Page 185 of North Queen
His lips parted in surprise, and he nodded.
Norah led him inside the sanctuary, where he waited for her cue. She wavered. “I didn’t mean… intimately.”
He nodded again.
She wondered if he could hear the lie on her lips, but she couldn’t allow herself that tonight. Not yet. Her mind wandered back to what she’d once told Tahla—that she’d only hoped for friendship with Mikael, to be strong allies.
That wasn’t true.
She wanted more between them.
But she hadn’t given herself to him since their wedding, and they seemed to be different people now. Different people who needed to make this step forward again, as if it were the first time. But before that could happen, she needed them fully well, and for that, she needed more time, with him. She needed them to be closer.
They stood in the candlelit silence.
“Can I simply sleep beside you tonight?” he asked.
Sleep. She needed sleep. But she didn’t know if she trusted him. She didn’t know if she trusted herself.
But she wanted him to stay, and she nodded.
He reached back, between his shoulders, and pulled his shirt over his head and then sloughed off his boots. Then he lay on the bed under the quilts with his arm stretched out to his side.
She glanced down at her dress. A nightgown would be more comfortable, but she had absolutely no intention of changing clothes with him so close, even in the side bath chamber.
Norah sat on the edge of the bed and then shuffled back and under the quilts. She laid her head on his outstretched arm, and he pulled her close to him. The heat from his body seeped into her, quieting her shiver. She let his nearness calm her, and she closed her eyes in the warmth of his being.
Then she drifted into dreams.
When Norah opened her eyes again, it was morning. Mikael lay beside her, his breaths long and rhythmic. She’d slept deeply, feeling safe, feeling right. Was this right?
She shifted back, careful not to wake him, and propped her head on her elbow. He lay on his back, and she gazed over the patterned skin of his chest and torso. It wasn’t often she was free to simply look at him, to study him. Close and unhurried.
At the base of his throat, shoulder to shoulder, spanned a thick collar of inked design. Overlapping shapes like plated spears edged the top, with hanging banners like the night sky. The color of his skin created an image against the black, resembling the peaked arches of the kingdom’s architecture. She reached out and drew her fingertips across it. She liked this one. He bore the only one like it. The other designs were the same as those of the lord commander—the braided motif on his right chest and the banding that ran to his right shoulder around a ring of mountains centered by a sun against a black circle. This one she didn’t like. Without thinking, she scratched at it with her fingernail.
“They don’t come off,” he said, his eyes still closed.
She bit her lip.
“You don’t like my markings?”
“Not this one,” she admitted. “It’s the same as the lord commander’s.”
He opened his eyes and turned his head toward her, inhaling a waking breath. “It’s when we fled Bahoul,” he said.
She ran her fingernail over the ring of mountains.
“To Kharav,” he added to his story as she made her way along the design. Her fingers grazed the sun. “And I became salar. It’s Soren’s story too. It’s why he bears the same.”
“He has a black sun. Yours is the color of your skin against a black circle.”
“Because I’m salar. My skin is the sun.”
Norah drew her brows together. “Why a sun?”
“That’s whatsalarmeans.”
She almost laughed. “The Shadow King is called the Sun?”
