Written in Sand

"It's nice that our duties will keep us together at least until we leave the desert," remarked Keir, speaking of the fact that his, Cait's, and Aisha's Rider groups had all been assigned to protect the king and queen for the first half of the royal progress through the country.

Keir, Zahir, Aisha, and Cait were hopping from stony outcropping to stony outcropping along the rocky shore near Port Legann. The foam-crested waves of cold, turbulent water threatened to swallow their ankles every time they leaped from one stone to the next. Barnacles in every hue of the rainbow clung to each rock, making the slick surfaces even more slippery.

Zahir could only hope that his typically smooth footwork wouldn't betray him now. After all, he didn't want to end up as dead as the now rust-colored seaweed smashed against the sand and rocks jetting out into the Emerald Ocean, which wasn't aquamarine today, but rather as gray as the seagull's wings glinting in the cloudy, chilly March sky.

"I can't wait to see Laila and Hassan again," Zahir commented, shivering in his cloak. Stubbornly, he blamed his shaking solely on the blustery weather, not upon his fears of the frigid reception from the Bazhir that Cait was likely to encounter the instant the tribesmen discovered that the candidate for the next Voice was in love with her.

Zahir knew that they would not really look at her for who she was. Instead, they would just see a northern warrior woman of common blood who was horribly foreign and dreadfully unworthy of marrying any Bazhir, nonetheless a chief and future Voice. Somehow, though, he and Cait would make them see and appreciate her for who she was. After all, what use was either of their strong wills if their extensive willpower couldn't help fulfill their dreams?

Thinking that the first step of persuading others to his view was controlling his own mind, Zahir went on, focusing only on the positives of a trip to the desert and not the negatives, "It will be wonderful to be able to see and hold my new niece and nephew."

It was only when Aisha scowled at him that he realized his tongue had landed him in a pile of droppings again. "Yes, and I still can't believe that you didn't tell me at once that Laila had given birth to twins," she snapped.

"And I can't believe that you're still gnawing at that old bone," retorted Zahir. "You've yelled at me for not telling you about the birth of the twins at least one hundred times now. Isn't that enough?"

"No." Aisha shook her head, her dark hair billowing around her in the wind. "After all, if you were really sorry about forgetting to share important information with me, you wouldn't act as though I was wrong to scold you for your complete lack of concern for my feelings."

"I didn't forget to tell you," argued Zahir, rolling his eyes in impatience at his sister's logic or, in his opinion, lack thereof. "I told you the day after I received the news myself. Anyway, how was I supposed to even know that you cared about Laila or any children that she might have with her husband?"

"How were you supposed to know that I cared?" Aisha echoed. Her mouth fell open in shock as she halted abruptly, poised on the verge of jumping from one rocky outcropping to the next one.

"Yes." Zahir nodded, the salty sea breeze stinging his eyes, and the waves pounding in his eardrums so that he didn't know where the sound of them ended and his thumping heartbeat began. "How was I supposed to know that you cared about anyone in your family? Didn't you flee from your widowed mother? Didn't you let your older sister and your brother-in-law believe you dead in the desert? This might come as some surprise to somebody as selfish as you, Aisha, but if you care about your family, you don't abandon them or allow them to think that you're dead."

"I had no choice," hissed Aisha, her hands balling into fists and Zahir wondered if she would punch him in the mouth.

"Don't lie," Zahir growled, his eyes narrowing. "You put a higher price on fulfilling your own stupid dreams than on remaining with your family. If you really cared about your family, you would have stayed in the desert. Then you would have been there, as you should have been, to clutch your sister's hand and rub wet cloths along her forehead when she gave birth. Instead, you were leagues away from her, trying to achieve your own dreams, but, of course, you still say that you care about her, even if you don't love her nearly as much as you love yourself and your own silly goals."

"Well, I'm sorry that I have too much self-respect to just allow myself to be married off to an abusive jerk like Nadir," seethed Aisha, lifting her nose in the air haughtily. "That worked so well for Nasira, after all."

"I managed to protect Nasira from Nadir in the end, and I would have managed to protect you, too." Zahir's jaw clenched. "You could have written to me if you had a problem with him—"

"Oh, as if he wasn't controlling all the venues of communication outside of the tribe," Aisha snarled, her face contorting into a rather ugly expression. "As if you heard any real news until I escaped to Corus to speak with you in person. As if Nadir didn't want to be your only source of information on what was going on in the desert. You're naïve to think that he would have let you hear about such a wedding until it was done and until he had taken over the tribe."

"You could have returned to the tribe after I defeated Nadir, then," scoffed Zahir, determined not to be impressed by his sister's argument. "If you said that you had just ridden off to visit me, you could have made a good marriage and been in the desert with Laila when she gave birth to Amaya and Taymur. After all, since Nasira was always walking around with black eyes and cut lips, everyone would have just accepted that you ran away to escape an abusive marriage. Maybe everybody wouldn't approve of your decision, but they would have understood it at least. You chose not to return to your family just as surely as you chose to flee from them."

"Fine. Have it your way," Aisha spat. "I am a selfish jerk. I chose to abandon my family to pursue my own desires. Now, why don't you tell me how you are any better than me?"

"I only left the desert because I had to." Zahir bristled. "Father wished for me to train as a knight in the north, and I obeyed him like a good son should. If it were up to me, I would have remained in the desert forever, but I gave up my personal desires to do what my family wished of me. That's the exact opposite of what you did. You placed your own wishes above your family's needs. You cared more about your own happiness than about the welfare of your entire family."

"Ah, yes, and you don't place your own desire to be with Cait above what all the Bazhir wish for in the mate of their future Voice." Sarcasm was etched into every syllable that emerged from Aisha's tight lips. "You certainly don't place your own happiness above the welfare of your entire people when you decide that you'll marry whoever you want, even if it means that the Bazhir will again have to deal with a Voice too northern for their tastes. Selfishness is the only unforgivable offense if it's practiced by anyone but you. When you are guilty of it, you find a fancy way of saying that you aren't. Please don't feel like a stinking hypocrite, although you do have the worst case of selective morality I've ever encountered—"

"Don't profane my love by dragging politics into it," snapped Zahir.

"If you cared about your people more than about yourself, you would be more concerned with Bazhir politics than your love," Aisha concluded in a hard tone, ignoring his heated interjection. "I suggest that you remember that before you accuse me of selfishness. After all, you and I really aren't so different. The main thing that separates us is that I have accepted my own selfishness, and you have yet to accept your own selfishness."

"I'll never allow myself to be selfish." Dimly, Zahir could feel himself trembling with wrath. "It is my honor and joy to serve others even if it is at the expense of myself."

"It's your honor, but is it truly your joy?" Aisha demanded skeptically, arching an eyebrow. Before he could respond, she continued in a sharp voice, "I doubt it. Like me, you have dreams, and you have been in the north far too long to stifle them. You want to make your dreams become reality, but you also feel a compulsion to serve your people. You're miserable because it isn't your joy to blindly do whatever duty requires of you anymore, but it also isn't your joy to just chase your dreams without regard to what is expected of you. You're unhappy because you're torn between duty and desire."

"What do you want me to do about that?" asked Zahir bitterly. "Until you can solve that dilemma, you can shut up, because you aren't telling me anything I don't know already."

"You must choose between duty and desire," Aisha answered, as though it were as obvious as the fact that the waves churning around them were wet. "In this world, you can be a Bazhir or a northerner, but you can't be both. However much you might want to, you can't always serve yourself and others. Sometimes you can only help yourself or others. When it comes down to it, you have to decide which matters more to you—living how you want to or living how others want you to."

"Living how others want me to is how I wish to live," Zahir ground out through gritted teeth.

"Then there should never be any conflict between what you want and what others want," pointed out Aisha dryly. "Therefore, you should never be unhappy. That doesn't sound much like you, though, because sometimes what you want clashes with what others want from you—"

"You make it sound like everyone wants the same thing from me," interrupted Zahir, a vein throbbing in his neck. "Well, don't go into cardiac arrest, but they don't. People all want different things from me. Cait wants my unconditional love, the Bazhir expect me to marry some chief's daughter, and the king demands that I always do his will no matter how crazy it is."

"Then you have to decide who is most important to you, don't you?" Aisha said tersely. "If you say it is Cait, then you have to ask yourself if you are fit to be Voice to a people you don't value more than the girl you love and if you are able to serve a king you can't obey without reservation."

"And are you able to be a part of a military organization when you are only motivated by your desire to be a warrior woman to boost your own ego, not by a humble wish to serve people?" hissed Zahir, glaring at her.

"I see no reason to talk with you if you have such a low opinion of me." Tossing her long black hair behind her defiantly, Aisha vaulted from the rock they were standing on back onto the shore. Then, without pausing to say farewell, she strode down the beach, retreating along the sand to the bright tents housing every member of the royal progress from the king and queen down to the lowest-ranking scullery maid.

"You hurt her feelings." Keir's voice was sharp as he made this statement, and Zahir started. During his argument with his sister, which could have taken place beside any oasis in the desert he had been raised in, he had completely forgotten that Cait and Keir were present.

His cheeks blazing as though they had been burned by the sun hiding behind the heavy clouds, Zahir thought about everything he had said about how he wanted to be with Cait—and just how complicated being with her made life for him and for the Bazhir as a whole. That was wonderful. He had agreed to take this walk along the seashore with Cait, Keir, and Aisha because it had seemed a grand opportunity to free himself, however temporarily, from the snare of politics. Instead, thanks to Aisha's tactlessness, the sticky spiderweb of disgusting political realities had wrapped itself around him and Cait again. Grimly, he asked himself how long, now that he and Cait were trapped in the web, it would take for the spider to devour them.

"If she values her feelings so much, she shouldn't go around offending so many people," snapped Zahir. "She never misses an opportunity to poke fun at me, so she shouldn't complain when I give her a taste of her own cooking and make her reap what she sows."

"Keep talking. Maybe one day you'll say something that justifies your own boorishness." With a snort, Keir leaped off the stone outcropping, landed on the sandy shoreline with the waves lapping at his shins, and set off down the beach after Aisha's fading figure.

"I'm sorry if I was boorish." As he offered this stilted apology, Zahir found that he couldn't bring himself to look at Cait, and so he ducked his head to study the barnacles beneath his feet instead.

"It doesn't matter." Zahir could hear the smile in Cait's tone, and so he risked a glance up at her to see that she was grinning. "I'm a piece of commoner trash, so naturally I could only fall in love with a boor."

"A sand scut and a piece of commoner trash are perfectly suited." Zahir snorted. "I can't think of a match more guaranteed to make the pulse of many a blueblood throb."

"Don't call yourself a sand scut." Cait shook her head, so that her plait of auburn smacked against her head in the wind blowing off the sea. "I don't want anyone—even you—making nasty comments about your ethnicity, because your ethnicity is part of who you are, and who you are is beautiful."

"Then don't call yourself a piece of commoner trash," retorted Zahir. "You probably came from a better family than Joren of Stone Mountain did."

"Well, I certainly didn't come from a wealthier family than he did." Cait smirked. "I'm as common as the oysters my father used to catch to sell in the market to feed us."

"At least you aren't as dark as dirt." Gently, Zahir tapped her nose. "Besides, pearls come from oysters. You can be my pearl from a family of oysters."

"Diamonds are dug from deep within the dirt," trilled Cait, leaping onto the next rocky outcropping. "You can be the diamond I never really expected to dig up in the grime of my ordinary life—the sort of diamond that everybody hopes to find, and almost nobody ever does. You know, the kind that everyone prays to hold in their hands just once in their lifetimes. The sort that no one dares to dream of actually possessing. The type that just having in your hands for a moment is enough to sustain you through everything or else to break your heart with longing for something that can never truly be yours."

Cait's tone had begun as playful and airy, but, by the end of her speech, it sounded almost despairing and leaden, as though she couldn't maintain the façade of joking about what was tearing her apart.

"You'll always be mine," Zahir assured her in a hushed voice, feeling as if a giant fist were crushing his windpipe as he rubbed Cait's palm between his hands. "I'd marry you now if I could, but I reckon that things will go easier for you in the desert if we try to make the Bazhir see reason before we tie the knot between us."

"Tell me what else you would do to me now if you could," Cait murmured in his ear, her breath brushing seductively against his skin.

"That's not an answer for a lady's ears." His eyes sparkling, Zahir nipped at the tender flesh of her earlobe. When she yelped in astonishment, he chuckled, twisted her around to face him, and kissed her, hoping that she would feel all the passion for her welling inside him that he could never manage to put into words. "Your request was also one that should never leave a lady's lips."

"Ladies don't know how to make proper conversation, do they?" Her entire face glowing, Cait stroked his arms and his thighs, her hands somehow creating the illusion that she was touching everywhere and nowhere at once. The sensation of Cait's bare flesh running over his own clothed skin prompted a moan to rise in his throat that he had to struggle to prevent from exploding from his mouth. Although Cait's palms were coated liberally with calluses, her touch was somehow gentle, and it was this peculiar melding of strength and softness that Zahir relished most about her. Cait's fingers were squeezing his upper thigh in a way that made him comprehend how a person could simultaneously and without contradiction wish for a touch never to end and hope that the hand igniting fires all over your skin would stop touching you. Every moment he spent with Cait was ecstasy and torture. She was all the pain and pleasure of life multiplied to an impossible degree, and that was the closest he could come to qualifying his passion for her in mathematical terms. "I mean, the language of love is one of stolen glances and touches, and not of words, isn't it?"

"Maybe you're right." Zahir allowed his hands to trail down her arms until they rested on her thighs. "Why are we wasting our precious time together with all this chatter?"

"Because your tongue—"Cait's tongue darted between his lips and danced against his—"failed to answer my question."

"Fine." Zahir rubbed his tongue roughly against hers. "I'd take you here on the beach until we both saw stars in broad daylight. After that, I'd kidnap you. I'd drag you off some place where we wouldn't have to worry about politics or about what we owed anyone. We'd find ourselves a little private island in that big ocean where we'd just make each other happy until we died. Nobody would ever be able to find us, and the king would have to bully someone else into being the Voice after him. We'd be free of all our responsibilities. It would be like paradise."

"It's paradise here with you." Cait nuzzled her cheek against his. "I don't know if there is an afterlife or not, and right now, I don't care. I know there is our love, and that is enough—more than enough, in fact."

"If it's all for nothing, all this racing about and stressing over a thousand things that don't make a difference in the end, I'm still glad that I have you as a traveling companion to angst with." Smiling, Zahir let his fingers stray briefly—ever so briefly—up to stroke the fabric that divided him from the tantalizing, secret triangle between her legs.

Then, before either of them could be tempted to do anything that would get them in more trouble than they were in already, he withdrew his hand. Clothes might have seemed like such an unbearably thick barrier when they were all that was separating your flesh from your lover's, but clothes were really much too easy to remove. Worse still, once they were removed, there was nothing to stop him from plunging inside of her.

He and Cait weren't married, yes, but the sacred bond of matrimony appeared to be a very abstract, unimportant concept on this seashore when they both wanted nothing more than to drown in an ocean of love.

On this beach, it was as though the only real people in the world were him and Cait. If he and Cait were the only beings in the world, they certainly didn't have to fret about society's definitions of marriage or morality. They only needed to be concerned with what they felt was right, and both of them felt it was right for him to take her now. Both of them knew that there was nothing wrong with them finally consummating their love. At least, he thought both of them knew that, but if that was true, why did Zahir hesitate to take her?

"You can have me now if you want." Cait's whispered words were loud enough to shatter Zahir's whole world. "Nobody would ever have to know."

"I'd know," Zahir pointed out through lips that were numb from kissing.

"That's kind of the point, actually." Cait's fingers closed around the buttons on his breeches, and he could feel himself stiffening, even though he didn't want to prepare himself for a deed he couldn't finish. "I want you to know me. Do you get it now, or should I just let my body explain it all to you?"

Zahir thought that their bodies had done too much thinking and explaining already, but the words died on his lips, which were parted in pleasure. He never discovered whether he would have found a way to protest Cait's advances, because a commanding voice rang out from the shore behind them, ordering, "Take your hands off each other now."

"Of course." Scowling, Zahir spun around to glare at his knightmaster, who was dressed in a cloak as teal as the ocean should have been. "I shouldn't dare to touch anyone or anything in Your Majesty's realm without Your Majesty's written consent."

Ignoring Zahir's insolent remark, King Jonathan addressed Cait, whose hands had fallen away from the already dwindling evidence of Zahir's arousal, "Kindly return to your Rider group now, dear girl. I want my squire to join me on my solitary walk."

"Yes, sire." Shooting Zahir a glance that was almost as affectionate as a goodbye kiss, Cait bowed, hopped back onto the sand, and hurried back to the tents dotting the distant shoreline.

"You aren't taking a walk," growled Zahir once Cait was out of earshot, jumping over to join the king he was fighting the urge to murder. "You just thought that Cait and I had been out alone too long. You were just trying to break us up."

"Good thing I was." The king shot him a look as cold as the water hitting the sand. "You were about to have sex with her on a rocky outcropping where anyone could have seen you. Do you have any idea what that could have done to your reputation and to hers?"

"I don't care," snarled Zahir mutinously, his hands clenching into fists that longed to punch King Jonathan in the jaw. "I'd just tell all the gossips that I would have married her first and done it properly, but you wouldn't let me do that. Yes, I'd just tell everybody that you wanted me to have her as my slut—not as my bride."

"You wouldn't dare." The king clutched Zahir's shoulders tightly enough to bruise.

"Telling the truth is one thing I've always dared to do, Your Majesty," Zahir spat.

"If you love the truth so much, you would, of course, remember to say that I always urged you not to be with Cait at all," stated King Jonathan, offering the fake, gleaming smile that probably had landed many a diplomat in a serpent's lair. "Certainly, you would also not fail to mention that I advised you to be discreet in any relations you had with her. You would also not neglect to assure anyone who asked that I told you to give her a charm to prevent pregnancies, so that no accidents would happen."

"Oh, it's so like you, sire, to refer to any babies I might have with Cait as accidents." Zahir gritted his teeth so loudly that he was confident that the noise would sound like a thunderstorm in Carthak. "Well, let me tell you that they wouldn't be accidents to us. They would be blessings."

"They wouldn't be blessings," corrected the king in a clipped manner, shaking his head. "For both you and Cait, those babies would be disasters."

"They would be disasters to you, but not to Cait or me." Derisively, Zahir snorted. "After all, if I got her pregnant, then I would have to do the right thing by her, and you are haunted by the fear that I just might do the right thing by Cait, aren't you, Your Majesty?"

"You wouldn't be doing the right thing by Cait. How many times do I have to explain that to you?" Impatience laced the king's tone. "You would be destroying her future and your own."

"The future is written in sand." Zahir shrugged. "Cait and I should live in the eternal now, not in some distant future that might never come for either of us. Anyway, it's not like you are concerned with Cait's future or mine. You are just worried that if I marry Cait, I'll damage my chances of the Bazhir accepting me as the Voice after you."

"You should be worried about that, too," hissed King Jonathan. "It's incredibly selfish of you not to be. It's horrible of you to put your own petty sexual desires above the needs of your people."

"Don't call me selfish," Zahir shouted, his voice breaking. Rage as blue as the hottest part of a flame seared through him, burning the ragged remnants of his heart. "You're the one who demands everything of me and of everybody else in your kingdom. You are the one who doesn't care about my dreams or desires. You are the one who looks at me and sees only how I can be used as a pawn in one of your sick political chess games. You want me to do your will so much that if I dare to have a dream that goes against your plans for me, you call me selfish. With you, it's never about what I want or need. It's always about what you want or need, and if I have the nerve to actually want something different than what you want for me, my rebelliousness needs to be crushed. You don't care about me. All you care about is what I can do for you, and yet I am the selfish one?"

"I care about you." His knightmaster's tone softened slightly. "What you must understand, Squire, is that, at your age, people fall in and out of love easily. Love is far more than kisses, pretty words, flowers, and jewelry. It must endure long after the thrill of the first attraction is gone. When I was your age, I fancied myself in love with Alanna, just as she thought that she was in love with me. Years later, we discovered that we would be better off marrying rocks than wedding one another. She wouldn't make a good queen, and we would hate each other every day of our lives for forcing her into a role she wasn't fit to fill. We are much happier with people who help us in our duties rather than hindering us. The halves that made us whole were those who could truly be our partners in everything. When you meet the woman who can be your companion in everything, then you will be grateful that I stopped you from having sex with Cait now. You'll be glad that you were able to save yourself for the woman who was worthy of being your partner in every sense of the word."

"You tell such lovely lies, sire." Zahir was choking on his own ire now. "You just want me to remain a virgin because nobody has ever heard of a human sacrifice who wasn't a virgin, and all I'll ever be to you is a sacrifice."

"I love you like a father loves his son, Zahir ibn Alhaz, and I've lost track of how many times I've had to explain that to you." Sighing, the king reached out to mess up Zahir's hair. "What will it take for you to believe me?"

"It would take you acting like you loved me." Zahir rolled his eyes. "Actions speak louder than words, Your Majesty, as the cliché assures us, and cliches, unlike kings, never lie."

"Zahir, I love you," King Jonathan insisted quietly. "Just because I love you, though, that doesn't mean that I won't sacrifice you. I love you but I will not spare you for your sake or mine. After all, how could I ask you to sacrifice someone you loved if I wasn't willing to do the same?"

"You wouldn't recognize love if it bit you in the ass like it does everybody else," scoffed Zahir. "Even if you did, let me assure you that I don't want a part of your twisted idea of love, which always sacrifices dear ones on the altar of political expediency. If you really loved anyone, you wouldn't put politics above them."

"If I didn't put politics above loved ones, I wouldn't be fit to rule." Once again, his knightmaster sighed. "I do what I must, even if doing so makes me miserable. I surrender my personal happiness for the sake of my people, and I ask you to make a similar sacrifice for your people. Don't imagine that I don't know what I am asking of you, since I know better than anyone what I am asking you to give up for the Bazhir. Understand, too, that I only ask this of you because I believe you are somebody strong and honorable enough to always place your needs and wishes after those of others. Frankly, if you don't take this burden, I don't know who will."

"When you say that, you only add to my burden," muttered Zahir, bashing his hand against his forehead, and wishing that no one would ever ask anything of him ever again. "No matter what you think, I can't be all things to all people. Why do you demand the impossible of me? I'm not a miracle worker."

"You can be more of one than you realize, and it was never my intention to add to your burden," replied the king softly.

"Don't lie." His temper flaring again, Zahir stamped his foot into the sand. "Ever since you first met me, you planned on adding to my burden. I wouldn't be of much use to you, sire, if you couldn't dump a million responsibilities I never sought upon my shoulders, would I?"

King Jonathan opened his mouth to protest this, but, nausea blooming in his chest like a weed, Zahir could not bear to listen to any more lies that would doubtlessly be meant to pacify him and that would only serve to incense him.

"I'm going back to my tent," he declared stiffly, because he was tired of being told that he couldn't do anything that he wished to do, he stalked off before his knightmaster could attempt to halt him.

The sand clinging to his shoes in a way that was different from how the desert sand attached itself to the soles of his shoes but was no less annoying, he marched back to the mass of colorful tents swaying slightly in the wind.

When he reached his tiny, sunflower-yellow tent, which, as if to emphasize its diminutive size, had been erected beside the expansive, indigo royal tent, he yanked the flaps open and then tugged them shut behind him. The decisive snap that the flaps made as they were pulled closed provided him with the illusion that he could keep the world at bay, just like he had on the beach with Cait.

Since Cait wasn't with him, the belief that he could keep the world at bay, however temporarily, didn't fill him with an uncontrollable, reckless euphoria as it had on the beach. Thinking dismally that if he could just get back that feeling of boundless bliss and freedom unhampered by any obligations to society as a whole, he would donate everything he owned to the realm's impoverished without a single complaint, Zahir collapsed on his sleeping mat.

As he fell onto his sheets and pillows, he couldn't help but noting inwardly how much more comfortable, warm, and soft the sleeping mat would feel if Cait had been stretched out beside him upon it. If she were here, he could have curled up against her body, which was warmer and softer than any blanket could ever be. He could have stroked every copper gold strand on her head until his mind had forgotten every fret in his life. He could have buried his nose in her hair and drank in the sweet scent of her long enough to forget the stench of society's corruption. She could have wrapped her arms around him, held him against her chest, and assured him with her mere touch that she would be able to get him through everything, no matter how impossible that seemed. She could have kissed away all his fears and his pain.

Better than anyone, she knew how to comfort him when he was lonely or despairing. She didn't just know how to challenge him for all the wrong things that he had done, she also knew how to make him forgive himself for them. When he was with her, all the anguish he had known and all the violence burning in his soul was taken from him with just a kiss from her magical lips. Somehow, she was able to remove all his rough edges and replace them with tenderness.

Yet, she wasn't here. That meant that he had to bury his face into his pillows, which smelled only of himself and soup, and not of her. That meant that he had to settle for snuggling into his blankets, which felt cold and prickly against him.

Tears pricked at his eyes, but, despite the fact that he was horribly alone, he refused to allow them to fall. Without Cait, he didn't have much, so the little dignity that he did possess without her was something that he must treasure all the more. After all, he told himself sternly, he wasn't such a baby that he would wail if he wasn't cuddled.

As a boy, he had been thrashed with a rod until bruises covered every inch of his back, his rump, and his legs, and he had not cried. That was how strong and proud he was. If he didn't shed tears of pain, then he shouldn't sob over lost love like some smitten maidservant. Unfortunately, to his chagrin, he was discovering that it was easier to ignore physical pain than emotional agony.

When his flesh was being torn by a rod, his mind could focus on something else, but when it was his heart that was being ripped asunder, it was difficult to find the courage to do so. He could continue to exist with gaping holes where his skin had been, but when there was only a hollow in his ribcage where his heart had once resided, he had no morale left to fight for anything.

Bitterly, Zahir thought that he finally understood just how much King Jonathan opposed a marriage between him and Cait. The king, he saw at last, would not only never agree to a wedding between them, he would also do everything in his considerable power to prevent such a thing from happening.

It wasn't fair that a chief like him couldn't choose whom he married, he screamed inside his skull, as he kicked at the blankets that were pressing much too heavily against his chest, trying to suffocate him before society could.

Desperate, hopeless anger pounded through his veins as he found that the more he struggled against his sheets, the more they clutched onto his skin, oppressing him and weighing him down. Cursing, Zahir suddenly remembered all the tales his father had told him about young Bazhir couples who tried to escape into the desert when their parents wouldn't allow them to marry. As the blankets clung to him like a funeral shroud, he recalled hearing how the couples were invariably caught and stoned.

With a pang, he reflected that, as a child, he had never understood why the young Bazhir lovers fled into the desert. At the time, he had thought the lovers foolish to believe that they wouldn't be caught and killed. He had thought that they hadn't truly grasped the gruesome fate that awaited them if they were captured, and that, if they had, they would never have attempted to escape into the desert.

Now, he comprehended all too well that the lovers had known that they were likely to be caught and stoned, but they had been driven berserk by the need to flee from a society determined to crush them. They were willing to risk death for a chance at a life with the one they loved more than life itself. Life without the one they loved petrified them more than death alongside their beloved. In the end, they had preferred death of the body by stoning to death of the spirit by lost love. As the stones hurled at them cracked their skin and as the sand beneath them turned crimson with their blood, they must have felt a savage sense of victory and defeat. When their bones were broken, they must have taken a perverse satisfaction in knowing that society could only shatter their bodies, not their souls. Perhaps, even as their heads were smashed, they could find the strength to twist their bleeding lips into a final, defiant smile.

Yes, Zahir could see how the lovers could die believing that they had won a pyrrhic victory when they were stoned, but he still couldn't help but wonder if they really were the losers. If you took any street packed with ordinary people, he asked himself, would the lovers be the losers or the winners?

He was jolted out of his bleak musings when he heard the flaps of his tent rustle as they opened. Looking up to snap at whoever had entered to leave him alone before he disemboweled them, he found himself meeting Cait's concerned gaze.

"I really enjoyed our walk along the shore," she murmured, her quiet voice quelling all the fiery thoughts and words blazing inside him. "I'm sorry if you felt like I was pushing myself on you earlier. It's just I love you so much—"

"I love you, too." Zahir wondered if it was possible to choke on your heart if it somehow had lodged itself in your throat after it had been ripped apart. "I want to have you as much as you want to have me. I just can't have you unless I'm married to you. It wouldn't be right for me to take you unless you were my wife."

"You wouldn't be taking anything I wasn't offering," Cait said, threading her fingers through his. "I'd be giving you something. You wouldn't be stealing anything from me."

"Give yourself to me when we are married, Cait." For a moment, he brought his lips to hers. Then, almost breathlessly, he went on, "I promise you that, no matter how impossible it seems now, we will be properly married. Our love might feel like something that could never be, but it is real. When we were on the beach together, it was as if we didn't have responsibilities to anyone but ourselves, yet we do, and we have to fulfill those obligations. It might have felt like there was no one in the world apart from us, but there was. We may have longed to escape from everything, but we can't. That means that we will just have to find a way to fulfill both our dreams and our duties. We'll have to make our love work in the real world and not on some fantasy island."

"Can we do that?" Biting her lip anxiously, Cait leaned her head against his shoulder. "Aisha seems to think that we can't."

"If one of Aisha's thoughts died, the other would perish of loneliness," Zahir grunted.

"That doesn't answer my question, Zahir." Cait rolled her eyes. "If you were smarter than your sister, I wouldn't have to point that out to you."

"Then, to answer your question, I would say that we have to figure out how to make our love work in the real world." Zahir's tone was hard, but his hands were gentle as they combed through Cait's hair. "If we give up our love, our hearts will break and our spirits will be destroyed, but if we completely defy society, we will be crushed."

"I suppose you're right." Cait took a deep breath, causing her spine to stiffen like a spear. "Well, if we have to do it, we will."

Marveling out how unflinching she could be, he grinned. "You really are one of the bravest and strongest women that I know."

"Why do you say 'women' of 'people'?" Cait elbowed him in the ribs. "Is there some reason you feel the need to distinguish between brave, strong women and brave, strong men?"

"Of course there is." Zahir tapped her nose. "Most of the bravest, strongest people I know have been women, while a majority of the most cowardly, weakest people I know have been men. Does that satisfy your pride?"

"Only because I know how much it must have hurt your pride to tell that lie in order to assuage mine." Cait giggled, and the sound of her amusement was so wonderfully liberating that he couldn't help but think that laughter might be one of the few ways they could make their love work in the real world neither of them could escape.