“It’s…different,” he said after wheezing and spluttering for a moment before taking another sip. “Not bad, though,” he admitted.
I smiled back. “You’ve never had vodka? It’s one of my favorites.”
He shook his head. We drank for a few minutes in companionable silence. Finally Kat spoke.
“So, what are the next steps? Now that V and I have agreed to help. What do we do now? You’ve been here for what, two years right?”
“How’d you know that?” I couldn’t hide my surprise as I eyed him over my drink.
A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth, obviously pleased to have caught me unawares.
“The Tagmatarches told us about the ‘scary, cannibalistic beast’ who ate all the Mageia they sent in,” he said.
I felt myself flush at being called a beast. It wasn’t exactly the first time, but it still stung.
“Well, at least they bought the story,” I growled. “I had to come up with some reason for Mageia to be disappearing. A couple of ripped up corpses, a stew pot with a skull in it, and there you go…”
This time Kat wrinkled his nose in disgust. I had no idea a nose could be so expressive.
“Oh, my goddess… That’s brilliant! You made them think you were a cannibal to hide missing Mageia?”
“Yes,” I growled. “And I’d do it again, if it meant stealing more people out from under those bastards.”
I paused for a moment as a thought occurred to me. His suspicious sniffing of the food I’d offered him earlier made more sense now.
“Wait—is that why you were so suspicious of the stew, earlier?” I asked, struggling not to laugh.
“I had cause,” his chin tilting up in defiance. He took another sip of his drink, and I noticed his cheeks were taking on a delicious flush.
“You might want to take it slow with that. If you’re not used to it, vodka can hit you like a freight train.”
He shrugged, and as if I had dared him, he gulped the last of his drink and set the glass on the table defiantly.
“I can handle it,” he insisted. I shrugged and poured him a refill, distracted by his flashing blue eyes. We’d see.
“So… what are you doing with the Mageia you are recruiting here?”
“I get them back to Illyria. Hopefully we can match them with Somas and train some Tesseris mages.”
“So, you’re essentially building an army,” Kat said, his eyes darkening as he spoke.
“If your family were under attack, I think you’d do anything you could to protect them,” I said. “I’m trying to protect my country, my people.”
“Doyou have any family?”
The thought of Ri made a sharp ache hit my chest. To hide it, I drained the rest of my own drink and poured another, topping off Kat’s cup as well. He was definitely starting to feel the effects of the vodka.
“Not blood family. Not anymore. Cousins, maybe. I don’t know. My parents died when I was young. I was raised by some family friends,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he said, looking down into his drink. For a moment I could feel such a sense of loss from him. He really seemed to know how I felt.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” I said gruffly, taking another drink then gazing into the fire. I felt a little warmth from the drink spreading through my body and I cherished it while it was there. Like other drugs, alcohol didn’t last long on a Soma.
The feeling of fingers, light as butterflies, regardless of the callouses on them, flitted across my cheek and I looked up in surprise.
“Is that how you got these?”
Suddenly the heat of the alcohol was like a match beside an inferno as a shot of power lashed through me from his touch. He must have felt the same thing because he jerked his hand back and looked at me as though I had bitten him.
