Chapter 2 Scene 2

Nahl flattened his latest batch of redbell flowers onto the drying rack and secured them with twine. The fragile blooms thrived in the highlands where Dros had been born, but here in his conservatory, only hours of painstaking care every week kept them from dying. Cosi had asked him once why he spent so much time on their cultivation, and he could offer her no answer that she would want to hear. The sweet scent of them soothed him when the long months of summer wore on and he was sure that Dros would not be coming home, and growing something made him feel the smallest bit useful when he spent weeks hating himself for being unable to stop the war.

The bright ring of clashing metal startled him from his contemplation. Sighing, he exited the vaulted glass structure and approached the railing that overlooked the courtyard. Four floors down, Dros and Cosi paced in a large circle over the bare ground while several of the reach guard looked on from where they had been training. He couldn’t hear their words, but their voices rose and fell as they taunted each other.

None of the guards would challenge Cosi with sharpened weapons, and fighting with practice blades offended her warlord training, so she spent the months Dros was gone sparring by herself, complaining that she never got a proper work out.

The first session after Dros returned was always the worst. If Nahl had any sense he would go back to the conservatory, or better yet, retreat to his office deep inside the reach, far from the sounds of a fight he didn’t want to see but couldn’t stop watching.

Without warning, Cosi dove toward Dros. When he dodged her left-handed slash, she tumbled away from his counterattack, regaining her feet and fluidly turning to face him. Pressing his advantage, Dros lunged after her, his sword’s edge barely missing her as she danced away. The echo of her laugh rang inside the courtyard.

There was a flurry of motion Nahl couldn’t quite follow that ended with Cosi shouting in triumph. The tattoos along Dros’s spine glowed, and the magic of the battleborn amplified his hiss of pain.

One of the guards shifted on his feet, feeling the call to arms that was the battleborn’s birthright. Dros rounded on him and growled something that rattled the racks of weapons around the perimeter of the courtyard. The guards cleared the area, abandoning their practice weapons in their hurry to move out of Dros’s sphere of influence.

Cosi took the opportunity presented by Dros’s moment of distraction. Dros parried her strike, but he had one weapon to her two, and the knife in her left hand slashed the underside of his forearm even as she pivoted away from his attempt to counter. His bellow would have sent seasoned soldiers fleeing, but Cosi stood at the center of it, utterly without fear.

Nahl gripped the railing until his knuckles hurt. It took every bit of his self-control not to yell for them to stop. Drawing the blood of someone you loved on purpose was something he would never understand. The first time he’d witness it, he had run into the courtyard to stand between them, shouting until his voice broke. They had both looked at him like he was the fool.

Afterwards, Cosi had sat him down and explained that they had been fighting this way since they were children. She had a dozen scars that Dros had given her and she wore each one with pride. There was no anger in what they did, no malice; it was a contest that neither of them wanted to lose.

When Nahl had brought up the danger Dros’s battlerage presented, she had laughed. She knew exactly how far she could push Dros without crossing into where he became a threat. Testing that line had been an important part of Dros’s training and they had danced up to but not over the knife-fine edge of it a hundred times.

Nahl had known the facts of what warlord training entailed, that had been a part of his own training, but he had never been forced to confront the barbarism of it head-on. The idea of inflicting pain on someone he loved made him sick and he couldn’t understand how they found the prospect of potentially maiming each other fun.

Cosi closed the gap between her and Dros with a blinding turn. This time after he parried her first attack, Dros grabbed her other hand at the wrist before she could strike with the follow-up. His laugh was a menacing, low rumble. He twisted her arm around behind her. She struggled in his grip as he lifted his naked blade to her throat. She dropped the weapon in her right hand and took hold of his forearm, tensing with the strain required to keep his arm at bay. After a few moments she realized how vain that effort was, but rather than be still under his threat, she fought like a cornered ulka, her elbows and heels catching Dros in a handful of delicate places in quick succession.

She yelped, and the blade in her left hand clattered to the ground. Dros released her wrist and caught her around the waist, pulling her against him and tightening his hold until her back pressed into his chest. From one instant to the next, Dros’s body language flowed from violence to seduction. His tattoos dimmed swiftly, until they faded to the same warm brown of his skin. He dropped his sword and his hand rose to catch hold of her throat.

Nahl didn’t have to hear the words that Dros spoke into her ear to know the honeyed tone of their delivery; he had been on the receiving end often enough. The hairs on his arms rose. He gripped the railing again, this time for an entirely different reason and noted that Cosi had finally stopped fighting.