“I wonder if I might be able to make an exchange, Your Grace,” she heard Nadir say after a moment.
Their gazes met. She could hear the strain in his voice as though he were holding himself back from doing something that would cost him everything.
“Oh? What kind of exchange?” the Noble asked.
“My finest furs, in exchange for a night alone with this beautifully striking creature at your side.”
Her heart swelled.
Her heart.
Her heart that had been numb an hour earlier, was suddenly back alive in her chest. Or perhaps it was the muscle memory of it—of the memory of what a heart should do, the beating and pumping and aching for a person so familiar and comforting—
For the safety of a simple touch.
The Noble reached for Nyssa’s arm. She flinched at the abruptness of it. Her skin crawled with his possessive graze, the pinch of squander on her elbow. His eyes were on her, she knew, and she averted her own to the ground, determined not to look at Nadir. She knew if she did, he would go full Commander on the tent, and there would be no plan for her to go through with.
“You like her, trader?” Bechmen asked.
There was a pause, one long enough that Nyssa chanced a glance up at him. His nostrils moved with the shift of his weight, and a blank expression filled his eyes as he obviously pushed his true self to the very depths of his being.
“I wonder where you found such a creature,” Nadir replied. “Or why anyone would give her up.”
“Paid a high price for this one. We are having to break her in, of course.”
“I’m sure,” Nadir said. “Every cinnamon-haired woman I know from our land is much too ferocious to tame.”
Her chest expanded at his words, stomach fluttering, and with it came the tremble of her jaw. His adornment echoed in her mind, and she missed the sentence he said next. But the Noble rose from his chair, and he clapped his hands together.
“Let’s see these furs you speak of first.”
Quinn pushed her arm, and she walked behind the wife outside the tent.
—Sunlight.
She nearly melted at the feeling of it wrapping her skin. Quinn led her to the side of the cart as the Noble and his wife began inspecting the goods, and Nyssa had to force herself to put one foot in front of the other, too entranced by the weight of warmth on her skin that she almost forgot how to walk.
Her sighing muscles sank into the abyss of it. She allowed her head to loll back, her eyes to close. Body weeping, jaw quivering, as she vibrated in its radiance. The heat of it seeped into her flesh, curling into her waning and exhausted muscles, down into the marrow of her bones. The winter sun’s warmth mixed with the shrill wind shuddered her body—for once, she didn’t mind the whirl of it around her. It whipped over the wet the tear had just made on her cheek, sending an icy shiver down her spine.
A reminder she was still alive.
Perhaps Duarb and the Sun were reminding her of her promises.
So she counted the breaths in her head as she soaked in the glow.
But it was the heated feeling of a body coming to stand beside her that made her entire being shake with the angst of such an overload. She dared not open her eyes, terrified if she did that, it would all be a dream.
Nadir.
Here.
Standing beside her as she soaked in the first sunlight she’d felt for more than a glimpse in over a week. She wept at the overwhelming anxiety of it. She wasn’t sure she cared then if the wife caught her looking so disheveled. She was broken and free all at once.
And then her eagle cried out overhead.
“Hello, Princess.”
She hardly heard him utter the words, but they shattered her existence nonetheless. She wasn’t even sure he’d said them, or if perhaps it had just been her imagining them in her head, wishing for him to have said them to solidify his being at her side. But the silent tears seeped down her cheeks, her eyes pressed firmly together as though pressuring her brain to grasp hold of the reality.
