Tybalt planted kisses along the backs of Mariella’s neck, arms, and shoulders, feather light, enjoying the way she shivered as he went.

  “Sensitive,” she murmured.

  He slowed down and then stopped. He and Mariella were still entwined on the ground, little leaves mixed into her hair, bodies covered in a thin sheen of sweat. She was almost fully unmoving, and Tybalt guessed that if left to her own devices, the fire mage would just fall asleep with him lying on top of her.

  Instead, he turned their bodies, guiding her with a hand on her hip and the other arm wrapped around her waist, until they were lying in a spooning position, facing toward the nearby stream. He was still inside her, just spent. Exhausted. But neither of them really wanted to separate just yet.

  He looked over her body. He could see some redness on her chest from where her breasts had lightly scraped against the dirt and plants. Her cheeks were still flushed. Her neck was darkening where he had bitten it.

  “That was great,” Mariella said softly, sounding both tired and pleased. “Bestial and also… loving? Maybe that’s the wrong word, but… um, thank you for your tender treatment… my lord.” She was blushing, Tybalt saw.

  “You don’t have to keep calling me that,” he said, even though he found it surprisingly pleasant. He didn’t want her to think this subservience thing was some newly added permanent dynamic to their relationship.

  “What if I want to?” she asked, turning her head and looking back at him with an expression that held a mixture of teasing and something else.

  If you like it, that’s different.

  “Then you can keep doing it,” he replied, giving her his most piercing look. “When we’re alone.”

  “Yes, my lord.” She wiggled her ass slightly, grinding gently against his pelvis. It normally would have been incredibly sexy, given that they were both almost completely naked—she was sort of halfway wearing a shirt, still—but with his member beginning to soften inside her, it felt a bit odd.

  He didn’t say anything about that sensation, though, just squeezed her waist lightly with one hand and caressed her hair with the other, curling his body to place his head right behind hers. Her hair smelled of rosemary and pine, as usual.

  “I need a nickname for you, too,” he said after a moment.

  “What would you like to call me?” she asked.

  “How does ‘Ella’ sound?”

  “Are—are you sure? That…”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “No, it’s fine…” She was blushing again for some reason. “Not a lot of people call me that. Only my family.”

  “That sounds like it will make it more special. If you’re all right with it.”

  She smiled. “Yeah. I am.”

  He nuzzled her affectionately.

  “I’m glad we came up here,” he whispered.

  “Not as glad as I am,” Mariella replied, yawning. She spoke with a funny cocktail of sleepy fatigue and nervous energy. “Oh, um, and we can talk about whatever you wanted to talk about now, my lord. I’m not completely out of control of myself anymore, even if you did exhaust me. Maybe that was your plan? Wear me down with the sparring and the sex? Then you could get whatever you really wanted out of me?”

  “It’s not my fault my stamina is higher than yours,” Tybalt replied after a moment.

  “You’re right, honestly,” she said in a serious tone. “I need to work more on my physical fitness. I can’t stand losing… although, if it’s to you, it’s not so bad.”

  Tybalt didn’t have anything to say to that. If Mariella got stronger, it would make him stronger, since she would fight for him if someone attacked them. So he wouldn’t object. But it would be idiotic to call her out of shape. If she was out of shape, then physically fit humans did not exist on Abadd.

  It was better to just let her make up her own mind about how much and what kinds of exercises to do, unless she directly asked about it, rather than offering an opinion.

  “As for what I wanted to talk about,” he said, “I already stated it briefly. You don’t have to leave. You could just stay. Vidalia says there’s a good chance you’ll die if you go back. You know what that means, given her powers. You have to take it seriously. And you and I can get even closer if you stay.” He lowered his voice. “We could do this every day.”

  “Tempting,” she said, giving him a slow, sleepy, wistful smile. “I do have to go, though. I owe it to my family. They deserve some kind of loyalty. Even if it’s imperfect, because I met this rebel I can’t resist.” She put a sultry note into her voice for a moment.

  Yeah, talk about giving comfort to the enemy, the necromancer thought. You’re definitely guilty of treason at this point.

  “It’s not really your family I’m worried about,” Tybalt said.

  “Well, my loyalty to the Kingdom is pretty thoroughly destroyed,” Mariella said, sounding slightly more awake. “What we’ve done to the beastfolk, across generations—over centuries, from the way Vidalia tells it—is monstrous. It’s something I couldn’t possibly support. My loyalty to the gods I was raised with has also been eroding. Lord Mudo doesn’t seem as bad, from the beastfolk shamans, as many other gods—or as bad as the reputation he’s given by Lord Vika and Lady Astara’s representatives. Lord Vika directly sanctioned the attack on the beastfolk this time, and even if he was doing it to get at you specifically, he still went about it in the worst, cruelest way possible. That just leaves my family competing with you for my loyalty, but my family was always ahead of everything else, anyway. I’d fight the Kingdom alongside you right now, if they attacked, but I can’t fight my family.”

  “And I don’t want you to,” Tybalt reminded her.

  “So you say… but I bet your ambitions stretch further than just securing this little patch of desert for the beastfolk, don’t they?” she asked, looking at him carefully.

  He nodded slowly.

  “You want… the Kingdom itself.”

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “I do.”

  She sighed. “Yeah, I thought so. You didn’t want me to just turn on the squad. You want to fight the Kingdom. The one my father serves as a general.”

  “I know that puts you in an awkward spot. I understood your reluctance to turn on the Kingdom even before I knew who your father was. At the same time, if you had been up for it, I never would have lied to you about any of the things I kept secret.”

  Mariella nodded and covered a yawn. “Well, I’m still not up for it. Not if it’s actually attacking the Kingdom rather than defending the beastfolk or administering justice to the criminals who murder them. My first loyalty is to my family… until and unless I marry. Then my husband will be my family and the leader of our family unit. But you’re not that. Not yet, anyway. And it’s one thing for me to say that my family wants to give me a lot of freedom in choosing a husband. Another thing to marry an outright enemy.” Her voice rose at the end, and he felt her frustration.

  He took her hand in his, and they just lay together holding hands for a while. He could see she was a little upset, but there was nothing he could say to make things better.

  Eventually, Tybalt broke the silence. He could only deal with what troubled him by confronting it.

  “So, your plan is to go back home. Back to the Kingdom proper, with the Divine Trust, the temple system, the Army, everyone who will want to interrogate you about all that happened here.”

  “Back to my family,” Mariella said firmly. “To tell them what happened and figure out what to do next. I can avoid running into all those other factions. I’m not a necromancer. The world isn’t hunting me.”

  “Yeah, that’s true enough, I guess,” Tybalt said. “It’s still not exactly safe. While we’re on the subject of my class, I should tell you something else about me. Something I meant to say back when I revealed my class, but there was so much going on that I didn’t get to it.”

  “You have a second class, don’t you?” Mariella spoke as if it was obvious.

  How the fuck did you figure that out from this conversation? It saves me the breath wasted on explaining it, but it’s always strange how well you can read me specifically.

  “I do,” Tybalt said. “And that was what I wanted to tell you. So no one else can surprise you with it later.”

  “You were the one who made the squad sick, right?” she said, her tone neutral. He could tell she didn’t care about their dead squadmates anymore.

  “Yes. How did you figure it out?”

  “I remembered the way you reacted when I discussed my theory about the soldiers getting sick. You were cagey, nervous. Plus, when the squad attacked the beastfolk village, the beastfolk didn’t have any mages of their own come out and defend them, even though it’s exactly the situation where you’d use a mage. Even a mage who mainly spreads disease would still be too valuable not to use in the defense of the village, because people with classes are usually physically stronger and quicker than people without them. Working backward from that, what if they never had a mage at all? Vidalia gave me little hints, too, when I would ask questions about other beastfolk having classes.”

  “Of course she did. Sounds like you should be proud of your deduction, though.”

  “Was there another reason you wanted to tell me that now?” she asked. “Besides ensuring no one else can reveal it later as a way of turning me against you?” She didn’t sound offended that he had somewhat inadvertently kept it from her for longer than his primary class.

  Maybe she got too used to me lying to even be disappointed anymore, or maybe she feels like this was a reasonable time to reveal it. Hard to say which…

  “It’s related to another reason I wanted you to stay,” Tybalt replied. “I need someone to help me figure out the right ways to use the powers that come with that class. As a pestilence mage and a necromancer, I’m practically a living weapon of war. But the pestilences aren’t like the undead. They don’t just do what I say. They have a life of their own that continues when I’m not paying attention. They want to grow and spread.”

  “You… want me to be your moral compass, Tybalt?” Mariella asked softly. “I really don’t think I’m qualified.”

  “Who has more qualifications than you?” he asked affectionately, running a hand over her body and then enveloping her more tightly in his arms. “You’re one of the best people I’ve ever known.”

  “The problem isn’t that I’m a bad person,” she replied in a deliberately slow and even voice. But her hands fidgeted as she spoke, as if she was uncomfortable. “The problem is that my instincts would make it hard to fulfill the desired purpose. Specifically, my instinct with you, in my bones, is to follow. I lo—I care for you a lot. I respect you. And I want to do what would please you. So I’d tell myself, ‘Tybalt said to do this, so do it for Tybalt. He wouldn’t order you to do something wrong.’ Exactly the opposite of what you want.

  “It was one reason I was reluctant to fight alongside you at first after I found out you were a dark mage. I was afraid of what I’d become if I let you in. If I decided that I wanted to be with you. Seeing the dead child—um, Hieron—brought it home for me. I was afraid that in a few years, I’d blink and find myself impaling some child outside a village to ‘Send a message’ to a family that disobeyed you, telling myself it was all for the greater good.” She shivered. “I still followed you to protect the beastfolk, in the end, and I don’t regret it. But I almost refused. I was afraid of where I’d end up.”

  “The fact that you know you don’t want to end up in that place is exactly why I can count on you,” Tybalt said.

  “I think you have a conscience of your own, and you also have Vidalia and probably Victoria, who will tell you if you go too far,” Mariella said evenly. “They’re not evil. This isn’t a reason for me to stay.”

  Tybalt sighed. Appealing to her conscience was one of the best strategies I could think of. I’m not sure what else—

  “I could stay a little longer,” Mariella said. She had turned to face away from Tybalt again, and her tone was unreadable. “If you wanted me to. We could continue doing this every day. Without worrying about consequences.”

  The necromancer frowned. Does she mean…?

  He bit back a reply that would have sounded harsh.

  “As in, trying to get you pregnant?” he asked, barely maintaining an even tone.

  She nodded and spoke again, in a small voice. “If I was pregnant, my family would be angry, but they would almost have no choice but to accept you.”

  “And on the off chance that they didn’t accept me, they’d keep you far away from me,” Tybalt said. “So you’d give birth to a child who would never know their father. Assuming that the authorities even let our baby live.” He was unable to keep a trace of irritation out of his voice. “I refuse.”

  “I thought you might say that. You do have a moral compass, you know?”

  We really don’t know how to share our feelings, either of us, Tybalt thought. She almost made me pretty angry with that idea, and for all I know, she didn’t even mean what she was saying.

  “Was it a serious suggestion? Or were you making a point?” he asked.

  “Serious,” she replied very quietly. “I want you to know, I’m completely serious about everything when it comes to both leaving and returning to you. I’ll do what I have to do to make that happen. Nothing I say right now is just to make a point.”

  “I get it,” he said. He leaned in and kissed the back of her neck. “I’m just completely unwilling to ever risk doing that to my own child.”

  She smiled softly. “I know. I love that about you. I’m not going to argue in favor of it. But I will point out that a bastard I gave birth to would have a better childhood than any peasant.”

  If the child lived, Tybalt thought. You’re just assuming you’d be protected. That our baby would be protected. Even if your father is important, that’s still… naive.

  He pulled slightly away from her and sat up, then ran a hand over her hair.

  She looked at him questioningly, with a hint of disappointment. Her expression said, Are we done cuddling?

  “I still have plans for us this evening,” the necromancer said. “You and I need to be somewhere at sunset. The sun starts going down earlier around this time of year. If we keep lying here, we’ll fall asleep.”

  She nodded reluctantly and sat up.

  “Why don’t we take a bath together in the stream?” Tybalt asked, smiling faintly. “You’ll have to stay close, to keep me warm.”

  Mariella smiled back. “Sounds good.”

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