Page 66 of White Horse Black Nights

He’s filthy, covered in blood, just like me. We should clean ourselves up, but I can’t bear to have this moment end. With the pad of my thumb, I smooth a drop of blood off his bottom lip. “What happened in Blackwater?”

“I shouldn’t have left you, even for a second. It’s my fault that they—”

I lay my finger flat across his lips, silencing him. “It isn’t your fault.”

He shakes his head. “Sabine, when I saw you were taken . . . When I smelled that bastard’s taint on top of your own scent . . . ” Rage contorts his face to the point where it feels like he’ll explode. He drags a hand down his face, trying to bring his emotions into check.

Myst whinnies at the door.

All dead?

I start to answer her, but before I can, Basten says in a voice heavy with exhaustion, “Yeah, crazy mare. We got her. We did it.”

I wrinkle my nose, confused. “Wait. Did you—did youhearher?”

“No. But that horse and I? We understand each other well enough without words.”

He weighs as much as two of you, Myst snorts at me.Tell him he walks on his own feet from now on.

I can’t help but smile, wondering how in the world the two of them got along well enough to team up to rescue me. Then, I look at Adan’s body, and grow serious.

“Basten, there’s something I have to tell you. King Joruun was the one who hired Adan and his men to bring me to Old Coros.”

Basten pulls back to search my eyes for an answer to a question he doesn’t understand. His eyebrows furrow. “King Joruun? Are you certain?” He hesitates. “What exactly did they say?”

“That the king wouldn’t want me, well,touched.” My voice bottoms out on the final word, as I feel the ghost of Maks’s hands between my legs. My throat goes bone-dry. My muscles seize up from the echo of past danger, and Basten must pick up on it with his heightened senses, because he lightly grips my chin with thumb and forefinger.

“Didthey touch you?”

A whimper slips out before I can swallow it. My body shakes. Basten’s eyes darken like storm clouds, and he shakes his head as I hunt for words to explain.

“No—you don’t have to say it, Sabine. I can find out myself.” As carefully as picking up a bird with a broken wing, he leans close to smell my neck, then over my shoulder, to the palm of my hand. Then he turns to the dead bodies.

“That one,” he says, pointing to Maks. “He tried—but didn’t get far.”

I give the ghost of a nod.

His grip on my hand tightens possessively. “I’d ask Immortal Woudix to bring that bastard back from the dead, just so I could kill him all over again.” He takes a shuddering breath. A moment passes, then he says quietly, “They weren’t talking about King Joruun.”

It takes me a second to realize we aren’t talking about Maks anymore. “But who—”

“They meant King Rachillon.”

I stare at him. I’ve never heard the name.

He explains, “They were Volkish raiders, Sabine. A king might have hired them, but not ours. It was King Rachillon of Volkany.”

Bewildered, I stare blankly like he’s telling me a fae story that happened long ago to people far more important than me.

“King Rachillon?” I pronounce it as he did,Rah-shee-yan.

I’ve been so sequestered for the last twelve years that any news that might have dribbled across the Volkish border didn’t make it into the Convent of Immortal Iyre. The last I heard, Volkany didn’t even have a king. “I—I don’t understand. Why would the King of Volkany want me?”

It feels unreal to even say, like we’re operating within a dream.

Basten mutters to himself, “That’s a damn good question.”

He brought up Volkany in the Manywaters Inn. I wonder if he knows more than he’s saying—or at least suspects more—but his clenched jaw tells me his thoughts are locked inside his own head for the time being.

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