Naamah's Blessing

letting it drop. “Jagrati? Sometimes, yes. I try not to. Why?”
    I shrugged. Bao had spent long months under her thrall, bound by Kamadeva’s diamond and opium. Believing me dead, he had been content to wallow in darkness. “I just wondered.”
    Bao leaned against the back of the tub. “Your presence keeps the memories away, Moirin,” he said in a serious manner; and then his grin returned. “Leo asked me if I was a prince in my own land. I told him that I was, but I gave up my kingdom to be with you.”
    I raised my brows. “That is stretching the truth, my magpie.”
    “Only a little,” he said in an unrepentant tone. “I’m sure the Great Khan would have gifted me with a territory of my own if I had remained wed to his daughter.”
    “It’s possible,” I admitted.
    “Anyway, Leo thought it was a very admirable story.” Bao nudged me with one foot. “Am I royalty now that I’m wed to you?”
    “Does it matter?” I asked.
    His dark eyes gleamed. “No, of course not. I only wondered if I was entitled to be called
Lord
Bao.”
    I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
    “Oh, well.” Bao gave a good-natured shrug. “Still, pretty good for a bastard peasant-boy with no family name.”
    “I’ve no lands to my name, you know,” I commented. “None of the Maghuin Dhonn do. We are allowed to dwell in the wild places of Alba in the terms of a sacred trust forged by Alais the Wise many years ago, but we do not own them. I have no title. Lady Moirin is just an honorific acknowledging my heritage.”
    “I am only teasing, Moirin.” Bao leaned forward, tugging me so that I slid to straddle his waist. Water slopped over the edges of thetub. Intensity heated his gaze. “I love you, and I would choose to be with you whether in a slum or a cave or a palace. All right?”
    I cupped his face and kissed him. “Aye.”
    His callused hands slid over my slippery skin, creating a glorious friction. I rubbed myself against him, feeling his arousal.
    One of the inn’s servants opened the door to the bathing-chamber, then closed it with a soft laugh.
    Bao reached down into the bath-water, grasping his taut phallus, fitting the swollen head between my nether-lips. “You see?” His other hand slid around the nape of my neck, pulling me down for a kiss as he pushed himself into me. “For you, I will even learn to be more like a D’Angeline.” His hips thrust upward. “Depraved and scandalous.”
    I drew a long, shuddering breath as he filled me, my fingers digging into his shoulders. “Indeed.”
    He smiled. “I have always been a clever student.”
    Laughing, the bright lady agreed.
    In the morning, with young Leo’s eager aid, we set about procuring passage overland to the City of Elua.
    After the close quarters I had endured on the ship, I could not bear the thought of being cloistered in a carriage for days. Mercifully, Bao understood, knowing that there was a part of me that chafed at being confined, all the more so since the ordeal I had undergone in Vralia.
    So it was that we bartered with a horse-trader that Leo assured us was reputable for a pair of saddle-horses and a pair of pack-horses. Bao watched with considerable amusement as I introduced myself to all four, cupping their velvety, whiskery muzzles and breathing into their nostrils, touching their placid equine thoughts with my own, leaning my brow against the bony plates of theirs.
    “Does she really
talk
to them?” Leo asked in a loud whisper.
    “I’m not sure,” Bao whispered in reply.
    One of the saddle-horses gave a dignified whicker. I patted his withers. “Well said, my friend.”
    The trader, testing the purity of our Bhodistani coinage bite by bite, widened his eyes.
    I smiled sweetly at him. “We will take them.”
    He coughed and nodded.
    There was scant hope in outpacing gossip anywhere in the world, and least of all in Terre d’Ange. I did not try. Within a day of our arrival, word had gone out ahead of us that Moirin mac Fainche had returned to D’Angeline shores.
    I hadn’t expected otherwise. Still, it galled me a little. Only because my reputation had sunk so low in Marsilikos, where I was reckoned to have seduced Jehanne and ruined Raphael. And now, thanks to Bao’s creative reinvention of history, it was rumored I had seduced a prince of faraway Ch’in to my own ends.
    It made Bao laugh.
    I scowled at him. “I did
not
seduce you! Stone and sea! You
chose
this!”
    He shrugged with amusement. “No,