Catching Pathways

by Danielle Berggren

  “It means someone who brings you food when you go to a restaurant. Uh,” she hastened to add at the woman’s deepening frown, “it’s like an inn, but you don’t sleep there. People prepare you food, and you sit and eat it, then pay for it and leave. A waitress is someone who brings the food to you and makes sure your glass stays full.”

  “So, you were a tavern girl?” Her eyebrows rose. “I thought you of noble bearing when we first met. I suppose I was wrong.”

  Maeve flushed. “Where I come from, we try not to judge someone by their profession. It happens—people judge other people, but most of us try not to make a habit of it. We have a lot of famous people who started out poor and grew to be wealthy or well-known.”

  “I came from little and grew to this,” Alexis shrugged, casting her eyes to the side. “A tavern girl,” she mused. “I suppose this means you’re impure.”

  Maeve grew hotter. “That’s none of your business.”

  The woman smiled. “Here, we value a woman’s modesty and purity. If, for instance, someone were to set their eyes on someone like King Rodan, they would have to be above reproach. A virgin, for one, but they must also be from a great family. Someone who might offer an alliance, ties of security and wealth—which someone like you could never offer.”

  Maeve rose from the cushion, trembling, “That’s not—I didn’t set my eyes to Rodan. He came to me. He wanted me. I didn’t ask for this. I—” Her vision swam, and she put a hand to her face, half covering her eyes. “Is it hot in here?”

  Alexis’s voice came out soft, soothing, “To you? I expect so. You may want to sit down.”

  Maeve did, more because her legs no longer wanted to support her than for any other reason. “What’s happening?”

  “You overstepped yourself,” Alexis said, with that same quiet voice. “You proved formidable. Stupid, but formidable. All you needed was a little friendly talk, and suddenly you trust everything put before you. I told Bairam my way was better, but he insisted on sending the assassin after you.”

  “Assassin?” Maeve asked, her voice a slur, her tongue too swollen for her mouth. “What? What are you talking about?”

  Alexis, Bairam’s eldest and most revered wife since his first died, smiled like a cat who had successfully pounced. “You are unfit to be his. And yes, we gather his intentions toward you. We have eyes and ears everywhere. Your little trysts are well recorded. The way he speaks to you. It disgusts us.

  “We have done everything for him—everything! We were the first to resist Sebastian’s reign. We knew King Rodan would return, and we knew he would come to us. He is supposed to find his bride among our family—a family who has supported him for nearly a thousand years. Instead, he brings you, this outsider, into our lives and gives you the highest of honors. You tried to kill him, you hurt him, you are the reason he lost his throne in the first place. You are not worthy enough to scrub his halls. What makes you think you can rise so far above the rest of us? When last night, you called Sebastian a friend?”

  Alexis duplicated in Maeve’s vision, as did most of the room, and things began to spin. Not unlike being drunk, though far worse. Her heart pounded, and her palms grew slick. Her head flopped to the side, taking in the goblet of wine still clasped in her hand. How much did she have to drink? Not a lot. Only a few swallows, but—

  “You poisoned me?” Maeve slurred, her breathing too shallow and her tongue too thick for normal speech.

  Alexis rose, her skirts swishing, afterimages following her movements through Maeve’s eyes. She reached down and plucked the goblet out of Maeve’s frozen hand and handed it back to her servant. The girl bowed and disappeared, her eyes averted. Maeve groaned, and Alexis glared down at her, her brown eyes sharp and no longer kind. “You brought this on yourself. You should have stayed in your world.”

  Maeve tried to move her hand, to reach up and snatch at Alexis’s skirts, but the woman moved away before she could muster the energy, her bare feet silent against the stone floor.

  “Good-bye, Maeve Almeida,” Alexis said. “May your passing speed King Rodan’s path to the throne.”

  Maeve shut her eyes, the burn of tears hitting her. Her heart raced, and she barely drew enough breath through the swelling in her throat and tongue. Try as she might, she made not a sound, nothing more than a hissing gurgle that sounded nothing like her.

  She tried to open her eyes, but every part of her body resisted her commands now. Heat so intense she likened it to standing near an open oven stole over her, yet she shivered. Her lungs burned, and all she heard through the thundering of her heart was her own pained breathing.

  Hands shook her, and her head lolled. Fingers pried open her eyelids and the face of Pike swam into focus.

  “Speak to me lass,” he growled, shaking her again. His gaze raked down her body, and he pressed his fingers against her throat and chest. He made a distressed sound and went for the dagger at his belt. Unlike her and Rodan, he had come to the party armed.

  Her eyes fluttered shut again only to snap open as a sharp pain penetrated her throat. She tried to pull away, to lift her hands and push at whatever caused her distress, but Pike held her fast.

  “Hold on, Maeve,” he said in his trademark gravelly voice. “Hold on, lass.”

  Something foreign invaded that pain, but suddenly air—blessed air—filled her lungs once more. Her heart gave a little skip and began to slow, and the burning sensation in her lungs dissipated. Her limbs remained heavy and resisted her commands, the only motion she controlled being her eyelids, which she blinked at Pike. It was a small improvement.

  She stared at him and willed him to understand her, Get Rodan. The potion would help heal her the rest of the way.

  Pike rose, and his hands were coated in blood. “I must leave you for a moment, lass. Stay there. I’ll get Rodan.”

  She closed her eyes in thanks, and Pike’s footsteps rang out as he bolted from the room.

  Time dragged on while the poison continued to work on her. Her heart fluttered on occasion, making her want to gasp, but the tube Pike shoved into her trachea prevented it. What Pike did allowed her to breathe, but it had also caused a not insignificant amount of pain on its own.

  Alexis was gone, as was her servant. How was it that Pike found her? Had he followed her in, somehow? Had he been alerted to the danger by someone else? The servant girl, perhaps?

  Tears dripped down from between her eyelids, running tracks down her cheeks before hitting her hair.

  She wanted Rodan.

  She wondered if he would be able to help this time. Something else grew inside of her. Something in her body that screamed wrong, and she could not put a name to it. Perhaps the way her heart fluttered and stopped from time to time, or the way heat and fire spread through her limbs. Something else lurked, too. A weight she sensed, like she sensed those little sparks of life around her when she worked her potions. A counterbalance to the spark. A heaviness.

  Footsteps intruded upon her thoughts, and Rodan fell to his knees beside her, his hands hovering over her body. His eyes shone wide and wild, his mouth set in a grim line.

  She desperately wanted him to look at her.

  When his eyes met hers, she found them lost. Like he was screaming. The tube at her throat gurgled and bubbled with her blood, and his hands sought hers, gripping her tight. “Maeve,” he cried in his deep voice. “Don’t let it take you, Maeve. Fight it.”

  But how might she fight something so insidious? So pervasive?

  He leaned his head down so his forehead touched hers. “Don’t leave me.”

  “Give her the potion,” Pike said from her right side, where he knelt. “Here,” he thrust a cup of water at Rodan. “You need something to transmute, right? Do it to this. Heal her.”

  Rodan did not take the glass. He glanced at Pike for a moment before his attention dragged back to Maeve, whose back bowed with a new pain that whipped through her like a crack of lightning. “How is she supposed to take it, Pike? She can�
�t breathe on her own. There is no wound to cup it to, aside from what you made. She can’t drink it.” His hands squeezed hers, and he stilled.

  Maeve caught the moment the thought crossed his mind, and she tried to pull away, but her limbs still would not obey her commands.

  “I can’t lose you,” he whispered, his face close to hers. “Please, Maeve.” His voice lowered so only she might hear him. “Please understand I can’t be alone again. I can’t do this without you.”

  He raised up, and she spasmed as another wave of agony overtook her.

  Rodan pulled off his glove.

  She tried. She tried to keep him from her, to resist, but her limbs hung like lead weights. One of his bare hands encircled her wrist, and he lifted her hand.

  “What are you doing?” Pike snarled.

  “I can’t lose her.” Rodan snapped back, “Can you?”

  Pike’s mouth shut with an audible click.

  No, Maeve thought, you can’t. You promised me you wouldn’t. You promised!

  Darkness stole over her vision, and the counterweight she sensed gripped her harder. Dragged her down.

  Her vision narrowed down to pinpoints, and at the end of it she only just made out Rodan as his naked hand slipped onto hers.

  Palm to palm.

  There was a spark, a rush like cool water flowing over her.

  And nothing at all.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Rodan

  RODAN STARED DOWN AT MAEVE, his hand clutched to hers.

  “Rodan?” Pike asked, his voice shaking. “What just happened?”

  Pain like nothing he had ever experienced in his life sliced through him, cutting him to his core. Rodan might have staggered and fallen if he were standing, but instead he shut his eyes against the sensation. Hot tears fell, cooling as they traveled along his face until they dripped in his lap.

  He hesitated, reached for her, smoothing those flyaway hairs back away from her forehead. Her skin, wrong. Almost elastic. Her amber eyes still open. Unseeing.

  He closed them.

  “Is she—” Pike cut himself off, swallowing hard enough that Rodan heard a click in his throat, “She’s not. She can’t be.”

  Rodan’s voice sounded strained, as though he had been screaming. “I felt the bond take hold. I felt her, for a fraction of a moment. But she’s gone.”

  The moment the bond sealed, he caught a glimpse of everything within her. Her pain, her heartache, her fevered desire that he not do this thing. He saw into her past, into her hopes for the future, into her heart. He experienced every ache of her body. The burn washed over him as the poison swept its last tendrils through her, pulling her down into the darkness, and then—nothing.

  He wondered if this sensation were not dissimilar to a limb being lopped off. He struggled to breathe. Struggled harder still to think. His eyes locked on her, her face and form empty of all the vitality she carried with her.

  Had he been wrong? Was she human, through and through?

  That fraction of a second had faded too quickly for him to determine if she were Fae, or to sense anything else within her. It was a flash, a flicker of a moment, before she slipped from him.

  Gone, in an instant.

  He had put his hand in hers too late. The bond should counteract any wound, any poison, no matter how severe. If only he had done it sooner, she would be with him. His hesitation cost him.

  It cost him everything.

  He bent down, pressing the side of his face against hers, inhaling the honeysuckle and fresh beeswax scent she carried through the oils they used in her bath. It grew faint now, already fading, the stronger scent of blood polluting his senses.

  The door to the chambers opened, and Rodan lifted his head. Bairam and his wife, Alexis, strode in, hesitating for a moment as the scene unfolded before them.

  Rodan’s magic stirred.

  Something must have shown in his eyes, for Bairam hesitated and, after a moment, prostrated himself before him. “My liege,” he said to the floor, his wife echoing his movements. “We did this for you.”

  “This was your doing?” Pike hissed. He drew one of his daggers and stood.

  Rodan motioned him down and addressed his old friend—this traitor, his mind whispered—while still holding Maeve’s hands. “Do you know what you’ve done?” he asked, his voice smooth as silk.

  Bairam’s eyes lifted, but he did not raise his head from the floor. “Your grace, I—”

  “You killed my bond mate,” he interrupted. “Can you possibly understand what that means?”

  Pike cast a questioning look at Rodan, and his eyes widened. Rodan wondered how much Maeve had told her old friend about the bond, about what Rodan offered her. Did Pike understand that because Rodan still stood, he would suffer a fate worse than death?

  At least in death, I might follow her to the underworld.

  A flicker.

  A thought, a—brush of a suggestion slithered against his mind. He grasped at it, but it fell away.

  “My lord,” Bairam whispered, his voice trembling. “My lord, what do you mean? You—you had not married her, you—”

  “A bond is stronger than a marriage,” Rodan said, looking down at Maeve’s face. Some said the dead appeared like they slept. She did not. She looked dead. Drained. Gone. “You destroyed a part of me. Tore it asunder. Crushed it. If you meant to wound me, you did so. If you meant to kill me,” he glared at the trembling man, so small and weak upon the floor, “you failed. For now.”

  Rodan slid his arms under Maeve’s body and lifted, rising to his feet and cradling her against him. How might it be that just this morning she stretched warm and alive beneath his fingers, and now this? How was it she did not respond?

  Something hollow thumped inside of him, and he realized it to be his heart. It still beat. Sluggish. Heavy.

  “You called her a traitor, but it is you who betrayed me,” Rodan murmured, knowing they hung on his every word. His magic whispered to him, begging him to call upon it, the ember of it burning beneath his skin. His hair floated from where it came loose from his braid. He clutched her harder, still not able to raise his eyes from her face. “Do you understand, Bairam? Could you begin to conceive of what you have done to me? And you call me a friend.”

  “He is your friend, my lord,” the woman Alexis said from her position on the floor. “He has thought of you—only of you—in this.”

  Pike let out a snarling growl and stepped forward, his dagger flickering in the torchlight. “Let me dispatch them for you,” he said. “For Maeve.”

  Rodan shuddered at the use of her name. The aching emptiness inside of him thrummed. “No,” he whispered. “Not yet.”

  That thought, that idea, that brushed against him before pushed harder now. What was missing? What—what flitted past his mind? The more he tried to pull at it, the faster it slipped through his fingers.

  He must put her down. She hung heavy in his arms, but it was a heaviness he would bear for the rest of time if called to do so. Her hand slipped from her lap and hung limply at her side, and he wanted to shake her. To demand she wake up, that she lift her hand and touch his face as she had a hundred times before.

  Rodan sunk once more to his knees, the movement slow, and carefully placed Maeve against the floor pillows. He picked up her hands with his own bare ones and placed them back over her stomach. She moved like a doll. Lifeless. No flicker or spark. It made his stomach churn.

  He wrenched his eyes away from her and rose, stepping over her to confront his enemies. For that is what they would forever be. His enemies.

  A trickle of his magic slipped out from his control and tightened around the two of them prostrate on the floor. They both gasped, and clutched at their throats, their wind cut off. Rodan pressed a little harder, and they both reared up onto their knees, eyes pleading.

  Like Maeve’s had been. He almost heard her as she gazed at him those last few moments. Just be with me, Rodan, be here with me.

  That was all
Maeve ever wanted. For someone stay with her. To love someone who would never leave. He had not left her. Would never leave her, even now.

  The magic boiled. Bairam and Alexis grew dark in the face as they continued to struggle for air. He pressed against them until they were a moment away from passing out, and then he released them.

  They fell on their palms, and he pulled back his power, tucking it away once more. “I’m taking your palace. Your family may remain, but you two will go to whatever serves as your dungeons around here. If you fight me, or if they fight me, I will kill all of you.”

  Rodan spoke plainly, not bothering to soften the words or the edge to them. They deserved no kindness after what they did.

  “Do you understand me?”

  Bairam choked and clawed at the neck of his tunic, ripping it down the front as he gasped for air. Alexis, ever calm, breathed heavily and stared at Rodan with a tear stained face. “We—we understand.”

  Rodan nodded. “Pike. Do you know where to take them?”

  “Aye,” he growled. “We’ll be taking the back ways, so if you two give me any trouble I won’t have issue finding a place to hide the body.”

  Slowly, the couple rose to their feet and followed Pike’s directions to leave the room by the servant’s entrance. Rodan stared at them as they went and turned back to Maeve.

  His stomach clenched tight as a fist, and he cast his eyes about the room. Leaving her here where she spent her last agonizing moments of life seemed intolerable. He knelt and picked her up, her skirts brushing the floor as he left the room and headed up the stairs.

  The library appeared the same as when he had rushed out of it, intent on finding Maeve and waylaid by Pike instead. No sign of the moment he held Bairam by the collar and nearly choked the life out of him for the first time that night. Something about that struck Rodan as wrong. The world should be changed now. Maeve was no longer in it. Things should look different.

  But they did not.

  Inside stood several long reading tables. Still holding Maeve tight, Rodan swept the few belongings off one of the tables to the floor. Books landed with soft thuds on the thick carpet, and trinkets crashed and broke as they rolled and hit the stone floor. Rodan did not care. He laid her out, folding her hands over her stomach once more, and summoned a basin of water and a cloth without a second thought.