“What will you do?” Ghisla asked. She pictured him summoning Hod, demanding that he leave the mount, and her anger bubbled again. The intrigue had gone on too long, and nothing—nothing—had changed.
The Highest Keeper raised his eyes to hers. “The question is . . . what will you do, Daughter?”
“There is naught I can do,” she cried. “I have been on this mount for more than a decade, waiting for salvation. Day after day, night after night, singing my songs, sleeping beside my sisters, and sitting with a tortured king. Tell me, Highest Keeper, what should I do?”
He nodded. “I fear there is naught any of us . . . can do.”
The king gave Hod a small room on an upper floor in the castle equally distanced between his own chambers and the servants’ quarters. He was not an honored guest—that wing of the castle was empty—nor an acknowledged member of the family; the Queen’s Tower where Alba and the old queen slept was up a winding set of stairs off the main entrance. Still, a room of his own in the castle was far better than Hod had expected, and it was far better than sleeping in the barracks with the king’s guard. A narrow bed and an iron tub were all he needed, and the room was more than sufficient, but he was required to work for his prime lodgings.
The king seemed eager—anxious even—to have him near. He stood sentry while Banruud ate and hovered in the hall while Ghisla sang. He guarded the king when he spoke with his advisors and trailed him when he walked the grounds. He was even asked to rove the corridors and walk along the temple wall to listen for approaching threats before he retired at night.
It was odd how so many feared him . . . and how Banruud feared him not at all. King Banruud did not think him a threat; Hod suspected he did not think him a man. It was as if he considered Hod a trained raptor, skilled and useful but without emotion or humanity. As if, having no eyes, he had no soul.
He was good at being useful and invisible at the same time. It was how he’d survived in Gudrun’s realm all those years. The temple mount was not the Northlands; it was simultaneously more civilized and more remote, more open and more oppressed. He did not dodge blades and evade blows at every turn, but the quiet desperation on the hill was much harder for him to endure. Mayhaps it was simply his proximity to Ghisla.
The temple itself teemed with worried hearts. He could hear Ghost and Dagmar and Master Ivo. He could hear the keepers and the daughters, and he could hear Ghisla. Even when he lay down to sleep in his strange bed in his strange new room he could hear her, and her nearness filled him with both elation and grief.
She had no freedom. He knew she could not seek him out. But twice she’d seen him in the corridor outside Banruud’s chamber, and twice she’d run from him. She was upset by his presence. He could hear it in her heartbeat and in her shallow breaths. But she had avoided him long enough.
When Banruud summoned her again, he was waiting when she exited the king’s rooms. The halls were quiet, the sentry sleeping, and Hod stood directly across from the door so she would not flee.
“I must go,” she whispered.
He shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Banruud will hear.”
“He will not. But let us walk.” He held out his hand, inviting her to come with him, and she moaned, the sound barely audible, as if she stood on a precipice from which she desperately wanted to jump.
She did not take his proffered hand but turned and walked deeper into the corridor, away from the stairs and the heat of the sconces. She sought the shadows, and he followed her. When she stopped, he stopped too, keeping a safe distance between them. He did not want to push her. He just wanted to be near her.
“What do you want, Hod?” she asked quietly. The words wounded him, but he did not flinch.
“I have missed you,” he confessed. “I don’t want to miss you anymore.”
Again the faint moan.
“And why . . . are you here?”
“You know why I’m here, Ghisla.”
“You cannot call me that out loud. I am Liis of Leok.”
“We are alone. And you are Ghisla to me.”
“Why are you here?” she insisted again. He knew she didn’t mean the corridor or even the castle. She wanted to know his intentions.
“I knew no other way to be near you. Arwin is dead. Saylok is dying. I cannot be a keeper. I have no clan. I have no family. I have only you. You are the only thing that matters to me. So I am here.”
“It has been years,” she said, her words a hushed wail.
“I am here,” he said again.
“You are the North King’s man.”
“No. I am Hod. The same Hod you have known for a decade. The same Hod you once loved.”
“You are the king’s man!” she said, adamant, but Hod could hear the tears in her throat.
“I am Ghisla’s man. I have only ever been yours.”
Her heart was pushing, pulsing, pulling at him, and he could smell the want on her skin and feel the weight of her stare. He reached out toward her again, beseeching, but this time he turned his palm up, exposing to her gaze the rune that had connected them for so long. For a moment he thought she would reject him again, that she would flee.
The corridor was quiet. The king was in his chamber, his breaths steady and his sleep deep. Below them, in the kitchen, the hum of voices and the heat of bodies radiated up through the floor. Food was being prepared for people who would sleep for hours yet. But they were alone. Finally. Blessedly. Alone. And he heard the moment she raised her hand, her sleeve whispering against the bodice of her dress, and then her fingertips touched his.
For a heartbeat, he allowed himself to exult, but he could not wait any longer, and he pulled her to him, seeking her mouth, and her heat, and her substance.
But he was not prepared for the reality of Ghisla, her breasts and her belly and her hips pressed against him; the collision rocked him, radiating in his legs and emptying his thoughts, and he groaned her name in wonderous disbelief.
She was no longer in his head and his heart but in his hands. She gripped his face like she too was clinging to a dream, and then his mouth found hers, soft and insistent, and violet rose behind his eyes and surged beneath his tongue.
She dragged her mouth away and moaned his name, “Hody, Hody, Hody,” the way she often called him in song, and for a moment, his own face rose in his mind, as if he looked at himself in that moment through her. Harsh angles and empty green eyes, his back bent to hold her, his lips wet with her kisses. Then his face was gone and her lips returned, consuming him.
Salt—were they her tears or his?
He couldn’t kiss her fast enough, hold her close enough, or taste her well enough, and impatience guided his hands over her hips and around her waist, up the cage of her ribs and over the swell of her breasts only to retrace the same path, seeing her in the only way he could. She bit at his lips and nipped at his jaw, and her words came back to him from so many years ago.
I want to be inside you. And I want you to be inside me.
She ripped her mouth from his and pushed herself away only to immediately return to his arms and bury her face in his neck, her hands clutching his back, almost clawing.
“I do not know when you lie,” she said.
He stiffened.
“You know when I lie, but I don’t know when you lie,” she whispered, keeping her face buried against him.