Pixilated Read online

  Pixilated

  A Garrison Love Story Book One

  Jane Atchley

  Copyright 2009 Jane Peterman Atchley

  Smashword Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for you personal enjoyment. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  First Published July 2010 The Wild Rose Press Faery Rose Imprint as Warring Heart

  All Rights Returned to the author

  Chapter One

  Lightening illuminated the cave-in. The storm howled. Rain pounded in blinding torrents carving tiny rivulets in the hillside, making footing treacherous. Kree Fawr shouldered two men out of the way, and shoved a granite boulder aside.

  The mine manager shouted over crashing thunder. "Twenty-six men trapped in there, My Captain. May the Gods help them."

  The gods didn't care. Hefting another three-foot chunk of rain-slick granite out of the pile, Kree's foot slipped. Muddy runoff sluiced into his custom-made cavalry boots. A mere half-hour ago, he was warm and dry, gambling with his fellows. Now, he was soaked to the skin, boot-deep in ooze, and wondering if the mine manager smelled liquor on his breath. He waited for the next rumble of thunder to fade. His soft voice did not carry. "Do they have enough air?"

  The manager raked away a layer of muck uncovering more boulders for the muscular cavalry captain to toss aside. "Depends on where they are. Half the shafts are buried!"

  Kree turned his head toward the trooper on his right and forced volume into his voice. "Bird, take some men up-slope. Dig out those air shafts."

  "We could blast our way through this blockage, sir." First Lieutenant Duncan offered at Kree's side. The manager looked panicked, but the first lieutenant ignored the man. "It is simple mathematics, sir. Calculate the correct size and placement for the charges and kaboom. No more debris."

  Simple? Kree glanced at the mine manager again.

  "Spark off a gas pocket and it will bring down the whole mountain."

  "The danger is negligible, sir, and it will save hours of digging."

  His first lieutenant sounded confident, but then he always did when talking of mathematics or black powder, and the trapped men did not have hours.

  "Do it," Kree ordered.

  Black smoke and timber-laced mud and rock shot several feet into the air. The mountainside held, and the captain congratulated himself. He possessed the finest black-powder man in the Kingdoms, and he had the balls to use him.

  ***

  The captain sat in the mud, resting his head and arms on his knees. The last man had been carried from the mine. The rain had stopped and the dawn painted the sky with colors promising a fine day. His officers and troopers sprawled in a semicircle around him while town folk bustled in and out of the makeshift hospital tent, and women moved among exhausted rescuers offering wine or water.

  "Kree!" Lathan Bruin took in the group of weary mud-slathered men with a glance. "Is everyone well here?"

  He glanced up at his best friend and nodded. "Tired but unhurt. When did you arrive?"

  "Not soon enough."

  Kree expelled a long breath. The gods truly didn't care. These were his people. He had sworn to protect them. Then something like this happened and he was damn near useless. "How many died?"

  Lathan shrugged.

  "How many?"

  "Three."

  "Namar’s bloody tears." Kree laid his head down on his knees. In a town the size of Qets, three counted as a bona fide disaster. Families of dead miners became immediately destitute. The gods may not care, but Kree Fawr did. He would visit the families and arrange relief. Miners always carried heavy debt, although he did not understand why, since they earned almost as much as his troopers did.

  Lathan moved off toward the next muddy group of rescuers, stopped, and turned back. "Kayseri arrives on the noon post. Do you still plan to be there?"

  Kree lay back on the muddy slope and massaged his temples with the heels of his hands. "I wouldn’t miss it."

  "She'd understand."

  "I'll be there. I’m looking forward to seeing her."

  ***

  Kree dried his face on a clean white towel. He caught his friend, Lathan's, reflection in the mirror and gave a lopsided smile. Together they had prevailed against a powerful Star-wizard back when he'd been nothing but an oversized boy with a sword, and Lathan a young man who'd come to the garrison seeking glory. Glory, fickle mistress that she was, had gone to Kree. His had been the killing stroke. No one had cared that Lathan's sacrifice made that stroke possible. But Kree remembered. He cared. The bond between them, forged by their shared experience, was stronger than blood.

  Lathan’s restless pacing took him past Kree’s desk. On his second pass, he picked up an unfinished letter lying on top reading aloud, "Honored Ladies of Elhar, regarding your inquiry concerning renegade sorcery... This is terrible."

  Kree snatched the letter from his friend’s grasp and quickly scanned it. His brow puckered. "Don't see any mistakes." He passed it back to Lathan, and returned to the mirror where he worked a single tight braid into his hair. By tradition, Goddess-born men like him left their hair unshorn and worn it in complicated blessing-braids, but he had hacked his hair off in a fit of temper some years back. It scarcely reached his shoulder blades. Goddess-born. What religious hogwash. Kree knew his parentage. He was the creation of selective breeding, no divine intervention required.

  "You should let your secretary handle correspondence with Elhar. That’s why the Ladies sent him to you."

  "Thank you, Lathan. I needed you to tell me that."

  "You know, you used to have a better sense of humor."

  "I used to be soaring on Goddess nectar every day. Hell's teeth, Lath, everything was funny when I was high as a kite." How Kree missed nectar's exhilarating high and the buoyant illusion of indestructibility that accompanied it. He chafed his hand up and down one arm. Why did his fucking skin always feel too tight?"

  Lathan crumpled the letter into a ball, tossed it into the trash, and glanced at his friend. "I told you I can stop the pain."

  "And I told you no."

  "Then at least take some willow–"

  "No, means no. No magic. No different potions."

  Lathan shook his head. "I don’t see the benefit of constant pain."

  Kree fastened the frogs down the front of his bright dragon’s eye blue jacket. "That is because you didn't live the first thirty years of your life without feeling a single honest physical sensation." He shrugged. "Besides, it's not too bad today."

  From the way Lathan stared at him, his friend understood not bad meant bearable. To his credit, he returned to the subject of his daughter's imminent arrival.

  "Tell me why are you taking such trouble for a youngster who’d be just as happy to see you if you were still nose-to-toes mud?"

  "I live to serve." Kree touched his chest above his heart, gave a slight mocking bow. "One: I ordered an honor guard for our little Katie. Pretty horsies always delighted her, and I must match their magnificence. Two: I am visiting the dead miners' families this afternoon. Three: I am meeting a lady later and will not have time to change."

  "The first lieutenant’s widowed sister-in-law again?"

  "Why not? The lady is beautiful. She knows what she likes, and she’s leaving town soon. These are three traits I find very attractive in women."

  "Everyone’s talking about her."

  "Everyone or just you?"

  Lathan flopped down on the
captain's bed. "What does Duncan say?"

  Kree made a weighing motion with one hand. "My first lieutenant keeps his own counsel regarding my love life. You should try it." The gleam in Lathan’s eyes told him just how much hope there was of that.

  "I can't. I am the voice of your conscience."

  Kree tugged his jacket straight. "You are the pain in my arse."

  "People are saying you’re ready to take a new wife."

  Pausing in the act of buckling the shoulder harness that supported his long gryphon knives, Kree fixed his closest friend with the stone-cold stare that made his enemies tremble. Lathan was immune. "I’d sooner take hemlock. I've heard that painless."

  ***

  Kayseri Burin smoothed her fine elfin gown's narrow skirt, settled more comfortably in the coach and waited. It seemed all she had ever done. Wait. She'd waited to grow up, Waited for the only man she’d ever loved through his dreadful marriage, and then after his wife died and he cared for nothing, she waited for her chance to make him care. She had finally reached her first stasis, frozen in the full bloom of womanhood for the next two hundred years or so until her next aging cycle began. She was through waiting.

  She caught her bottom lip with her teeth. It had been five years since she’d last seen him, and he would have changed in that time. Humans changed. Still, she could not imagine sharing her mate bond, the mystical Wilderkin union of soul and mind, with any other male. Furthermore, Kayseri was so sure of her choice and had been for so long, she never tried to imagine such a silly thing.

  Her coach rocked and churned along the rain-rutted road. Kayseri leaned out of the window letting the wind tangled her long black hair. Like all pixies, all Wilderkin actually, she loved sun on her face and wind in her hair. How she longed to sit up in the box with the driver, but that would not be grown-up and her goal was to appear grown-up because she would see him. But it went against nature because pixies were mischievous and exuberant from cradle to grave.

  Humans were different. Kayseri understood this. They thought when one reached a certain age one had to act and dress in certain ways, so she endured the stuffy coach while sunlight and color beckoned to her from the window. Ah, the things one did for love. She smoothed her skirt down again. The provocative way her gown hugged her curves helped her appear very grown up indeed, but this was not the reason she'd chosen it. The green silk, the exact color of old jade, perfectly matched her beloved’s eyes.

  Outside the curtained window, the familiar landscape moved slowly past, far too slowly for Kayseri's avid pixie spirit. Mud dragging at the wheels slowed the horses’ progress, the green hills dotted with sheep crawled by. But summer was in the air, and Kayseri smelled the fruit orchards heavy with peaches and apricots. She was so close to home it was hard to sit still. There was the big tree she had climbed as a little girl even though her father had forbidden it. She lost her nerve halfway to the top and had sat frozen afraid to move until he came to her rescue. He'd reached up and plucked her out of the branches with no more effort than he would spare a ripe fruit. She felt safe in his arms. Best of all, he had not teased her, and he had not told her father. Kayseri had fallen irrevocably in love with him that day.

  At last, the coach rounded a bend and began the assent into town. High on the hillside the blue tiled roofs from which the garrison and the surrounding town took their name sparkled in the afternoon sun. Qets Garrison meant Blue Garrison in the old language. Her fellow travelers stirred. A blade-sister, newly posted to the garrison, pelted Kayseri with a barrage of last minute questions about garrison life in general and about Captain Fawr in particular, whom the sister heard had a fearsome and uncertain temper.

  Her five brothers, her pixie mother, whom she noticed was days away from delivering another child, and her wonderful human father waited on the platform. Kayseri loved her family fiercely, but her gaze fixed on the big trooper standing beside her father. The sun sparked copper highlights in his garnet colored hair, and he looked dashingly handsome in his dragon’s eye blue and black uniform. The little scar on his cheek he called proud flesh lent just the right touch of danger to his face. The sight of him made her stomach to do a funny little flip-flop.

  The honor guard in attendance surprised her, the cadets’ corps by the look of them, a group of handsome young men in brilliant light-armor mounted on gorgeous horses. Had he assembled them for her? Oh, he must have. He wouldn't have done it for the Sister. Another little thrill zipped through her.

  The coach rolled to a halt as close to on schedule as it ever was in Qets, splattering Kree’s spit-shined boots with red mud. A farm couple got off, followed by a blade-sister, who saluted him smartly. Kree returned her two-fingered salute automatically. His attention fixed on the last passenger, an exquisite, raven-haired, dark-eyed Wilderkin beauty gowned in High-Thallasi fashion, but not Thallasi though. Oh no. This beauty was petite and dark and not at all his usual type. But something extraordinary about her captured his attention and wouldn't let go. The Wilderkin beauty met his bold gaze and smiled. Kree's heart raced. He had the niggling feeling he knew this female, but this was impossible. No one, not even he, dared dally with Wilderkin no matter how willing they seemed. Their pesky mate-bond got in the way.

  The beauty swept past Lathan’s family as if they didn't exist and stretched herself against the long line of Kree's body. She pulled his head down and pressed an innocent kiss to his lips. Her lips, rose-petal soft against his, stole his breath. The vanilla scent drifting from her wild black curls stole his reason. He felt disembodied, weightless, and then, as the beauty's identity registered, terrified. Kayseri sighed as Kree gently held her away. Then she opened her eyes and looked up at him.

  "What’s the matter, My Captain? It’s your Katie home from Elhar. You look as though you don’t know me."

  Kree couldn’t have been more stunned if she had hit him between the eyes with a war hammer. One side of his mouth quirked upward in a crooked smile and little beauty reached for him again, but her family gathered around them jostling him aside.

  Chapter Two

  "My Captain?"

  Some instinct, call it self-preservation, urged Kree to ignore Kayseri. His cowardice irritated him. It would take more than last night's the embarrassing events to make Kree Fawr hide from a slip of a girl like Kayseri Bruin. She slid the door wide, stepping into the stable. Standing where the shaft of sunlight slashed the dim interior, she could not see him, but he could see her. Too well. Gone was her slinky green gown, replaced by one of the form-fitting soft leather garments pixies preferred. Not an improvement to Kree’s way of thinking. He had to admit five years had worked some delicious and well, disturbing changes in Kayseri. His throat went dry. Goddess help him, he was in so much trouble.

  Kree forced volume in his soft voice. "Over here."

  Kayseri smiled at him over the side of the stall where he groomed a golden-coated horse. "I brought your jacket. You left it at the house when ran off last night."

  Ran off? She’s lived around a fort her whole life, and she doesn’t recognize a strategic retreat when she sees one. Kree gave a sharp irritated snort. "You wasted your time. I have dozens of jackets."

  Kayseri blinked at his harsh tone. She tossed his jacket on a nearby hay bale. Instead of leaving as Kree half-hoped she might, she roamed up and down the sally port, trailing her fingers over the tack. His gaze tracked her movement.

  "Well...That’s not the only reason I came." The way she caressed a saddle horn had him choking back a moan.

  "Today is our birthday."

  As if, he could forget.

  Kayseri peeked at him from behind an oak support beam. "I wish you’d written to tell me mother was expecting?" She signed dramatically. "Again."

  What did that have to do with anything? Why couldn’t pixies stick with one topic? "It’s not my business." Kree spoke to the space where Kayseri had been an instant before. The fine hairs on his arms stood on end. He had a sensitivity to magic, even low-level magic like p
ixie-mischief.

  Kayseri reappeared atop the wall separating the stall where he worked from its neighbor. Damnation. He hated pixie-mischief. It brought nothing but trouble. In fact, he did not like any magic and magic, other than his Goddess's own, did not like him. Kayseri tiptoed along the wall like a ropewalker in a carnival.

  "Don’t do that." Realizing Kayseri would not understand he meant make mischief, he grumbled. "You might fall."

  She made a face at him just so he'd understand how unlikely falling was. "Mother and father would be a scandal in Thallasi. Too many children." Kayseri shook her head. "It’s not the Wilderkin way."

  "Too bad, I like children." Kree gave his attention to the horse in front of him, so Kayseri could not read his expression. He had wanted a family, children, a wife who loved him for himself and not for his power and position. It didn't sound like a lofty goal, but it was beyond his puny ability. Infertility was a side effect of Goddess nectar it turned out, and one he couldn't change. Would he change it given the chance? He didn’t know. His Goddess didn't give him a choice, and he resented the hell out of it.

  "That's because you don’t have to share the bathroom with them." Kayseri made a smart pirouette, starting back toward him. "My father’s sole ambition is to remake the pixie nation in his own image."

  Kree laughed. Katie always made him laugh. And it was true; all of Lathan’s children shared a certain homogeny. His gaze followed Kayseri’s progress, as he knew she intended. Her body was lithe and graceful ripe for the taking, and it would be, he reminded himself, long after he was dust. Why, his hands could span her waist. As soon as this hypothesis formed, he longed to test it. He was ten kinds of a fool.

  "Please land somewhere, Katie. You’re making an old man dizzy."