The Soldier's Lotus (22 page)

“
Some retirement,”
Darien said. “We have to go all the way up north, and then gather an army, and
then sail a fleet down the river all the way back down here, and then lay siege
to Arinport and kill that traitorous Ulen and all the fools who followed him.”
He wanted to make sure that these men knew exactly what was going to happen
after he had killed them.

Kamen shook his head like it was a real shame. “That’s a
lot of work.”

Darien groaned a long affirmative, and the assassins both
looked at each other. They were cornered, and they knew it. Darien would not
give them a chance to strike first. He leaped forward
with
 
a
mighty cry, startling the pair with
his ferocity. They raised their swords above them in response, but that was just
what Darien expected them to do. He grappled the one nearest him and yelled at
Kamen to take the other one.

Darien’s foe was no match for his strength. After pinning
the man’s arms, Darien squeezed him in a powerful hug. Darien could feel his
back and stomach muscles straining against the pressure, but the man could not
escape. Darien only squeezed more tightly, and it was only then a matter of
moments before those muscles all went limp as the assassin’s backbone gave way.
Darien dropped his prey and looked over to check on Kamen’s progress. The
battle was over. Kamen’s foe was dead as well, but Kamen himself, too, lay in
the sand bleeding.

Darien rushed to his friend’s side. The cut was
superficial, a thin line of blood from Kamen’s pelvic bone to his ribs.

“
A
scratch.”
Kamen extended his
hand, and Darien helped him to his feet.

“
We made short work of
them, didn’t we?” Darien laughed, his body tense, every muscle taut,
every
nerve singing in the joy of battle. He looked around,
almost hoping for more enemies to appear. But then he thought of Saerileth, and
he turned to go check on her.

Kamen moved to walk with Darien, but his legs gave way, and
he collapsed.

“
What’s wrong?” Darien
knelt beside his friend. “What is it?”

“
I...don’t...know.”
Each word was forced through a labored breath. Kamen’s legs lay rigid, splayed
out before him. His arms were stiff as boards.

“
Poison.”
Saerileth’s voice came out of nowhere.

Darien spun around. “Are you sure?”

Saerileth nodded. The boy and the ambassador were also
standing nearby, safe.

Darien turned back to Kamen. Kamen’s breathing was growing
shorter,
more wheezy
. His eyes rolled back in his
head. His hands
shook,
his fingers unmoving.

From Saerileth to Kamen, Darien looked again and again.
Then he remembered that Saerileth was a Lotus. “Can you do anything?”

“
Yes, I can,”
Saerileth said. She dug in her
pallav
and pulled out
some dry herbs.

“
You have them on
you?” Darien found it rather odd.

“
Keep his head
elevated.” She nodded at Kamen as she knelt near her bag and fished out a cup.

Darien did so.

Saerileth mixed up a horrible smelling concoction and
handed the cup to Darien. “Give it to him now, before his muscles tighten up to
the point where his ribs break and puncture his lungs.”

Darien stared at Saerileth. “He’s poisoned?”

Saerileth nodded, and it explained everything. The
assassins fought the way they did because they knew that all they needed to do
was scratch Kamen and Darien. That was all it would take to kill them.

Darien fed Kamen the herbal drink, and the young man’s body
relaxed at once.
Soon after he fell asleep.

“
That worked fast,”
Darien said, laying Kamen’s head on a balled-up cloak. “Ulen had those men
poison their blades.”

“
Of course he did,”
Saerileth said, coming up to hug Darien.

“
What do you mean, ‘of
course’?”

“
Ulen knows you, and
he knows no man could defeat you in a fair fight.”

“
So he sent ten men,
just enough with poison to do the job.”

“
But not so many that
some might survive and see the boy-king.”

Darien marveled at how quickly Saerileth saw things. “Ulen
wants people to think the heir is dead.”

Saerileth’s expression was eloquent. Ulen may have been
brutish, but he respected Darien’s battle prowess. He was not as clumsy as
Darien had thought.

Kamen was in no condition to travel, so Darien decided to
let him sleep through the night. An eerie silence fell over the camp – at
least, it was eerie for Darien. It was that strange calm that always followed a
battle, how everything that was normal in the world suddenly seemed surreal. A
few minutes before, there were ten living, breathing men. Now they were all
corpses. Saerileth, who had gone back to the boy after releasing Darien from
her arms, was rocking
Jahen
to sleep, and to Darien,
the juxtaposition of that scene – the life, the nurturing – seemed the
strangest of all.

“
I can never give you
a baby,
Saeri
,” Darien said, the words breaking out
unbidden.

Saerileth looked up from the boy. “What?”

Darien’s mind swam through the surreal moments that enticed
him to honesty. “I never seeded any of my concubines.”

Saerileth laid
Jahen
down and
covered him up. The boy was asleep. She moved over to sit next to Darien and
put her arm around his waist, hugging him and resting her head on his shoulder.
“
Lia
did that on purpose. She kept your concubines
from you unless their wombs were dry, unable to take seed.”

This news shattered the eeriness, and reality rushed back
in on Darien with a wave of anger. “What?”

“
Lia
could not conceive,” Saerileth said, “so she
made sure none of your other concubines did, either, lest one replace her as
first.”

“
She told you this?”

“
No. It was so obvious
I knew without her saying anything, though when I confronted her, she tried to
deny it. Still, the proof was in the records she had kept.”

“
I’m blind to so many
things,” Darien said, rubbing his hands down Saerileth’s cold arms.

“
You are a leader of
men, a ship’s captain, and an unmatched warrior. You see what you need to see,
just as I do.
Lia
tried to poison me the day I
arrived, to poison my womb, just in case you had gotten me with child aboard
ship. That showed me her nature and purpose, so it was easy to discern the rest
of her behavior.”

Darien took a few moments to let his mind sort through this
information, and his fury evaporated into joy. “So, I
can
sire
children.”

Saerileth nodded and kissed his shoulder.

“
I want to make a baby
with you. Why haven’t you conceived yet?”

“
All Lotuses drink
herbs that prevent conception. But I, too, want your child.”

Darien pulled Saerileth up on his lap. “No time like the
present.” He reached up and caressed her breasts.

“
My
love.”
Saerileth brushed his
lips
with her own
. “One day I will bear your child,
but I must remind you of our present difficulties.” She gestured to the barren
desert around them. “We are here for a reason. Your country is in political
upheaval, and you must go to war. Now is not the time for baby-making.” She
indicated the corpses of the assassins stacked up some ways off for the
jackals. “Now is the time for blood and death.”

Darien kissed Saerileth’s lips and imagined what her
lovely, naked, pregnant body would look like. “Well, we can play now, then, as
you’ve obviously been drinking those herbs – that’s why you have them on you,
isn’t it? – but as soon as we are back in Arinport, we make our baby.”

“
That is a promise.”
And Saerileth returned his kisses with the passion he so loved.

Chapter Thirteen

Saerileth closed her eyes and slipped beneath the warm,
soothing bath-water. The past two weeks, these fourteen days of travel through
the desert, had been horrible. The sun was deadly, and the ambassador’s facial
blisters had burst and become infected. Kamen had been unable to walk properly
for days, and it had taken him two days to be able to walk at all. The little
king had been as irritable as any child would be who was forced to travel
across the desert – and who had not seen his parents for a fortnight. But
Saerileth would not have wished herself anywhere other than that harsh desert,
for that was where Darien was.

She surfaced, shaking her head to swirl her hair through
the water. This was her first real bath since leaving Arinport, and she did not
intend to waste the opportunity. She had washed her hair thoroughly even before
stepping into the bath, and the sensation of clean hair was delightful to her.
She was not much sunburned, thanks to Darien’s extreme care of her, and she
would be ready to help him in this newest endeavor. She knew that the
Vadal
would not necessarily be interested in fighting a war
of liberation for the
Sunjaa
. They had their own
people back – the ambassador and King
Jahen
– and
though it was right and just for them to help the little king win back his
crown, it would be costly. She knew that she would need to use all her
influence to help Darien get the army he required.

Saerileth smiled to herself. Darien did not think that
there would be any difficulty, as there would not be, if all men were as
perfect as he was. The image of Darien walking the desert, traversing the sands
with the same ease he sailed the waves, while carrying the little
Jahen
on his shoulders, shot through Saerileth’s mind, and
a tenderness that was three parts pain filled her heart. She wanted nothing
more than to throw away her herbs and become the mother of his child. She
wanted to hold Darien’s son to her breast, and the knowledge sent the blood to
her cheeks. No Lotus bore children. But Saerileth had already come to terms
with the truth that when she was near Darien, she was no proper Lotus. She was
merely a girl in love, in love with a man who had become her whole world.

“
Lotus?”
The deferential voice of the girl assigned to
attend her broke through Saerileth’s reverie. “His Grace will be ready to
receive you and your companions within half an hour.”

“
I will be ready.”
Saerileth rose from the bath. Fresh garments of
Vadal
design had been provided for her, and she had some adjustments to make to them.
She would need all her wiles to pull off this maneuver.

In fifteen minutes, Saerileth was dressed, her hair piled
high on her head, with some half dozen loose, damp ringlets hanging in seeming
disarray around her face. Her
Vadal
gown she had
decorated with a silk shawl, and she wound the tassels of the shawl around her
long, slender fingers with a studied carelessness.

“
Saeri
!”
Darien, fresh from his own bath and still
wearing a
Sunjaa
skirt, came to meet her in the
hallway, and he swept her up into his arms. “You look fresh as the morning,
glorious as an army with banners!”

“
I hope to get you an
army with banners, my love.” She whispered the words in his ear.

Darien pulled back to look at her. “Kamen said that the
Vadal
wouldn’t come with us, that we might as well settle
here. Do you mean that you agree with him?”

“
No.” Saerileth
smiled. “You want an army, and I shall get you one.”

Darien kept his arm around her waist as they made their way
to the throne room. Kamen joined them before they had gone half the necessary
distance,
and Saerileth felt the same peculiar burning in
Kamen’s gaze as he looked at her.

She nodded appropriately as Darien greeted his friend, but
she avoided looking at Kamen’s eyes. Ever since she had saved him from Ulen’s
poison, Kamen had looked on her with a charged scrutiny. There was a mixture of
emotions in Kamen that Saerileth did not want to identify. She did not want to
grow any closer to this beautiful
Itenu
nobleman. He
was her rival and her enemy.

“
So what do you want
to bet that the
Vadal
don’t join the fight against
Ulen?” asked Kamen.

“
I’ll bet you your
whole household,” said Darien. “
Saeri’s
promised me a
Vadal
army.”