“What?”
“The caliph,” she said. “He may not give you men or arms. But it would cost him very little indeed to offer you something almost as valuable.”
She felt him still again. “Yes,” he said. “Of course. Recognition. His war-band won’t like it, if you and Hrahima are right.”
“I shall see him tomorrow,” she said.
“Will he see you?”
“I am a Wizard of Tsarepheth,” she scoffed. “He’ll see what I tell him to.”
She paused; she saw him considering her silence. He said, “Whatever brilliance is upon you, Wizard Samarkar, pray share it.”
“Is there a…” She didn’t know the Uthman term. “An empress dowager, a valide sultan? The mother of the caliph? If I could infiltrate the harem—”
“Cocky.” His tone shifted along with hers: what had been hushed and serious became banter, flirtation. “But then you’d be stuck in the harem, and what if you could not gain the sympathy of the valide sultan?”
Samarkar sighed, frustrated. Despite that, she was startled anew by just how easy it was, lying here in the arms of someone who cheered and comforted her.
She turned her face to his and breathed in his breath, let him breathe hers. He leaned his forehead against hers and smiled at her. “Stay out of the harem. They’d keep you if they got you, and I wouldn’t trade you for eight good mares, Samarkar.”
“So show me again,” she said, gazing deeply into his eyes, “what you’ve learned in the saddle, Re Temur.”
He drew in a breath and held onto it, fighting giggles. Until she poked him in the ribs and he collapsed into laughter in her arms.
That laughter—and their pleasure in it—was a little frantic, uncertain in her ears: a shine off a bitter edge. Edene still lost, their allies fragile and scattered, an army at their face but no army at their backs … and yet. Samarkar touched Temur’s face in the shifting dark, his downy beard snagging her travel-rough fingertips. The skin of his shoulders, which never felt the sun or wind, was supple and soft. His breath tautened as she traced the line of the bone and turned her head to press her open lips to the soft hollow between his neck and collarbone. His scar was rough and hot—and slick with grease—against her cheek. He gasped; his thigh slid between hers. She felt the press of his sex through fabric, against her hip. His mouth passed over her eye and cheek to find her lips, his fingers beneath her chin to lift her face. The kiss was soft at first, nibbling. She did not bite, but caught his lip between her teeth so gently. His mouth opened. The slippery, velvet roughness of his tongue found hers for long moments before he broke it off and pulled back the width of her hand, panting.
“You see?” he said. “Very adaptable to your foreign customs, my folk.”
She pulled him down to her again. His hand skimmed her breast, the softness of her belly, dimpling flesh as it slipped inside the waist of her trousers. Now she caught her breath and held it.
He paused, perhaps concerned. “Too soon?”
There had been blood, that first time. Not much, but enough for irony. She, widowed and barren, had offered up a virgin’s sacrifice to the six merciful immortals of fertility. She’d laughed brutally at it then; he had been horrified he might have done her harm. And here he was, worried still.
She put her hand over his. “The surest way to expertise is practice.”
He hesitated still but found her gaze with his own, and she made sure to hold it. Her tone, she thought, could have been more confident.
“I want you,” she said, adjusting her tone to that of a wizard—or a princess—who gave orders meant to be followed even when her heart quailed with uncertainty and misgivings in her breast. At least there were no misgivings this time … and the only uncertainty was that of inexperience.
His, as well as hers, she thought, watching relief smooth the hesitation from his face. He had not said, but she thought his Edene had been his only lover. It made her like him better, and she already liked him very well.
If he needed her to be certain for him—she was Samarkar. She could seem as certain as anyone.
“Touch me,” she urged, finding a smile for him that was fierce and sincere and more passionate than she herself would have believed she had the heart for, back in Tsarepheth. And he did, gently and slowly, until they both forgot themselves again and the awkward carefulness dissolved into a messier and more enthusiastic sort of awkwardness altogether.
7
The twins huddled in their insufficient coat and boots, dizzy with altitude and glad of the feathered warmth of the enormous bird whose neck they bestrode, glad too that the rukh was perched and not beating into the savage winds that had borne them this far. Though it was high summer below and beyond the Steles of the Sky, they had flown up into the depths of eternal winter. Only the rukh and the bar-headed goose could fly so high.