He should kiss and tease. But with ravenous hunger, he sucked her taut nipple into his mouth. Always he wanted her too hard. Too much. But her gasp was pure pleasure, her soft moan and the arch of her back a plea for more.
That he would give this night. Releasing the engorged bud, he growled against the soft swell of her breast, “And the bed?”
Panting, eyes heavy-lidded, she looked down at him. No reply she made. Because his mouth had erased the thoughts from her head, he realized with smug satisfaction.
He kissed the glistening ruby of her nipple before reminding her of what this lesson had been. “Is the bed also where battles are lost and won? They are fought with swords and tongues.”
She came back to herself with amusement curving her lips. Her two-fingered hand cupped his bearded jaw, her thumb caressing the smiling corner of his mouth. “Perhaps it is. Particularly if a warrior views a woman as a fortress, with walls that must be battered down.”
His chest tightened. Vela had truthfully revealed what was in his thoughts. Yet Yvenne seemed neither surprised nor angered. So well did she know him.
But it was not only Maddek she knew so well. “How many suitors do you have?”
“Suitors?”
“You knew Cadus would stand firm. All depended on that. And you knew because your mother watched him. As she watched me.”
Coolness slipped into her gaze. “She did.”
“How many suitors did she prefer over me?”
“I have no suitors, Maddek.” She sharply tugged at the point of his beard, as she did when she believed he didn’t listen to her. “My mother watched many people. Some she considered as partners for me. Some she did not. But none knew she observed them, and certainly none courted me as a suitor does.”
“Why not choose the ones your mother favored? Why not Cadus, if his only fault is that he stands so firm?”
In hot irritation she shoved at his chest. He moved not a bit.
A fierce snarl curled his lips. “I stand firm, too. Whom did your mother prefer?”
She set her jaw. With a flick of her hand, she closed her robe, covering her breast. Withdrawing from him.
Maddek flicked it open again. “Who?”
Her chest heaved on two sharp, angry breaths. “Why do you ask? Did you not trust the vow I made with Vela as witness?”
“I do trust it.” Yet jealousy still burned in him, a poisonous blister. Jealousy he resented. Jealousy Yvenne did not deserve. Jealousy that Banek said the goddess deliberately prodded . . . so that he would overcome it. “Vela gave me a lesson to learn. I need to have the heart of a king.”
A heart that burned true. Not because it was always afire with foolish jealousy.
She sighed heavily. “That might only mean she wants you to tear my father’s heart out.”
He would do that, too. “And what manner of heart do you want me to have?”
For a long moment she gave no response, only regarded him steadily. “That is not the question a king would ask.”
It wasn’t. As he well knew. It should not matter what manner of heart she wanted him to have, but what manner of man he wanted to be. “What heart will best serve my people?”
Approval lit her gaze. “My mother’s first choice was Dagenoh of Toleh.”
The captain who had brought Maddek news of his parents and had stepped into command upon the Lave—and who was also son of Gareth, the alliance council’s minister, and nephew to Toleh’s king.
Truth forced him to respond, “Dagenoh would have been a good choice of a husband and king. A fine warrior he is, clever and fair—and he would have helped you free your people.”
“He is too fair,” said Yvenne. “And like everyone who has studied under Toleh’s monks, he favors reason and diplomacy.”
Maddek could find no fault with that. “Why not choose him, then?”
“Because he would have tried appealing to my father with that same reason and diplomacy. And while he attempted to find a resolution that avoided bloodshed, my father or brothers would have stabbed him in the back.”
That was likely truth, too. “And Cadus?”
“He is a man whose heart longs for justice but whose head is bound to law. He has persuaded himself that if rules are followed, then it is the same as justice. So although he hates the route his sister has taken with Goge, he did not push against her, because he deferred to her position and her rule. Her word is law—but sometimes the only justice is burning rule and law to the ground.”
Maddek agreed. Yet now nothing he’d learned made sense. “Why would your mother prefer them, then?”
“Because they both suffer from the same flaw—they rely on diplomacy or law to provide resolutions. But she believed that I could prod them to action.”
“I believe you could have, too,” said Maddek, and she smiled. “But you preferred a warrior, hot of blood.”
“Hot of blood, yes. And hotter of head.” Her lip caught between her teeth before she added, “But I could have found a hot-blooded warrior anywhere. For a time, we watched the wandering king of Blackmoor—until he pissed in one of Vela’s offering bowls. You are not that hotheaded, even when she insults you.”
Or not that foolish. “Why then?”
Her brows arched.
“Why choose me over other warriors?”
“Many reasons,” she said, then nothing else for a breath, and he thought she might leave it at that vague response. Until she added, “But I decided during the campaign against Stranik’s Fang.”
Almost ten years past? “Because you saw me fight?”
“Because I saw when you didn’t fight. I saw you hold out your hand.”
To the Farians. Instantly Maddek could see them again, as he’d seen them countless times in dreams and nightmares in the years since. The priests had enslaved the savages in dark caves and left them to die in cavernous pits. Maddek had been only a captain in the alliance army then, leading a small group of soldiers to make certain no more priests remained in the caves. Instead they’d found thousands of Farians, half starved and stinking, eating their dead to stay alive.
The Farians were not human, though they shared similarities in shape and expression to the people of the western realms, and the savages spoke their own language made of hoots and clicks. But they were only as similar as humans were to apes—and despite the rapes, never had been born a mix of Farian and human.
He’d heard many different stories of their creation—that ancient human mothers drank silac venom while the children fed at their breasts, that a bat-winged ape had mated with an ice walker and their pale-skinned savagery was the result. Most stories claimed that they’d dwelled in cavernous tunnels within the Fallen Mountains until the god Hanan rocked the world with his fuckings, and then they’d poured forth from those broken caves. Maddek knew not what was true and he cared not. Because he could still see the crying Farian children, the desperation of mothers and fathers—and that they’d had no way to escape the pits.