“Then we’d just take our stuff back with us. I figured whatever we decided from here, we’d be set.” He looked to Astar. “Carriages and trunks should be here by evening.”
“It was good thinking.” Astar nodded at Jak. “Thank you.”
Jak slipped his dagger into a hidden sheath, stood, and clapped his fist over his heart in the salute used by the high queen’s personal guard. “I live to serve, Your Highness. Just don’t forget that sinecure we discussed.”
“Pays well, an unreasonable amount of power, no effort on your part.” Astar ticked off the criteria on his fingers. “I have something perfect in mind.” Though he didn’t look at Stella, a tingle through their twin connection made her wonder…
“All right everyone, we leave in the morning,” Astar declared. “Until then, you may do as you please. I suggest rest if that’s what you need, or commencing with those hand-to-hand lessons.”
“I know some hand-to-hand I could teach you,” Zeph purred to Astar. “We could—”
Gen clapped her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to hear this!”
Zeph snickered, pleased to have annoyed Gen so easily. “In all truth, I was kicking myself that during our… adventure”—she slid a rueful smile to Lena—“I hadn’t practiced taking off from the ground in gríobhth form more than I had. I think I’ll find a quiet place away from prying eyes to do just that.”
“I’ll keep you company,” Rhy offered, surprising everyone. “I need to practice shapeshifting too.”
“That would be terrific, Rhy,” Zeph replied with a dazzling smile. “I need to build up to being able to lift off from the ground with a person on my back. Maybe you could take various forms and gradually increase weight?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Zeph gave Astar a lavish kiss, fluttered her fingers at the rest of them—Lena studiously avoided Rhy’s searching look—and they left.
“What do you say, Jak?” Astar said. “Shall we teach these lovely ladies some weapons work?”
“Indeed we shall,” Jak replied, his grin sharp.
Gen groaned. “I hate you both.”
~ 5 ~
It had been an especially keen torture, Jak reflected, to instruct Stella in the skill of using the twin Silversteel daggers. He’d somehow made it to the next morning without imploding, but the need she stirred in him showed no signs of abating. Having “volunteered” to drive the carriage—let’s face it, he was the only one who knew how to handle regular horses and mossback conveyances—he perched on the coachman’s seat, guiding the team of horses along the winding road that bordered Lake Sullivan. The views were spectacular, the silence welcome, and the crisp air bracing enough that it should’ve cooled his heated thoughts.
Turned out nothing in this world was cold enough to diminish his ardor. Worse, it only seemed to be increasing. The afternoon before should’ve been a distraction. He liked bladework, and normally it allowed him to focus on nothing but that.
Then Stella had shapeshifted into a set of fighting leathers. He couldn’t get the image out of his head. Her delicate body in the form-fitting black that delineated every perfect curve, her hair coiled into a tight braid that set off her hauntingly lovely face, the way she’d set herself to the task with a solemn determination that only made him love her all the more…
Don’t think about wanting her! The horses threw up their heads, protesting his death grip on the reins, and Lena poked her head out the carriage window. “Everything all right up there?”
“Thought I saw Stella’s lake creature!” he called back. It was a plausible excuse, the lake serene and smooth to the left, falling away as the road climbed higher, a steep and rocky hillside to their right. “I got all excited, but it was just a log.”
Lena studied the lake surface anyway. “Too bad. I’d like to see that thing for myself.” She glanced up at him again, narrowing her eyes. “Sure you’re not lonely up there? I could come up, help you keep lake-creature vigil.”
He grinned at her. “You’ll get cold, Princess of Nahanau.”
Sticking her tongue out at him, she added a narrow glare. “I’m not that much of a weenie.”
Pretending to think about it, he finally shook his head, looking sorrowful. “I’m sorry to have to say it, but you are that much of a weenie.”
“Just for that, I should make it rain on you,” she grumbled, then withdrew to rejoin Stella and Astar inside the carriage. Gen, Zeph, and Rhy were on the wing, scouting ahead. Like him, they were happy to be outside. The arrangement allowed the group to consolidate to a single carriage, and put them in a position of greater freedom, no longer reliant on drivers prone to abandoning them in the middle of nowhere. It was just a side benefit that driving gave him a respite from Stella’s intoxicating presence.
He didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to pretend that he didn’t want her with every fiber of his being. What would be best would be to figure out how to not want her at all. Stella didn’t want him—he kept repeating that painful truth to himself, like poking at an unhealed wound—and he needed to get a grip on that bald fact. Unlike Rhy, Jak did understand the difference between Zeph’s diligent pursuit of Astar and Rhy’s apparent inability to understand why he needed to leave Lena well enough alone.
Unfortunately, knowing the right thing to do didn’t change his feelings. Oh, he could make himself stand back, treat her like the sister she wanted to be to him—love her from afar as he’d been doing for the last seven bloody years—but that didn’t kill the craving for her, the sheer longing she stirred in him, the endless need.
Oh yeah, on a viscerally wrenching level, Jak fully understood why Rhy couldn’t let go of Lena.
And wasn’t that a shameful realization? The difference was, Rhy had had Lena and threw it all away. Jak had never even come close. Stella forever treated him like a bratty little brother, while her gaze stayed on some future only she could see.
The easiest solution would be to stay away from Stella entirely. His sailor’s soul could be at peace with that. It would even be romantic, in a tragic-Dasnarian-ballad way. The broken-hearted sailor, traveling the world, never forgetting his lost love.
The problem with that, however, was that living a tragic love story lasted your whole damn life, not just for the space of a beautifully rendered ballad, drunkenly sung with good friends, the tears shed all vicarious and quickly forgotten. Jak was a gregarious kind of guy, and he didn’t want to live his whole fucking life pining after Stella. And it was all his own Danu-cursed fault. He couldn’t even blame it on some inner bestial, mate-for-life deal.
His mother would tell him to find someone else, preferably any number of someone elses, and his father would likely agree. Neither of them would understand him fixating on one person. Well, maybe his father would, having fallen so hard for Jepp that he gave up a chance at being emperor for her. Maybe that was where Jak had gotten this self-destructive urge.
Whatever caused it, he’d never found anyone who compelled his interest like Stella did. Who made him want to wrap her up in safety and also kiss her so thoroughly that she’d lose that dreamy distance and see him. Danu knew, he’d tried to stay away from her. He’d been doing exactly that, all these years, when circumstances allowed. Now, not only did he have to be flung into her company daily, but he had to work with her in close physical proximity.