The Centaur Queen (The Dark Queens #7)(14)
My insides quivered. I always enjoyed watching her brush her long, silky hair. My eyes drank her in as she performed the first stroke of the night.
“Tell me, Petra. What is bothering you?”
Lulled into a trance-like state as I watched her, I didn’t realize she’d spoken until she cleared her throat and repeated herself.
“What?” I blinked. “Oh, bothering me?”
Amber eyes stared at me with patient expectation.
I pinched my lips together. “I’m thinking about our trip.”
True enough.
“Aye, I’m sure you are.”
Fifty strokes on the one side. With a deft flick of her dainty wrist, she moved to the other side and began the process anew. Each time she brushed, I caught sight of the two small freckles on the side of her long neck that’d always seemed to me to be a set of crudely drawn hearts.
“But there’s more to it than that. You’ve not stopped staring at that seeing disk ever since I gave it to you.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Have you been spying on me, Ty?”
A ghost of a smile pulled at her mouth.
“I have no need to spy on you, gída, not with the way you moon over it constantly.”
I’d not been very happy when, upon first meeting, Tymanon had called me gída. It meant goat in the ancient tongue. Comparing me to a goat was the same as comparing her to a horse, and yet she’d done it with a hint of a smile upon her rosebud lips and, well... I’d not minded it coming from her.
“I do not moon.” Suddenly, I was back to thinking of Myra and scowling down at my hooves.
“My friend,” she said softly, “I do not wish to wound you. Your troubles, whatever they are, are yours. I merely wish to show you I am a friend, if you find yourself in need of one.”
With one final flick, she finished her grooming, and I found myself grumpy about it. Heart feeling heavy, stomach twisted with nerves, and soul weary, I stood to my feet. Myra was my problem. I’d wanted to use Tymanon’s cleverness to see me through the three, but I couldn’t do that to her. My problems were my own, and not anything I could or should burden her with. Somehow I’d figure out a way to help her save Kingdom and maybe, hopefully, work through the puzzle of my own personal war.
“I thank you. I should go bathe.”
A shadow crossed her gaze, and for just a moment, I thought she was disappointed, but I knew that could not be. Tymanon and I were temporary companions, nothing more. Once we’d accomplished whatever it was that we’d been tasked with doing, we’d go our separate ways, me to my forest full of nymphs and worldly pleasures, and her to her books and scholarly centaur males who’d ram their large pricks into her and make her scream out in glory.
Snapping to my feet, I turned on my hooves and marched off, refusing to look back.
Chapter 4
Tymanon
The next morning saw us up bright and early, just as the sun began to crest the horizon. Because of the wild magic still lingering like a fog, nothing was quite what it used to be. The sky, rather than being a lovely shade of tangerine, was speckled. Thousands of glowing yellow dots, like miniature suns, were everywhere.
Petra riffled his fingers through his shaggy hair, squinting up into the sky. “Bloody weird,” he mumbled.
Last night, he’d stayed in the stream for hours. I wanted to go after him, but I didn’t have a legitimate reason to and didn’t particularly want the awkwardness of watching him bathe. Though, I found myself imagining what I’d see if I had.
I’d once read in a book of Kingdom species and genera that satyrs’ penises were monstrously huge, and that only nymphs could handle the girth and steel of their pricks. I’d found the paragraph revolting to say the least. Who in their right mind would ever want to bed a satyr? I’d often looked down my nose at the nymphs who did.
And yet last night, for reasons I still couldn’t quite fathom, I’d found myself wondering what it would have been like to stumble across him in flagrante. Would I have looked upon him as he’d looked upon me, with the type of liquid heat that made my skin feel stretched too tight and my breaths far too choppy?
Stomping out the last coal of tinder with his thick, black hoof, Petra looked at me. “Did you pack up your smoked flesh?”
My lips twitched. “You make me sound like a cannibal when you say it like that. It’s meat, gída, and yes, I have.”
Though he wasn’t as lighthearted anymore, I warmed to see the flash of a smile cross his face. “Good. I have seeds and berries to see me through.” He patted his pouch. “We still have a long journey ahead.”
“Yes, at least another forty miles until we reach the coastline. Stone dwarf country.”
His nostrils flared.
Dwarfs and stone dwarfs may as well be two entirely separate genera of species. Dwarves were drunkards, fighters, and jewel hunters, but mostly harmless for all that. Stone dwarves, on the other hand, were cannibals, territorial, and demonic little imps I’d gladly see stomped off the face of the earth.
But they mined the most precious of stones and jewels from deep within the earth, a task no other would be foolhardy to undertake. So they lived within their mountains, isolated from the rest of Kingdom. They did not come into our part of the world, and would kill anything that came into theirs if given the chance. They were nasty little beasties.