Tallis grinned into the worst of the snow. “I’m doing a piss-poor job at it. I admit it. Lead on, goddess.”
Her fingers became five small vises. She wasn’t letting go, and neither was he.
“You find our direction,” he shouted. “I’ll guide against the worst of the here and now.” He caught his foot on a rock that poked out of what was already a half inch of snow.
Kavya rolled her eyes. “Like that?”
“Shut up.”
The next thirty minutes were longer than they should have been. Tallis was certain they’d walked for at least six days. The hairs in his nostrils were frozen. He knew he should breathe through his nose, to better protect his lungs, but he was panting. Pain gathered in his chest. The cold pounded a beat meant to rip him open from the inside out. He focused on keeping Kavya from harm as she focused her gift on the tiny speck that was Bhuntar. Sometimes the fool woman closed her eyes. Sometimes she talked to herself in the strangely singsong language of the Indranan.
He was equally strange in thinking he’d like to hear her talk to him with those melodic syllables. Warm and safe and close.
Frostbite must be reaching his brain.
She swayed. Tallis reached out to find soft skin caught in a deathlike chill. “Dragon damn, Kavya. You think not saying anything will keep it from happening?”
“Hmm?” Her eyes were glassy, although he couldn’t tell whether it was from concentration or the hazy sleepiness that preceded losing consciousness. “Damn you? What?”
Tallis wasted no time in opening his coat. The cold shocked his body like machine-gun fire. He hadn’t realized that being cold and being cold while wearing a big leather coat would be so different. He swept her into his arms and tucked as much of the wool lining around her limbs as he could. Too much of her skin remained exposed.
“Go,” he said near her ear. “Tell me the way. Pound it into my brain with a hammer if you can. Just show me the way and I’ll get you there.”
—
Kavya focused on two things: the collective warmth of hundreds of active minds in Bhuntar, and the very personal warmth of being held by Tallis. She couldn’t decide which was more seductive. She only knew that to have more of his warmth, she needed to get them to safety.
Passing images into his mind would’ve been simpler. Half out of reflex, she tried twice before giving it up as a lost cause. She didn’t want to risk losing the way. Instead she had to make her numb lips and stiff cheeks form words.
“Close,” she said, teeth chattering so badly that her temples hurt. Her eyes stung, and a headache burrowed into her skull, using her ears as convenient entrances. “Another two hundred meters. First building.”
“Dragon-damned, lonayíp sonofabitch.” Rather than stop, he picked up the pace and held her even closer.
Winding her arms around his middle, where the coat retained the heat of his body as it worked to its maximum potential, Kavya nestled close. She offered words to guide him. When was the last time she’d spoken so much to one person? To groups, sure. They needed a clear, sure tone to rise above the din of other voices. Otherwise she spoke with her mind. Another mind would speak back. Here it was the intimacy of how his chest rumbled when he replied, and how his breath was a welcome flash of damp heat against her temple. This was the intimacy of speaking with bodies—tongues and lips and the thousand other things that went into verbal communication.
A different sort of gift.
Tallis followed the long line of what appeared to be a warehouse. At least for those moments, they were both protected from one direction the wind used to attack. Kavya rubbed her ears. The blizzard lived there in a perpetual cacophony. She would scrape it out if she could—grab one of Tallis’s seaxes and hand it to him with the command that he dig out the mind-numbing sound.
“Cross to that building with the high gable,” she said past numb lips. “People eating and drinking. There’s a fire. A couple is . . .”
Another chuckle rumbled out of his chest, where she pressed tighter with every step. Only his embrace kept her from shattering into chunks of ice. “A couple is what, goddess?”
“Naked together. Upstairs. There must be rooms.”
“Is that all? Naked?”
Even as he teased her, he crossed the wind-whipped street toward an inviting orange glow. A few more strides and she could make out windows lit from within. A tavern? A bed-and-breakfast? Dragon be, just anything.
“Not just naked.” Her relief was so close and potent that she said aloud what she’d only ever thought. “They’re fucking.”
“Very nice.” Surprising admiration shone through Tallis’s wind-scoured voice. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“I have a lot in me. Your thick Pendray brain can’t hear much of it.”
He gave her bottom a quick pinch. “Then you’ll just have to show me instead. The Dragon Kings play charades. The world’s worst potential game show.”
Kavya giggled, made half hysterical by their intimate, dangerous trek. “The Tigony would refuse to play because it would be too debasing.”
“If they did, they’d charm the audience and win hands down.”
“Garnis, of course, wouldn’t show up.”
She could become addicted to the way he laughed, with the whole of his body, yet centered where her ear pressed against his sternum. She didn’t like admitting such vulnerable thoughts, but they remained front and center.
He laughed that way now.
“The producers wouldn’t even put out a chair for them,” he said. “The Sath would know everything because they’d have found out the questions in advance.”
“Thieves,” Kavya said without malice. Yet she knew their kind. A Sath would trade just about anything for a secret. “The Indranan would either learn the answers telepathically or kill each other trying.”
“I like that you can laugh at your own people, no matter how grim.” Tallis kissed the top of her head. “And the Pendray would tear the place apart in a child’s tantrum when they didn’t get their way.”
He put her down as they reached the building. The snow was cold against her feet, which remained barely covered by her shredded slippers. Her knees were unsteady after having been carried. She righted herself using the solid steel of Tallis’s upper arm. “And thus ends our attempt to cast the Five Clans in a game show.”
“We didn’t do very well.” He smoothed hair back from her temples. The wind took it, scattered it, and he smoothed it again.
“No, but everybody needs a hobby,” she said, returning to their first shared jest. “And we saved ourselves the embarrassment of looking like fools in front of potential investors.”
“We’ll save our skills at persuasion for getting a room at this inn. I’m not sleeping in a manger.”
“You’re going to be picky in this storm? I’d trade your seaxes for a chair next to the fire.”
“And then I’d trade you and the chair back for my weapons.”
They pushed in from the storm. What had been frigid and noisy became fireplace-warm and relatively quiet, filled with the soft chatter of two dozen voices. Kavya felt as if she’d been sucked into a vacuum. No screaming wind. No biting ice. She was standing on her own, but she didn’t let go of Tallis’s arm.
“Witchcraft,” he whispered. “Have at it.”
His expression was unexpectedly bright and teasing, with a dark pink flush across his features. He was half-sweating, half-covered in melting snow. His dark, silver-tipped hair was sprinkled with ice crystals that were quickly turning to gleaming droplets.
“On a small scale, maybe. Unless one of your hobbies means you’ve learned to pilot a Cessna off a short, slick runway that leads right over the Beas—you take off, or you drown—then I suggest we stay friendly with the locals. That means as little obvious manipulation as possible. I can’t force them to behave out of character, or someone will notice. The more they notice, the more foreign and threatening we’ll appear.”