Page 27 of Prize of the Warlord
I lift my fingers, and he quickly pads the horse’s wound with the scarf and cinches the belt tight.
“She’s too weak to carry both of you,” he says. “You’ll ride with me, mouse.”
I slide off the horse, and my legs immediately crumple. Terror has left me weak. My bloodied hand sinks into the crusted salt.
The Warlord drops to one knee, cupping my face and running his thumb along my scratched cheekbone. Then his fingers drift to my chest, where there’s a gnawed hole through the furs and leather.
He pulls all of the clothing aside, inspecting the small teeth marks over my breastbone. “Not too deep,” he says. “It’s barely bleeding.”
But he doesn’t remove his hand from my chest.
Zeha has dismounted and moved aside to tend to her mare and call her hawks. The others in our party seem distracted with their own wounds. For a moment, the Warlord and I are alone, unobserved.
His fingertips skim along the inner curve of my breast. I inhale raggedly, watching him, quivering at the intensity of the pleasure that rolls through me at that one tentative touch.
His fingers nudge deeper, under the edge of the furs, grazing my nipple. It’s hard and tight with need. Color rises in his face, above the blond scruff.
“She’s right,” he whispers. “I was a fool to take us through that part of the forest. You could have died.”
I swallow and suck in a breath, my chest surging against his fingers.
“Sometimes the passage is easy,” he continues. “Not a swarm in sight. But this time—” He sighs and arranges my clothes again before unfolding his great frame and standing to his full height. He towers above me, and I tremble with the hunger for him to lift me, to crush me against himself.
My body craves him, and I don’t know why. He’s my enemy, a killer of my people. His kind have destroyed lives and villages all along the borders of my district.
I shouldn’t want him. And I certainly shouldn’t be tremulously thrilled at the idea of riding with him again.
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The Warlord makes me ride behind him this time. I suppose he doesn’t want to deal with his body’s response to me when he should be mourning his fallen warrior. But I’m not sure that having me leaning against his back with my arms around his waist is any less tantalizing for either of us.
The sun sets and the sky darkens to a deep bluish-purple, like a bruise. Crisp white stars glitter in the arched expanse. Yet still the Warlord does not call for a halt. He seems intent on crossing this stretch of the Bloodsalt before we stop for the night.
The white tiger Kaja has run off, and he doesn’t call her back. Perhaps she’s not so much his pet as his occasional partner, half-wild, permitted to roam as she pleases.
My body aches, my wounds sting, and I’m so weary I think I might tumble off the horse any second. And it’s cold—a deep, dark, bone-cracking cold.
“How much longer?” I whimper against his cloaked back.
“This part of the Bloodsalt is volatile,” he says. “We can’t stop here.”
“Volatile how?”
“Sometimes it bursts open.”
“Like an earthquake?”
“Like an explosion of liquid clay. Like a geyser of blood. And then, as it settles, everything is sucked down with it, and the hole seals over. See there?” He points to a branching scar, half-concealed by salt. “That’s from a recent explosion.”
“I thought the Bloodsalt was safe, or stable, at least. Why do you ride across it if it’s so dangerous?”
“Because we have no other choice. Because this is the world we were given—a land laced with ruin, soured by corrupt magic.”
“It’s my people’s fault you were driven out here,” I murmur. My limbs are weakening, slackening, no matter how desperately I want to be strong for him, to endure, to show him that I can be tough—
My arms drop from his waist, and I nearly slide off, but he reaches back and steadies me.
“I’m so cold and tired and thirsty,” I moan.
