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Chapter Nineteen

Guinevere

This, Guinevere told Teinidh the next day, is all your fault.

A laugh like the sputtering of a dying fire was the elemental’s only response.

Guinevere was the sole diner in the lobby of the inn at this early hour, which meant that no one was around to witness her shame as she abandoned her manners to rest her elbows on the table while she spooned a bit of coddled egg into her mouth.

Her head throbbed something fierce. It was a punishment.

Last night, Teinidh had spurred her into trying ale for the first time. Guinevere had regarded the frothy tankards being passed around with curiosity, and the wildfire spirit had leapt on that like a…well, like a moth to a flame.

It’s not ladylike to drink ale, Guinevere had protested.

Neither is it ladylike to rub yourself all over strange men in the swamp, Teinidh had retorted.

Oskar is not a stranger—

But he isn’t your betrothed, is he? Drink the ale, little girl. You want to, so just do it. I won’t shut up otherwise.

Guinevere was quickly coming to the conclusion that, more than being dangerous, Teinidh was downright annoying. She regretted taking Elaras’s advice and opening the connection. She regretted it with every inch of her aching head and dry-as-sawdust mouth.

But she would doubtless be in direr straits were it not for the hot bath that she’d gratefully sunk into when she woke up.

Oskar had apparently arranged it for her before he headed out to resume his woodchopping.

And, in fact, once she’d broken her fast and helped herself to the mushroom coffee that was a Berleben specialty, Guinevere felt very nearly like her old self again.

Planning to keep Oskar company while he worked, she skipped out the back door of the Drowned Nest and into the murky sunshine. Almost immediately, however, she realized that she’d made a terrible mistake.

First of all, the moment she saw him, every utterly humiliating thing that she’d done the night before came crashing back to her with the intensity of a thousand flares from a thousand suns apiece.

Second of all, he was shirtless.

After all these days on the road with a rather inordinate amount of hugging on horseback, Guinevere was no stranger to the feel of Oskar’s body. She knew that he was rock solid and well formed underneath his simple tunics. But nothing could have prepared her for the actual sight.

For the sweat-damp waves of his midnight-black hair curling against his broad oakmoss shoulders, and the beads of moisture that trickled tantalizingly into the divot between his sharp collarbones.

For the wide expanse of his chest, the sculpted plane of his abdomen…

the spurs of his lean hips, peeking out from dark trousers that hung far too low to be decent.

For those arms, bare and gleaming in the daylight, the cords in them rippling with each swing of the axe.

Dear gods, his muscles had muscles. Guinevere felt faint.

Inside her, Teinidh cocked her head in interest. Licked her lips like a cat with a fiery tongue.

Oskar didn’t notice Guinevere standing there for several long moments, which was just as well, because it gave her time to collect herself. Unfortunately, she didn’t do a very good job of it, because—

—when he caught sight of her and straightened up, lowering the axe, his golden eyes crinkling at the corners as his lips curved into a lopsided little grin—

—she all but fell to pieces at his feet.

Twenty years of existence, and how could she never have known about someone like him?

“Good morning, sleeping beauty,” he drawled. “How’s your head?”

“Oh, Oskar,” she said plaintively, because it was all she could think to say.

His grin widened. The years fell away from his face. Oh, to have him like this forever—boyish, rumpled, lighthearted. And shirtless. Mustn’t forget shirtless.

“And what have we learned?” he asked.

“That ale is devil’s water,” she murmured.

“Good.” He nodded toward the inn. “I’m almost done. Go back inside and rest while you can. There’s around two days’ worth of travel between us and the next city.”

“What if…what if the mercenaries attack again?” Even just saying it made her look around, half afraid that her words would conjure them.

“Ambushing someone in Labenda would be like setting fire to yourself to kill a vampire,” said Oskar. “I don’t think we have anything to worry about until we’re back on the Amber Road. And even then, I’ll be ready for them.”

He was one man against several. It was ridiculous to feel assuaged. And yet, somehow, she was. Somehow, she understood, deep in the marrow of her bones, that Oskar would never let anything happen to her.

He cast an assessing look at the bits of sky visible through the gaps in the trees, gauging the time, and went back to chopping. His brawny arms swung, and the axe sang, and one chunk of wood after another split on the stump as effortlessly as though he were merely sinking a knife through butter.

Guinevere castigated herself for being the worst kind of voyeur as she just stood there, watching his shoulders roll like mountains and the sweat glisten on his forest skin. But it was physically impossible for her to turn away.

At least—until Teinidh started purring.

Guinevere wished she could reach inside and put her hand over the wildfire spirit’s eyes. Given the impossibility of that, she settled for retreating into the Drowned Nest with acerbic haste.

So possessive, Teinidh chided her. Not very sisterly of you to stop me from appreciating a handsome man.

I’m fairly certain no sister of mine would have singed off Mother’s eyebrows. Guinevere still remembered being locked in her room for three days thanks to that fiasco.

She was shouting and shaking you because you refused to give up your totem. You didn’t understand why she hated you so much. Teinidh shrugged lazily. I was protecting us the only way I knew how.

The rest of the journey through Labenda was uneventful.

Guinevere supposed that it might have to do with the fact that they were on the Byway, which was riddled with the tracks of horses and carts.

The swamp’s fauna would have learned to steer clear.

She sometimes got the impression that they were being watched, but Oskar seemed unconcerned when she brought it up.

“Probably just that treehugger making sure I don’t litter in his precious swamp.”

“Treehugger?” She relaxed against him, rocked gently by Vindicator’s steady pace. “Oh, you mean Elaras. He was nice, wasn’t he?”

Oskar made a noncommittal rumble in the back of his throat.

Guinevere wondered if he was uncomfortable with her basically using him as an armchair; she attempted to straighten up in the saddle, but he curved an arm in front of her stomach in response, keeping her there. She subsided with a happy little sigh.

“Oskar,” she said, “about last night—thank you. For taking care of me. And for not…you know.”

She hadn’t been lying when she said she liked kissing him, but she didn’t know how she would have felt doing it with her mind all muddled from the ale. This thing between them—it was so new. Completely uncharted territory, as terrifying sometimes as it was exhilarating.

“No need to thank me.” His tone sounded vaguely bleak. “You deserve to be treated right. No one should be taking liberties. Not even Lord Whistledong.”

She didn’t bother to correct him. Her mood had once again soured at the reminder that she had a betrothed waiting for her on the Menagerie Coast.

By midmorning of the next day, the swamp had blurred back into temperate red-gold forest, and Guinevere was in dire need of a bath.

She’d slathered herself in salve the previous afternoon.

Oskar had kept his promise and bought a small round tin of the stuff before they set off from Berleben, and it was effective—in both soothing her existing bites and staving off new ones.

She swore that she’d seen more than a few of the tiny insects shrivel and fall to the ground the instant they came into contact with her skin.

Whichever enterprising Berleben native had invented the salve was a mad genius.

There was a major drawback, however: It smelled absolutely horrid, a cloying blend of incense and bitter herbs and musk. It was a thick, oily, yellowish concoction that trapped her sweat…and there had been a lot of sweating in the oppressive humidity of Labenda.

The end result was that she currently felt about as attractive as the troll Oskar had killed. She smelled much worse, too.

Oskar was no help at all. After Guinevere instructed him to not hold her so closely while they were riding because she stank, he teased her mercilessly, leaning in whenever she least expected it, burying his nose in her neck and taking deep breaths, smirking every time she squealed and pushed him away.

She was becoming quite cross with him, although she had to admit that his cavalier attitude got her to see the humor of the situation.

Got her to laugh at herself when she would have normally wanted to die from embarrassment.

They were almost to the Amber Road, by his estimate, when she heard the not-so-distant roar of water.

She cast him a beseeching look, and he wordlessly steered Vindicator off the Byway and into the forest, Pudding trotting close behind.

A few more minutes, and then Guinevere was letting out a gasp of delight as the undergrowth gave way to a glade so beautiful that it might as well have been enchanted.

Here the river that snaked through the woods coursed over shale terraces in curtains of white froth and spilled into a lake the bright blue color of melted fine-grade turquoise.

The water’s glassy surface scintillated with diamond pinpricks of reflected sunlight, bordered by the garnets and topazes of Fessuran.

It was a surfeit of jeweled radiance, rendered further dreamlike by the lilt of birdsong that thrummed through the clearing and mingled with the rush of the cascade to form a wistful lullaby.

Oskar helped Guinevere dismount, and he set the horses to grazing while she ducked behind some bushes and stripped off her clothes, carefully tucking away her totem amidst them.

Even though she was outdoors, there was no room for hesitation—not when she thought about getting clean the way a starving man thought about eating.

And, for her, there was no lovelier feeling in the world than slipping into that cold, fresh water, letting it whisk away the sweat and the dirt. She might have moaned a little.

Guinevere splashed about happily for a while. But a fair bit of the salve still clung to her skin, and she swam over to the far shore where Oskar was standing with his back to her, arms crossed and feet slightly apart.

“Oskar,” she said sweetly.

He grunted.

“Could you hand me the soap? It’s in my pack.”

He didn’t move. “You should have brought it with you.”

“I forgot. Please? ”

He huffed out an exasperated breath, then went over to Pudding and rifled through one of the rucksacks dangling down the mare’s dappled side.

When he returned to Guinevere, it was with soap in hand and topaz eyes looking everywhere but at the water…

eyes that he squeezed shut, with all his might, when he crouched down and held the soap out to her.

Guinevere would have liked to blame Teinidh entirely for the wicked impulse that surged through her just then.

But it was more accurate to say that she was the one who came up with the idea and Teinidh pounced on it and crooned in delight, and the flames of mischief built and built until they roared like the terraced waterfalls behind her.

She would never have done this to anyone in the Shimmer Ward. She would never have done this, period. Out here in the open wild, though, where the sky was endless and the trees were vast and the air was clear—well, there was no better place to not be herself.

Or perhaps to truly be yourself, Teinidh hummed. Or ourself.

What do you mean by that?

The wildfire spirit didn’t respond, so Guinevere forgot all about her. She wrapped her eager fingers around Oskar’s wrist and tugged him into the lake.