The silken gown managed to satisfy propriety while simultaneously placing every one of the young woman’s beautiful features on display. With her pale hair worn up in an elegant coil atop her head, the rather deep neckline of the gown made her neck look long and delicate, giving the lie to the slender strength he knew was there. It left her shoulders and arms bare as well, her pale skin smooth and perfect in the glow of the muted furylamps inside the pavilion he’d had set up on a bluff overlooking the restless sea.

The silver-set emeralds she wore at her throat, upon a gossamer-thin wire tiara, and on her ears flickered in the light, gleaming with tiny inner fires of their own. A subtle firecrafting had been worked into them by a master artisan at some point in their past. The second firecrafting that went with them, an aura of excitement and happiness, hung around her like a fine and subtle perfume.

She arched one pale brow in challenge, her lips curving up into a smile, waiting for an answer.

“Perhaps,” he said, “I’ve developed a hunger for something other than dinner.”

“It is improper to have one’s dessert before the meal, Your Highness,” she murmured. She lifted a berry to her lips and met his eyes as she ate it. Slowly.

Tavi considered sweeping the tabletop clear with one arm, dragging her across it and into his arms, and finding out what that berry tasted like. The notion struck him with such appeal that he had lifted his hands to the arms of his chair without even realizing it.

He took another slow breath, savoring the image in his mind, and the desire running through him, and with a moment’s struggle, sorted out which were his own ideas and which were hers. “You,” he accused, his voice coming out much lower and rougher than he’d intended, “are earthcrafting me, Ambassador.”

She ate another berry. More slowly. Her eyes sparkled as she did. “Would I do such a thing, my lord Octavian?”

It became a real effort of will to remain seated. He turned to his plate with a growl and took up a knife and a fork to neatly slice off and devour a piece of the beef—real, honest Aleran meat, none of that leviathan-chum they’d been forced to choke down on the voyage—and washed it down with a swallow of the light, almost transparent wine. “You might,” he said, “if it suited you.”