“I’ve been thinking…” Talking in the tower still didn’t feel natural. Kelena half expected a backhand for speaking without Mother’s permission, but she swallowed the fear and went on. “You like this chamber because it has no openings except the door.”

  Alaan looked up from the cold leg of roast fowl he was cutting into. The servants had brought up hot food when they returned to the tower chamber—enough to feed three men—but he had left that to her, taking instead the cold supper from the day before.

  “It is easier to secure,” he said, “but if it were assaulted with even a small guard, there would be no escape. The same is true of fire. This chamber would become a deathtrap.”

  “But you’re able to rest when I’m here.”

  Kelena poked nervously at the creamed turnips on her plate, watching the steam rise from the place where her knife slid into them.

  She shouldn’t say anything more. It was stupid to think that she might have come up with a solution. But she had to try. She couldn’t let Alaan come to collapse again.

  “I was thinking… What if there were a sort of… chest-bed? For traveling. It wouldn’t have to be very big. I don’t need much space. But it would only have the one lid, the rest would be enclosed, and you could make your bed on top of the lid, so you could sleep knowing I was inside.”

  “I would not sleep at all knowing I locked a woman in a chest. I am not the refuse you call your family.”

  “Izak isn’t refuse.” Idly, Kelena turned over a lump of turnip. “In any case, I would know the lid was only locked for the day. That I hadn’t done anything wrong.” Anxiety tingled along her spine. She suppressed a shiver. “And you would let me out at sunset… wouldn’t you?”

  Alaan’s expression hardly ever changed visibly, but she could feel him contemplating her suggestion while he ate.

  When he looked up, she dropped her eyes hurriedly to her uneaten turnips.

  “Even if I agreed, it would not be a permanent solution,” the pirate said. The touch of awkwardness in the grafting didn’t reach his voice. “When you are married, your husband will not wish to sleep in a box.”

  Of course. Little idiot, never thinking of anyone but herself. Lord Clarencio was at least a head taller than she was.

  Belatedly, it occurred to her that Alaan hadn’t been referring to sleeping at all. Spots of fire burned along the top of Kelena’s cheeks, and her heart beat like the wings of a trapped bird.

  For some reason, she had never considered that Lord Clarencio might want that. Mother said that was all any man wanted, but the gallant Lord of the Cinterlands had seemed to Kelena to be set apart, something more than a man.

  “So stupid. It wouldn’t be a marriage unless it was consummated.”

  Kelena didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until she felt the awkwardness swell in the grafting. Every word she said on the subject was making Alaan more uncomfortable.

  “This is inappropriate dinner conversation,” she murmured to her plate.

  He accepted that without comment.

  For several minutes, they ate in silence. Or rather, he ate and Kelena moved food around her plate while it slowly cooled. She was hungry, but there was nothing appealing about the steaming meat, bread, and vegetables. During the fight, when Etian had cut Alaan’s hand, the smell of fresh hot blood had made her mouth water.

  Her stomach growled. She couldn’t feel the teeth chewing at her insides yet, but it was only a matter of time.

  “I’ll have to feed soon,” she said in a small voice. “I’m sorry.”

  Alaan wiped his hands on the napkin, then rose and washed them at the basin.

  “I will not bring you someone to slaughter,” he said.

  Swallowing, Kelena nodded. “I’m—”

  “You are sorry. But you do not regret it enough to stop.”

  Tears of frustration blurred the chamber. “Maybe if I were better or stronger… But it feels like it’s eating me, and then I don’t know what to do. I lose control.”

  Alaan spent what seemed like a long time hanging the towel back in its place on the stand, adjusting the edges and the ends until it draped perfectly.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  Just when Kelena had decided he wasn’t going to respond, he said, “I may have a temporary solution as well.”

  ***

  Long ago, Alaan’s father had told him a proverb—To the young, solutions are as obvious as the sun. They had been discussing a raed commander’s responsibility to take action, even in cases where there was no moral clarity to direct his course.

  At the time, he had thought understood, but he knew now that had only been childish arrogance. In the three cursed years since being dragged onto dead land, from his sixteenth raid season to his nineteenth, Alaan had been forced to jettison the simple, obvious answers of youth for harsh muddy reality.

  The lack of certainty forced him to weigh decisions carefully rather than take impulsive action—Alaan knew that was wisdom—but at times even the best possible course available left him unconvinced that he had done the right thing.

  He rasped the sharpening stone along the cutlass’s graceful curve a final time, then tested its edge.

  The steel was not the quality of the blades the Waeld forged, but he could not deny that Master Smith had created as beautiful a pair of weapons as a dirter could. He ran the rag over the black blade, wiping away the fine metal dust and leaving behind a light sheen of oil.

  The princess stood watching him, wondering at his choice of the heavy cutlass over the smaller swordbreaker, but she remained silent. She must sense through the grafting that he did not wish to explain.

  Ocean Rovers did not name their weapons. That was another foolish dirter custom to add to the many foolish customs Thornfield boasted.

  But in the sandy mud of the bailey, in the wake of his return from death, when Izak had prompted him to give a name to his blades, Alaan had not hesitated. He had known the blades like a part of his body, had felt their names resonate in his bones.

  Haelbringer, the cutlass, and Mehet, the swordbreaker.

  He couldn’t bring himself to sully his wife’s name for this task. That might be a sign that the solution he had devised was folly, but this was the only immediate answer to the blood drinking that he could live with.

  Or, potentially, not live with.

  Alaan rose.

  The princess’s heart raced, and her slender white hands wrung each other endlessly. She was more distressed by his proposed course of action than he was. To the Ocean Rovers, Death was an old friend. A raedr lived side-by-side with Death, and when it came for him, he embraced it as his final reward. To dirters, Death was an enemy to be feared and fled. They could not stand in its shadow without panic.

  Laying the blade to his arm, Alaan slit open the vein in his inner elbow.

  Hunger reared up in the princess at the scent of blood. Alaan felt himself salivating as if her hunger were his.

  She took a step closer, then stopped, her dark eyes questioning and afraid. He held out his arm. She took it, barely holding on, her fingertips as light as butterflies and cold as ice. Watching him as if she expected to be struck at any moment, she delicately licked the red that trickled from the gash.

  With the first taste of blood, her appetite overcame her fear. Her grip tightened. Her lips covered the wound, and she drank greedily.

  The idea of letting her feed from him had come to Alaan after the sparring match with the crown prince, while he watched the splintered laceration in his hand repair itself. The blood magic and the grafting conspired to heal Thorns much faster than regular humans. Within an hour, the mark had disappeared completely.

  Alaan would not bring an innocent to the slaughter, and he could not leave the princess long enough to find someone deserving of death. But he could allow her to drink his blood. If he survived, he would heal quickly. If he died, it would be fitting justice for allowing her to kill that serving boy in Siu Augine.

  None of these thoughts occurred to him while the princess drank, however.

  His world had narrowed to the sensation of her lips and tongue. The pressure of her teeth. Small gasps and wet slurps rose from the feast. Her long black hair hung down around her face, exposing a slice of pale, flawless flesh at the back of her neck. Every breath drew the clean, feminine scent of her into his lungs.

  His blood mingled with her saliva to cool on his skin, but he was molten inside. It had been so long since a beautiful woman had touched him.

  Alaan wrenched his arm away.

  The sudden violence of the jerk sent the princess stumbling past him. She caught the stone wall and righted herself. Panting, she stood with her blood-smeared face turned away from him.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw her shakily wipe her lips with the backs of her fingers.

  He composed himself. “Was that enough?”

  The lie rose within her, clearly tangible through the grafting. Her thirst for blood was quenched, but another part of the princess hungered for more. Not for blood, but for taste and touch and rapture.

  Through their connection, she must feel his sudden awareness of his own starvation, neglected, ignored, and now a storm of liquid fire.

  God of the Waves help him. Lusting after a woman betrothed to another man? Was there no longer any sin he would not commit? No sanctity he would not defile?

  The princess’s dark eyes were polished jet when she turned to him, her lips brilliant ruby, sparkling and wet, crimson with his blood. She took a shuddery breath to tell him that she had to keep feeding, when they both knew that what she meant was she wanted to be close, closer than skin—and that she knew he did as well.

  “Let that be enough,” Alaan cut her off.

  The lie sunk unspoken to the depths. “Yes… Yes, it was. I won’t need to feed again before we leave.”

  Nodding, he stalked to the washstand and studiously cleaned his arm. A spotty bruise colored the flesh around the cut from the suction and the prodding of her tongue.

  He slammed the hatch on that thought.

  “Alaan?” she said tentatively. “I’m sorry.”

  “You apologize for things which are not your fault.” He dried the wound. Already the blood magic was sealing it. In a few hours, nothing would remain. “I am to blame. This was a tactical error.”

  “Mother told me, with the grafting between a man and a woman… With her Thorns… But I wasn’t doing that, I swear!”

  “Please.” Alaan glared down at the bloody water in the basin, waiting until he could talk without shaming emotion clogging his voice. “Let that be enough.”

  Slowly, agreement filtered into the grafting.

  Without looking her way, Alaan stepped out into the corridor. He remained posted outside the door until midday, rebuilding the mental bulkhead that had been torn down, and contemplating her suggestion of a sleeping chest.