The Kraken King, Part 7 Read Online Free PDF Page A

embassy is, and no one will kidnap me here.” She shrugged and looked to the hearth. “Will you eat?”
    â€œNot yet. If you’re hungry, start.”
    â€œI’ll wait.” Her gaze pierced him. “What can’t you put aside?”
    He glanced pointedly at the clockwork horse. “The imperial guard came today and put that in our chambers, yet Mara and Cooper still agreed to leave?”
    â€œOh. Well. I just pointed out that
if
Lady Nagamochi and her soldiers returned, Mara and Cooper couldn’t protect me, anyway. The guards have more weapons and we would be far outnumbered.” She glanced up at him through her lashes. “Even you could probably not stand against them.”
    Now she teased him. But there was likely some truth to what she’d said—and the Coopers must have seen it. Against the imperial guard, they would have little defense. Just as almost all of western Australia would have little defense if the empress decided to destroy them.
    Which meant any danger the empress posed here was part of the same battle Ariq was already fighting. The same battle he had to win before a single shot was fired or sword was drawn. Because if it reached that point, he’d have already lost.
    So Ariq forced it aside for now and looked at his wife. There was still another battle to win. “If the imperial guard ambushed us, I wouldn’t try to stand against them. It isn’t the custom of my people.”
    Her eyebrows arched and she reached up, tugging a pin from her hair. “No?”
    In the time that it took for her to lay the pin on the table between them, his cock hardened to burning stone. Ariq dragged his gaze from the pin to her face.
    â€œI’d flee and leave you behind, because you would only slow my escape. Then I would return when I had enough strength behind me to destroy them and rescue you.”
    She laughed and laid another pin beside the first, a soft
tic
of steel against wood. “And that is the custom? To abandon your wives?”
    â€œNot custom,” he admitted. “But I wouldn’t be condemned for it. Even Chinghis Khan did the same.”
    â€œTruly?”
    Slowly, Ariq nodded. “They didn’t have enough horses. Börte was left behind because he knew his enemies wouldn’t kill her as they would have killed him. In those days, it was custom to enslave captives.”
    Her amusement had died. “But enslavement is not all that a woman has to fear when she’s captured.”
    â€œNo,” he said softly. And was not all that Börte had suffered. She’d given birth to their first son not long after her return. Seven centuries later, the argument over lineage still created small factions within the empire. The histories claimed there had been no question of paternity, that Jochi had been Chinghis Khan’s son, but those were only histories—and written by men who’d had reason to make that claim, beginning with Jochi’s son Batu, who had been both khagan and the greatest general the Golden Empire had known.
    â€œWhat happened to her?”
    â€œHe rescued her months later, then went on to conquer the world. She became empress of it, and her children its rulers.”
    â€œMonths,” Zenobia echoed.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI suppose it’s sensible,” she said, but the set of her jaw told Ariq that she didn’t care if it was. “If they had been caught together, he would be dead and she would still be enslaved, but with no hope of rescue.”
    â€œAny sensible man would do the same,” Ariq said.
    She stared at him, a glassy sheen shimmering in her eyes. “You are not sensible at
all
.”
    â€œI’m not,” he agreed.
    â€œGhazan Bator thought you would be. On the ironship, he thought you would . . . do the . . .” Her breath shuddered. “He thought you would do the same. Leave me behind. Because it
would
have been