Once Bitten: A Dragon-Shifter Fantasy Romance Page 17

  Petulantly, she said, “Vasayt.”

  She turned and left. Eloisa braced herself for the door to be slammed, but Jedora closed it gently behind herself.

  The instant she was gone, Caleth reached out and put his hands on Eloisa’s waist, pulling her into his lap.

  What would have alarmed her only a day ago now made her chest swell with excitement. It didn’t bother her that she was practically naked beneath her blanket.

  How far I’ve fallen, she thought as she cuddled close to his chest.

  Caleth was writing again. Eloisa peered over at his words. Ye’derache was a language of symbols rather than letters, and he occasionally used different ones than she might have, which must have lent to a regional difference. Eloisa was still able to grasp his meaning with little challenge, and she found that it was actually fun to decipher his unique script.

  ‘Where did you learn to read Ye’derache? I’m assuming you don’t speak it?’

  They passed the pen back and forth as they communicated.

  ‘’I don’t. I learned it in the tower. The Ye’derache were the most prolific record keepers in the ancient kingdoms of the north. At least a quarter of the historical records in the tower were in Ye’derache. I have probably read more Ye’derache than Atolian in the past century. Do you speak it?’

  ‘I do, but it has been a very long time.’

  Eloisa loved the precise way his wrist flicked when he tapped ink off on the side of the jar, and the confident way he stroked his pen on the paper as he wrote.

  ‘I don’t know where to begin with you,’ he wrote. ‘But I do know that I am tired of courting you.’

  Eloisa turned to regard him, her eyes wide. His aura was dancing with humor and he tapped the pen to bring her attention back down to the paper. Eloisa reread the line, and what he’d written afterwards.

  ‘But I do know that I am tired of courting you. I want you to be my wife.’

  Her heart was galloping as he handed the pen to her. In shaky script, she wrote, ‘We hardly know one another.’

  It must have been nerves fueling her sudden reservations. She’d known him infinitely less only an hour ago, yet she would have married him at the dinner table, had he asked her to.

  Caleth wrote, ‘And I intend to learn everything I can about you, but you will be my wife.’

  Eloisa accepted the pen, but hesitated in her response. She knew what she wanted to say, but she wasn’t sure how to write proper Cal’derache names in Ye’derache. She had no choice but to make a substitution.

  ‘Your daughter said that you’re marrying me because of my light reading.’

  Light reading was how the Ye’derache had referred to aurasight. In ancient times, the ability was far more common, yet at the same time, vastly more maligned. It was an era when women the world over could, and were, be put to death for possessing aurasight.

  ‘Jedora is right,’ he wrote. Eloisa paid attention to the way he wrote Jedora’s name phonetically. ‘Though it isn’t on that factor alone. There are several women within my court and my kingdom that can see as you can.’

  She didn’t let her surprise show.

  ‘But none who come with succession rights to a southern throne,’ she wrote.

  Caleth smiled as he took the pen. ‘You are very perceptive.’

  It had actually been Lidia who had pointed out that Caleth might be using Eloisa as a means to stake his claim on Atolia, but she didn’t want to admit that. Surely, she would have parsed it out on her own…

  She tried to take the pen, but Caleth gave her a chiding look and continued writing.

  ‘But the truth is, that is only a minor benefit to our marriage. I could have the Atolian throne any time I want. In fact, I have been planning on taking it for a long time. However, I had not thought to take it until after the central lands came under my rule. Two or three more centuries, at least.’

  It shocked her, how casually he spoke of his plans for world domination. She plucked the pen from his fingers.

  ‘You have been planning on taking Atolia by force?’

  ‘If necessary. Atolia was always meant to be my first southern conquest, but the death of your father and the proceeding Atolian Wars complicated this. I wanted Atolia intact, which is why I was intrigued when your brother came to me, proposing I marry his daughter, Ili.’

  “His daughter?” Eloisa blurted.

  Caleth must have inferred her meaning, because he nodded before he resumed writing. Even writing in small script, it took him three full pages to detail all of the events that led up to his engagement to Eloisa. The web of intrigue was far more complex and convoluted than Eloisa had realized.

  It had begun five years ago, when Atolia was already desperately in debt. When Philomen had come to Caleth proposing that he marry Ili, Caleth had briefly considered the engagement, as it would have afforded him a platform in the south from which he could launch a dual-fronted assault on the central lands. However, he’d ultimately declined the engagement on the basis that Ili was too young and Caleth predicted that by the time she was of marriage age, the kingdom was unlikely to still be standing.

  Shortly thereafter, Philomen had Ili betrothed to a southern prince and was given a modest advance on her bride price, which Philomen subsequently squandered on a team of mercenaries who would later betray him. For Caleth’s part, he decided to continue down his original path of conquering key regions in the central lands, and then reassessing southern conquest after the Atolian Wars had ended.

  ‘Then, a month ago, your brother sent me a letter regarding a possible marriage to his youngest sister, an astronomer, and asked for an audience. He also sent a portrait of you. It bears your likeness, but I can see now that it was falsified.’

  As Eloisa took the pen from him, the edge of her warm hand brushed against his cool one. Given that she was sitting barely clothed in his lap, the simple touch shouldn’t have made her heart beat faster and her mouth go dry.

  ‘A portrait?’ she wrote, using a different, but similar set of characters to confirm that she’d understood him. ‘Do you still have it?’

  “Vayt, hascre,” he said. Yes, I do.

  He wrote, ‘It is in my room. I will show it to you tonight, before we go to my bed.’

  His pronouncement that they would go to his bed was subtler in Ye’derache, than in Atolian. In Ye’derache, it was common that nouns received a particle in the form of one to three dots that indicated ownership. To make a noun general, one had to specify with a simple, but additional character.

  Nevertheless, her eyes remained on the character ‘my bed’ for a moment, her skin tingling with anticipation and her insides twisting with worry. Once she’d gotten past her terror, she had loved falling asleep beside him the night before. Yet it seemed they grew more familiar with each moment that passed, and she wondered how long it would be before Caleth decided to push past her reservations.

  Swift as his script was, he’d written nearly a paragraph by the time she let her eyes move on. As he continued with his story about how she’d come to be his bride, Eloisa found that it told her as much about him as it did about Philomen.

  Caleth was pragmatic and, despite what she’d perceived during their courtship, far from gallant.

  When he’d received the letter from Philomen, Caleth had decided to hear him out. He’d invited Philomen and Eloisa to Cal’en Fasha without any real intention of accepting the proposal. He didn’t care for Philomen, and he thought it would be an amusement to his court to see a southern king grovel.

  When Philomen showed up three days later with only his wife, Caleth was initially under the impression that Eloisa didn’t exist. However, instead of asking for an advance on Eloisa’s bride price, Philomen asked for a modest sum of ten thousand pounds of Cal’derache gold, to be paid only after Caleth accepted Eloisa as his bride. It was a surprisingly small request, given that Caleth had lords in his kingdom who’d paid nearly twice as much for their brides.

  ‘It caused me
to reevaluate the situation,’ he wrote. ‘I moved forward under the assumption that you were real and that his financial situation was even more dire than my spies had reported. I also considered that marrying you would give me significant leverage. I could feed your brother enough money to keep his kingdom afloat, and when the opportunity presented itself, I could have him deposed in favor of our son, who would have matrilineal rights to the throne.’

  Eloisa opened her hand. Caleth paused in his writing and passed it to her.

  ‘You’re forgetting that my brother already has an heir. If you deposed Philomen, Kiryos II would be king.’

  Caleth smiled at her as he took the pen, as if she’d said something cute.

  ‘Any debt owed by the father must be repaid by the son. Your nephew would have no choice but to abdicate to our son, or allow his kingdom to be crippled by debt. In any case, the whole idea seemed tedious and relied on too many pieces falling into the correct places, so I declined Philomen’s offer.’

  Eloisa reread the characters. “You declined?”

  ‘I did. However, as fortune willed it, this was all occurring around the time Jedora was requesting to pursue a marriage. Allowing her to marry would mean losing my eyes, so I wasn’t able to grant her request.’

  “Your eyes?” She searched for the Cal’derache words, and then said, “Shta ka sran?”

  ‘Light reading,’ he explained. ‘My armies are my weapons, my gold fuels them, and Jedora’s light reading tells me where to point them. In spite of the petulance she’s shown you since you’ve arrived, she has been an invaluable asset to me, as was her mother before her.’

  Eloisa took the pen. ‘Her mother had it?’

  Caleth appeared confused. ‘That is how it is passed. Mothers pass it to their daughters.’

  “I didn’t know,” she said, rubbing her temple.

  If it was passed down from mother to daughter, then that would mean her mother would have had it, too. Why hadn’t her mother ever told her about it, or warned her father of what was to come?

  Caleth had continued writing. ‘For several years, Jedora had been suggesting I take a wife, one with light reading who could take her place. I knew it was a thinly veiled ploy to have me marry her mother, but—’

  Eloisa plucked the pen from his hand.

  ‘Her mother is alive?’

  ‘She is a member of my court and an old friend, but I had no interest in marrying her.’

  Eloisa tried to take the pen back, but Caleth evaded her with a smirk.

  Annoyed, she said, “Cuest nesh?”

  She was almost certain that wasn’t how the Cal’derache asked Why not? But it was the best she could do.

  Instead of answering her, Caleth wrote the one thing that could distract her from her line of questioning.

  ‘You have no idea how much it pleases me to hear you speak my language. I could listen to you read expense reports and be captivated.’

  As his pen stopped, Caleth gave her a lingering look. It made Eloisa feel as if she was beautiful and desirable, definitely not like a woman who’d just slipped into a tub of water and then had a fit of crying.

  Caleth continued with his tale, as though Eloisa had never interjected, and by the time she caught on, she had something far bigger than Jedora’s mother to occupy her curiosity.

  ‘After Philomen left, I continued to ruminate over his offer. There was something that was tickling the back of my mind, an old rumor I’d once heard in passing. I didn’t have the time to pursue the thread myself, so I enlisted the help of a few historians to do research on your family line.

  ‘That same night, they came back to me with their findings. Your mother, Cassandria, had an ancestor who married a Stravean prince some three millennia ago. When it was found that she possessed light reading and had been using it within the king’s court, she was put to death. The matter was rather infamous, even for that era, because two of her three daughters were also executed after they confessed to possessing the ability as well. The third daughter managed to escape, only because she’d been married to a southern lord just a few months prior. That daughter was your great-grandmother.’

  As Caleth paused to get a new sheet of paper, Eloisa scanned the lines over and over again, wanting to be certain she’d read everything correctly. She hadn’t known that her lineage went back to the central lands or the Stravean throne. Even when she’d secretly charted her family tree while in the tower, her mother’s line had only been documented back to her grandmother, who had supposedly hailed from Xlona, a coastal nation at the edge of the southern continent.

  Caleth dipped his pen in the inkwell and resumed writing. ‘With that information, it was an easy matter to trace your maternal line back to that ancestor. Along the way, I found what would be expected of those with your ability. Women that lived reclusive lives or disappeared from the records entirely, or kingdoms that began to inexplicably thrive once their king married. The latter was the case with your mother in Atolia, and your sister in Agreia.’

  Was he claiming that Lusia had light reading?

  Eloisa couldn’t fathom how that would be possible. If her sister had it, surely she would have told Eloisa. And wouldn’t they have both been sent away, rather than just Eloisa?

  ‘It wasn’t difficult to make the next logical jump, that you possessed light reading as well. Suddenly, it made sense why Philomen was offering you at such a small price. He needed a quick infusion of money and assumed it would be a small enough amount that I wouldn’t retaliate, once I found out what you were.’

  If what Caleth was assuming was true, then Philomen had sent Eloisa to marry Caleth under the assumption that she would be exposed and possibly executed. And for only ten thousand pounds of gold. The figure should have been irrelevant, but it stuck with Eloisa. Her life had a price, and it was modest, at best.

  ‘After much consideration, I wrote to Philomen, telling him that I would meet with him and his sister in a week’s time, and if I approved of the match I would give him sixty thousand pounds of gold on loan, as well as military forces to protect his kingdom. It wouldn’t do to have my bride coming from a functionally defunct realm and I could not have anyone claiming my bride was cheap. Of course, my true purpose was to ensure Atolia remained whole, and that Philomen would be in my debt.

  ‘Philomen accepted the terms without negotiating further and assured me that he’d have his sister at the palace upon my arrival. I had the satisfaction of telling Jedora that she may yet be able to marry, as I would be taking a southern bride with light reading. You can see how well she has taken that news.’ He paused, his lips quirking. ‘Despite all of this, I actually had little intention of marrying you, even if you possessed light reading.’

  Eloisa arched a brow at him, prompting one of his slow smiles in return.

  ‘And then I saw you, and you were more beautiful than I could have imagined, inside and out. Even Jedora had to admit that you had one of the purest and most radiant auras she had ever seen.’

  “Halkta sos?” Eloisa asked. She said that?

  Still smiling, Caleth put a finger under her chin and pulled her in for a kiss. Though she hadn’t been expecting it, Eloisa went soft and pliant straight away, kissing him back as heat spread through her core.

  ‘You taste like wine,’ he wrote a few moments later. Eloisa was already flushed from kissing him, but the remark made her want to hide her burning face. ‘Do you enjoy it when I kiss you?’

  Couldn’t he tell?

  Eloisa nodded.

  ‘And when I touch you?’

  The look he gave her wasn’t sultry or teasing, but only curious. It gave Eloisa pause, and she wondered if she’d been stiff in her responses to his touch. She remembered the awkward moment in the booth at the arena, but surely she’d been receptive since then, hadn’t she?

  Eloisa swallowed, and then nodded again.

  He scrutinized her expression, and then returned to his tale without further comment.

  ‘When
I saw you, I wanted you. You will come to learn that I am not a man who is accustomed to wanting. If there is something I desire, I acquire it. If there is something in my way, I remove it.

  ‘I could tell that you were something rare, though I did not understand how, considering that you were related to that fool brother of yours. When I had you back in my home, I already had it in my mind that I would marry you, so when Jedora uncovered that you had light reading, there was no longer any doubt in my mind. From there, it was just a matter of observing you, learning where your loyalties lay, and if you could be trusted.’

  He allowed Eloisa to take the pen. ‘You’ve been spying on me?’

  ‘You are a foreign princess whom I know nothing about, and who possesses the ability to know a man’s mind at a glance. Of course I have been spying on you.’

  He offered her the pen, and Eloisa hesitated before taking it. ‘This is so much information. I hardly know where to begin. You want to marry me because of my light reading and because of my claim to the Atolian throne?’

  Caleth waved a hand in a circular motion, indicating for her to continue.

  ‘And because you,’ she hesitated, feeling vain and foolish even though Caleth had been rather direct with her, ‘like me?’

  With a laughing exhalation, Caleth took the pen from her.

  ‘I understand how you may not know when a man is attracted to you, but how is it that you have no concept of your own beauty?’

  Eloisa wrote, ‘In the tower, we’re taught that beauty is an illusion, not to be lent any credence or regarded with any value. And, there were no mirrors. I am only starting to become accustomed to my reflection.’

  Caleth responded, ‘I would like to learn more about these things they have taught you, but that can come in time. At present, I am most concerned with your vows. Jedora told me that you are a sworn virgin.’

  He passed the pen back to her. It still had plenty of ink, but Eloisa dipped it in the inkwell to stall for time as she considered her response. When she withdrew it, she forgot to tap it off and left a trail of ink droplets as her hand moved across the page. She pressed the pen to the page, but her hand went still and no words came to her.