Damn I miss you, wench.

He did his best to put some genuine melancholy behind the thought, but his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t really miss her at all. In the last six or seven years he must have sired close on a dozen squalling bundles from the gates of Ishlinichan to the Voronak tundra outposts in the northeast, and at least half the mothers had as close a place in his affections as Lara. The marriage had just never worked at the same level as the initial roll-in-the-summer-grass passion it was based on. At the council hearing for the separation, truth be told, what he’d felt mostly was relief. He’d offered only token objection, and that more so Lara wouldn’t get more pissed off than she already was. He’d paid the settlement and he’d been plowing another Skaranak milkmaid within a week. They were practically throwing themselves at him, anyway, with the news that he was single again.

Still. A little short of decorous, that one.

He grimaced. Decorous wasn’t a word he used, wasn’t his fucking word at all, but there it was, embedded in his head along with everything else. Lara was right, he should never have made the vows. Probably never would have done but for those eyes as she lay in the dusk-lit grass and opened herself to him, the startling jade-edged pupils that stabbed him through with memories of Imrana and her muslin-hung bedchamber.

Yeah, those eyes, and those tits, my son. Tits she had on her, old Urann himself would have sold his soul for.

That was more like it. That was a thought for a Majak horseman’s head.