The bodyguard had rarely spoken opinions aloud. He assumed more virulent thoughts were stored in her mind, or shared with Kavya. Tallis appreciated that she at least thought to include him in her assessment.

“They have free will.” Kavya sounded tired and, more tellingly, she sounded disappointed. Grief bowed her posture and tightened the lines around her eyes. She was a woman in mourning, but remorse was not for killers. Tallis had firsthand experience with that fact.

She was so Dragon-damned beguiling that she kept distracting him from his goal.

“They would’ve been a hindrance,” he said tersely. “We need to move.”

Chandrani nodded, although she still assessed Tallis as she would a rabid coyote. She pulled her curved saber from a scabbard wrapped at her waist and set out, descending the mountain toward a river far below. “If you strike me again or harm Kavya,” she said over her shoulder, “you will never sleep again. You’d awaken missing your legs from the knee down.”

“Noted.”

Kavya didn’t follow. She stood facing Tallis, chin raised high. He wished he could read her eyes. As his gift ebbed, so did his heightened awareness. What would he see in those amber depths? Misery? Regret? Or worse, something akin to Pashkah’s sly triumph? Regardless of his personal grudge, he didn’t want to learn she was her murderous brother’s beatific partner.

“Are you back?” she asked.

“Back?”

She reached up, hesitated, then cupped his cheeks in her icy palms. He would’ve thought her skin warmed by exertion, but perhaps shock ruled the day.

“Are you Tallis? Or will I have a berserker at my back for the rest of the night?”

“You shouldn’t want either.”

“I just want to know who or what I’m dealing with.” She paused and tilted her head. “Wait, why wouldn’t I want the other side of you? You and your gift saved my life.”

“Unpredictability.”

“I saw that, yes. But something deeper. Your voice . . . you didn’t mean that.”

Tallis made a halfhearted attempt to shake free of her gentle hold, but she held fast. A foreign part of him liked the idea that his skin was warming hers. “Finally able to read my mind, goddess?”

“You’ll know when I can,” she said with a tart scowl. “Tell me.”

“Or?”

“Or I’ll ask Chandrani to forgo waiting for you to sleep. How would you use your gift without your legs?”

He placed his hands over hers. Now she was the one gently trapped. “She does everything you say?”

“She has a mind of her own, but she’s devoted that mind to my safety.”

“Must be nice. A trained Amazon at your beck and call. Why didn’t she find you in the tent?”

Kavya pinched her lips together. Her eyes darted aside. “I . . . I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it.”

“Talk.” The derision he felt toward her kind spiked. His rational anger was returning. “You don’t talk. You’re unnatural.”

“And you’ve nearly evaded my question. Don’t believe that will ever happen. Other than the obvious, what do I have to fear from the berserker?”

Tallis tightened his fingers around hers until she winced. He pulled her fists to his chest. “I was able to evade your brother’s psychic attacks because nothing logical remains when I go that deep. Just . . .” He swallowed. What was this? He’d never been ashamed of his gift before. Something about this woman made him want to be more than a thoughtless Pendray cliché. “I work by instinct and take on an animal’s compulsion to survive at all costs. And . . . to reproduce at all costs.”

Confusion marred her soft brow. “We’re a dying race. We can’t reproduce.”

He pulled her closer. Their mouths could touch if he wanted that connection. Or if she did. “That doesn’t stop the animal from trying. A primal part of me wants you any way I can get you.”

Kavya inhaled. The steady rhythm of her pulse at her wrists pumped with new force. She wasn’t a fluttering butterfly beneath his fingers; she was a drummer pounding on a timpani.

“You’d force me? My people have a long, disgusting history of forcing women. I’d never known it was part of the Pendray tradition.”

“We fuck like animals, but not by force.” He grinned at her look of blatant shock—nostrils flaring, lips parting. “In that way it seems we barbarians have one over your high-handed ways. Anyone who tried to assault a Pendray woman would be pursued to the ends of the earth by her family.”

She snatched her hands free despite how firmly he’d imprisoned the wrists abraded by hemp. “I wouldn’t know anything about that either. Family means danger.”

“So I’ve seen.”

“You . . . you bit him.”

“I did. I like my seaxes too much to risk them against a Dragon-forged sword.”

She straightened her shoulders. “Thank you.”

Her gratitude was a surprise. So was the moment she slowly lifted one flowing sleeve to his mouth and used the fabric to stroke his skin. The blood was sticky against the silk, grabbing at it. He must look like the beast he’d unleashed.

Again, that galling sense of shame. He forced it aside, as the last of his primitive temper cooled. He wanted her discredited. That was a given now. Why was he having anything more to do with her? He could take her to the Council to stand trial. But what had she done? There was no proof that she’d broken laws worthy of imprisonment in the high Fortress of the Chasm.

Staying with her had nothing to do with the way she cleaned his face.

Nothing.

Tallis batted her hands away. “Don’t try tricks that have worked in the past, goddess. I’ve learned them, and I don’t appreciate being condescended to.”

Without waiting for her reply—too stricken by the hurt on her face—he followed the woman in armor. She was a third of the way down the mountainside. The Beas River carved a wide ravine that ran from the highest reaches of the Pir Panjal down to the Punjab Basin. They might camp soon, down among the river-fed trees. Or Tallis might leave soon. He continued moving for the sake of moving.

What if she really had meant to present those Leaders? What if they’d been ready to work toward ending the Indranan civil war?

Tallis was left to his thoughts. Yes, the Sun had fallen. Her reputation among her kind would never be restored. But what if his personal revenge had led to Pashkah’s discovery of her presence—and to those murdered men? Would Kavya have been able to protect them had she been readying herself behind the altar, preparing to greet the cult with genuinely hopeful news?

No. She would be dead.

That knowledge was as clear as the river below, and just as chilly. No matter Tallis’s actions, she never would’ve taken to that altar except to kneel and die. Pashkah would’ve been nauseatingly satisfied and incomprehensibly powerful.

Tallis had saved her life. After all, he hadn’t wanted the Sun dead. Only ruined. That sense of having accomplished his mission returned, yet it felt oddly hollow. He breathed deeply and exhaled so much tension. The morning would see his senses clear and his life restored.

That sealed it. He wouldn’t camp with the Sun and her bodyguard. Instead he would leave them on the low mountain pass with her shredded reputation as company.

But the animal lurking deep in his soul protested Tallis’s decision.

—

Kavya reached the river’s edge in time to see Tallis turn to the south and keep walking. Where is he going? she silently asked Chandrani.

He didn’t say. Just finished his descent. Didn’t even look my way.

“After all that?” Kavya’s wrath surged into something powerful and unknown. She’d been angry before, but this was anger born of insult. “Travel on. Put distance between us and the valley. Make what camp you can. I’ll be back soon.”

With long strides, she strove to catch up to Tallis. The wind whipped through her silk sari, chilling her bone-deep. She had intended to don a heavier sari for the evening’s announcement, one without the turquoise of the North or the cobalt of the South, and without her customary gold.