Lynn Flewelling - The Oracle's Queen

Grannia gave them a last confused look, saluted, and obeyed.

Tamír expected Ki to go back to his cot, but instead, he sat down and pulled her close. Too shaken to object, she sagged against him, glad of his arm around her. She was glad for the darkness so he wouldn’t see how it made her blush.

“I think we might have just started a rumor,” she muttered.

Ki chuckled. “As if we haven’t already.”

“Highness?” Baldus whispered. He still sounded scared.

“It’s all right,” Ki told the child. “The princess just had a very bad dream. Go to sleep.”

Tamír’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough now to make out Ki’s form, but she’d have known him anyway. Ki bathed often when he had the chance, but always seemed to smell faintly of horses and leather, fresh air and wine and clean sweat. It was a nice smell, comforting and familiar. Without thinking, she reached up and buried her fingers in the soft hair at the back of his neck and felt his start of surprise.

He hugged her and whispered, “What was that all about?”

“Don’t know.” She didn’t want to think about it any more, not in the dark like this. Baldus was still whimpering, over there by the door. She knew too well what that felt like, to be afraid in the dark.

“Come here,” she called to him.

The child climbed onto the bed and curled trembling against her legs. She reached down and made sure he’d brought a blanket with him, and then stroked his hair to comfort him. It felt cool and coarse under her fingers, nothing like Ki’s.

“I’m sorry, Highness,” the child whispered, voice hitching.

“Sorry for what?”

“For not being brave. I thought I saw a ghost. I thought you saw it, too.”

She felt Ki’s arm tighten around her. “It was just a bad dream.”

Baldus fell asleep quickly and Ki carried him back to his pallet, then returned to the edge of the bed.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve heard you calling out to him in your sleep, Tamír, just the worst. Can’t you tell me what’s going on? I know he’s lurking around. I can feel him sometimes, and I see the way you go still all of a sudden, staring at something no one else can see. If there’s anything I can do to help—”

She found his hand and drew him back down beside her. “He’s still angry at me about the way he died, but he can’t tell me what it is, except that I must avenge him,” she whispered.

Ki was quiet for a moment, rubbing a thumb over her knuckles with a soothing rhythm that sent chills up her arm. At last he said, “There’s something I never told you.”

“About Brother?”

“Yes. I’d forgotten all about it. It happened the day Lord Orun died.”

“That was years ago.” She’d tried to forget that day, too, when she’d watched Brother kill her abusive guardian with a single touch of his hand.

“That day you went to see him, I stayed behind at your mother’s house, remember? I never told you—I never told anyone—but I saw Brother that day, while you were gone. That was the first time.

“I was pacing around in Tharin’s room, fretting over why Orun wanted me gone and worrying about you being alone with him and all. Then, out of nowhere, Brother just appears and says something like ‘Ask Arkoniel.’ It scared the piss out of me, but I asked what it was I was supposed to ask the wizard about. He wouldn’t say, though, just stared at me with those dead eyes of his and disappeared.” He paused. “Then they brought you back half-dead and told us about Orun and I forgot all about it. But now, with him still hanging on this way, it makes me think. Do you suppose Arkoniel knows more about him than he lets on?”

Brother’s empty hissing laugh in the darkness was answer enough for both of them.

“If Arkoniel knows something, then Iya must, too,” she replied.

“So maybe you should talk to them? I know you’re still angry with them, but they have to help you, right?”

Tamír gave a grudging shrug and Ki sighed and settled more comfortably beside her. His breath stirred a strand of hair against her face. “I don’t like to admit it, but I guess I’m getting past being mad at Arkoniel. And why would Brother say to talk to him if he didn’t know something?”

“Something else they’ve been lying to me about all my life?” Tamír muttered bitterly.

“I know, but I believe them when they say they wanted to protect you any way they could. Ask him, will you?”

“I guess I’ll have to. I just haven’t found the right moment, with all that’s had to be done. Maybe— Well, maybe I don’t want to know.”

Ki put his arm around her again and hugged her. “You still care for Arkoniel, don’t you?”

Tamír nodded. In the months since the change, she’d begun to remember how it had been before. She was still hurt at the deception the wizards had practiced, but deeper than that ran the memory of what a patient, kind teacher Arkoniel had been. She hadn’t welcomed him then, either. He’d been awkward and known nothing of children, but even so, he’d done his best to ease her loneliness. And it had been Arkoniel who’d convinced her father and Iya to bring another child to the keep, a companion for her. Ki.

Sitting here next to him like this, the simple fact of his presence fending off the darkness and fear, she decided that she could forgive Arkoniel a great deal on that account. Whether that forbearance extended to Iya remained to be seen.

“Maybe you don’t have to ask them,” Ki whispered suddenly. “Maybe you could go to the Oracle’s priest instead.”

“Imonus?”

“Why not? He speaks for the Oracle, doesn’t he? You could at least ask him.”

“I suppose so.” She was still getting used to the idea that the Lightbearer was her own special patron. “I’ll talk to him in the morning.”

She reluctantly lay back against the pillows, knowing Ki would leave her and go back to his cot.

He didn’t. Instead, he settled against the bolsters beside her and kept a hold on her hand. After a moment she felt him shift, and then the quick, awkward press of his lips against her hair.

“No more bad dreams tonight,” he whispered.

Not trusting herself to speak, Tamír just squeezed his hand and rested her cheek against it.

Ki hadn’t meant to kiss her. It had been a sudden impulse, and it left him blushing in the dark. Her silence afterward left him even more confused, but she hadn’t pushed him away or taken her hand away.

What am I doing? he thought. What does she want me to do?

What do I want to do?

Her breath was warm and even against his wrist, her cheek smooth against his fingers. He knew she didn’t use scent but he could swear there was a new sweetness rising from her hair, something decidedly unboylike. For an instant, it was just him and any girl, on a bed.

Not just any girl , he reminded himself, but that only increased his confusion. Was she asleep, or waiting for him to get under the covers with her?

As a friend, or as a lover?

Lover. The thought made him go hot and cold all over and his heartbeat quickened.

“Ki?” A sleepy whisper. “Lie down, why don’t you? You’ll get a crick in your neck.”

“I—um—All right.” Ki slid down a little.

Her breath was against his cheek now, and one of her braids had shifted to tickle across his hand. He reached to move it with his free hand, but paused a moment, noting how silky it felt between his fingers. He thought of how her fingers had felt against the back of his neck and felt a ghost of that same tingle.

A girl’s touch, even with callused fingers .

He turned his head a little and felt her breath against the corner of his mouth. What would it be like, to kiss her mouth?