A Burning Sea by Theodore Brun (i am reading a book txt) 📕

still. The room was tastefully appointed, easily large enough to take the few pieces of furniture placed about it. He noticed a doorway into another room which was cast in shadow, and opposite him an opening onto a balcony, through which he could see the sea wall of the city and beyond that the Bosporus.

Why would he be released from Arbasdos’s black hole into this empty set of rooms? Was he still a prisoner? If so, he infinitely preferred these new quarters.

There was a movement in the corner of his eye. He turned as a figure appeared out of the shadow and stopped in the darkened doorway.

Seeing it, he felt a strange fissure crack open in his chest. He was still dreaming, surely. This was some cruel mockery brewed in his befuddled brain. All of it – the pleasant scent filling the room, the dusky glow off the Bosporus, this slender form he knew so well, stepping gracefully into the dim light of the chamber – must be a lie. ‘You,’ he whispered.

‘Yes,’ she replied softly. It was her voice, and the shock of it struck him like a whip. Her face looked thinner than he remembered. It wore on it, he realized, the mark of suffering, her high cheekbones sharp as arrow-tips, the full curves of her lips a little drawn, the restless swirl of those dark ocean eyes calmer now but brighter, almost feverish. Yet she was still astonishingly beautiful.

‘I dreamed of you,’ he said.

Her lips pressed tighter, not quite a smile. ‘And I, you.’

‘I. . . I have a hundred questions. A thousand—’

‘Later,’ she murmured.

They moved towards each other with a sudden rush, meeting in the middle of the room, folding into one another, his doubting mind only now believing what his hands could hold. She clasped him even tighter, as if the vision of him might slip away like smoke through her fingers if she gripped him any the less. Pain flared across his back like a hearth flame, making him suck in his breath. She immediately relented her grip.

‘You’re wounded,’ she said.

‘It’s nothing,’ he murmured. ‘I’ll live.’

‘Let me see.’

She made him sit on the small backless seat set to one side of the room and had him pull off his tunic. They said nothing as her fingers traced the lines and furrows that the scourge had drawn in his flesh, her touch light as a moth’s wing. She left off and crossed the room, soon returning with a basin of water and a cloth. The water was soothing against the hot, dull throb of the whip wounds. And soon he felt the warm patter of some other liquid on his shoulders. She was weeping.

‘You’ve tended my wounds before,’ he said. A world away, in the frozen forests of the north. ‘When I came for you. This time, it was you who came.’

‘I had to.’ She left off her swabbing and sat down beside him, lifting something from round her neck. ‘I had to return this.’ She opened her hand and there, in the dim light, he saw his amulet nestled in her palm. ‘I know it means much to you.’

Such a simple thing. Two pieces of silver fashioned into the shape of a little hammer. But she was right, its twin arms had much to tell. . . although she didn’t know what. His hand moved over hers, closing her fingers. ‘It’s yours now.’

‘I followed you to Dunsgard but I was too late.’

‘Huh. I couldn’t serve that worthless piece of—’ He stopped, not wanting to sour this moment with the memory of a man like Osvald. ‘I had to leave.’

‘Why did you come here?’

He shook his head. ‘Why did you follow?’

She sighed. ‘We have ample time to tell each other everything. It’s enough for now to know you live. You are here.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘With me.’

His gaze was falling deep into hers, but he found himself afraid. He knew how he had been there before, had not forgotten the wound that the loss of her had scoured into his heart. ‘And Ringast,’ he said, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice. ‘Does he live?’

‘Is this answer enough for you?’ Gently, her hand slid behind his head and pulled him towards her. They kissed and it was like a spark to dry tinder in his heart. He breathed in the scent of her – even here she smelled like the woods of her homeland, fresh and free, untainted by the decadent concoctions of the perfumers of this city. He remembered that scent, remembered their one stolen encounter in the darkness among the byres of Uppsala. The start of so much. And yet the end of it all.

The kiss ended and she rested her forehead against his, her eyes closed. He listened to the ebb and flow of her breathing, answered by the distant turn of the waves on the Bosporus.

At last her fingers threaded through his. ‘Come,’ she said.

He must never know, Lilla thought to herself.

He will never know.

She lay in the darkness, her heart still beating fast, feeling joy, fear, relief, shame. Feeling too much for one heart to understand. Instead she focused on the presence of him lying next to her, sound asleep. She guessed the silk sheets and soft pillows were as good as a sleeping draught to his weary body after the torment he had endured. It was strange. She hardly knew the man and yet their lovemaking came as naturally as breathing. She remembered that from the first time. The only time. It was like inhaling him, drawing him deep inside her like the smoke of Urtha’s weed, filling her mind and body with him until those waves of sweet thunder swept through her body and left her undone.

Was that love? Did she love him? He had suffered and she couldn’t stand the thought of it. And yet here she was, about to ask him to suffer some more. . .

‘Lilla.’

She glanced down, surprised to see his dark