It was entirely pleasant. Warm, earthy… like sandalwood and something darker beneath it, unfamiliar but not unwelcome.
Terran didn’t answer right away. He was busy lighting a second taper, as if he hadn’t heard me. But I saw the twitch of his mouth.
“You noticed,” he finally said.
“Of course I noticed. It’s… distracting.”
Another almost-smile. “My mother’s blend. Oils from the southern forests. I burn it when I want to think.”
I inhaled slowly, letting the scent consume me. “And now?”
He looked up. “Now I burn it because you’re here.”
Even as I put down my leather satchel, I said, “That comment is precisely the reason I will not be staying in your bedchamber, Terran.”
He approached me. “Because I don’t pretend, as you do, that there is something between us?”
I ignored the flutter in my chest. “I am not jesting.”
“Nor am I, when I say I’ve a notion where my father hid the Stone. And if I’m right, we’ll have to remain in the palace to find it. Since you were ordered to leave Gyoria, there is little choice.”
Could it really still be in the palace? If so, I was closer to it than I imagined. When I whispered back to Aethralis to speak to Mev, Kael guessed that his father may have brought it to The Forbidden Tunnels, but it seemed the Gyorian relic may be more within my reach than I expected.
“I’ll make inquiries and must train with my men lest they grow suspicious. Make yourself comfortable, and I’ll return as soon as I’m able.”
He wasn’t jesting.
“You mean for me to stay locked inside your bedchamber while you go about your day being”—I waved my hand with a flourish—“Prince of Gyoria?”
Terran blinked.
“What would you have me do instead? Not attempt to locate the Stone? Escort you beyond the border, as my father ordered? Or perhaps you can accompany me to the training yard so that word of me disobeying that order gets back to him?”
That he was disobeying his father’s order alone was so surprising that I considered his words, and my options. Though I’d utilized my audience with the king to begin to unravel some of the secrets Kael learned his father had kept from him and his brother, I still hadn’t expected Terran to acquiesce so soon in any way.
He’d felt the shift. And likely knew his father to have grown unstable.
“Also, you are not locked in my chamber. None would dare to enter here, and you are free to leave whenever you will. Although I’ve no doubt you could do so anyway, if I did choose to lock the door.”
Unable to help myself, with a flick of my fingers, I used the air current to lock his chamber door.
This time, Terran’s smile wasn’t a hint but a bold statement.
“Not sure I have time to play, but…” He shrugged. “If you insist.”
With one swift, assured motion, the Gyorian lifted his tunic from his body and tossed it to the floor.
“Terran,” I warned. He glanced at me with such a raw, unfiltered look of desire that I forgot what I’d been about to say. “You are outrageous,” I managed. “Put your tunic back on and leave as you intended.”
I reopened the lock.
Laughing, the brief intensity replaced by a rare moment of joy—it was the first, to my knowledge, that I’d been in the presence of Kael’s brother actually laughing aloud—he did as I suggested and covered his linen shirt with his tunic.
“Come,” he said, and I followed him through a carved stone archway draped in deep-green velvet. A vision of him in this bath chamber, shirtless with water glistening along the edges of his collarbone, assaulted me.
Refocusing, I marveled at the large space warmed by candlelight, a flicker dancing over dark stone walls veined with pale quartz.
“Lumenbind keeps them lit,” he said. “The enchantment is said to have been developed by the first Gyorian king as a symbol of the ‘light that would never dim,’ as a reference to our clan.”
