The Winter King
Page 78

“To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit this morning, Lady Villani?”
The woman smoothed a hand over her expensively gowned hips and summoned a surprisingly convincing expression of worry and remorse. “I’m afraid we may have somehow gotten off on the wrong foot last night.”
“What makes you think that?” Kham asked in a mild tone. She lifted her teacup and regarded Reika over its rim.
“Well . . . I . . .” Clearly, she hadn’t expected Khamsin to play ignorant. “The way you left the dinner . . . it was obvious you were upset.” She took a half step forward, wringing her hands. Kham thought that was a particularly nice touch. “It’s just that Wynter—ah, I mean, the king—and I are such old and dear friends. I fear we might have made you feel a little left out.”
“Don’t trouble yourself, Lady Villani. I understood perfectly the nature of your relationship with my husband.”
“Oh . . . well, that is good . . .”
“Yes, it is, though perhaps not in the way you mean. Roland Soldeus always said understanding the nature of one’s enemy is the path to ensuring his defeat.”
Great blue eyes blinked in charming confusion. “Enemy? Defeat?” Reika gave a tinkling laugh. “You have me at a loss. Surely you’re not suggesting that I—”
Khamsin lifted a hand to cut her off. “Lady Villani, please. Spare me your fluttering lashes and false confusion. I am not susceptible to your charms.”
Lady Villani made one last attempt to cling to her illusion of innocence. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“Let us be frank with one another. You want my husband. I will not share him with you. There, the matter is out in the open now, and the battle lines are drawn.”
“Indeed.” Reika’s voice had a new, hard edge that hadn’t been there before, and her eyes changed from limpid pools to glittering stone. “Well, like your countrymen before you, Summerlander, this is one battle in which you will find yourself far outmatched.”
Khamsin took another sip of her tea and curled her fingers around the porcelain cup. Energy from the confrontation was gathering inside her, and she could feel its electric warmth beginning to speed the blood in her veins, making the hot tea seem cooler by comparison. “It must have been very hard for you to want a man so badly only to have your sister snatch him away. And then, after she left him, and he was free once more, to have him go off to war for three long years and return with yet another woman on his arm, a wife no less. You have my sympathy. I know what it is like to want something you cannot have.”
“Keep your sympathy. I have no need of it.” The corner of Reika’s mouth curled in a sneer. “He only wed you to secure the peace and breed an heir acceptable to both kingdoms. You are simply a means to an end, chosen for your bloodline, nothing more. Any Summerlea princess could stand in your stead.”
The words struck deep, catching Khamsin unprepared and surprisingly vulnerable. Reika wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know, so why did it hurt to hear it?
Stung, and wanting to sting back, she touched the faint abrasions Wynter had left on her neck and forced a smug, triumphant smile. “Really? Then he truly is an amazing master of deception, to be able to feign such convincing passion again . . . and again . . . and again . . .”
The woman went quite still. For a moment, Kham thought her barb had struck home, but Reika was not so easy a target. Her eyes grew calm and intent. “Yes,” she agreed smoothly, “he is a very . . . intense lover and skillful enough to make a woman lose all reason. It’s one of the things I’ve missed most these last three years. And I can see how an inexperienced girl might assume the power of his sexuality implies a bond that doesn’t really exist.”
Kham’s confidence faltered. She would have sworn Reika and Wynter had never been lovers. She lifted her teacup and took a sip to hide her dismay.
Reika stood beside Khamsin, smiling with cool serenity, no doubt silently gloating that her second, well-aimed blow had struck home even more deeply than the first. And that made Khamsin’s temper simmer.
Walk away, dearly. Tildy, who understood peace, would say. Just walk away.
But Roland, who understood war, would have offered different advice. Behind your enemy’s smile lies treachery. Show him that behind yours lies steel. Fail to do so, and you only make him bolder.
Khamsin stared down into the fragrant, golden brown depths of her tea. She was no wise, peaceful Tildy, no matter how she might try. She was a daughter of the Sun, capable of warmth, but just as capable of fire and lethal volatility.
Khamsin tightened her grip on the teacup and turned back to face her adversary. “What do you know of the Heirs to the Summer Throne, Lady Villani?”
Blond brows drew together in a delicate frown. “I beg your pardon?”
“The Royal Family of Summerlea—my family, and my ancestors before me—what do you know of us?”
“I . . . don’t understand how that has any bearing on this conversation.”
“It has great bearing. Have you ever heard of Roland Soldeus—Roland Triumphant, the Hero of Summerlea? No? Perhaps you should do a little reading, broaden your horizons.” She flashed a brief, tight smile. “Roland once crushed a well-supplied army of fifty thousand invaders with scarcely three thousand men of his own. They say he blazed bright as the sun, and that his sword shot beams of burning fire, and that his enemies burst into flames before him, and the charred dust of their bodies blew away on the fierce, hot winds—the khamsins—he could summon at will. My family can trace its lineage back to his brother, Donal. The same powerful blood that ran in Roland’s veins runs in mine.”