Her hand rose to her throat, and the sudden, wild acceleration of her pulse pounded against her fingertips. “Are you talking about…Adrial?”
Colum’s handsome face contorted with rage. “Don’t you dare pretend innocence!”
“It’s no pretense!” she shot back. “I haven’t seen Adrial since he and his brother left with the Tairen Soul and the rest of the Fey over a month ago.”
“Lyingpetchka!” His hand shot out.
Talisa gave a choked cry, but he moved so fast she had no chance to duck his blow. Her eyes squeezed shut in an instinctive reaction and she braced herself for the smack of his hand against her cheek.
The blow never came.
She pried open her eyes to find Colum frozen, his hand a scant breath from her face, his face purple with rage.
“Colum? Oh, gods.” Realization sucked the breath from her lungs, and she gave a short gasp. “Oh gods, he was right. You are here.” She turned on trembling legs as the air around her began to sparkle with tiny flashes of light.
Seven leather-clad Fey warriors shimmered into visibility, their pale, shining faces grim, their eyes cold and flat and filled with lethal intent.
She barely saw six of the warriors. Her gaze—her entire being—focused on only one: the achingly beautiful face of the man she’d dreamed of all her life, the truemate she’d never thought to see again. Her heart leapt into her throat, and even though Colum was standing frozen a scant arm’s length away, her soul soared with dizzying joy.
“Adrial.” She took one step towards him, her shaking hands outstretched. He closed the rest of the distance in a flash. His arms wrapped around her, pulling her tight to his chest, pressing her so close she could feel the hard forms of his Fey’cha daggers and hear the beat of his heart in her ear. Abruptly, the tears she’d kept to herself as she cried into her pillow each night burst free, and she began sobbing as though her heart were breaking. “Adrial…oh, Adrial…”
He bent his head, his black hair spilling over his shoulders to envelop her in fragrant dark silk. He smelled of springtime and warm meadows, of fresh sunlight after a long winter’s dark. “Aiyah, I am here,shei’tani. I never left your side…and I never will.”
“Oh, Adrial.” Talisa nearly wept with regret. “You cannot be here. You can’t,” she said, no matter how much she wanted him to stay. Her hands traced the soft, fine-grained skin of his face. She couldn’t stop gazing at him, touching him. “The reasons you had to leave before haven’t changed. I cannot go with you.”
“You cannot stay with him.” Adrial jerked his chin towards Colum’s frozen body. “And you definitely are not going to the borders. It is far too dangerous. The real fighting hasn’t yet begun, but it soon will, and I want you nowhere near what’s coming.”
“What choice do I have? Colum is my husband, and he has said we must return to our home.”
“Your home is with me.”
Her lips trembled. The fingers stroking his face trembled, too. “No. It isn’t. Though I wish with all my heart it were.”
He caught her hand and pressed a kiss into her palm. “Say the word, Talisa, and I will make it so. Ramiel—the Fey who serves as Spirit master of your quintet—can spin a weave to change diSebourne’s mind so that he will agree to let you go.”
“That sort of weave is forbidden. If you were caught, the penalty would be death!”
“Then I would take care they didn’t catch me.” His grip tightened. “Teska, shei’tani, let me set you free.”
The lure was so powerful, so tempting. But before she could open her mouth and damn herself, she saw her father’s face and heard once more his sober lecture on the inviolability of a Barrial’s vow and the dangerous political explosion that would ensue if the wife of Great Lord Sebourne’s heir ran off with a Fey warrior. She turned her head away, closing her eyes to block out the sight of Adrial’s beloved face. “I can’t. He’s not just some common man, Adrial. He’s the heir of a Great Lord, and his father already hates the Fey. You saw it yourself this summer. If I left with you, Lord Sebourne would plunge this country into civil war. Celieria can’t be divided that way right now.”
“No one needs to know. If Ramiel spins the weave, they’ll all think it’s Colum’s idea.”
“Lord Sebourne would know…and so would I.” She bowed her head and stared at her tightly clasped hands. “When I married Colum, I swore an oath before the gods that bound my life to his. I cannot forsake my vow.”
“He has already forsaken it. Did he not vow to care for you and keep you from harm? Yet he lifted his hand against you. If we had not been here, he would have struck you.”
“He was upset.”
“He would have struck you,” Adrial repeated. The thickly lashed eyes that could be so meltingly warm were hard as polished stones. “If he had, I would have killed him for it.”
She pressed her fingers to his lips to silence him. “Don’t say such things. Don’t even think them.”
“There is nothing I would not do to keep you safe,shei’tani. No Celierian law I would not break, no enemy I would not kill. Wed to this mortal you may be, but I will not let him touch you. Icannot.”
With those words, Colum’s strangely accommodating behavior these last weeks suddenly made sense. She drew back, covering her mouth with a hand to stifle her shocked gasp. “You’re the reason he hasn’t pressed me to come to his bed. Oh, Adrial, what have you done?”
“I did what I had to do.” Adrial gripped her arms. “You are my mate, myshei’tani, and our bond is not complete. If he touched you, I would kill him. Since both you and Rain made me swear not to do so, I had no choice but to make certain he never laid a hand on you.”
