Silent Warrior by Lindsey Piper Page B

involve Hark when she didn’t understand it herself? Or was he meant to join her? She didn’t care. Maybe he wouldn’t either. He was always damning the Dragon to do its worst, and she was being greedy and, yes, behaving more impetuously than had any Sath.
    That was part of the appeal.
    “See?” He twisted back into bed, propped on one elbow. “Thorns. Straight from our Motherland, no less.”
    Silence frowned as he pushed a small sachet into her hands. She undid the silken tie. Out fell two silver-gray needles in the shape of crescents. One end of each crescent was slender and pointed. The other was topped with a tiny ball of the same silver-gray metal, as well as a ruby almost too small to see.
    She peered closer, not yet ready to touch them. “Is that galena?”
    “Yeah. Mined by the Red Sea, apparently. I had them appraised once—just in case I needed to make a quick exchange. High silver content. But the iron ore would’ve been good for grinding down into kohl. The composition, I mean, would’ve been . . . obviously there isn’t enough here to . . . I’m rambling, aren’t I?”
    “You finally noticed it yourself.” Fingers trembling, Silence picked up one of the thorns. “The pain of the world,” she whispered. “I’d never thought I’d see one, let alone hold one or actually consider . . .”
    “We do it or we don’t, Orla.”
    She took a deep breath, sat up, and encouraged him to do the same. Cringing past the pain of her healing injury, she crossed her legs under the sheet and laid a blanket between their bodies. They faced each other. Only the blanket, the small sachet, and the thorns lay between them. “We do it.”
    The sun had angled into the room in such a way as to illuminate their small, private altar. The Sath had never required witnesses because the thorns spoke for themselves. Silence liked that. She would never need to explain to any Dragon King that she belonged to another. They would see the matching thorn in Hark’s arm and know he was her man.
    “I wish I had some golish ,” she said. “To take the edge off.”
    “You don’t need that.” His grin was huge. Wide. Stupidly, happily assured. As sunny as their morning. “Recklessness is our intoxicant of choice.”
    She held out her arm, wrist up. “Hark, you have a difficult gift to give me.”
    Silence could feel the energy between them, like a Tigony’s static charge ready to strike. His hands didn’t shake. He smoothed blond curls back from his forehead and chuckled a little as he picked up one half-inch crescent. “I never really thought about it. Did you? The trust involved? You, holding your arm out to me. Me, with a really sharp needle and no idea how to use it. Too shallow and it won’t stay. Too deep and it won’t show. And if I hurt you—”
    “That’s the point.”
    “Don’t start giving me fodder for puns. My point is that then I get to see what you can manage in return. Same unknowns. Same trust.”
    “You have a difficult gift to give me,” she said, more exasperated. She took his chin in her free hand and gave it a tug. “I want it.”
    He grinned again, then sobered. She’d seen him intense and ready for battle. She’d seen him fight off Jawahar’s mental hold. She’d seen him given over to the abandon of sexual release. This was different. She relaxed as she learned that Hark of Sath could make a promise with the solemnity required of any man.
    Cradling the back of her wrist, he selected a spot halfway up the inside of her forearm. She had no scars there. Dragon Kings didn’t scar easily, but she had a few. It was a rare Cage warrior who could claim otherwise. So when he placed the tip of the crescent against her skin, she inhaled—for courage, not just in receiving the wound but in being able to follow through with all it represented.
    He met her gaze, his blue eyes stormy. “This thorn is the pain of the world,” he said softly. “When I cannot protect you from it, I will