“Tides!” Arkady exclaimed in annoyance. “Whatever else you do this night, Cayal, will you shut him up?”
“Gladly.” He took her arms from around his neck and held them by her sides, his eyes locked on hers. “But you have to wait until I leave the cabin. Don’t come out with me. And don’t ever give Jaxyn so much as a hint that you might feel something for me other than contempt. He’ll find a way to use it against you, sure as the Tide’s on the turn.” Or worse, he added silently to himself, he’ll find a way to use you against me and once the Tide is up, that could prove catastrophic.
“Will you be all right?” She studied him closely, more reflected on her face than she imagined. But then, Cayal was very good at reading faces, even closely guarded ones. He was eight thousand years old, after all. He was good at everything.
“I’m immortal, Arkady.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
He shrugged. “I appreciate your concern, truly I do, but don’t waste your time trying to fix what’s wrong with me, Arkady. Believe me, I’m broken beyond repair.”
“I don’t believe that, Cayal,” she replied, her eyes suddenly glistening. He suspected she was too proud to cry in front of him, and too smart to cry in front of Jaxyn, but that she had any faith in him at all left him speechless. “I won’t believe it.”
“Then you’re a fool,” he told her gently, kissing her one last time, with aching tenderness, fairly certain that the kindest thing he could do for Arkady Desean was to step out of her life completely and never see her or speak to her again. She would be safer. And probably happier.
Nothing good ever came of a Tide Lord loving a mortal.
The unbidden thought startled him and made him step away from her, as he realised just how close he was to allowing himself to feel something he’d long ago decided was more pain than it was worth.
“It’s not going to be pretty if I have to come in after you, Cayal!” Jaxyn called, his impatience growing by the minute.
“Be careful, Cayal,” she warned, softly.
He nodded dumbly, not trusting himself to speak, not sure what he might say if he replied.
So instead he turned his back on her and finally opened the cabin’s small door. Squaring his shoulders to face down Jaxyn, he stepped outside, leaving Arkady, and all the conflicted emotions that came with her, behind him.
Chapter 62
The Immortal Prince finally emerged from the cabin, just as Jaxyn was seriously starting to weigh up the advisability of going in after him and risking Maralyce’s wrath if anything was broken. But there was no need. Cayal stepped through the doorway, still wearing his linen prison garb, but otherwise unchanged since the last time the two of them had met, which was longer ago than he cared to recall.
Jaxyn was a little disappointed. Although he knew nothing could have changed about him, Cayal’s greater height, his breadth of shoulder, even those sharp blue eyes of his, so rare in Jaxyn’s country of birth, all combined to irritate Jaxyn in a way he couldn’t explain. Perhaps his ambivalence toward Cayal was motivated by simple jealousy, as Diala had suggested once, but Jaxyn considered himself above such petty emotions.
The truth was far more simple and it boiled down to this: essentially, Cayal had ruined immortality for Jaxyn.
Until this wide-eyed princeling came along, Jaxyn had been the most noble of the immortals. Highborn and proud of it, he was the one the others looked to. When Syrolee and Engarhod decided to set themselves up as the Emperor and Empress of the Five Realms, it was Jaxyn they turned to for advice on how a royal court was run. The others looked up to him, their simple peasant minds taking their natural awe of the highborn into immortality with them.
And then the Immortal Bloody Prince came along. A mere accident of birth, that’s all his wretched title was, and given Tryan had wiped Kordana off the face of Amyrantha eight thousand years ago, it was a pretty empty title at that.
But Cayal looked like people imagined a prince should look—Diala took great delight in pointing that out to Jaxyn every chance she got—garnering far more respect than he deserved on his appearance alone. And then, as if to rub salt into Jaxyn’s open wound, it turned out the lucky dimwit was able to manipulate the Tide. Not just manipulate it. Master it. He was as strong a Tide Lord as any of the immortals. Probably rivalling Lukys, if the truth be told.
The unfairness of it all set Jaxyn’s teeth on edge and meant the two of them had been at odds from the moment they’d first crossed paths and nothing much had happened in the intervening millennia to resolve the issue.
“Well, well, well,” Cayal remarked, smiling condescendingly, a gesture Jaxyn was certain he meant purely to irritate. “Hear you’re some nobleman’s girlfriend, these days. My, how the mighty have fallen.”
“Where’s your girlfriend?”
“Who? Oh, you mean the duchess? Inside, waiting for you to rescue her. You should mark this day, Jaxyn. Your arrival was the first time I’ve ever seen anybody actually glad to see you.”
Jaxyn was sceptical. “You mean you haven’t been sampling the delights of the lovely Duchess of Lebec? I find that hard to believe.”
“She talks too much.” Cayal shrugged. “You’re welcome to her. Ah…but your tastes lie in a different direction these days. What happened, Jaxyn? Run out of women who don’t puke when you touch them?”
“You think you’re so damned clever, don’t you?” he snapped, a little surprised at how easily Cayal could rile him. “But at least nobody’s trying to hang me, Cayal, and if you don’t stop moving, I’m going to have one of the ladies here disembowel you.”
Cayal had been inching his way around the yard as he spoke, moving away from the cabin. He stopped. “You think I’m going to let you take me back to Lebec?”
“I’m very much hoping you’re going to resist, actually. I’d enjoy watching a couple of dozen Crasii tear you to shreds.”
“Not on my claim you won’t,” Maralyce declared, emerging from the mine, her face filthy, eyes glittering angrily in the torchlight.
“Maralyce!” Jaxyn declared with mock enthusiasm. “How nice to see you again!”
She dumped the rope and pick she was carrying on the ground and glared at him. “Thought something on the Tide smelled rotten. What are you doing here, Jaxyn?”
“Come to collect your houseguest,” he told her. He and Maralyce had never really gotten along, either. He wasn’t sure why. That she would tolerate Cayal under her roof periodically when she rarely admitted any other immortal into her home—that alone was enough to irk him. “Cayal’s been a naughty boy, Maralyce. Didn’t you hear? They want him for murder. Already hanged him once. I think they’re planning to keep on trying until they succeed, which should be entertaining, don’t you think?”
“Get off my claim.”
“Not without my prisoner.”
Cayal actually laughed at him. “I’m not your prisoner, Jaxyn.”
“We’ll see about that.” He took a step toward Cayal, but before he could do much more than that, the wind picked up, dust swirling about them, stinging his eyes and forcing the Crasii to cover their faces. The force of the unnatural gale extinguished a good half of the torches the Crasii were holding. Several others sputtered and died on the ground as the felines dropped them in a desperate attempt to protect their eyes from the swirling gravel.
“Don’t take your eyes off him!” Jaxyn cried angrily, calling on his own power to quell the sudden gusts. Within a moment, the wind had died, but when the dust had settled, Cayal was gone.
“Idiots!” Jaxyn screamed, turning to backhand the nearest feline, who staggered under the blow but made no attempt to resist it. Cayal hadn’t gone far. Jaxyn could still feel him on the Tide, and given the smug look on Maralyce’s face, he’d probably taken refuge in the mine.
“Find the duchess and watch her!” Jaxyn ordered the Crasii. “I’m going after him.”
“You wreck my mine, and I’ll have your hide, Jaxyn,” Maralyce warned, a
s he snatched one of the few remaining torches from another feline and turned toward the dark maw of Maralyce’s endless tunnels.
“Go to hell,” he told her as he stepped up to the entrance.
He bent down to enter the mine. All that power to burn and she wastes it living like a pauper, digging underground in a mine that must be so big by now the whole damn mountain is in danger of caving in, hoarding gold she never bothers to spend. Maybe that’s why she and Cayal get along so well.
They’re both fools.
Jaxyn was barely a hundred feet into the first tunnel when a length of rusty chain came hurtling along the passage, striking him in the forehead. He was dabbing gingerly at his bleeding temple as it healed when he heard a faint noise and glanced up, barely dodging the next missile, which flew past so fast he couldn’t tell what it was.
It was then that he realised the torch was making him a perfect target in the darkness. Tossing it aside, he closed his eyes to give them time to adjust and to allow him to better sense Cayal ahead of him. He couldn’t pinpoint him exactly—with the Tide so low he was barely able to sense the disturbance the other Tide Lord created—but he was there, some way ahead, probably setting traps at every turn.
It was stupid, Jaxyn realised at that moment, to have followed him into the mine. Cayal was the aggressor here. He held the high ground.
So we’ll just have to change the lie of the land, Jaxyn decided, opening his eyes. Jaxyn waded into the Tide, weaving a wall of air around his body until it was almost solid. He wouldn’t fall victim a second time to Cayal’s flying debris.
Stepping forward, letting the silent darkness envelop him, Jaxyn concentrated on the Tide, rather than the mine, hoping to detect some warning surge that Cayal was drawing on it. It was an optimistic hope. At best, he’d get a fraction of a second’s warning before something fell on him. On the other hand, once he located Cayal, who was already much deeper into the tunnels than he was, a fraction of a second might be all he needed.
A scraping noise ahead caught his attention. He ignored it, fairly certain it was Cayal trying to distract him. The Immortal Prince wasn’t stupid. Foolish, sentimental and squeamish by Jaxyn’s standards, perhaps, but hardly stupid. He was too clever to make a noise he didn’t want Jaxyn to hear.
The darkness was suffocating the deeper into the mine Jaxyn went. The chill night air was soon replaced with warm, rancid dampness. The tunnel sloped down for a time and then came to a junction. Three tunnels led off the main branch. He stopped, letting the Tide tell him where Cayal was hiding, rather than wait for a betraying sign. Cayal must be quite a bit ahead of him by now, the ripples in the Tide created by his passage were diminishing with every passing moment. Jaxyn hurried into the tunnel on the right, certain that’s where he could feel him.
This tunnel plunged down sharply. Jaxyn took it at a run, partly in his haste to corner Cayal and partly because the slope of the tunnel allowed him no other option. Afraid he might plummet through some hidden vent, he tried to slow his progress by keeping his hands on the sides of the tunnel, scoring little more than a few spectacular splinters for his trouble.
The shaft went on and on, seemingly without end. Just when he was beginning to wonder if Maralyce had tunnelled to the very centre of the mountain, he almost tripped on a fallen beam as he rounded a corner to arrive at the next junction.
Lit by a score of sputtering torches, this was an unnatural cavern quite a bit larger and much lower underground than the first junction, with nearly a dozen tunnels leading off it. The walls had been magically wrought, the granite cut away in large slabs, the polished jagged surface glittering with mineral deposits of mica, pyrite and feldspar in the torchlight. The blocks cut from the cavern must have been huge, which made Jaxyn wonder what Maralyce had done with all the dirt and rock she’d been tunnelling out of this hollow mountain for the past few thousand years. Perhaps the next mountain over wasn’t the result of natural formation but was actually Maralyce’s slag heap. Jaxyn smiled at the thought and then froze as he caught a hint of Cayal on the Tide, off to his left somewhere. With the extra tunnel entrances, it could have been any one of several down which he had vanished.
“Cayal!”
His voice echoed off the cavern walls but he received no response. That didn’t surprise him. Cayal was hardly going to make this easy for him.
“I’ll find you, Cayal!” he warned. “It’s not as if we don’t have the time!”
Again, there was no answer. Jaxyn frowned. He was lying about having the time to waste hunting his enemy through the mine. Truth was, he needed to get back to the surface before Maralyce took it upon herself to dismiss the Crasii and let Arkady go.
Cayal was still moving away from him. Jaxyn could feel him growing fainter and fainter, the ripples in the Tide less and less easy to detect. If Jaxyn didn’t move soon, he’d lose Cayal altogether.
Perhaps that was Cayal’s intention. Perhaps he’d led Jaxyn down here not to fight him, but to get him irretrievably lost. Right now, Jaxyn was fairly certain he knew the way back, but how much deeper did the mine go? How much longer would the chase go on?
Shaking his head, Jaxyn cursed himself for a fool as he realised he was walking right into Cayal’s trap.
Still, a trap was only a trap when you didn’t know it was a trap. And a smart prey could turn a trap around and use it on the hunter.
With a thin smile, Jaxyn abandoned his search for Cayal on the Tide. He was in one of the three tunnels to the left. That was near enough for his purposes. There wasn’t enough power in the Tide to bring the mountain down on top of them, but there was certainly enough to weaken the supporting beams to all three tunnels and there were plenty of other potential hazards hanging from the cavern’s ceiling. The weight of the mountain over their heads should do the rest.
Jaxyn dropped his air-wrought shield and drew every drop of power to him he could find, turning his attention to the beams at the entrances of the tunnels on the other side of the cavern. It was hard work, with the Tide still so tenuous, and he was sweating from both the effort and the underground heat by the time he heard the first creaks of collapsing timbers.
The ground rumbled as the tunnels to his left gave way. The mine belched a cloud of thick, choking dust, out of which soon emerged a figure covered in dirt and grime, bent over double, coughing up dust until he puked, wiping his streaming eyes. One arm hung uselessly at his side and there was blood pouring from a cut over his left eye.
“All hail the Immortal Prince!” Jaxyn declared with a sweeping bow.
“Go to hell, Jaxyn,” Cayal replied, still bent double, his face contorted with pain as his broken arm began the painful healing process. Already the cut over his eye had stopped bleeding.
He didn’t have long, Jaxyn guessed, bracing himself, before Cayal was recovered enough for this to get very, very nasty.
Chapter 63
“Did you want to be rid of them?”
Arkady looked up from her tea, which had gone cold from neglect, and stared at Maralyce blankly. She’d been too worried since Jaxyn followed Cayal into the mine to hear what the old woman was saying.
“What?”
“The Crasii,” the old woman explained, waving her arm to indicate the three felines standing guard over Arkady. “These wretched abominations. They’ll follow my orders sure as they will them other two. I can send them all walking off a cliff if you’d like.”
“Thanks,” Arkady replied, fidgeting nervously. “But it’s not their fault. And I do have to return home.”
“You’re assuming Jaxyn will emerge victorious.”
Arkady hesitated, not sure what to say. She was being eaten alive by fear and anticipation, wondering what was happening underground. Who was winning? Was Cayal even bothering to fight back?
“I think Cayal intends him to,” she said finally.
“Waste of effort, if you ask me, the whole damned thing. They fightin’ over you, perchance?”
That suggestion almost
made Arkady smile. As if she figured anywhere in the plans of two immortals. “Hardly. Jaxyn is more interested in my husband and Cayal…” Her voice trailed off. It wasn’t because she was unsure about Cayal. It was because Arkady couldn’t believe that in the space of an hour she had confided in two complete strangers a secret she’d kept from everyone she knew since before she married Stellan, even her best friends.
There was something about the weight of immortality that made her secrets seem insignificant.
“You could order them not to repeat what I just told you,” Arkady suggested, a little uneasily, when she realised she’d not only confessed Stellan’s secret, but done it with three Crasii in the room.
The old woman smiled. “You heard the duchess,” Maralyce informed the felines. “You are never to repeat a word about what we discuss here, understand? Not among yourselves or to another Tide Lord. Is that clear?”
The three felines nodded without blinking, their eyes glittering in the candlelight.
“There,” Maralyce assured Arkady. “They’ll die before they say a word now, although I think you worry unnecessarily.”
“How so?”
“You say Jaxyn’s been living in your palace for nearly a year? If that’s the case, the one Tide Lord with the power to destroy your husband by exposing his secret has known about him for a long time. The damage is well and truly done, I’d say.”
Before Arkady could reply the ground began to tremble and they heard a faint rumbling in the distance. She gripped the edge of the table in fear and looked to Maralyce, wondering if the old woman knew what the tremor meant. It only lasted for a moment, but it was enough to have Maralyce cursing and on her feet.
“I warned those boys…,” she muttered as she slammed the cabin door open with a wave of her arm and stormed out into the yard.
Arkady glanced at the felines. “What was that?”
“I don’t know, your grace,” the tabby on her right replied. “A quake, perhaps?”
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