The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  With his magic, he had given her back herself. Dying, he had tried to give her back her life. She could have let him live, she could have gone home.

  She stared at the two beast’s claws that had killed him—the Reborn—her gift. They marked her as Scarred, but she could cut them off. She could take an ax and hack them off and go home, except she had sworn to have her revenge on her Family.

  Her Family would welcome her back now, but her oath to the gods stood between her and them.

  I could have let it all go. I could have begged the forgiveness of the gods. But I have sacrificed my son to my oath. I’m bound by his life.

  She stroked the soft cheek of her son. “I could have been a real mother for you,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

  A sickly blue glow surrounded the baby’s body, and Danya pulled her hand away. Magic touched him again, but this time it came from the outside, accompanied by the reek of rotted meat and honeysuckle. The holes in his chest closed, though two black scars remained to show where her claws had dug through him. His chest rose once. Fell. Rose again.

  She wanted to rejoice, but she couldn’t. She felt no love when she reached out to touch him—instead she felt terrifying coldness and calculating watchfulness. The infant took another breath, and his eyes focused. After a pause, he took another breath, and then another, and then the fact that he was breathing again ceased to seem miraculous. His arms moved, but cautiously. Experimentally. He gave two quick kicks with his legs, then let them rest, too. Another smile crossed his face, but this smile had none of the infant innocence she had seen in her son’s only smile. This smile was smug. Self-satisfied. Evil. Whatever spirit inhabited the body of her son, it was not her son’s.

  “I should think not,” the baby said in a whispery, thin voice. It struggled to sit up, but couldn’t. “You know me, Danya. I’m your friend Luercas. I’m going to be your new son.”

  No. She couldn’t watch someone else grow in her baby’s body. Not even Luercas, who had saved her life. Luercas suddenly terrified her. She reached for him with her talons, determined that her son’s body would not be tainted by a stranger’s spirit. A flash of powerful, furious magic shot from the baby’s fingers straight at her eyes. It drove her back, fire burrowing in her skull. She screamed and collapsed on the dais, and gripped her eyes. Pain roared through her head.

  “I didn’t hurt you permanently,” Luercas said. “This time. But don’t try that again. You want your revenge, and you’ll get it, but not without me. And I needed a body. No sense letting this perfectly good one go to waste.” A chuckle that made her skin crawl. “Until I can make this body do what I want it to, you can take care of me. Feed me. Change me. So you see, you didn’t lose your baby after all.”

  But she had. Her baby, dying, told her that Luercas had lied to her. She realized that was true, that Luercas had found a way to lead her in the direction he’d wanted her to go. But she had followed. Willingly, she had followed, and now her baby was gone and something evil had taken his place. What sort of mistake had she made?

  One she needed to undo. She could leave Luercas behind, run away as fast as she could, never return to In-kanmerea. He would die without her, and whatever evil he’d planned would die with him.

  “Don’t even think it. You and I are going to do tremendous things. We are going to be immortal and own the world. We’ll need a little time, and a bit of effort, but together we’ll manage. You’re just having qualms right now, and that’s understandable. Infanticide is a nasty thing, and hard to get over. But you’ll put it behind you.”

  She lay on the dais, still blind, still in pain. “I won’t. I did something evil.”

  “Well, yes. You did. And you did it voluntarily.”

  “I can’t live with myself,” she whispered. The answer came clear to her then. She could kill herself, pay for the evil she’d done, and stop Luercas at the same time.

  “No, you can’t.” The little baby voice sounded so delicate that she couldn’t understand how it could have such a foul undertone. “I won’t let you kill yourself any more than I’ll let you kill me. You’re stuck with me. You’ll do what I want you to do voluntarily, or you’ll do it because I make you. I can do that. Either way, I’m going to get what I want, and you’re going to give it to me. But you can make yourself as my ally, Danya, or you can find out that you’re my slave.”

  She cringed.

  “Now pick me up and feed me,” he said. “I’m hungry. And when you’re finished, take me back to the village. You’ll have to think of something to tell them about your new look. The Kargans don’t like humans much.” He laughed again. “But if you’re a good girl and don’t try to give me trouble, maybe I’ll fix those fingers of yours.”

  She picked the infant up, wishing him dead. Wishing herself dead.

  Chapter 37

  Kait crawled through the window she’d left open and dropped to the floor with a relieved sigh. If she ever had anything worth stealing again she might someday regret it, but her bad habit of not closing windows came in useful from time to time—this night she was grateful that she wouldn’t have to parade naked through the tavern that lay on the ground floor of the inn, where men and women still sat eating and drinking and watching the two dancers who twined and shimmied to the smoky beat of the tala drums.

  But she only had an instant to be grateful. She realized she wasn’t alone, and a heartbeat behind that, she heard breathing, caught his scent and felt, with that sixth sense she could only think of as magic, that the darker shadow in the darkest corner of the unlit room was Ry. He wore an air of waiting and anticipation around him like a heavy cloak.

  She froze and stared into the corner. “Why are you in my room, Ry?”

  “I’m celebrating the fact that you’re alive.” His voice was velvet, and her pulse quickened at the sound of it. “Waiting to congratulate you on your escape. I had to celebrate alone until you got here because your uncle and Hasmal and damned Ian are convinced you’re dead. They took offense at signs of merriment from me.”

  “How did you—” she started to ask, but when she thought about it, she already knew how he knew she’d survived. Part of him was bound as tightly to her as her own soul. She took a deep breath. “I—thank you for . . . waiting for me. I’m amazed that I survived. . . . I didn’t expect to when I jumped.”

  He rose, and took a step toward her. She took a step back in response. He said, “You were courageous. Even facing torture, I don’t know that I would have jumped to my death to protect my friends.” He paused. “I like to think that I would have. My record for doing the brave thing hasn’t been so wonderful, though.”

  Kait realized suddenly that he could see her much more clearly than she could see him—he stood in the shadows, but the light from the moon and the stars shone in the window, and she still stood clearly framed by that. She felt the heat rising to her cheeks, and said, “I have to let everyone else know I’m back. Leave just a moment for me, please? I’ll hurry, and we can talk once I’m dressed.”

  “We could do that,” he agreed, but he didn’t move.

  She waited. He still didn’t move. She cleared her throat and said, “I have clothes in the trunk behind you, but I can’t reach them if you’re standing there.”

  He didn’t say anything for the longest time. Finally, he murmured, “I know that,” and the dark, silky timbre of his voice made her skin prickle and her heart race.

  Weary though she was from Shift, hungry and worn and dragged down, still her body responded to the fire she sensed in him. Every sound came clearer to her ears, every scent grew sharp and separate, every form in the room seemed to glow with its own inner light. Her long abstinence fed her hunger, but more than that, his presence fed her. She wanted him, as she had wanted him from the first time she caught his scent in the air, and her body sang with eagerness. “Oh, no,” she whispered.

  “Why ‘no,’ Kait? Why always no? When I crossed the ocean pursuing you, every night I dreamed that we da
nced, you and I. That we floated over gardens and fields and forests, naked in each other’s arms; that I held you and that we moved together to music that we felt but never heard. Every night, I slept with your body pressed against mine, and every morning, I awoke to nothing.”

  “I know,” Kait said after a moment.

  “It wasn’t a dream,” Ry told her. “It was real. It was the truth. You and I were made for each other. We are the two halves of a single perfect soul, and our incomplete souls reach out, when we sleep, for the only thing that will complete them. In our sleep, we are together because we are supposed to be together.”

  Kait shook her head.

  She saw the quick flash of his teeth—a brief, stubborn smile in the darkness. “Yes. You know we’re meant to be. You know. Yet you refuse this . . . this gift the gods have given us . . . even though you and I are the only ones who suffer when you refuse.”

  “You’re Sabir.”

  “And you’re Galweigh. And I don’t care. I didn’t care when my parents told me I couldn’t have you. I didn’t care when my mother told me she would make me barzanne if I pursued you instead of taking over as head of the Sabir Wolves. Well . . .” He paused. “I did care about that, but I came anyway. And I don’t care what my Family thinks now, or what they will think in the future. I waited a lifetime to find you.” He laughed softly, a mirthless laugh. “Mine was a lifetime of careful celibacy and painful restraint—partly to avoid the fate my Family planned for me, but partly because I knew that somewhere you existed, and I didn’t want to be tied to anyone when I finally found you.”

  Kait felt the pain of her own past weighing on her then. “I wasn’t so . . . circumspect.”

  “Ian.” She could hear the distaste in his voice; he covered it well, but not perfectly.

  “Not just Ian.”

  A sigh. “I know. I accept your past. I had training in controlling the Karnee drives from the time I was born. You obviously didn’t.”

  “The Family would have demanded that I be sacrificed with the rest of the Scarred children on Gaerwanday, had they known about me. My family hid me, and got me to a house in the country, and raised me on a farm away from sight until they’d taught me what they could about hiding my . . . curse. My mother and father had given birth to boys on two occasions who were Karnee, but both were murdered in their cribs before they reached their first month, so my parents knew nothing, really, about the Karnee Curse or how I could control it. They read Family histories and gleaned what they could from those, and learned the rest from trial and error. They taught me what they could.” She shrugged. “As far as I know, I’m the only Galweigh Karnee.”

  As soon as she said it, she wished she hadn’t told him that. Better perhaps that he should think the Galweighs had a number of Karnee, as the Sabirs did.

  But he seemed uninterested in the strategic import of what she’d told him. He shrugged. “I know about your past lovers. They’re past.”

  It was her turn to laugh. “I haven’t had lovers. I’ve had encounters. Brief meetings with strangers when the curse drove me the hardest. I can only call one of the men from my past a lover, and he . . .” She fell silent. And he was Ian, and he still loved her, and she still cared deeply about what happened to him. And the moment she declared herself for Ry—the instant she told Ian of her choice—she hurt him in a way she could never undo. She would not make such a decision lightly.

  Ry said, “The past is the past. It doesn’t control the present unless you let it. My past is behind me forever. I’ve found the Reborn; my first loyalties can never be to Sabir again, any more than yours can be to Galweigh. You and I walk the same path now.” He looked at her, and in the darkness she caught a change in his eyes. They began to reflect the light in the room as a cat’s would. His voice when he spoke again was deeper. Huskier. “But that’s not all. Kait. I love you. I need you.” He took another step toward her, and she could feel the burning edge of Shift pushing him. “Dance with me.”

  She could tell herself forever that she avoided him because she honored her Family, but when she looked into her heart, she knew that was only partly true. She also avoided him because he would take her into an unknown realm. She knew pain, and loneliness, and despair. She knew emptiness. She knew how to settle for less than what she wanted; she knew how to pretend to feel something she didn’t feel; she knew how to live on scraps and refuse. She hated those things, those feelings, but she had survived them before and she knew she could survive them again.

  But she knew nothing of the realm of love. Of the banquet of passion. Of the feast of genuine, mutual desire. Those terrified her. “I’m not ready,” she said, and wasn’t sure whether she had said it aloud or only to herself.

  “Dance with me,” he whispered.

  He took another step toward her, and she knew that if she never had the courage to declare what she wanted, she would never really live. She could deny herself the love she wanted, but that wouldn’t make her dead Family return to life, and it wouldn’t create in her the love that would be the only thing that would satisfy Ian’s wishes. She couldn’t give Ian what he truly desired, and if she kept it from herself, they would both be unhappy.

  He took another step toward her.

  And she walked into his arms and whispered, “Yes.”

  Their bodies pressed against each other, her skin against the silk of his shirt, the leather of his pants. Their cheeks touched, and their hands twined together. They moved slowly, spinning around to the faint, sensual beat of the tala drums that rose through the wood-plank floor.

  The dance was the dance of her dreams, though this time her feet touched the ground. They moved together surely, confidently, knowing when to step, how to turn, as if this were the hundredth time they had danced this way instead of the first. Perhaps her dreams and his dreams had been real, and it truly was.

  They stepped and turned, stepped and turned, gliding left, spinning right. His warmth surrounded her. She pressed her face against his chest, liking the broad expanse of hard, flat muscle. She inhaled his scent—musk and spices, heat and hunger. They danced that way for a while, and then he kissed her once, lightly, at the point where neck and shoulder met.

  She shivered, but not from the cold. She slipped one hand free from his and with it undid the laces of his shirt while the two of them kept dancing. Leaned close and kissed the hollow of his throat, and he made a sound halfway between a purr and a growl. Freed her other hand and slid both arms around his waist, and pulled the tail of his shirt loose from his pants, and let both hands wander beneath the shirt, stroking the lean, hard muscles of his back, discovering the heat and texture of his skin, the soft triangle of silky fur between his shoulders at the base of his neck.

  His hands in the meantime settled on her bare shoulders and slowly, slowly stroked down either side of her spine to the small of her back.

  She lifted Ry’s shirt over his head and let it drop to the floor. They danced skin to skin as they had in the dreams, the fullness of her breasts pressed hard against the furred breadth of his chest.

  In the tavern below, the beat of the talas quickened.

  She fumbled with the buckle of his belt, and he moved one hand from her back to release it with a short, impatient tug. He loosed the laces of his pants, too, but then returned his hand to her back. She got his message—he would go so far on his own, but no farther. She would have to show him she wanted him.

  Her heart pounded and her blood burned. In the dreams, they had only danced, but she wanted more than dancing. She wanted him, wanted to take him as her lover—wanted to meld with him, to complete herself.

  She stopped dancing and tugged his pants down. He kicked off his boots, stepped out of pants and underclothes. Waited. The beat of the drums, resonating through the floor, mimicked the racing of her heart.

  He kicked his clothes out of the way, then enfolded her hands in his and began to dance with her again. They moved slowly, sensuously, skin against silken skin, heat to heat,
kissing lightly, nipping and biting, dragging fingernails down backs, always spinning close and then stepping apart, then pulling together again, tighter than before.

  At last they danced their way into a corner, and Ry stopped. “Now,” he said.

  And she said, “Now.”

  He stepped in closer and caught her around the waist and lifted her up, and pressed her back to the wall. She locked her legs around his hips. And as the tala drums died away to silence, they danced another, older dance.

  Chapter 38

  Hasmal began to sense the wrongness of the night even before Kait leaped from the tower. He’d carried that gut-wrenching premonition of pending disaster with him while he watched her fall and when he and Dùghall lashed out at Ry for insisting she lived. While he and Dùghall knelt on the floor of the common room, saying the offices for a dead Falcon—for though Kait had not taken the oaths of the Falcons, and though she had not yet learned all the secrets, both of them agreed that she had been a Falcon in truth—that sense of doom had grown worse.

  The sense of wrongness had become an inescapable horror as the night progressed, until Hasmal asked Dùghall if he felt it, too.

  “Of course I feel it,” Dùghall had snapped. “She’s dead, and lost to us forever. How could I not feel it?”

  But Hasmal wasn’t convinced that his grief over Kait’s death was the demon that rode him.

  Ian joined them for the final prayers, and Hasmal wished he would go away. In normal circumstances he would have been pleased to share the burden of praying a soul safely through the Veil—in normal circumstances, it was a burden best shouldered by as many as would willingly assume the task. But the presence of even such allies as Ian grated on him like a rasp on bare bone. The night felt like it would never become dawn.