Leonidas was having trouble breathing. While he was on the subject, he was also having trouble moving. His muscles were silently screaming while all the voices in his head were howling in unison. He needed to stop. He needed to rest. He had not slept since the night before the rebels struck. He had stayed up all night searching, hunting, finding… not his brother, but a woman with her ferocious beast who both had the energy of devils. He couldn’t see anything except the white belly of the tiger as it pressed ahead. He saw the belly because it was above him.

“I… uh…” he breathed.

Samara turned.

He couldn’t see her. He couldn’t see anything that wasn’t white.

“Enough,” she said. “You are stubborn like a statue, but it is not the muscles in your legs that need to move, but the heart in your chest that needs to grow. Now hear me.” She placed her palm on his forehead and whispered an invocation that he did not understand.

Her voice made words he had heard before but forgotten. Together, her words made an appeal to his body that each part understood, if not his head. He felt his pain melt away. His eyes closed, and for the first time in Leonidas’s life, he let himself slacken. It felt like the sun was shining on his face, though it was not. He felt he could hear angels singing, though it was only the wind coursing through the thorns. He was touched by the divine, and suddenly, he was no longer a mortal man…

He could run.

Leonidas had never run with a tiger before. He had never run with a woman before. He had never defied gravity and chased toward the stars like there was no difference between earth and heaven.

The freedom he felt was like escaping chains he didn’t know he had always been wearing. The flash of Samara’s white face in the starlight as she dropped her headscarf and her veil. When she stopped to breathe, she insisted that they all take drinks, and he found himself looking at her differently. Was she a witch? She could not be an angel. If anything, she was the tiger’s mate made human. He was confused. How had she made him come alive in that way? She had practically strapped wings to his back and made him fly. He had never moved like that before.

She drank from his water skin.

“How long have you been married to the King?” he asked hoarsely before taking the water from her and quenching his thirst.

“Not long. When I first arrived, I was in a separate annex of the palace for six months doing a purification ritual.”

He asked a clipped question in the darkness. “What does that entail?”

He couldn’t see her in the darkness, but he could hear evidence of an attitude he could not define.

“Nothing,” she said as if his suspicions of the atrocities of the inner palace were silly. “They let me take hot baths and scraped my skin with stones. More than anything, they wanted to make sure I had no unauthorized contact with anyone.”

“Why?” he asked, curious that there wasn’t more to the story.

She matched his energy and answered, “They wanted to make sure that I was not pregnant and that I had not brought any disease to the King’s bed. So, they kept me there for six months to prove both things.”

“They weren’t concerned with whether or not you were a virgin?” he asked, feeling some of his past distaste resurface.

Her voice carried a few of her feelings to him. “Ah… That’s neither here nor there. A beautiful woman is a beautiful woman, and my greatest charm is my uncle’s wealth and his interest in trade. I was placed in the King’s palace to provide a bridge for those discussions.”

“Would you like me to help you use your jewelry to pay for your journey back to your uncle’s kingdom?” he asked kindly, trying to be kind. He had to be kind to her with his voice since he did not want to touch her.

“I don’t know,” she whispered blankly. “My course has not yet been revealed to me. To answer your question, I have been married to the King for eleven days.”

Leonidas felt a sick chill play down his spine as he thought of the King and Samara. He was a captain in the King’s army. He did guard shifts on the wall.  Sometimes he did shifts in the palace courtyard. He was not a rebel, but the King disgusted him. The glimpses he had of the life the King lived repulsed him, and by extension, Samara did too.

“Did you like him? The King?” Leonidas asked, doing his best to keep the displeasure out of his voice. A perceptive person would hear it, especially when there was nothing to see in the dark, but would Samara?

“Uh… He was… not what I expected,” she said slowly. Whether she was trying to evade Leonidas’s question to keep her insights private or to protect the King, Leonidas could not tell.

He stayed quiet in the midnight air and waited to see if she would say more.

When she did not, he prompted her. “He did remind you of your uncle?”

She sighed. “My uncle is a kind man.”

“Is our King not a kind man?” Leonidas ventured.

Her voice came clipped like blades clashing in the dark. “You don’t like him because of what his orders did to your brother?” She said it like his chest had opened to her view and showed her all that was in his heart.

“Do you approve of that sort of thing? Young men being cut back so they can protect the women that are reserved for the pleasure and continuity of one man?”

“It’s just as hard for the woman,” she retaliated. “She receives only a fraction of her husband’s love so that he can spread his seed so thin. Sharing a mate is hard.”

“But your kind uncle asked you to do it?” Leonidas asked. “Marry that type of man?”

She made a sound like laughter. “I don’t think my uncle approves of it. He does not have a harem. What he told me was that marrying your king was the next step in my journey. I agreed. It was the next step, but that did not make it the final destination. After all, I’m not locked up in a harem now.  I’m out in the wilds with a wild animal for a friend and you for a guard. I can say this because I can’t see you, but Leonidas, you are…” Her voice faltered. Then, low in the dark air, he thought he heard her say, “More exciting than the tiger.”

“What?” he let out, wanting her to say it again.

“Nothing…” she said, trying to rewrite her words into something more acceptable. “Just that in all the palaces I’ve been to, with all the guards, all the army men I’ve seen, all the princes I’ve spied… out of everyone, you’re the best-looking man I’ve ever seen.”

Leonidas felt heat hit his head like he was suddenly sick with a fever.

He wasn’t good-looking.

He wasn’t anything.

Ciphas had been good-looking. That had been part of the reason he had been chosen to become a eunuch. For Samara to say something like that, his voice was completely lost.

He wasn’t good-looking. The bronze mirrors in the temple showed strength, but not beauty.

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” he said.

“You have such a light in your eyes, like rainbows,” her voice went on dreamily. “Like you are thinking many things at once. Things that are dark and belong in the shadows, and at the same time, things that are light and will one day earn their wings. Rainbows in the dark. I love it,” her voice almost singing her words like a love song. “Except, it's all over your face. You do not have the same admiration for me. You do not think I’m beautiful,” she finished, her tone descending to the depths of reality.

“I don’t?” he asked, annoyed that he’d given so many of his private thoughts away. Besides, it wasn’t that he didn’t think she was beautiful. It was that he did not like how he had felt when he saw her bare skin. He wanted to view the beauty of a woman with reverence, not like an animal who could mate after inhaling her scent. He wanted holiness, and no matter what Samara said about God, a woman in a body like that was not holy.

“No,” she went on. “You… You want… something more familiar. I look like a beheaded monkey to you.  Something interesting and disgusting at the same time.  It’s fine. I don’t wish I looked different, even if my looks are not to your taste, and even if you are the handsomest man in the world. My father made me look this way, partly because he wants to hide the part of me that looks like him.”

“You haven’t mentioned your father,” Leonidas said quietly. “He does what your uncle tells him?”

She giggled, but then she clamped a hand firmly over her mouth. Slowly, she got on her knees and crawled over to Leonidas.

He did not know what she was doing, but he dared not move.

She grabbed his face.

He held himself firm.

For a second, he thought she was going to put her mouth on his… the wife of the King was going to kiss him… she was going to put those forbidden lips on his. He should move. He should do something, but he was paralyzed as though her gaze was a cobra’s. His heart quickened with feverish excitement.

Instead of fulfilling his expectations, she jolted his head to show him a view down the mountain.

There were torch lights moving through the pass and up the mountain.

They were not alone.