealed, and the skirts full and warm around her legs. A simple cut, but
beautiful. Feminine. Regal. She put it on and ate on the aerie again.

But apart from
the ominously quiet hours she spent in Kazuul’s company, her nights passed just
the same. She wandered—in the lyceum one day, the Nave the next, even the
ephebeum again—opening every door she could and searching for recently Malleated
walls which might conceivably hide her friend. She interrupted a number of
lectures in the advanced study of arts, but the demons within dealt with her
respectfully, allowing her to invade their private rooms if she remembered to
ask, or just to sit quietly on some distant riser and hear the lesson. She went
through all the right motions, but no longer considered it a search. Time
itself seemed to hang, suspended, and she didn’t even know what it was all
waiting for.

“What do you
want from me?” she asked one night, watching the sun set over the snow-capped
mountains.

“Thou knowest.” She
heard the sound of snapping bone as he tore himself another bite from the
unknown roast which was his breakfast. “I mean to lie with thee.”

“What else?”

He grunted, then
rose and came to the aerie beside her. “Thou art all I have desired, throughout
these empty ages.”

She snorted and
threw the rest of her tea out over the rocky slopes. Steam puffed up from the ice
where it landed. Some unseen creature above the aerie scrambled away, knocking
pebbles loose to tumble down over the mountainside. Far, far below, the lake
shimmered in the last light of day, all its edges frosted over, the water at
its center as dark and round as a staring eye.

“Believe it
not?”

“Was I supposed
to?” she asked dryly.

“Tis truth.” He
crouched down close beside her, his shadow and hers merged to a single body. “What
wouldst thou have of me?”

“So you’re
willing to bargain, are you?” She had to smile at him, at the scowl darkening
his shadowed face. “Did you think all you had to do was trap me in your bed and
I’d be immediately overwhelmed by lust for you?”

“Aye.” He gave
her a sidelong glance, sharp and sparking with frustration. “I knew thy will
was great, yet did not anticipate thou wouldst deny me so long out of malice.”

“You’ve got a
lot of nerve complaining about malice after you sent Devlin to a tribunal just
to get him away from me.”

“He liveth.” Kazuul
smiled into the dying light, his fangs gleaming in white points. “He liveth
still.”

“Sometimes you
make me very glad that you don’t know where Connie is.”

“Never would I
cause her harm.”

A bitter laugh
was her only reply to that.

“Thou wouldst
despise me for it,” he said quietly.

“I despise you
now.”

He looked at her
and into her while she faced the mountains determinedly, answering neither his
piercing stare nor the cautious touches of his mind. The sun was swallowed up,
the last light taken. She had nothing else to look at and still refused to look
at him or meet his sendings.

“Nay,” he
murmured, and combed his claws once down her hair. “Thou art not yet so great a
liar.” He stood and smiled down at her as the wind gusted. “Shall I show thee a
thing?”

“What thing?”

“A mystery I
know thou hast often pondered. I’ll say no more. Aye or nay?”

“In exchange for
what?”

“To show thee, I
must hold thee in mine arms.” His voice dropped to a smoky purr. “Where thou
dost yearn to be also.”

“Dream on.”

“I dream not,”
he replied. “Thou dreamest of me.”

Something
tickled at her cheeks. She realized she was blushing. Mara threw the crust of
her breakfast bread out over the mountain and stared straight ahead. A mystery.
In his arms.

“I have sworn an
oath to press thee not for the pleasures of thy body,” he reminded her. “Though
I would savor well whatsoever I am offered.”

She could think
of nothing she had often pondered, apart from Connie, and she knew he wouldn’t
be taking her there. On the other hand, she had nothing else to do with herself
today. She put out her hand without thinking, and his enveloped it at once, before
she could pull it back again. He drew her up gently, purring under his breath,
and put his arms around her.

To feel him
again, pressing close, his heat searing through her clothes, was enough to stir
the stubborn ghost of purely physical desire. She didn’t dare look up at him. Her
eyes belonged to him all too often. But he felt good. He always felt so damned
good.

“Wither?” he
rumbled, flexing his claws lightly at her hips. “To my mystery, or to my bed?”

“That’s
suspiciously close to making a demand.”

“Nay, for I wait
upon thy will.”

“Show me what
you have to show me,” Mara said, and then, unwillingly, she felt herself
embracing him, her hands scraping over his rough skin to bring her even closer.
She could feel the swell of his essential maleness solid at her belly and she
wanted to feel it hard against her, hard inside her. Even his scent, as mild
and mineral-rich as the mountain itself, stirred her to some kind of longing. “Show
me,” she said again, not meeting his eyes. “After that, we’ll see.”

He lifted her,
nuzzled briefly and with tense passion at her throat, and then snapped away out
of his candlelit lair into full dark and sudden, icy winds. She gasped, and the
frozen air stole the breath right out of her again. Mara clutched at his
shoulders, choking on cold, then shoved away from him once she realized what
she was doing.

Kazuul released
her, chuckling, only to catch her again when she stumbled over the ice-crusted
snow and loose rock that lay beneath. **Hold,** he warned her. **The moon is not
yet risen and thy eyes will yet be weak. Hold.**

“It’s freezing!”
she shouted, and doubled over choking again.

**Use the silent
voice.** He watched her hop from foot to burning foot with an expression of
close interest, then grunted, and pulled her back to him.

She stepped on
his foot by accident, slapping at him and shivering almost too hard to see, but
his foot was broad and hot under hers, melting the snow and ice away in great
craters. She looked sharply up at him. He smiled invitingly. She scowled and
stepped on the other foot too, grappling at his spikes for balance as he
wrapped one arm around her to shield her from the worst of the wind. He was
fantastically warm. She’d known that every time she ever touched him, but here,
now, right in the frozen eye of winter, it was even more startling.

**Is this an art?**
she asked grudgingly, trying to touch him as little as possible while warming
herself against his body. **I’d like to learn how, if it is.**

**Thou surely
wilt, with my guidance,** he answered after a moment. **And to Correspond. I
suspect thou wilt have some skill at it.**

**I’d rather
walk than risk ending up halfway through a wall.**

**Thou hast
Sight. I’ll teach thee its employ in all ways.**

**I won’t be
here that long.** She squinted into the stinging wind and saw, in silhouettes
only a shade darker than the night sky, a forest of bare branches stabbing up
from the rock, but the everpresent shadow of the mountainside was nowhere to be
seen. They were at the top, in a shallow valley with rock raised up in blunt
peaks all around them. **What is this place?**

**Canst thou not
guess?**

**I hate
guessing games,** she sent irritably, but looked again. There was still no
moon, but her eyes must be adjusting to the faint starlight, for she could see
the trunks of trees now, dozens of them, and the mounds of other shrubs between
them. **Is…Is it a garden?**

**Aye.**

**But everything
is dead.**

**Nay, ‘tis
sleeping only, as all things do in their season.** He shrugged her up into the
crook of his arm and carried her to the first tree. He touched it, running a
slender twig through his fingers to its tip, where green leaves suddenly
sprouted, pale blossoms opened, dried, and fell away. He cupped the golden fruit
that grew and plucked it just as the wind fell enough to bring its fragrance to
Mara’s senses. It was warm in her hand when he gave it to her, warm with life,
even with ice in a shell around its stem. **Yet a Master’s touch doth awaken,**
Kazuul sent, watching her bite into it, **so many things.**

An apricot,
sweeter than anything she’d ever tasted from a grocery store. She devoured it
in just a few bites, forgetting all about the breakfast she’d only just eaten. Mara
looked out over the garden again as she sucked frozen juice from her fingers,
and saw movement. Kazuul followed her gaze, grunted, and set her back on his
feet.

**What was that?**
she asked, trying to find it again.

**One of the
reavers.** He must have summoned it, because it came out of the dark on its
belly, bristling and snarling, its face pressed to the snowy ground. Kazuul
looked down upon it, his arm moving to wrap her more securely against him. **And
well out of its hunting grounds it be.**