Queen of Fire полностью

A sudden wariness at the gravity in her voice, a swelling fear.

“I have to go away for a time.”

The fear surged and Orena’s gaze went to Murel, standing nearby, hands clasped tight and forcing a comforting smile. She found being in Orena’s company a painful trial, the weight of her unconstrained gift hard to bear, especially when it chose to share memories dreadfully reminiscent of those Murel fought to suppress.

“Yes,” Lyrna said. “Murel too. And Iltis and Benten.”

More fear, bordering on terror, a jarring sense of abandonment. Orena’s hands clutched at Lyrna’s, a desperate plea filling her gaze.

“No.” Lyrna forced a note of command into her tone. “No, you cannot come with us.”

Anger mingled with churlish reproach as Orena snatched her hands away, averting her gaze, her face a mirror of her thoughts.

“It is my hope,” Lyrna said, voice soft as she traced her fingers through Orena’s dark curls, “to return with a man who I think can heal you. I was selfish to let him go, but when he looked at me, looked at this face, I knew he saw that his gift had failed. I am beyond healing, but I think you are not, for your soul is so bright.”

Orena’s features softened, her face suddenly losing all vestige of the woman-sized child she appeared to be. She met Lyrna’s gaze, brow furrowing . . . and the memories flooded forth.

Lyrna tried to summon a calculation to suppress the inrush of image and sensation, but the torrent was too great, overwhelming the trickle of numbers with an ease that told her Orena had been exercising much more control over her gift than they knew. The smell came first, brine, sweat and excrement. Then the sounds, the clink of chains, the muffled sobs of despairing souls. Vision and pain arrived together, the shackles chafing wrist and ankle, the dim outline of huddled captives. She was back in the hold, a slave once more. Her panic flared then receded as she saw the view differed from her own memory, the steps leading to the upper deck now seen from a less acute angle, and chained next to them a young woman in a blue dress, her face shadowed but the play of light on her hairless scalp revealing dreadful burns. Nevertheless, she knew this profile, she had seen it outlined against a campfire on a distant mountainside a few months before. Exhilaration mixed with malicious satisfaction in her breast . . . along with heady anticipation of the Ally’s reward.

The memory blurred, fracturing and re-forming into a scene of terror, the hull splintered by the shark’s ramming, screaming desperation on all sides. She saw the burnt woman standing next to the steps, key dangling from her grasp. The moment of hesitation was brief, barely noticeable but these eyes had centuries of practice in discerning weakness and she knew in a rush of grim understanding that this newly risen queen was about to abandon her subjects to their fate.

It had been a long time since she felt anything close to wonder, but the sensation that gripped her as she watched the burnt woman return to free first the brutish brother, then the outlaw, and then, incredibly, herself, was the closest she had come for many lifetimes. The babble of thanks she offered the burnt woman as she struggled towards the steps surprised her further, for it was completely genuine.

The images blurred into another memory, Harvin’s scarred face poised above hers, breath mingling as their lips touched. “I’ll never hurt you,” he whispered. “And nor will anyone else.”

“You can’t promise that,” she whispered back. “No one can.”

His fingers played over the bruises on her neck, faded but still dark enough to spoil the pleasing smoothness of this shell’s skin. “I promise I’ll visit bloody murder on every Volarian shit we find, just on the off-chance he was the one who did this.”

She felt something then, something more than familiar lust, and it irked her. “Enough talking,” she said, pushing him onto his back and straddling his waist. “And try to keep quiet this time.”

The final shift was more abrupt, as if Orena sensed her discomfort. The deck of the Sea Sabre pitched continually that day, the seas around the Wensel Isle were rarely calm. She looked up at the burnt woman and the ring she offered, wondering why the tears came so easily. Normally she had to force them, but that day they streamed unbidden from her eyes. “I think such trivia is beyond us now, my lady,” the burnt woman said and a thing that had long forgotten its own name knew then she had found a queen.

Lyrna gasped as the final memory slipped away, finding herself staring into Orena’s apologetic eyes, an uncertain smile on her lips.

“Highness?” Murel hovered at her side, touching a tentative hand to her shoulder.

Lyrna stood and pulled them both into an embrace, Orena clutching her waist as Murel rested her head on her shoulder. “I only ever had ladies,” Lyrna told them. “Never friends.”