As slowly as if waking from a dream, she opened her moonstone eyes. Yet slowly was not how she rose from sleep—Maddek knew that well. The past few mornings when he’d roused her, she awakened instantly, her clear gaze piercing him through to his bones.
As it did now, when she regarded him with amusement arching her brows. “Shall I shield myself from the elements as well as you do, Commander?”
Beside him, Kelir snorted out a laugh. Banek grinned. For Maddek wore nothing but his belted linens—and had not even drawn the outer layer up over his shoulders. There was no need, for the storm had formed over the Boiling Sea. He had known baths colder than the wind and rain were.
Yet she had never known the wind and rain at all—or the sun. The heat of the past days had burnished her face, her skin as tight and as hot as if she suffered from a fever.
“When you have a warrior’s strength, you may ride as bare as you wish,” he told her. “I have no use for a frail wife who falls so ill she cannot be bred.”
Her amusement hardened like stone. “I have no use for a husband whose performance in bed can be diminished by my cough.”
A cough would not stop Maddek from burying himself between her soft thighs. Had they not needed to wait for her moon night, he’d have already spent each day riding her, spilling his seed within her silken sheath until his vengeance took root. But he only said, “Draw up your hood.”
Not one of his warriors would have argued. Yet she slowly shook her head, pale gaze never leaving his.
“The rain feels sweet upon my face,” she said.
Her sunburned face. Yet perhaps the downpour against her heated skin was not the only reason it was sweet. The first day upon her horse, she had lifted her face to the warmth of the sun in the same way, though it burned her. Because she’d never known it before. Just as she’d never known the rain.
He held her gaze for another long moment, an odd tightness squeezing within his chest. Finally he nodded and faced forward again.
And the lashing rain was sweet against his own heated skin. How a treacherous, sickly woman warmed him so quickly, he knew not. By all that was rational, he should not desire her as he did. Not the woman who might have lured his parents to their murders. Not the woman who had so coldly plunged a dagger into her brother’s back.
That memory still sat unsettled in his mind. She had skewered her brother as easily as one skewered a roasting pig, with no emotion and no warning. Certainly Cezan deserved to die—and over the course of his life, Maddek had seen far more blood shed, and spilled much of it himself. Yet that had been in the heat of battle.
Yvenne had been as ice.
But the fires of vengeance burned hot in his own blood. When he’d first looked upon Yvenne, he had no thought but to kill her. The moment he’d agreed to take her as a bride, however, little else but bedding her filled his head—of getting her with the child that would hail Zhalen’s end. If she had not been a virgin, he’d have been upon her so often that any soldiers in pursuit would have been at their backs now.
Bedding her would only slow them further. Though Maddek yearned for vengeance, he could not let its fires blind him. Only a sevennight remained until the full moon. She would be beneath him soon enough.
“She has steel in her.” Kelir’s voice was pitched too low to carry to the riders behind them. “More steel than her horse does.”
That was certain. For although she was new to the saddle, Yvenne had not slowed them. Had she been upon a Parsathean horse and they’d set a brutal pace, no doubt she’d have clung like a burr to its back. Just as she had the first eve.
Her horse had less stamina than she did. Maddek had known upon a glance that it was a poor mount, with a stiff stride and shallow chest. The gelding couldn’t maintain a pace faster than a jog trot for any distance, and even before the mud had slowed them, the gelding’s walk had. Instead of the Parsathean horses’ swift and smooth ambling gait, it lumbered along on ponderous steps. Yet there had been few horses to choose from in a village full of farmers who placed higher value on heavy, laboring beasts. Maddek bought the gelding with the intention of trading it for a more suitable mount at the next village. He’d found no better selection there, however—or at any of the settlements they’d passed.
“I should have taken the dun stallion,” he said now. Though smaller than a Parsathean steed, the dun had been the only horse they’d seen worth having, but its fiery temperament wouldn’t have suited a new rider.
Eyebrows drawn and braids dripping with rain, Kelir frowned. “You’d have put her on that fire-breather?”
“I’d have ridden him.”
“And you’d have given your mare to your bride?”
Maddek inclined his head.
Disbelief burst from the other warrior on a hearty laugh. Amusement lighting his eyes, he said, “I suppose putting her on your mare would be easier than teaching your bride to ride. She would not even need reins to guide her mount, because that mare would follow you like a dog.”
So the mare would. Her dam had also been his mount, killed by savages upon the river Lave when she’d been little more than a spindly-legged foal. Recognizing that she had the same steady strength as her mother, Maddek had raised her by hand. When it had come time to ride her, he’d never known a horse better suited to him, or with as much courage and ferocity in battle.
Though for that same reason, better not to ride an untested horse. If he did, Maddek could not be as certain of protecting Yvenne. Fighting to control a panicked mount made it harder to fight anything that threatened her.
But he said nothing, and Kelir cast a speculative glance behind them. “For her third day upon a horse, she does well.”
“She stays on.”
“From dawn until nightfall.”
Maddek grunted, a grudging agreement. For Yvenne did not ride well. She was nowhere near to it. But she possessed an abundance of fortitude. And ever since Maddek had held her against him and they’d raced beneath the night sky, she’d been determined to have her own mount—not just to ride it, but to care for it. She’d insisted on tending to her horse even at the end of day, when her stomach grumbled loudly enough for the entire camp to hear and her limbs trembled with exhaustion and pain.
That effort earned her more respect from his warriors than any skill upon a horse could have. Maddek suspected that Yvenne knew it would win them over.
But even if she manipulated them all, her effort wasn’t false—and it took a toll. Each night when Maddek retired to his furs, she was already there, sleeping so soundly that she didn’t stir when he pulled her against his chest and wrapped his arms around her frail form, shielding her with his body as they slept. The previous eve, she had not even finished her meal first. Her eyelids had drooped with every bite, and she’d finally put it aside, crawling into bed with her dinner half eaten.