Read Drenai Saga 02 - The King Beyond the Gate for Free Online

tracing his memories like salt over a festering wound.
    “I should have killed you then,” he said. “None of this would have happened to me.”
    He pictured Tenaka dying, his blood seeping into the snow. It gave him no joy, but still he hungered for the deed.
    “I will make you pay,” he said.
    And set off to the south.
    Tenaka and Renya made good progress on the second day, seeing no one or any track made by man. The wind had died down, and the clean air held the promise of spring. Tenaka was silent through most of the day, and Renya did not press him.
    Toward dusk, as they clambered down a steep incline, she lost her footing and pitched forward, tumbling and rolling to the foot of the hill and striking her head on a gnarled tree root. Tenaka ran to her side, pulling free her burnoose and examining the seeping gash on her temple. Her eyes flared open.
    “Don’t touch me!” she screamed, clawing at his hands.
    He moved back, handing her the cotton burnoose.
    “I don’t like to be touched,” she said apologetically.
    “Then I shall not touch you,” he answered. “But you should bandage that wound.”
    She tried to stand, but the world spun and she fell to the snow. Tenaka made no move to help her. Glancing around for a place to camp, he spotted a likely site some thirty paces away to the left: a natural screen of trees blocking the wind, with overhanging boughs to halt any storm snow. He made his way to it, collecting branches as he went. Renya watched him walk away and struggled to rise but felt sick and began to tremble violently. Her head throbbed, the pain a rhythmic pounding that sent waves of nausea through her. She tried to crawl.
    “I … don’t need you,” she whispered.
    Tenaka prepared the fire, blowing the tinder until tiny flames shivered above the snow. Then he added thicker twigs and finally branches. When the blaze was well set, he returned to the girl, stooping to lift her unconscious body. He laid her by the fire, then climbed a nearby fir tree to hack away green boughs with his short sword. Gathering them, he made a bed for her, lifted her onto it, and then covered her with the blanket. He examined the wound. There was no fracture as far as he could tell, but an ugly bruise was forming around an egg-sized lump.
    He stroked her face, admiring the softness of her skin and the sleekness of her neck.
    “I will not harm you, Renya,” he said. “Of all the things that I am, of all the deeds I have done that shamed me, I have never harmed a woman. Nor a child. You are safe with me … Your secrets are safe with me.
    “I know what it is like, you see. I, too, am between worlds—half-Nadir, half-Drenai, wholly nothing. For you it is worse. But I am here. Believe in me.”
    He returned to the fire, wishing he could say those words when her eyes were open but knowing he would not. In all his life he had opened his heart to only one woman: Illae.
    Beautiful Illae, the bride he had purchased in a Ventrian market. He smiled at the memory. Two thousand pieces of silver and he had taken her home only to have her refuse to share his bed.
    “Enough of this nonsense,” he had stormed. “You are mine. Body and soul! I bought you!”
    “What you bought was a carcass,” she had retorted. “Touch me and I will kill myself. And you, too.”
    “You will be disappointed if you try it in that order,” he had said.
    “Don’t mock me, barbarian!”
    “Very well. What would you have me do? Resell you to a Ventrian?”
    “Marry me.”
    “And then, I take it, you will love and adore me?”
    “No. But I will sleep with you and try to be good company.”
    “Now, there is an offer that’s hard to refuse. A slave girl who offers her master less than he paid for, at a much greater price. Why should I do it?”
    “Why should you not?”
    They had wed two weeks later, and ten years of their life together had brought him joy. He knew she did not love him, but it did not matter. He did not need