The Ippos King (Wraith Kings #3) - Grace Draven Page 0,22
The purr of a cat mixed with the promise of a warm fire and the sleepy seduction of a satisfied lover, all bound together into a sound that rolled out of her throat and rasped past her lips to bewitch him.
“I will take that as a compliment and bid you good evening, margrave,” she said, setting her half empty goblet down on the balcony’s railing cap. “I'll see you at dawn?”
He remembered to nod, even as all the blood in his body rushed toward his groin. He’d bless the darkness for its concealment except for the fact his companion saw better at night than she did during the day. “Shall I send a servant to fetch you?”
She declined the offer and wished him a peaceful sleep. He watched her until she disappeared from sight.
Serovek groaned under his breath. “Peaceful sleep. Not likely,” he muttered. He drained the contents of his goblet and did the same with Anhuset’s. He didn’t remember the last time he’d indulged in such a luxury as restful sleep, but maybe this time his dreams wouldn’t be of a doomed monk but of a silvery-haired woman of imposing gravitas and firefly eyes. One could always hope.
Chapter Four
No voices, no nightmares, no lights.
“Pluro Cermak’s farmstead.” Serovek gestured to a stretch of fallow fields sleeping under a thin blanket of new-fallen snow, the treeless landscape dotted by a large house and several barns. “Megiddo rests there.”
Shielded from the sun by her hood, Anhuset still squinted for a better look at the place where the monk’s body, alive but soulless, slept protected by ancient Kai magic. Her horse’s breath streamed out in misty clouds that hung in the cold air, obscuring part of her view. A year ago, Anhuset might have sensed the presence of sorcery. No longer, and the reminder of what she—and all the Kai—had lost in the galla war deepened the hollow inside her.
She and Serovek had departed High Salure just before dawn, accompanied by a half dozen of his soldiers as they descended from the mountain fortress to the flat plains at its feet. They had ridden a half day, finally stopping on this small hillock overlooking the farmstead. The rattle of a bridle and occasional creak of a saddle as someone shifted in their seat mingled with equine whuffles and the far-off call of the first birds returning north in anticipation of spring. Otherwise, their party was silent, waiting for their leader’s next instructions.
Serovek’s face was grim as he gazed down at his vassal’s holdings. Anhuset had seen the margrave flippant and teasing, an unabashed flirt who never failed to raise her hackles with his glib wit. She’d also seen him brave and self-sacrificing, displaying more nobility than sense on occasion. He was charming, ruthless, and calculating. A man of many facets who’d dug an arrowhead out of her shoulder with gentle hands, executed a murderer with those same hands, and ridden into battle alongside a man his own king considered a possible enemy. She’d never seen him like this: remote, forbidding, as if the task of returning Megiddo’s body to the Jeden monks was a trial to be endured.
“Is the monk’s brother willing to give him up to his order? Or is this a thing he’s obligated to do?” She’d assumed the first, but the death of a loved one, especially an unnatural death like this, sometimes made people react in strange ways and hold on to that which had already left them long ago.
Serovek maneuvered his mount to start down the slope. Anhuset stayed abreast of him as the others fell in behind. “My impression from his letter is that he welcomes the monastery’s willingness to take over guardianship of his brother’s body. He simply needs someone else to take Megiddo there.”
A man bearing a strong resemblance to Megiddo, only older, met them at the door. A woman, coiffed and layered against the cold, stood next to them. Both bowed stiffly, and their gazes shuttled back and forth between Serovek and Anhuset, lingering on her the longest.
“Welcome, my lord.” Pluro Cermak offered a second bow. “We’re most pleased to have you guest with us. Come in from the cold.”
Anhuset didn’t follow Serovek across the threshold. The invitation had been for the vassal’s lord, not his escort, and she considered herself part of that group. They would wait outside until Lord Pangion had spent time with Cermak in courteous fraternization.
Serovek was having none of it. He half-turned, scowled at her and the soldiers with