The Barbed Rose

“How is it that you can sit here calmly and talk with us?” Torchay added. “Why haven’t you lost your wits?”

Last year, Stone’s magic-driven urgency to reach Kallista had him half-leaping from boats or falling into convulsions. Fox had likely been much the same, for he remembered little of his journey to them.

“I don’t know.” Joh shifted in his too-soft chair, chains clacking together. “I believe that I did. I don’t remember much of the trip here. And my hands—” He held them up, showing injuries he might have acquired trying to dig through prison walls. Stone’s hands had borne similar marks when he’d been brought to Arikon and Kallista. “It could be I am rational now in her presence because I was marked not so long ago.”

“When?” Kallista glowered at Torchay to keep him quiet this time. “What happened?”

“Just over a week ago. The guards put us back in the cells after breakfast instead of herding us out into the courtyard because of some disturbance in the countryside. I was reading the Meditations of Orestes and praying. There was—I can only call it joy, but that isn’t a tenth of what I felt.” His expression glowed, making Kallista shiver with its overflow.

He shook himself, recovered his thoughts. “And next I knew, I found myself clawing at the walls. It took the prison governor a few days to learn of it, and several more days to bring me here. And a few more for you to arrive.”

“How long ago did it happen?” Torchay asked. “What day?”

Joh shook his head. “I lost so much time—”

“Guess.”

“It—it might have been—It was a Graceday. Maybe the twenty-sixth or-seventh of Terris?”

A chill ran down her back as she met Torchay’s gaze. “That disturbance in the countryside. Do you know what it was?”

“No.” Joh looked from one to the other of them, fear growing in his expression. “Why?”

“The rebels struck throughout Adara on Terris twenty-seventh, assassinating naitani and military officers. The day the One marked you.” Kallista took a deep breath.

She could not put it off longer. Likely should not have delayed this much. The interlude given her to enjoy simply being ilias and mother had ended. She could not stretch it longer by wishing. She was who she was and could not be other. The signs that Joh had truly been marked by the One were all there. It only required her touch to know.

CHAPTER FOUR

Kallista slid from her chair to her knees. “Give me your hand.”

“Captain, no.” Joh struggled to rise and Torchay clapped a hand on his shoulder, holding him in place. “Do not kneel before me.”

“If I fall, I’d rather be closer to the ground.” She raised an eyebrow. “Surely you remember what could happen when our hands touch.” He’d been there for both Stone’s and Obed’s first touch.

“I—yes.” He sank back into his velvet prison, his whole body tense with nervous anticipation. “What—”

“I don’t know what will happen. Perhaps nothing. My magic has not yet returned since the twins were born.”

“Twins?” Joh whispered in shock while she went on.

“It could be this will wake it. Or not.” She smiled, shifting to one side, off her knees. “I can promise, whatever happens, it won’t hurt.”

Joh did not seem to believe her.

“Torchay, let go of him,” she said.

He looked at her, expression bland. “I’d rather not. You lost the magic the same day I was marked. I want to know what the others know.”

“There’s plenty of time for that.”

“I’m tired of waiting.”

She didn’t think that was his only, or even his primary, reason for keeping his grip on the chained man, but she let it go. Arguing him down would take time she didn’t think they had. “Joh, give me your hand.”

With a faint rattle of the chains holding them together, Joh extended both hands and opened one out flat. He turned his head away slightly, nostrils flaring as if he faced something terrifying. Magic could terrify, she supposed, if one were not used to it. Hoping her smile looked reassuring, Kallista took his hand in hers. And nothing happened.

She wanted to scream in frustration. Her fingers tightened, squeezing his hand. She took his other hand in her empty one, silently shouting for the magic, Wake up! Do something!

And it slammed into her with a force that brought her high on her knees, bowing her backward in an impossible arc as she screamed with the near-forgotten pleasure of it.

The magic swept every inch of her, a storm scouring her end-to-end with delight, blasting open paths that had withered shut over the winter. Creating new ones.

Dragging her in its wake, the magic roared back into Joh. As Kallista tumbled toes to nose in the wave, there was a sort of wrenching, of something twisting aside or tearing open, and Joh cried out. Goddess, she’d forgotten.

She reached for him to soothe his pain and he was there, with her, riding the magic. She tasted his fear, breathed in his desperation, his need to make things right. She saw the colors of his soul, though she couldn’t have matched them to any tints she knew—colors of loyalty, passion, loneliness, honesty, deep and agonizing remorse….

Kallista felt the magic swelling. Something new. She caught Joh tight, wrapping him in her unseen embrace, whispering wordless, voiceless reassurance as the magic whipped across the skin-to-skin contact into Torchay.

He cried out, knees buckling, though Kallista thought he somehow managed to stay upright. The magic lashed them with pleasure, tearing sounds from three throats, but it had not finished with them. Kallista reached out as Torchay spun past, brought him into the web and knotted him there, adding his booming strength to the harmony they made as the magic swelled yet again.

It leapt across the gap to Obed, increasing the pleasure fourfold with the addition of the fourth. His shout drowned them all out and he fell to his knees. Kallista barely had time to bind him into their knotted chorus before the magic expanded again, spinning outward until she thought she would leave pieces of her soul scattered across all Adara.

She fought to keep the men whole. They were helpless and vulnerable without magic of their own and she shielded them with layers of herself.

Then the magic crashed into yet another, and Kallista tasted Fox. He was cold, worried and falling to his knees in snow as he shoved his fist in his mouth to stifle the shout of delight, but he was alive. Was he in danger? Kallista had no time to tell, barely enough time to pull him safely into the bonds, before the magic poured out of Fox and into Stone. Who fell full length on his face in the snow and shouted loud enough to wake the dead.

Laughing, Kallista scooped him up, wove him into place with the others, ready now as the magic rolled on to find Aisse. She was sleeping, somewhere dark and smoky but safe, seeming to think she dreamed when the magic first caught her up. She woke only as it spun them tighter in the ecstasy it made.

Kallista held on fiercely, twining their separate selves into a glorious whole—Torchay’s strength, Obed’s truth, Fox’s order, Stone’s joy, Aisse’s faith, Kallista’s will…Joh’s vision. All her marked ones were there.

The magic pushed them, pulled, whirled and tumbled them as it rose to explosive heights. Again and again, Kallista hauled it back, building the power and the pleasure with each check of its escape while it bounced again through each one of them. Her pleasure fed theirs, which fed back to her and into the magic which then spilled back through each of them to push the cycle higher still.

“Goddess!” Someone screamed it, or maybe all of them did. And the magic exploded out of Kallista’s control.

It blasted through them in a seven-fold sexual climax before it erupted into a cloud of glittering fallout visible to every naitan in Adara who might chance to look toward Arikon. Then it drifted slowly down, folding back into its separate homes.

Kallista blinked, alone inside her body again, and found herself seated on the floor, her arms draped across Joh’s naked legs, her face buried in his lap. Torchay sat slumped against her, weighing her down, and Obed lay curled on his side a short distance away. She shoved at Torchay and he shifted his weight off her, leaning bonelessly against the chair holding Joh.

“Beware of what you ask for,” Torchay mumbled through lips that didn’t seem to be working quite right.

“I asked for nothing.” Obed sounded bitter, his voice choked with some hidden emotion. He’d told her more than once that he wanted nothing to do with sex by magic.

Kallista wanted to go to him, to bring him closer, but she couldn’t move from her spot. She stretched out her leg, touched him with her bare toes, and he flinched away.

“I’ll kill him.” Torchay lifted a hand toward the sword hilt over his shoulder, then let it fall again. “Later. When I’ve rested up a bit.”

“Don’t kill him just yet, please.” Kallista rolled her head to one side and Joh gasped. The chains rattled and she realized his hands were tangled in her hair. He started to pull them back, but Kallista managed to close a hand over his wrist and prevent it.