Leonidas was quite blind as he jumped out of the tiger pit. He couldn’t see the woman. He needed to find her. He needed to hear her story. Did she know what had happened to his brother? As for the tiger… Something was wrong with the tiger… and her…

When he finally spotted her, she was walking next to a stone wall, obviously trying to slip past without anyone noticing her and her enormous striped friend.

Leonidas cut off her path and pulled his sword on her.

She stopped, and her tiger growled—a terrifying sound made in the back of the animal’s throat. Leonidas would normally have been very afraid of that sound, except for everything he had experienced the night before. The sound quickly became part of the nightmarish song that played on repeat in his head.

“You came from the harem?” he asked between clenched teeth.

She held her hands where he could see them, and in the moment before she answered, he saw her for the first time. He really saw her instead of the shadowy figure of her. She had reddish brown hair. It was so red, it was almost the same color of orange as the tiger. Her eyes were amber and made orangier still by the thick lining that marked her eyes. There were so many lines drawn that she almost looked like a monarch butterfly, poisonous and beautiful. Her hair was tied in a low ponytail and fell in a tangled cluster of curls down her back. She wore a top constructed of repeatedly tied light brown silk that did not cover her navel or the sharp bones of her hips.  The gauzy trousers she wore were slightly transparent and showed the outline of her legs.  Leonidas had never seen a woman from a harem before, and he found her appearance genuinely shocking. Her hair was uncovered?  He’d seen a woman’s hair before, but he’d never seen that flash of red.  Her hair was scandalous, but not as scandalous as the visible cut of her cleavage. She was dressed to entertain a powerful man’s fantasies.

Leonidas felt disgusted.

“Was your brother Ciphas?” she asked softly, bringing him back into the conversation.

He nodded curtly to stop himself from expressing any other kind of emotion.

“He looks a little like you,” she explained. “I’m sorry. He stayed behind to fight the rebels when I fled with Yorrik.”

“So you don’t know what happened to him?”

“No,” she admitted sorrowfully.

The tiger chose that moment to growl a second time. The girl slid her arms in a fluid motion, unworldly, like her arms were made from the bodies of snakes. She whispered in the tiger’s ear and pressed her forehead against his with her eyes closed.

He trusted her completely.

The tiger quieted.

She did not move, but she whispered, speaking to Leonidas. “I need to leave the city. I need to return this tiger to the wild. Will you help me?”

Leonidas stared at her like he didn’t understand what she was saying. The night had been long. The fighting? Inescapable. He had only stayed awake because of his feverish desire to find his brother.

His mouth spoke before his mind caught up. “Why should I help you? Don’t you know the way through the mountains to the jungle?”

She had parted her lips.

Leonidas stifled a sneer.

Lips like hers should be covered. No man should see lips like those if he were forbidden from parting them with his tongue.

Leonidas shook his head to shake the thoughts loose. He was not attracted to her. He had always been drawn to quiet women, who made their contribution to household life with reverence like they were making an offering to the gods. The men of the household were gods. However, getting a woman that holy was challenging.  Those women were always so desired that none of his proposals had been accepted by a doting father.  He always already had better plans for his daughter. It was infuriating.

It was more infuriating to see this woman, an untouchable woman, trained for pleasure, one of the King’s concubines, out in public.

The woman with the amber eyes said things.

He didn’t hear her. He was pulling his cape off his shoulders and throwing it over hers.

“Don’t cover me with that!” she hissed, pushing him away. “Cover the tiger.”

“The tiger is in less danger than you,” he bit back. “No one will want the tiger as much as they’ll want you.”

“Does that mean you’ll help me?” she asked fretfully.

“It does not. Unless you can tell me where the King has gone, or where the other harem girls have gone, or where Ciphas is likely to be. I have to help my brother, not you.” He looked down on her with demanding eyes.

“If I knew, I’d tell you because I want your brother to be safe too. I want all the girls to be safe,” she said, her lips moving in a way that infuriated Leonidas.

“Not the King?” he asked scathingly, noticing her omission.

She looked at him, then looked at the tiger, then back at him. “I was given to the King as a present from my uncle. He’s the King of Mirracarda, but he clearly did not know there was as much civil unrest here as occurred last night. If he had known, he would not have sent me as a present because he would have waited until he knew who was going to be in power before he tried to strike a deal with them.”

She turned her head away from him. She was still talking to him, but she was looking down the road in multiple directions to confirm they were alone.

In the moment that she displayed such sense, Leonidas got a grip on himself. He absolutely had to take the girl out of the city, not because he wanted to help her, but because he needed to leave the city himself. The harem and the palace were both empty when he searched them. They were not empty of just living people. There were no dead people or treasures. There had to be survivors, as not everyone had been burned. They had to have fled out of the city to the mountains. Since the rebels seemed to have won the coup, he was now in danger in his soldier uniform, and leaving the city with a tiger seemed the safest option.

He grabbed her upper arm.

The tiger growled.

He let her go in response. “I guess I’ll help you. It’s this way. Let’s get moving.”

“Thank you. What’s your name?” the foreign princess asked as they hurried down the deserted street.

“Leonidas. And yours?”

“Samara.”

“You look like a tiger yourself with those lines on your face,” he said critically.

“They come off.  I just need to wash.”

He wished there was a hood on his cape so he could cover her hair.

They reached a crossroads, and Leonidas rushed them down an alley rather than down the main streets, which were busy with people. He wondered how well the tiger would change directions, but he came easily, following Samara like he was her goat.

“Where did you learn to tame a tiger?” he asked as they rushed between the stone walls.

“I didn’t,” she said as Leonidas made them pause at the end of the alley.

He wasn’t sure which way to take next. “Then why is he obeying you?”

“He’s not obeying me. He’s obeying God.”

Leonidas did a double-take. A woman with a mouth as seductive as the gates of Hell was praying, and a god was answering her prayers? It sounded unbelievable. “What god were you praying to?”

“God. The main God. There’s only one God.”

He looked at her over his shoulder. “You’re not from here, or you could find your way without me. Where did you come from?”

Maybe it was just as bad to have her eyes showing. They were flashing like midnight moons framed by red lashes.  She did not seem like a creature who had been made by a benevolent god, but her eyes let him, let him see himself in the golden mirror of her gaze.  “Over the desert, across the sea, into the seaspray, and down from the clouds.”

His gaze was hypnotized.

“That way!” she said, pushing him out of the alley and rushing the party across the street and onto a side street.

Who knew how long the path would stay empty?

They ran.

They arrived at another crossroads.

They ran again.

And again.

And again.