His Conquering Sword Read Online Free

against her hair. He stroked her along the line of her torso and down along her hips, and up again, and down, while he considered. “No,” he replied, sounding surprised, “I don’t think I am.”
    “So. Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”
    His hand stopped. “I’ve kept no more hidden from you,” he said indignantly, “than you’ve kept hidden from me.”
    Shame overwhelmed Tess. Gods, he didn’t know the tenth of it. Yet what could she say? There was nothing she could say.
    “It wasn’t Natalia they were asking, anyway,” said Ilya, “it was my mother and my aunt. It’s decent to observe a period of mourning before marrying again”
    It took Tess a moment to recall where they had left off their other conversation: with his sister, Natalia. “But she did marry again?”
    “Yes.” Although she wasn’t looking at him, she felt him tense. “That’s when I left for Jeds. I hated him.”
    “Why?”
    Ilya let go of a shuddering breath, and he clutched her tighter to him. “He mocked me. He scorned me. Gods, he tried to rape me once. He knew about Vasil; he caught us together, one time, and he held the knowledge of it over me like a saber. He used to fence with the boys, those of us who aspired to be riders, and he’d torment me. He’d cut me up, fine cuts all along my arms and my chest.”
    “But, Ilya, how could your sister ever have married someone like that?”
    “Oh, no one else knew. He made sure of that. He was charming to everyone else, a good rider, a fine fighter, good with horses and the herds. No one believed me. They all thought I was just jealous. They said I was too attached to Natalia. They said—” He broke off. “Anyway, I left.”
    “And you went to Jeds. It’s strange, now that I think of it, how much I know about your journey to Jeds, and how little I knew of the reasons you left the tribes to go there. But, Ilya.” She laughed a little, into his shoulder. “Does that mean that the courtesan Mayana was the first woman you ever slept with?”
    “Yes.” He didn’t sound amused; defensive, perhaps.
    “She’s so famous, though. I remember that she used to come have tea with Cara once a week. She must have been young, even though she seemed old to me. I was only—what?—ten. She’d just recently bought her freedom from the brothel she was indentured to, so it couldn’t have been long after you left Jeds that I arrived there from Erthe. So it wasn’t only a university education you got at Jeds.”
    “Are you complaining about the education I got at Jeds?”
    She canted her head back to grin at him. “Not at all. Then you came back to the tribes. Was Vasil still with your tribe?”
    “No. He appeared about two winters later. He’d heard that I had returned. My mother had already made me dyan, so no one wondered at first when I took him into my jahar. Josef left his tribe at about the same time to ride with me. The Roskhel tribe traveled alongside of us many seasons during that time.”
    “Why did Khara Roskhel turn against you? Gods, what brought him to murder your whole family?”
    But the question evoked only silence. His left hand ran a pattern, up and down, along her lower back. She felt as if the gesture, repeated obsessively, was itself the answer, but in a language she did not speak.
    “Ilya?”
    “No.” He lay the index and middle fingers of his right hand on her lips, gently. “No more, Tess. There’s been enough today, and tonight. I’m exhausted.” As well he might be. She sighed, knowing that if he would not confide in her now, as vulnerable as he was because of all that he had laid bare this night, he probably never would confess the truth of the troubling mystery of Roskhel’s defection and subsequent horrible revenge.
    She shifted until she was comfortable. His breathing slowed and gentled, and he slept. From outside, she heard the night guards conversing, the murmur of their words but not their meaning. Or perhaps it was just one of