Primal Quest Page 9

She greeted everyone there, exchanged a few words, and generally just gave the women a chance to call to her if they felt the need. She left the room with a smile. She looked in on a few other places, but didn’t say much. She was becoming more and more focused on her own problems. She just wanted to make certain that there weren’t any obvious issues that needed attention.

  By the time that the sun was setting and the evening meal was drawing close, Caidi had come to no real plan of broaching the subject delicately. She didn’t know how she was going to tell him about the things that they had “forgotten” to tell him in such a way that he would come to understand the position the women had been in and the fears that they had, but she had to tell him without any further delay. They had known nothing about him, except that he was probably her mate.

  The evening meal in a Zarain pack was a communal meal held in one of the large halls built onto any Zarain holding for just that purpose. Caidi walked into the hall while the women were still readying it. She sat down in one of the high-backed chairs at the head table of polished dark brown wood, leaned her head against the back and closed her eyes as she tried to think.

  Although she had expected to be in a position like this, it didn’t help her to find an answer that was both honest and would work. Her knowledge that her pack-mates would keep secrets hadn’t prepared her for the reality of finding an answer. This marriage thing wasn’t easy. The adjustment to thinking about how another would feel was hard. So far, she hadn’t found any advantages, other than the sex, to recommend the state.

  Chapter Nine

  Hello, sweet, Raven’s voice sounded in her head. The greeting wasn’t cheerful, but she could feel his satisfaction in being able to use this form of communication. I have respected your privacy thus far by not invading your thoughts, but your worry, your distress beats at me. I want to know what has caused such turmoil within you. I want to help you. You aren’t alone anymore.

  Caidi’s eyes snapped open and looked around the hall. She saw her mate standing in the doorway to the room, leaning one shoulder against the frame. In spite of her anxiety, Caidi felt an immediate rush of desire. He looked so sexy. He was so large, his body muscled and his movement fluid. He pushed away from the frame and came forward with long, easy strides and a smile on his face. He took the seat beside her.

  “I will tell you all about what is bothering me after we finish the meal.” Caidi reached over and laid her hand over his. There was little choice but to give him the information and try to minimize the explosion.

  Their first evening meal together seemed to Caidi to be completed in the blink of an eye. She wasn’t eager to begin this explanation. She had picked at her food and drunk several cups of wine, but not enough to make her drunk. Caidi took a final sip of her wine and then stood when Raven did. It was now time to try to explain things.

  “Shall we go below to our room where we can talk in private?” Raven held out his hand to her and raised his brow. He could feel the tension boiling within her, the unease. He wanted to tell her that there was nothing that she should worry about, but it might be better to let her worry about the matter and his reaction to whatever she had to tell him.

  Caidi grimaced, placed her hand in his, but didn’t take the escape from what she knew would be a difficult discussion. “I have some things that I have to show you.”

  “I got the tour of the Taivain from your own people. I am sure that they showed me everything that I need to know.” Raven gave her an assured smile.

  Caidi frowned at that smile. Maybe he did know that something had been hidden from him and was just waiting for it to be revealed. “They showed you everything that you needed to know at that time. They couldn’t be sure that you were who you said you were until I returned.”

  “They lied to me?” Raven’s smile turned into a very intimidating, threatening frown. He watched with hidden amusement as her expression became nearly panicked.

  “They didn’t lie to you,” Caidi stressed. “They left a few things out because, until I got here, they didn’t know if you actually had a right to know them. They were protecting the pack, because I wasn’t here to do so.” She rushed to defend the women who had given him the short tour of the Taivain. She would have done the same if she had been in their position.

  “You can stop the defense of your pack. They are safe from my wrath this time because we weren’t mated when they gave me the tour and apparently left out some things. I wasn’t yet their true Achan. If they do it again, you won’t protect them from me so easily.” Raven’s stern frown let her know that he meant what he said. He expected complete loyalty from those within his pack. “Let us begin this tour of exactly what they forgot to show me. Where shall we begin?”

  Caidi sighed, a little relieved and puzzled that he had accepted everything with such ease, such calm. She wasn’t going to question such a gift just yet. “We start our tour at the guardhouse at the corner of the east wall.”

  Raven nodded, tugging on her hand as they left the Taivain and began the walk toward the east wall. With a shortened stride, he paced at her side as they walked to the guardhouse. He told her about his plans to add another thick wall around the Taivain and about his warriors who were finishing an assignment that had been taken before he had found her. They would arrive as soon as the job was completed. Raven opened the door and allowed her to enter the guardhouse first, stepping inside and closing the door after himself. Men were sitting at a table playing the tile game Atical before their duty on the wall began.

  “Well, where is this thing that I don’t know about?” Raven asked, surveying the building, trying to figure out where this secret was hidden in the stark, utilitarian building that was the guardhouse.

  “Back this way.” Caidi lit a lamp and led him to the back room of the guardhouse. It was beyond the small sleeping quarters and in a closet-like room that was used to hold weapons and had always been used for that purpose. Shelves held swords, arrows and knives. “Hold this.” She placed the lamp in Raven’s hands without further warning.

  She began clearing the shelves along one of the walls with quick efficiency. “We didn’t discover this particular secret until I was a young girl. Most of the other secret places in the Taivain were discovered by my mother and those of her pack when they first found the Taivain. We discovered that the walls of this guardhouse are thicker than they appear, particularly along this inner wall. We measured everything. There is a closet on the opposite side of the wall, but that still left an area of space unaccounted for. It took us ronas to find the entrance.”

  Caidi took off the slats of wood that made up the shelves and leaned them against the light gray wall. She stepped into the space between the metal braces that supported the shelves. She had done this many times and could open it with her eyes closed. She ran her hand along the slightly grainy surface of the wall, back and forth until she found the seam of the hidden door. She moved her hand up along the seam, pressed and then, sliding lower, pressed again and again. The thin door swung open, revealing a steeply descending, narrow staircase.

  Caidi turned back to get the lamp, but Raven lifted her with one arm wrapped around her waist and deposited her behind him without a word of explanation. Raven went down the staircase first and Caidi followed, slightly exasperated by his behavior. He was being protective when there was absolutely no need. She wouldn’t take him anywhere dangerous without giving him a warning.

  Raven stepped out of the way when Caidi poked him in the back as she reached the bottom of the stairway followed by one of his warriors. He had stopped when he got to the bottom of the steps. He stared at the shelves of weapons—daggers, swords, metal-tipped arrows and more. There were tools there to make the shafts, as well as an apparatus to straighten a bent shaft. It was an armory.

  “Is there one of these in each of the guardhouses?” Raven asked.

  “We thought that there might be. It made sense that there would be, but we searched long and hard and couldn’t find anything in an
y of the other three. You are welcome to search yourself.” Caidi shrugged. “It makes no sense for only this guardhouse to have an armory. It’s not even near the gate. If there is one in the other guardhouses, it is very well hidden.”

  “I wondered how you fought off the rogues and humans that you had spoken of,” Raven said as he examined a sword. He held it, tested its balance in his hand, the fit of the grip.

  Caidi walked over to a set of shelves near the wall and stood on tiptoe. She reached up to the highest shelf to get something. Raven came up behind her and plucked the leather-wrapped bundle from its hiding place at the back of the top shelf.

  “What is this?” Raven asked as he untied the leather ties and removed the covering from the rectangular package. There was a thick tome within the leather. He opened it, delicately turning the pages of the old book.

  “That is one of our few remaining mysteries. It was on the table when we found this room. From the way the thing is written, I know that it has recipes, instructions. From the drawings, I know that they have something to do with weapons, but I don’t read the language. I have never found any writing even similar to that in any of the libraries I have visited in my travels and I made it a point to visit and look whenever there was a city big enough to protect a library since I took my place as Acine,” Caidi said in explanation.

  “There are libraries that you wouldn’t have been able to visit. Libraries in shifter-controlled worlds where you wouldn’t have lingered.” Raven closed the book and placed it back on the shelf. “I will see what I can do about finding a way to translate this. Is there anything else I need to see in the guardhouse?”

  “Not in the guardhouse.” Caidi sighed. The man was in for more than a few enlightening moments tonight. “There is a place that you should see outside of the walls, but it is too late tonight. I will have to show you tomorrow. The next thing that I need to show you is in the weaving house. We will work our way back toward the living complexes.”

  Raven raised his eyebrows in surprise, but followed her up the steps and out of the guardhouse. Once they had left the guardhouse, he signaled to two of his men who fell into step behind him. When they entered the dimly lit, empty weaving house, Caidi led the way past the large looms to a closet filled with mops, brooms and a pail. She moved the cleaning tools out of the way and opened the concealed door at the back of the closet. When Raven led the way down the circular stairs holding a lamp, Caidi wasn’t surprised but was unable to suppress her frustrated frown.

  A cavernous, underground storeroom was revealed when Raven reached the bottom of the steps. Casks of wine and tirsa were stacked in neat rows four barrels high in separate areas. Only a small portion of the available space was used by the barrels of liquor. There were a few crates in the far corner, but the room was largely unused.

  “And I thought you were running low on wine and tirsa,” Raven mused as he studied the rows of barrels.

  “We also make cider from various fruits, but that is kept in another place so that it doesn’t get mixed up with the liquors since we only trade the liquor. The wine is marked with one red mark on the lid, the tirsa with two black marks. What is in the brewing house is what is left from last year’s trading stock that we didn’t sell. There is a passage from here to the brewing house and a mechanism to help get the barrels down here safely and easily.” Caidi showed him, opening a well-concealed wide door along one of the gray walls. She led him down a wide passage to a narrow set of stairs and past a machine that lowered the barrels onto rails. The stairs led up to a secret door in the brewing house along a wall where the top of the machine could be seen but looked like part of the machine next to it.

  “Next?” Raven raised his brows. It appeared that this place was in far better condition than he had thought.

  Caidi showed him several innocuous passages in the smaller living complex and the underground storeroom that connected to that kitchen. She explained that some of the tunnels and passages in this complex were mirrored in the larger complex as she led him up the stairs back into the kitchen.

  “Anything else?” Raven asked after they had left the kitchen. He was surprised at just how much he hadn’t known.

  “Oh, yes, there is more,” Caidi said, but her voice wasn’t cheerful. “We did our best to make this place secure, but it wasn’t easy. Whoever built this place was fanatical about secret passages and tunnels. There are secret rooms, little secret storage places for small treasures throughout both complexes. Even after living here for my entire life, I can’t be certain that I have managed to find everything. As you probably guessed, some of the passages were threats to our security.”

  Caidi led him to the lower level of the small complex. She opened a secret door at the end of the hall. “This particular passage used to lead to a concealed exit outside of the walls. We built a brick wall near the end, filled the outside entrance with dirt and planted a tree over it. I wasn’t giving an enemy an easy way into the heart of my home should they by chance know about it.”

  Raven waved one of his men into the tunnel to check the work that had been done on the wall. Caidi turned and led him to her old bedchamber. She went straight to the large painted mural that occupied most of one wall. A touch of her fingers on a button under the painting opened a door farther down the wall.

  Raven entered the short hallway a few steps ahead of Caidi. In all truth, she couldn’t go before him, he still had the lamp. Raven descended the stairs at the end of the hallway with quick, sure steps. He stopped abruptly at the bottom of the stairway, blocking Caidi and the warrior who followed her.

  On the light golden wood of the table almost directly in front of him was a pile of gold coins. There were also some in stacks, as if the coins were in the process of being counted. There were many gray pouches on the shelves as well as some cream-colored cinched bags.

  There were many rows of shelves and almost all of them had bags and pouches on them. Raven knew that there weren’t shells or some keepsakes in those bags. Those were coins and she had a very large fortune in this room. It seemed that his little chalie was shrewd at the trade she conducted.

  “There is an identical room connected to the master chambers in the large complex, although it is unused. We kept the coins here because we were here to protect them,” Caidi explained. “This will all have to be moved over there, including the shelves and the table.”

  Caidi walked over to a shelf. She opened one of the cream-colored pouches, frowned and muttered to herself when she looked into it and moved on to another of the pouches. She untied the first bag, withdrew something from it and without a word tossed it to Raven. He instinctively reached up and caught the object before it could hit him in the chest.

  “That is what we think is the source of most of our troubles.” Caidi watched Raven.

  Raven looked down at the blue gem in his hand. This explained the repeated attempts to take this isolated holding. “That is why the rogues, the outlaws and the others kept coming here, in spite of the disappearance of the ones before them, not your success in trading?”

  “I don’t think anyone has ever put together exactly how much and what we trade. We use different agents for each product and some of our trade is done for something we need, not coin, but it is possible that someone put together that we must have a considerable amount coming to us from our trade ventures. The rogues and such didn’t really start coming until we began trading those.” Caidi looked around the room and pursed her lips as she considered the question.

  “You were going to show me where you get these tomorrow. That is the secret outside of the Taivain.” Raven nodded.

  “Yes,” Caidi affirmed with a sigh and a nod. It was a little hard giving up the control she had held on her own since she had taken control of the Taivain. “As you are now in charge of seeing to the protection of the Taivain, I thought that you should know why you might be called regularly to protect it.”

  “I think that we can find a way to trade these without d
rawing rogues here and, in fact, discourage any of them from coming here.” Raven smiled, placing the gem on the table. He relished the challenge. “Is this the last of what they didn’t tell me when they gave me the short tour?”

  Caidi nodded. “If you don’t want to view the rooms mimicked inside the larger Taivain, that is it. Except for showing you the site where we mine those gems, you know everything.” She looked around the room, mentally going over the Taivain in her mind. “I don’t think that I have forgotten anything.”

  “Then we can go to our room. This has been an eventful day. You finally return home, we formally bond, and I discover that there was much that I didn’t know about my new home that I should have known.” There was a hint of humor in his voice as he slipped his hand around her waist.

  Caidi simply nodded, relieved that her prediction of a flare of his temper had been wrong. He hadn’t yelled or even gotten angry when she knew that he had genuine cause to do so. He was the true Achan, even if the women hadn’t known it for certain. He was her chalon and as such deserved to know everything about the Taivain, its dealings and the people within it. Even as she acknowledged that fact, she knew that she wasn’t yet ready to tell him her secrets.

  They had always been held by the Acine, by a female, but she admitted that that probably had more to do with the fact that the pack had always been completely female, than any tradition or good reason. The secrets she held had been learned over the years as they had had to hide from other shifters regardless of if they were Zarain or some other shifter race. In her mind, she knew that this was something that he had a right to know, but she simply couldn’t tell him yet.

  “Don’t worry about it, my chalie. Work it out in your own time.” Raven knew that she was confused over revealing the secrets she held. She wanted to tell him, but habit and tradition told her to keep them secret. “I know that it isn’t as simple and uncomplicated to reveal the secrets you hold as it was to show me all of those rooms.”