Chapter Thirty

 

GREAT MOON LUN RODE HIGH in the sky, veiled by the smoke that had taken Altan to his ancestors. In the shadows cast in her pure white light, Altan’s pyre stretched black and smoldering across the beaten grass. The men of the hunt had spent the day gathering turves and felling trees to supply the pyre. Tayy had worked beside them, hauling brush and logs roped to his saddle from the river. By late afternoon Bolghai had set torch to kindling; the night had passed watching the pyre burn. Midnight saw the flames fallen to glowing embers crumbling into ash.

After paying her respects, the Lady Bortu pleaded weariness and returned to the ger-tent palace. By ones and twos, the warriors and chieftains who had stayed with the khan’s army followed her lead to find their own tents and their rest. Mergen had stayed until his general, with much gratitude for the honor shown his son, had led his household away to suffer their grief in privacy, and then he, too, had gone, to his bed. Perhaps to one offering more human comforts, but Prince Tayy didn’t want to know about that. Sechule had wandered among the lesser mourners, leading the gur-khan’s gaze like a tame lamb until she attached herself to a knot of women making their way home while the flames still burned. Goodwives, they didn’t acknowledge her presence among them. Given the power of her whispers in the court’s ear, neither did they turn her away.

The prince noted it all with maddening clarity. The three shamans conferred over the fire and his cousin the poet with a lute in his hands plucked out some song to commemorate the life returning in smoke to its ancestors. With his face closed and secret, Qutula had stayed at his side for most of the night. Pleading only a desire to support his prince in his sorrow, he had allowed no one to approach until, as Great Moon shone down on them from the very top of the sky, he had drifted to the edge of the thinning crowd and quietly slipped away.

Tayy thought he ought to send someone to watch him, but the only person he trusted with the errand lay in cinders on the pyre. He wanted Jumal back in his own company, and General Yesugei to guard his uncle while Jochi digested the bitter herbs of his grief. But they were far to the south with the Uulgar prisoners, now vassals of the Qubal. The death of one soldier seemed hardly sufficient to require their return.

“Grim thoughts for a grim day.” Bolghai had come upon him silently, while his mind had lingered on his departing cousin. As with everything the shaman said, his words held a riddle connected at their center to Tayy’s own thoughts.

“I think he wants to kill me,” he said. “I think he worried Altan would figure that out. Duwa must have guessed as much and solved the problem for him.”

“Clever boy,” the shaman approved while Prince Tayy watched the woman, Toragana, approach his cousin Bekter with a promise in her smile. Bekter seemed not to mind the stuffed bird nesting on her head; his answering smile was warm and full of memories. So. The royal poet slung his lute onto his back. Taking the hand of the shamaness, he led her away from the crowd. Tayy didn’t begrudge them their happiness, but he felt like he’d swallowed a coal from the pyre, and that it had lodged beneath his breastbone where his heart should be.

“Am I going to die?” he asked more of the blighted night than the shaman. But the shaman heard, and answered anyway.

“Of course,” he said. “But as to when, who knows?”

He did know, though. Tayy could see it in his eyes. “Will it matter?” He qualified the question.“To the ulus? To anyone?”

“Oh, yes. I can assure you that your death will matter.” Bolghai gave him one of those enigmatic smiles with more mischief in it than seemed called for under the circumstances. Then, with a little hop in his step, the shaman walked away.

“It will matter to me.”

Eluneke. She’d come up behind him, silent as Bolghai had been, and had heard the conversation he’d meant only for his own ears, really. He felt like a whining fool when he remembered it, but she took his hand in hers and said, “Your death means everything to the ulus.”

She didn’t say it wouldn’t happen. In fact, she said it as though it already had happened. So, again. At least he knew. He let her draw him away from the dying embers, down to the place they counted as their own by the side of the river, where the light of Great Moon scarcely penetrated the mossy trees.

 

 

 

Qutula rode out past the glow of firelight. His heart felt light and he grinned in anticipation as he left behind him the gloom of a court in mourning. His lady was pleased with him. The fizz she sent through his limbs, like a well-fermented kumiss, might have addled the mind of a lesser man, but it spurred Qutula to greater feats of clearheaded machinations. Dead or sent away or in mourning, the greatest threats to his conspiracy now littered the field of the vanquished. Power fueled his sleepless energy. He would have laughed at the exultant pleasure of it, but restrained himself that much, to ride in silence. He didn’t own the night yet and wouldn’t have his plans ruined by a chance ear.

He found a place protected in shadows cast by an outcrop of rock and filled with flowers that had lost their color in the moonlight. There he dismounted and laid his coat on the ground. This time, he knew she would come and threw himself down on his coat to wait with the smell of the flowers in his nose and the pleasure of a plan well begun coursing through his veins. He had stripped the prince of his protectors; soon Tayyichiut, son of Chimbai, would be dead. With his rivals out of the way, the khan would look to his son for an heir. The thought warmed him and, in spite of his intentions, he slept.

 

 

 

It was no surprise that Toragana led him to her shaman’s tent. They’d left the girl, his sister it now seemed, at Altan’s funeral pyre. She couldn’t have arrived before them except in her totem form, but Toragana assured him she wouldn’t take that route. “It’s much too soon,” she said as they passed under the watchful eye of the stuffed raven over her door. “The risk is too great that she would lose her way.”

By that, he thought she meant that the girl might turn into a toad and stay that way, permanently. There were other hazards to that calling as well, however. Only the initiate, and the occasional foreign god, might know the mystery of dream travel, the nether region between their world and the next by which the shaman moved through the mortal realm. He’d never heard of a shaman who entered the dreamscape and failed to return, but he supposed it could happen. As a poet, the tragic possibilities captured his imagination. As a brother, however, the same images made him shudder with dread. Sensibly, he figured Eluneke would walk home.

“I didn’t know she was my sister the last time we met,” he reminded the shamaness. He’d thought her a threat to the prince’s standing, if not his life. Now he didn’t know what to think. “I’d like to talk to her again, now that I know we’re related.”

“And you will.” She took the lute from his back and leaned it against her worktable, then drew him to her bed of feathers and furs, her mind and her nimble fingers focused on the ties of his coats. “But not tonight.”

She was with Prince Tayyichiut, he guessed, and figured he ought to be more worried about that. Mergen needed them both for marriages of state and he’d charged Bekter with keeping an eye on her. But Altan was dead and Duwa a slave. Things seemed to be falling apart and he knew enough of legendry and the old songs to recognize the signs of disaster that followed when kings set their own will above the will of the gods. He would never accuse his father of hubris, but an excess of caution could prove just as costly.

Toragana had taken off his coat and was working on his breeches. Politely he had begun to slide her shaman’s robes from her shoulders, but his heart wasn’t in it. Tonight he felt too sad for the pleasures of her flesh.

She must have read his thoughts in the hesitation of his fingers, because she stilled him with her hands over his heart. “My spirit is heavy with many sorrows, too,” she told him, “but if you would do me the kindness, I would wish to be held a little before you go.”

He hadn’t known until she asked, but it was exactly what he needed as well. He told her so with a kiss and lute-string roughened fingertips upon her skin. Lying face-to-face, with arms and legs entwined, her forehead resting lightly on his brow, he felt the tightness of his grief ease a little bit. When his fingers began to relearn the map of her skin, she didn’t complain, but stroked his own more coarsely drawn country with her lips. They didn’t laugh the way they had before; desire became a drowning thing, with sorrow left on the shore like old clothes for a little while. Not all magic, he realized, required a potion or a spell.

 

 

 

“ ysonshavegone to the beds of strangers, my only daughter to the heir. All that I’ve worked for is coming undone, Sechule, and once again I find myself back here with you.”

He had followed her blindly to the tent she shared with her children for no reasons of secrecy, but out of blind need where she led him. It was smaller than he remembered, two lattices crowded with bedding and the worktable where she mixed her herbs, but with few of the luxuries he should have provided for the mother of his sons. Chimbai had wanted no claims on his younger brother, but Chimbai was long dead now, back the other side of a war they had fought and won without him. And without him they must go on, though the world seemed to fall like the ash of Altan’s pyre around them. Perhaps his mother had been right all along.

As if reading his mind, Sechule answered the melancholy litany of his thoughts, both spoken and not, with an old challenge lightly laid. “Perhaps you should take that as a sign from the gods and marry me.”

She stroked his face, her eyes dark with invitation. Her lips fell lightly apart, drawing his attention to the rush of her heated breath and he thought, Yes, perhaps it’s right this time. He knew it was a weakness, to forget the fights and her ambition. But Mergen’s body clenched with the promise of solace in eyes that seemed to swallow him whole. He could have her beside him for all the nights of his life, desire quenched with no greater effort than to reach his arm across the blankets . . .

“Yes,” he said, and met her light tone though it cost him, because the sorrow was still there like a blight on his heart. “Perhaps, when the prince has been made khan, and I have stepped down to live out my days as a well-loved adviser, we can marry and grow old together with our sons and our grandchildren around us.”

It wasn’t what she wanted to hear, and he couldn’t figure out what he’d done now. She’d known, from the beginning . . . she couldn’t have thought . . . He would give her all he was and all he had to himself alone, but she must know that she would never be khaness, her sons would never follow him on the dais. He owed that duty to his brother.

That she had not known, or had not accepted this simple fact, showed itself in the cooling of her ardor.

“Don’t think about it now.” She gave a little rueful laugh, as though she had come out the butt of some cruel joke, but her fingers paused only a moment as they stripped him of his sword and dagger, and his clothes. “Who knows what the future will bring.”

The way she said it, he thought perhaps the rumors about witchcraft had more truth in them than he had ever believed. What do you know? “Can you read my fortune in the bottom of a cup, then, and promise me a wife with skin as soft as butter, with hair like the mane of a fine black mare?”

“And fine strong sons to give offerings to the spirits for your soul.”

With Altan lately dead he thought the promise of sons to see him on his own way to the ancestors less than tactful. But she drew him down into her soft bed and welcomed him into her arms with an indulgent smile. “Think later,” she admonished him. “You can be gur-khan in the morning. Tonight, you are my intended husband and entitled to an accounting of what I bring to this match.”

She meant her body, and he took possession like a husband while he planned the campaign to capture her soul, which remained remote and out of his reach. As he fell asleep between her breasts, he thought perhaps when they had married, she would open that door to him as well.

 

 

 

By Great Moon Lun, Eluneke could see the Qubal heading back to the tent city of the khan. Bathed in that stark white light, the pyre of the prince’s follower, Altan, showed stark and black. The descent into the little dell where the Onga River ran, however, became a descent into moist and earthy darkness.

Taking his hand, Eluneke led the prince carefully down into the pitchy night that wrapped the trees. “Not magic,” she assured him as all the details of leaf and tree disappeared into the darkness.

He knew that, of course. “I wish it were,” he answered, and she heard the pain of his loss and the knowledge of more to come tighten the words in his throat. “We could hide down here in the dark until it was all over up there.”

She understood the sentiment, but there was no hiding from fate. Before her mystical eye, his face was losing its flesh, the beautiful young warrior she loved fading to flensed bone as each step took them deeper into the darkness. Above, a dry leaf rustled with a purposeful tread. They had picked up a guard, possibly an assassin, but she didn’t think so yet. Qutula was occupied elsewhere. Tears welled in her eyes, but she didn’t stop. Didn’t need to warn the prince either. Though he divided most of his attention between the treacherous climb and her face, he stole a glance back at the moving shadows where the sound had come from.

“I don’t think Qutula can afford to lose another man yet,” he said, which summed up her own thoughts on their unwanted companion.

Between them, they knew the lay of the land along the river better than any of Qutula’s Durluken, or the Nirun. The spy, or guardsman, came no further as Eluneke and her prince made their way by touch among the dark and looming trees. Finally, she knew by the soft press of moss underfoot that they had come to their own special place. Tayy folded his legs and sat with his back against the tree sacred to King Toad. Eluneke followed him, pensively resting her chin on the arms crossed over her knee.

“So are you a real shaman now?” he asked, “I saw a lot in my travels, but never someone climbing lightning before.” He’d seen wonders, however, and this one, she recognized, had frightened him only for her sake.

“Not yet,” she answered glumly. Eluneke still had one more task to complete. She had to travel to the underworld and return with the knowledge to lead the dying to their ancestors. This was the last, most terrifying step: to travel with the dead and learn their secrets, and return unscathed. And she would have to cajole the soul of the prince back to the living with her.

“I am committed to saving you,” she said, knowing the trap his mind was caught in.

“I don’t know how,” he answered glumly. “My uncle won’t see the danger, or if he does, refuses to believe his eyes.”

Eluneke winced at the mention of the gur-khan who was, it seemed, also her father.

“I’m sorry.” He hurried to apologize for hurting her with the reminder, but she didn’t shy away from the thought.

“It doesn’t matter what he wants, you know, or who he would see us marry to secure the peace. You’re my husband by the gods’ light.” Her visions had made that clear enough, so she hadn’t given much thought to his feelings in the matter. Hadn’t given much thought to her own feelings come to that. She’d accepted it as she accepted that her hair was thick and her hands square and more useful than pretty.

He was a prince, which was nice, but he was about to die, which wasn’t. She had felt herself drawn to him at first sight, but hadn’t expected the way her body went still and watchful whenever he came into view or the unthinking way she moved to meet him with all her nerves tingling when he looked back at her. From that first vision in the doorway of Toragana’s tent, however, she had known the urge to rage and weep at the sightless skull that came between his face and her eyes. If she couldn’t save him, how could he be her husband? If she couldn’t save him, how could she live without him?

Her husband. He’d accepted her from the first and had joined in her loving conspiracy to save him without understanding why she was worth fighting his uncle for. They still had to work around the whole dead thing, though.

“Then we have to convince my uncle, your father, very quickly, before the gods have made you a widow.”

“Don’t joke about it.” She hadn’t meant to sound so angry, but she wouldn’t hear him give up. If she had to follow him onto his pyre and drag him away from the gods by the force of her arms and her will, she wouldn’t let him go.

“Sorry.” He ducked his head to hide his confusion and misery, but she sensed it rolling off his skin in waves. “Altan is already dead. I should be glad my uncle sent Jumal away, or he’d be dead now, too, I think. So I have to ask myself which is best: do I fight my cousin, and my uncle, too, if necessary to stay alive, knowing that it will cost the lives closest to me and that I will die anyway? Or do I give Qutula the opportunity he’s waiting for and end it quickly, without the loss of all the innocent life that stands between us.”

“Don’t say it! Don’t give up, don’t ever give up!” She took his face between her hands, as if she could impress on him the absolute necessity that he fight even a losing battle against his cousin. “The gods gave you to me, and you will fight until I give you permission to stop, which will be never. If the task were truly impossible, they would not have promised happiness at the end of it.” Fate had promised her a husband. The happiness part she came up with on her own, but she was determined to make that happen as well.

“It doesn’t have to be impossible,” her prince corrected her, his own hands trailing fingers through her maiden’s loose tresses. “It need only be unacceptable.” He kissed her with tears and fierce longing and she knew she would be his downfall and wept.

“Not for me,” she berated him. Her knees tucked under her chin, she rocked inconsolably. “Do not trade your life for mine, I forbid it!”

“You have taken to the role of princess with remarkable speed, but I am still the heir.” He joked gently, brushing her hair back and wiping the damp from her cheeks. “I give the orders here, and I command that you stop crying this instant. I’m not dead yet, and until it happens, we won’t know how we are meant to stop it.”

“I don’t think I’m going to be a biddable wife.” She wrinkled her nose at him to show her displeasure at his lordly manners but brought the argument back to the urgent promise she required of him. “But I’ll make this bargain with you. If you don’t make any stupid deals with your cousin, I’ll try to be an obedient wife.”

He tilted his head so that it rested against the tree at his back and looked up into the graying sky. “No you won’t,” he said with a little smile on his face.

“Probably not,” she agreed. “But I’ll do anything I can for you if you just ask.”

“I know.” He took her hand in his, kissed her knuckles with the breath of a sigh. “Sit with me,” he asked, “until I have to go.”

“Always,” she said, meaning: “I will always be here for you, no matter what.”

He seemed to understand all that and more that she hadn’t even put into thoughts yet. He didn’t exactly relax, but he let her carry some of his burden. Between them, they found some peace in that. That peace seemed short-lived. Nearer at hand than any assassin should have been able to approach unheard, the leaves shifted lightly.

“Ribbit.”

With the keen insight of the shaman, Eluneke saw that King Totad, with his crown of leaves, had crept down his tree and settled nearby, contemplating them with kingly measure. It was too dark for the prince’s eyes to make out the shape, but he had heard—Eluneke saw the shifting of shadows as he turned his head toward the voice in the dark.

“What did he say?” Tayy asked, “Is it King Toad?”

“Ribbit,” King Toad repeated.

“Yes, it is.” Her time with the sky god and his daughters had taught her many things, and among them the languages of the animals, so she understood that he was offering his own cautious support.

“His majesty says he’s had enough of adventures but will defend this place, his own realm, with all the power of the toads.”

“Ribbit!” King Toad swelled his throat, which flushed with a florid warning of the poison exudations of his skin.

“We are welcome here, to share in the peace of the mossy trees under his protection.” Eluneke translated, and again, when the prince asked, “Thank him for me, please,” with the formality of one royal to another.

“Croak!”

With a bob of his head to acknowledge the courtesy, the king of the toads withdrew, leaving them with the illusion of privacy, though Eluneke knew more than one set of toady eyes were watching them. They were her totem, however, closer to her in some ways than her own skin. In her totem form, they were her own skin. So she rested under the prince’s arm, her head leaning on his shoulder, and said nothing of Great Moon Lun chasing her brothers from the sky.

 

 

 

 

Qutula woke with the smell of moist earth in his nose. By the drugged heaviness of his limbs he guessed that he had slept for some time. The stars that had glittered in a clear sky above the rocks where he’d lain his coats had vanished, but the dark remained, more complete than any night he had ever known. His coats were gone, and so were his clothes and his weapons, but beneath him the softness of silk cradled his naked back. No breeze stirred. He lay alone, surrounded by stone, with only the fragment of jade from the battlefield sprawled by its golden thread across his heart to cover him.

“What?” He tried to rise; the question had escaped his sleep fogged senses. With a moment to orient himself, he knew the truth. Only his lady of mystery could have found him in the shadows cast by the tumbled stones, and only she would have troubled to remove his hunting clothes. But where had she brought him? And where had she gone?

A cool, firm hand, lightly cupped over the jade talisman, pressed him back, then lifted, leaving him bereft even of her shadow. He didn’t try to rise again; didn’t think he could, so there wasn’t much point in trying except to make a fool of himself.

“Where are my clothes?”

“Safe.” He’d never disrobed in her presence before. It felt dangerous to do so now and his body tightened with the anticipation.

He heard a sound like the snapping of fingers, smelled sulfur, and a lamp leaped to life, its flame quickly hidden behind its shutters. By the smothered light he saw that she had set it on an outcrop of stone that roughened the otherwise smooth curve of a low-roofed cavern. Underground. How had she brought him there? Beneath him lay his mother’s best coat—he recognized it in the half-light—and about him other items of silk or gold set with precious stones, that he recognized from the camp. Then his lady crossed into the light.

Though her long dark hair hid her face from him, her emerald green coats hung open from her shoulders, lamplight gilding her naked curves. Her legs remained partly in shadow; he made out just the suggestion of their long, curving sweep, outlined in the golden light. Almost absently her hands met across her belly, kneading softly the flesh over her womb like an invitation. Never before had she made herself so vulnerable to his eyes.

Qutula’s arms felt heavy when he reached for her. “Let me hold you.” He meant to command her, but it sounded too much like pleading in his own ears to please him.

This time, however, she allowed it. “Of course, my beloved.”

He could see her smile behind the drape of hair that crossed her cheek. Then she came to him, dropping the coats she wore in a heap on the ground before standing astride him. The lethargy that had overwhelmed him on waking had gone, but looking at her, he couldn’t breathe for a moment. In the half-light of the shuttered lamp, what he could see of her was as beautiful as feel had taught him in the dark and he wanted to touch her again, to relearn the delicate sensations of her skin against his rough fingertips, against his belly and thighs.

Her ankles rested on either side of his hips and he took them in his hands, smoothed the skin of her calves, following that curve like a swan’s neck to her thighs. He pulled her down so that she must kneel to him, over him. Her breasts came within his reach and he took them, soft in his hands, and drew her down to bury his mouth in them.

“This time tomorrow, it will be over,” he said, meaning the prince’s death.

And, “How,” she answered back. “How will it be done?”

“By poison. The vial in my sleeve.”

Her fingers traced the knife-sharp bones of his face and he turned his head to kiss her wrist where it poised near his lips. She would, he supposed, return his coats with the prince’s death folded in the cuff. “Already I’ve dosed him in small amounts. The whole court believes he suffers some malady of evil spirits. When he dies suffering the same ache in his gut, they can have no suspicion. I have eaten the same food as he, after all, and drunk from the same bowl.”

His mother had provided him the antidote, which Qutula had taken with great care. No suspicion would fall on him.

“And if he doesn’t eat or drink the tainted food? Or if he survives the poison?” Her voice was muffled, her face buried in his neck then lower, trailing a flicking dry tongue over the taut flesh that banded his rib cage. Not a human tongue, but when her fingers were so busy elsewhere on his flesh, it was hard to remember why that might matter.

“Then war,” he answered, thinking, One, two, three, and who knew he had so many ribs? Not enough of them, if it meant she had come to the end of that careful addition of their sum. He had other parts, however. His belly, his hip: she found each with her mouth and explored it with her fingertips, leaving the bloody traces of her sharp nails to show where she had gone.

“Steal the girl,” she murmured into the hollow of his throat. “If the poison fails, the prince will look for her. You can draw him away from the court and kill him then.”

She was right. A hostage would simplify the murder of the prince, if it came to a fight. Qutula hesitated to tell her so; he hated taking orders from a woman, even his mother, who had worked all her life to put him on the dais. He didn’t want this one to think she could control him with her ideas.

“Of course, I may have misjudged you.” Her cool belly brushed against his softly, but she withdrew from him with her voice. “She is your sister, after all.”

And his father had acknowledged her before either of the sons who had served him all their lives. “As Tayyichiut is my cousin,” he agreed at least on the kinship. “She is one more obstacle between my father and his true heir.” Once the prince was safely murdered, the girl would follow him to the ancestors. Killing her would be easier than holding her hostage, though.

“She’s a shamaness and I am no bridegroom kidnapping his willing bride. She can vanish into the dreamscape and travel anywhere at the speed of thought. How do we take and hold her against her will?”

As he talked, he traced circles insubstantial as a kiss around the pink nipple that brushed his fingertips.

“With this.” From around his neck the lady of mysteries plucked the gold thread and passed it over her own head, so that the smooth jade fragment rested gleaming over her burnished breasts. “Let me keep it for a little while; you will have it back soon enough. When the time comes, set the talisman around the girl’s neck. At our command, the power it binds will pin her to the mortal realm, invisible to her teachers in the dreamscape, until she goes to meet her ancestors. Which will, I trust, be soon.”

“Then we are agreed.”

Though he felt more naked in its absence than he had from his lack of clothing, Qutula didn’t ask when she would return the jade talisman, or how. A lifetime spent in the tent of his mother had taught him not to question certain powers but to command them through others, by cunning. Now, the thought of such powers in his hands fed his desire. He would have tipped her over and taken her in one sweep of his strong body, but she nipped him more than playfully on the shoulder and he felt a cold like death spread from the wound.

“I will give you the means to take the dais of your father,” she said, though as yet she had done little more than suggest the ways by which he might do it for himself.

He owed her nothing, but it cost him less to humor her, at least until the princess his sister had gone to her ancestors. He might need her help for that. So he lowered his lashes humbly and answered, “I am in your debt, my lady.”

“I know. And tonight you will give me my heart’s desire in payment of that debt.”

Her voice, imperial and desperate, fired his senses. “You already have it,” he assured her. “The prince will die tonight, I swear it.” The bargain cost him little. He had already told her of his intention to kill his cousin that very day.

“Not enough, not enough,” she groaned into his ear. Frustrated in his desire to have her, it was on the tip of his tongue to rebuff her demand and override her objections by force, if necessary. But: “It’s time,” she moaned, her voice rising in an anguished cry of desire more powerful than any he had felt in her before.

“Oh, gods, my fathers, it’s time!” With those strange words she took his willing body inside her, rocking with little moans, “Mine, mine.”

He thought she meant himself, her willing property at such moments, and answered, “Yours, yours.”

Suddenly, she went very still over him. He would have screamed, or strangled her until she had no choice but to serve his body or die, but the cold on his shoulder was spreading. She might kill him if he tried.

He needn’t have feared, however. She said only, “Do you mean it? Mine?”

How could she doubt? When she had him in this way, at least. “Anything,” he answered, “I have sworn my life to you. Anything I am is yours.” The thing about promises, he had already learned, was that they were so easy to make when they served him, and so easy to break when that served him better.

He could tell by her sigh of satisfaction, by the renewed interest she showed in his body, that she had believed him. When finally he had spent himself inside her once, and again by the power of his youthful vigor and her eager encouragement, she lay across him weak with her own pleasure.

“You, too, have made promises, my lady,” he said, and brushed her hair aside with fingers gone slack with satisfaction. “Before I leave this place, I must know who you are.”

“Time,” she agreed, and lifted her head. Suddenly, it seemed as though a hood had been lifted from his eyes, so that he could see for the first time.

“My Lady Chaiujin!” His heart stuttered in his chest, for reflected in her human eyes he saw the slitted obsidian of the serpent. Framing her sweet oval face he saw the faint tracery of a serpent’s green scales. A part of him, he realized, had known all along that it was she, or something very like the serpent-demon who had taken the Tinglut princess’ place in his uncle’s bed. Torn between a natural terror and covetous lust, he wondered if Chimbai-Khan had seen the demon behind the human face of his second wife, and if he had courted the danger in the pleasure, until it killed him.

She must have seen the confused lust in his eyes, because she smiled and revealed to him the forked tongue that flicked pleasure where his neck joined his shoulder. Her sinuous hands stroked him and he felt the smooth dry shift of scales against his skin when she wrapped her legs around him.

Qutula grinned up at her, then quick as any snake rolled her under him. “With you beside me, and your power in my grasp, we can rule the world.” He took the globes of her breasts in his hands; through the pale green of her skin, a rosy blush deepened at their tips as he mapped the paths of his conquests on her flesh. She wanted him, and by her acquiescent smile let him know that she would allow his dominance this once.

He took what she offered, kissed her mouth with its strange tongue and plunged deep between her parted legs. Still a woman there, she could not become fully serpent while he pressed her thighs apart. Then he was done, gasping for breath while his sweat fell, drop, drop, drop, on her dry, smooth skin. Her fingers soothed him, tracing the fall of his braids on his shoulder.

As he drifted to sleep, he felt the slither of a serpent cross his flesh. Reaching out with the last strength of his arm for her, he let the smooth scales glide effortlessly through fingers growing numb and heavy and strange. Without knowing quite how it had happened, he surrendered consciousness to strange and pain-filled dreams.