“So would I.”
The immediacy and fervor of his reply kindled her heart. To see what she had come to mean to him in such a short time was a balm to all the unfortunate hurts she carried.
“I’m afraid…” Her voice caught in her throat, and she had to steady herself to continue. When she spoke again, it was quieter. That was necessary if she wanted to stay present. “I’m afraid that if we indulge in too much more of that, eventually you might not be able to see me at all.”
Radagast dropped heavily into his chair, stricken. Again, Araminta was running up against the cost of whatever happiness she had found, and he wondered if it was all too much. Finding joy only made it more terrible to lose it.
“This isn’t tenable,” she continued, “and you know it. Whatever we share, it can’t last. You should go home to your clan and try to forget about me.”
“I can’t. I couldn’t. Araminta”—he looked up into her translucent face with tragic eyes—“you are unforgettable. I’ll carry you inside of me for the rest of my life. I have no choice in the matter.”
Her heart broke. She sat alongside him and brushed away the tears that came fresh upon her cheeks. How could something so perfect, something she had longed to hear so desperately, hurt so much?
“Tell me,” he said in a low voice.
“There’s only so much I can tell.” It was true, and a skirting of the strictures of her curse. They forbade her from revealing all, and even forbade her from saying that she couldn’t say more.
“Tell me as much as you can,” he said. “I want to know you. To help you, if I can.”
He could help her, if only she could show him how. If only she could lead him to the book that held her secrets and had the power to free her. Because she was embedded there, wound around the words of a poem, clamped tightly in a book no one had ever read. Not even her. To hear the whole of her heart unfolded on his lips would break her spell, but she was mute to tell him so.
“It was a long time ago,” she began cautiously. “Rad, I’m sorry. I don’t know if I’m strong enough.”
“Please. Just try.”
She swallowed hard. “Maybe if I let myself fade. If you just heard me, I would have strength enough to tell you as much as I’m able.”
He nodded and she released her grip, slipping from his sight. Sitting by the side of his chair, she longed to lean into him as she spoke.
“Can you hear me?”
“I can,” he whispered.
That much was a relief. Taking a deep breath, she began to unfurl it.
“I was young. Nineteen. And there was a powerful warlock who wanted me.” At the mention of him, she felt Rad tighten in his chair. “I refused him, but he wouldn’t listen. He became more and more insistent, almost to the point of violence.”
“Who was he?” Rad’s throat was choked with fury already.
The name was on her lips, but she couldn’t speak it, no matter how hard she tried. She had to settle for a weak, “I cannot say.”
“You mean you don’t know or can’t remember?”
“I cannot say.”
“All right.” He shifted, clearly angry over the barrier between them. “Please, go on.”
“I was a witch then, and he insisted that I had bewitched him. I hadn’t, of course, but he tried to blame me for his own inability to control himself, as men do. His desire for me tipped into obsession, and there was nothing I could do. With every refusal, he became angrier. I began to fear for my life.”
“Did he kill you?”
“Worse,” she said. “He cursed me. Made me a remnant—a shadow of what I once was—and imprisoned me here. He bound me out of spite to this place I loved so well. More than him, he said. Which was true, because I didn’t love him at all.”
Her voice was growing fainter, and Radagast had fallen impossibly still. “Can you still hear me?”
“I can.”
“I’ve been here for so long, I can’t even remember how long it’s been. Time doesn’t matter…” She caught herself. “Didn’t matter. Days meant nothing. Until you came along, and then I counted them again.”
“You must hate this place.”
“I don’t. I did for a while, perhaps, but then I didn’t feel anything for ages. To feel at all hurt too much, so I gave it up.”
She paused, wondering just how far she could go. What was the worst that could happen? Death would be a blessing and nothing was more torturous than what passed for her life.
“At first, I tried to revel in it. A world of reading to be done, and all the time I wanted in which to do so. Every book I could ever hope to read. All but one.”
“Which one?” he asked.
As much as she would have loved to cry out the answer so loud the walls would shake, the words weren’t hers to give. She could hear them in her head, but her lips refused to make them.
“I cannot say.” That same mechanical answer, and the sting of it choked a sob from her throat.
“Araminta?”
Snapping her eyes up to look at him, she realized that he hadn’t even heard the answer. She said it, at full cost, and her voice was mute to him. Her energy was depleted so much that she couldn’t reach him.
“Araminta, are you there?”
“Yes,” she whispered, knowing he wouldn’t hear.
Radagast rose from his seat, bracing his hands on the table—their table—then turned his gaze on the spot where he’d last seen her.
“I know you can hear me, Araminta. I have faith that you can hear me. Thank you for your courage and your trust in me. Just know this—“ His upper lip peeled back to reveal his heightened emotions. “—I won’t give you up. I won’t return to Stormgulf to leave you here, some remnant lost in this place. I’m going to find you and I’m going to help you.”
“You can’t,” she said in her silent voice, “but thank you.”
He drew a sharp breath as if he felt her words rather than heard them.
“I’ve solved one mystery, with your help. And I’m going to solve this one, Araminta. It means far more to me than the troubles which have consumed my family. That was a curiosity, but you? You are a necessity. Dearer to me than breath. I will break this curse or die trying.”
There, in the cool quiet of which she knew every inch, Araminta cried fresh, secret tears. She would have loved to believe him but knew that she couldn’t.
No man, not even Radagast Oberon, could do the impossible.
Chapter Seven
For a full week, Rad spent every day in the library. When they opened, he was waiting on the steps, and a librarian had to fetch him every night at closing time. At first, they had been curt about it, but something insistent in his manner seemed to tell them that he deserved a gentler hand.
He always made his way to the same study table—an old wooden antique with a leather inset that was cracked and dry with age. To start, he’d worked his way through the ancient texts, finding that he needed a reference close at hand in order to decipher some of the more archaic language and symbols.
It would have been an excellent education if his myopic focus had allowed him to invest in any of it. There were times when he wondered what his cousin Eldan would have made of all of this. Not the romantic aspect, per se, but the study of all these arcane texts might just have thrilled his academic cousin.
Always, as he turned the leaves of the great tomes, Araminta was near at hand. When he had begun his great investigation, she had been visible, at least faintly, most of the time. But, as the days passed, he often could only sense her presence. Perhaps he was merely trusting to it, believing that the search meant as much to her as it did to him.
It had to, didn’t it? After all, the curse was hers. It had trapped her in this place for so many years she claimed to have lost count. Rad would have thought she would be leaping to help him in whatever way she could, but as the days passed, she only seemed to grow sadder.
“What is it today?” she asked as he trundled up to
the table on his seventh morning of trying to crack the mystery of her curse.
“The last of the modern witchcraft section,” he said as brightly as he could. “After coming up empty on the internet yesterday, it felt like it was time to get back to good old-fashioned paper, don’t you think?”
He offered her a smile and got a wan one in return.
“Paper is the way to go.”
Her answers were always so damn cryptic that it rankled him. There was always a kind of reticence when she spoke about her curse, as if she possessed more knowledge than she was sharing.
Thinking back to the first time they had talked about it, he thought of how she had shied away from naming the man who had cursed her. It had all sounded strangely like a fairy tale in the way that it lacked in specific details. She had been evasive even then when he had tried to press her, so he had cautiously avoided trying that approach again.
But after days of exhaustive research, he was desperate for any guidance she could give. Any clue that would help him crack this open so he could save her from such a terrible existence.
“Araminta,” he said, “am I on the right track?”
A strange expression crossed what he could see of her face.
“I cannot say.”
He leaned back in his chair and let out an exasperated breath. Then, pulling his lips into a tight line, he began to thumb through the pages of some book on the metaphysics of shifter magic and its applications. Even as he cracked the spine of it, he knew what he was seeking wasn’t in the book. Rad turned the pages almost mechanically, barely scanning the words in his frustration.
“I’m sorry,” Araminta whispered.
“For what?”
He didn’t even look up at her. She sounded sincere, but after her continued evasions, he was beginning to doubt it. As if to confirm his suspicions, she remained silent. He finally met her gaze and asked again, this time more forcefully.
Her eyes lined with water. “I cannot say.”
Rad clapped the book shut and leapt to his feet. He paced for a moment, shaking his head. When he turned to her again, Araminta looked stricken.
“I’ve asked you before who put this curse on you.”
“I cannot say.”
“So you’ve said,” he nodded tightly. “And any time I ask you for the slightest hint as to where I should look, you say the same thing. I’m starting to doubt that what I’m supposed to be searching for is even in this library. Is it?”
The tears grew thicker but had yet to break over. “I cannot say.”
“This is insanity.” Rad’s voice got loud enough that it was in danger of raising shushes from a floor away. “Why won’t you answer me?”
“I cannot say.”
“Is it just that you don’t know any of the answers? That you don’t know how to help me? Or that you don’t want me to help you?”
“No,” she said with grim determination. “I cannot say. Don’t you get it? I can not say!”
Rad went cold. The truth of it broke over him at last. It wasn’t that she was stonewalling him or playing some kind of wicked trick. The curse forbade her from revealing anything that might help someone break it. The man who cast it must have been extraordinarily powerful. Even as a fae, he’d never heard of such a curse. In an instant, all of his frustration melted, and he saw the shivering woman in front of him afresh.
“I’m so sorry,” he said at last. “I’ve been so blind to it, and it made me angry that anyone would want to harm you. Araminta, forgive me.”
Her tears began in earnest, and he stepped toward her. On instinct, he reached to hold her, but his hand passed through the cold air where she stood.
“My darling, please.” She backed away when he reached for her again. “Please. Let me hold you. I need to be able to hold you right now.”
“No.”
Her voice choked in her throat, and the sound of it only made him need to comfort her more. To smooth his hands along the insubstantial lines of her and hold her to him in whatever fashion he could.
“Just a little? Just enough to let me wipe away your tears, okay? Let me do that for you.”
“It’s too much. Any time I manifest enough for that, I’m left entirely depleted. What if I get so weak, you can’t see me? Or hear me?”
He shuddered at the thought of it. He had seen how she faded from view after they’d touched, and it terrified him. The times when he could merely feel her presence were bad enough for him, what if that was all he had left? As much as he yearned to cradle her until her crying stopped, he didn’t want to tax her further.
Still, it seemed as though there were something else. This amazing woman, reduced to a remnant by an unspeakable curse, always seemed to be holding back. More than just the bonds and rules that kept her there, but something more. Something indefinable, always just under the surface of how she looked at him.
She could have let him hold her. He sensed it. But she was holding back and refused to tell him why. The very notion of it inflamed him.
“Listen to me,” Rad said, unable to disguise the vehemence in his voice. “I’m willing to do whatever it takes. If I have to sit in this library from dawn until midnight every day for the rest of my life, then that’s what I’ll do. Even if it means reading every volume thirty times—backwards!—I’ll be here to do that. Breaking this curse will become my life’s work.”
“What about your clan? Your lordship?”
“It doesn’t matter. Let it go. Another could take my place, if need be. Abdications have happened before. Araminta, freeing you from this is the only thing that matters now.”
“But why?”
Her question hit him in the center of his chest, and he let out a breath of startled laughter.
“Why? Araminta, are you serious? Because I love you. I’ve fallen so deeply in love with you, that I couldn’t climb out if I wanted to. And I don’t want to. All I want, all I need in the world, is you.”
She stood blinking at his confession. Her lips parted ever so slightly, and he wondered if he had gone too far. All in a moment, he felt very small. Lost, even.
For one harrowing second, he almost asked if she felt the same way, but her silence was answer enough. He had been so certain that she felt the same way, and now all of that surety fractured. Rad’s determination remained every bit as firm, but there was a hole in the center of him now that ran terrifyingly deep. He didn’t dare look into the abyss.
Swaying slightly on his feet, he turned back toward the table and sat down.
“Well,” he said, just so his ardent confession wasn’t the last thing in the air between them. “Let me see what I can find.”
The book fell open before him, and he kept his eyes on the page, unseeing. Araminta was next to him—he could feel her. He just didn’t have the courage to look up to see what secrets her face was keeping from him. Perhaps she had slipped back into invisibility. Whatever the case, he returned to his studies, with the echo of his own words pounding in his head.
There was the momentary pressure of her hand on his shoulder, and then it was gone. For Radagast, it was a balm. That fleeting touch, whatever it must have cost her, was enough.
Chapter Eight
While Araminta hung unseen over his shoulder, Radagast had doubled over the desk, poring over a mountain of archaic books on magic. Hunting through forgotten tomes about curses wasn’t going to help him. She longed to cry out to him that he was on the wrong trail but was powerless to break the boundaries of her curse.
The words that he had said to her thundered inside her, and she struggled with just where to put them. On one hand, they were all that she had ever longed to hear, and on the other, it only made her feel more ill at ease. In an effort not to display the whole of her worry to him, she drifted in and out of visibility.
“Araminta,” he said after hours of diligent reading, “I’m so sorry. I’m going to have to eat something. I’ll be back as soon as I can. This isn’t over.”
He stood, and she resisted the urge to follow him. Instead, she hung by the table, watching the new slump in his shoulders as he left her behind. As much as he had been fighting it, she could see the defeat he carried like a mantle. Even if he turned over every book in the library, it could be a lifetime before he found her.
A peculiar memory bubbled up inside her—something she hadn’t considered in well over a century. Hunger. What must that be like? Her own experience of it was so distant, so faint that it was little more than a vague concept. Like sleep or getting a little tipsy on mulled wine.
If, by some miracle, Radagast were able to break her chains, there would be so much to relearn. The thought was daunting and exhilarating all at once. As it threatened to rekindle the hope that tickled at the fringes of her soul, she did what she could to chase it from her mind.
All at once, the whole of it overwhelmed her. Not only the futility of his mission, but the constant back and forth of her emotions. After centuries of numbness, the scope of it was too great to handle. Retreating from their table, in an effort to put as much space between herself and the yearning Radagast inspired, she fled to the deepest, darkest recesses of the library.
Once she was safely among the shelves not even the librarians went near, she collapsed into helpless tears. For the first time since she had first been reduced to a remnant, she abandoned herself to the well of grief she’d kept locked. Over two hundred years of it came pouring out of her.
“Easy, there,” a familiar voice said over her hunched shoulder. “If you keep on like that, you’re going to choke.”
Araminta turned to find the resplendent figure of Alistair Flayme floating at the edge of a shelf. His face was uncharacteristically gentle.
“There have been times when I would have given anything to be able to cry like that.”
“You don’t cry?” she asked with a wet snuffle.
“Not anymore.” There was something wistful in the way he said it that took a bit of the edge off her own misery. He ventured to drift a little closer to her. “What’s got you so tied up, sweet?”
Fae Lord Bewitched: Real Men of Othercross (Paranormal Fae Romance) (Real Fae of Othercross Book 4) Page 4
