She held on to him, not wanting to let go. He turned, shifting his weight onto the bed, and they lay wrapped in each other. She felt so happy, so heartbreakingly happy.
“Can it be like this again?” she asked.
“It can be however you want it to be,” he told her, and kissed her lips.
She closed her eyes and smiled.
* * *
“YOU never told me why you do this. Why you went after the slavers.”
Richard turned his head and looked at her. Charlotte lay on her stomach on the covers, still naked and completely his. That glorious hair spilled over her back like a silken waterfall. Her face, neck, and arms had a tan, but her br**sts and the swell of her butt were pale, and the intimate bare stretch of that pale skin seemed intensely sexual. She lay next to him, content, perhaps even happy, completely at ease, looking at him with her silver eyes. Like sunlight shining through the rain, he thought.
Mmm. Mine. My Charlotte.
He’d made her happy, he’d made her moan and ask for more of him. If it was at all in his power, he would make it so it would always be like this.
It could always be like this, a quiet voice whispered inside him. He could take her with him and disappear. Just walk away. Nobody would blame him. Nobody but the ghosts in his memories.
Richard reached over and stroked her shoulder.
“Do you remember the girl at the Camarine Mansion? The one who met us?”
“You look alike. Is she your daughter?”
“She’s my niece. Her name is Sophie.”
“The Sophie? The one you were saving when you were delirious?”
He nodded. “My grandparents had several children. My father was the oldest son, and Gustave, my uncle, was the second oldest. Our family was involved in a feud. In the Mire, everyone feuds with somebody. Our feud was old, with deep roots.”
“Is that why your father was shot in the market?”
“Yes. I was too young to take care of the family, still a child by the Mire’s standards, and Gustave was a much better fit. He became the head of our clan. He had two daughters, Cerise, who is now married to Earl Camarine’s best friend, and Sophie.”
“So you’re her cousin?”
“Technically. Our relationship was always more that of an uncle and niece. I’m old enough to be her father. Gustave was often busy. One day, he had gone out and taken his wife and Cerise with him. Sophie came to see me. She wanted to take a boat down the river to Sicktree, the nearest town. Her mother’s birthday was coming up, and she wanted to sell some wine and buy her a gift.”
Telling the story was like cutting open the old wound deep inside him. He was surprised it still hurt that much, after so many years. “Celeste, my second cousin, was going with her. I didn’t see the harm in it. Celeste was a capable young woman and a good shot. In the Mire, everybody knows everybody, and our family had a dangerous reputation. Nobody except for the feuding family would dare to bother them, and our feud had cooled to a smolder. I told them to go ahead.
“About twenty minutes out, a group of slavers found them. They put a bullet into Celeste’s head. She pitched into the water, and Sophie went in after her. When Sophie broke the surface, the slavers hit her over the head with an oar and hauled her into their boat.”
Charlotte moved closer to him, wrapping her fingers around his.
“Slavers were unheard of in the Mire. The border with Louisiana is the only place they could enter, and it’s guarded too tightly. Someone on the Dukedom’s side had to have let the slavers in for that raid. We never found out who or why. The girls didn’t come home, and that evening, we went out on the river and found Celeste’s body. We began combing the swamp, but we had no idea who had taken Sophie or why.”
“Where did they take her?” Charlotte asked.
“To a hole in the woods. They wanted children, specifically. They put her into a hole in the ground. Sophie said on the second day a man climbed down to visit her. He groped her and tried to rip off her clothes.”
Charlotte’s eyes shone with outrage.
“Sophie can flash. She’s properly trained like most of us. Her training wasn’t complete then, but she defended herself. She flashed through the man’s eyes and killed him. In punishment, they stopped feeding her or giving her water. It took us eight days to find her. I remember that camp like I saw it yesterday. Half-flooded holes, starving children, some dead, some dying. We slaughtered the slavers. I got into the hole to pull Sophie out. I stood on the slaver’s corpse to lift her. Some of him was missing.”
“Dawn Mother, did she eat him?”
“I don’t know. I never asked. She didn’t know when we would be coming for her, and she did what she had to to survive. But she was never the same. First, she stopped brushing her hair. Then she stopped wearing nice clothes. She decided that she didn’t like her name and she wanted to be called Lark. She spent most of her time in the woods and stopped talking. She would hunt small game or just find carrion and hang it on a tree in the forest because she was convinced that she was a monster, and we would run her off into the woods to fend for herself.”
Charlotte sat up. “Did you get her help?”
“There are no healing colleges in the Mire,” he said. “Every time I tried to speak to her, she would run away as if I were one of them. One of my cousins is a physician. Not like you, but she is talented in her own way. She examined Sophie several times. There was nothing physically wrong with her. But Sophie was always close to her mother, and as long as some connection between her and her family remained, I thought that, given time, she would slowly heal. But the Hand came calling.”
“The Louisiana spies?” Charlotte’s eyes widened.
“They wanted something our family had. Do you recall the exile I mentioned? Vernard?”
“Yes.”
“His last name was Dubois. Does it mean anything to you?”
Charlotte frowned. “Vernard Dubois was a celebrated medical scientist in the Dukedom of Louisiana a few decades before my time. I’ve read some of his work—he con-centrated on applied medical botany. Contrary to what some people think, the College healers don’t just limit their medical education to the use of magic. We study pharmacology, herbology, and other disciplines just like any other medical . . . I’m rambling. Was he the same man?”
“Yes. He’s Sophie’s grandfather.”
Charlotte blinked.
“Louisiana exiled him into the Mire because he had crossed the line into the forbidden territory of magic alteration.”