“On the ferry first.”
“No, I need her now.”
One of the jacks on the pier’s end let out a shout and toppled into the water. Jafe’s three-fingered hand darted from the river, grabbed the second man’s ankle, and yanked. The thick-limbed jack wrenched free, tripped, and dropped to a knee.
A shout behind her could only mean Raker had arrived. She leapt toward the man holding Rose. Time contorted, both crawling and racing by, as she watched him let go. She lunged for the pier’s edge, her arms reaching and fingers curling on air as Rose plunged into the river. The jack grabbed her as she screamed. She wrapped her hand around his exposed arm and shredded his heart.
The man Jafe had tripped bolted by her. Somewhere, someone bellowed her name as she staggered mindlessly to the pier’s edge searching for Rose in the current. “Catling!” She glanced up and saw Jafe lift her baby from the river. Clutching the edge of his raft, he passed the coughing child to Leena.
Jafe’s first victim swam for the whirling raft. Jafe clambered up and gripped a pole. Upriver, a sleek waterdragon rolled in the current, fanned a watercolor wing, and dove. It surfaced behind the struggling jack and curled around him. The man yelled, paddling in a frantic circle. The fluke of the creature’s tail slapped the water before it disappeared below, dragging the man to his death.
Catling’s focus snapped back, and she spun. Raker had the bearded jack down and groaning with a fractured arm, his elbow at an ugly angle. The last man faced him, two blades in his meaty fists. He sneered and edged toward his fallen partner, and with a brutal thrust, stabbed him in the throat. Witnesses on the pier hustled away, and a woman screamed as blood pumped through the dying man’s grappling fingers. He choked and gurgled, and his beard turned crimson.
“You’re next, half-blood.” The jack crouched, both Raker and Catling in his sights. Raker narrowed his good eye, the frost-green iris vanishing beneath his black hair as it fell forward and hid his face. His bone-handled knife beckoned with a sharp flick. He nodded to Catling and charged. The broad-bodied man faced the onslaught, his attention riveted for the assault. Catling ducked and tapped the skin of his arm, the contact too brief for a kill. Then Raker stormed by her, both men hurling into the river, blood leaving a trail down the pier.
She ran to the planking’s end. The dark shapes clung together underwater, the luminescence stained by blooms of blood. They swept north and separated, one rising to the surface to gulp air. Raker. Jafe paddled toward him. Leena sat at the middle of the raft with two children in her lap, little Rose crying. Catling wrapped her arms around herself as if they alone prevented her from shattering. She rocked on the pier’s lip and poured her love across the swirling water, sating them with joy and pleasure. Her whole heart streamed over the liquid light. Leena and Jafe laughed at the children, Rose quieted and cuddled into Leena’s arms. The woman leaned down and kissed the top of her head.
Raker pressed up onto the raft, gazed back toward the piers, and met Catling’s eyes where she stood alone amidst the clamor. He canted his head in question. She nodded and hurled another wave of love over them as the city guards converged. Her heart broken and bleeding, she turned away.
Chapter Eleven
Catling shuffled up the pier, her body wooden, the hinges holding her bones together rusted and grinding. The swamp’s reek curdled her stomach, and the heat saturated her lungs, suffocating her. The rift in her heart yawned open, a fathomless abyss nothing could fill even if it sucked all the color, beauty, and life out of the world.
The guards bustled around her with the bodies and witnesses, the ferry’s captain and crew, the blood and questions. The commotion hummed in her ears, but the words made no sense. She drifted, submerged in empty space as if she’d lost her way, lost herself. The person she was that morning ceased to exist.
Gannon met her halfway up the pier. The sorrow in his eyes and compassion in his embrace tapped hairline fractures in the fragile shell holding her together. “Rose?” he whispered, his eyes welling as he sheltered her in his arms.
“Gone.”
The word lent finality to her choice. Not dead, but vanished. And no one, not Gannon or Kadan or Minessa required the truth.
“Oh, Catling.”
The despair in his voice and loneliness of her secret pushed her loss beyond her ability to contain it. Pain erupted from her chest and bled over her fingers. She didn't feel human, her grief wild and wailing as what remained of her heart shattered. She felt eviscerated, wrenched from her body, every shred of her being reeling toward unconsciousness. Her legs turned to rope, her muscles to water.
“Catling.” Gannon picked her up, and she hid her face in her hands trying to trap the breathless sobs as he carried her to the lift. Two guards followed them in, and the door closed around them, entombing them in silence.
“Take me to the twelfth tier.” Her words echoed in her head as if they belonged to another woman, one steadier than she. A decision took shape in her head. “You can put me down.”
He did as she asked and tapped the panel for the top of Ava-Grea. “I’ll handle Lelaine and the doyen. You should rest.”
“I will.” She leaned on the lift’s wall, empty and exhausted. “Tell them I’m with the Poisoner.”
“No, Catling.” The shock and worry on his face would have drawn her smile on another day.
“For healing,” she whispered. “For time. Markim-Ava will care for me, and I’ll return when I’m ready.”
Gannon raked his fingers through his curls, but he refrained from asking the questions that creased his brow.
“A few days.” She wiped her eyes. “They will manage.”
He nodded, and when the lift opened, he sent the guards in search of the queen while he escorted her to the Poisoner’s Hall. She rapped on the door.
The nondescript Founder-made building squatted on the top tier, along with the doyen’s personal quarters and private meeting chambers. The coveted location attested to Markim’s importance to the guild. In his world of polished steel and razor-sharp blades, he’d cut a garden of woads into her scalp and back. Vines and petaled flowers adorned her flesh with elemental colors, the crimson bird of death in its tangled midst. She owed him for saving Raker’s life and now would honor the debt; he would let her in.
She knocked again, and after another wait, the door opened half way. Markim-Ava peered out, eyeing her and then Gannon. He scowled, his weedy eyebrows bumping together on his forehead, lips pursed. “What do you want?”
“I… my daughter…” Catling searched for the words, and all she found were tears.
“Never mind.” The hunched man stepped aside, and she slipped in. “Not you,” he said to Gannon and shut the door in his face.
Markim stood in his hallway, scarcely taller than she. “You’re bad news, you realize.”
“I’m here to pay my debt.” Her fingers brushed the red birthmark encircling her eye.
“Your consent or did they put you up to it?”
“My choice. You can complete the rose.”
He rubbed his jaw and squeezed his lower lips between his finger and thumb. “Going to hurt.”
She wiped a tear. “I’ve suffered worse than the edge of your blades.”
***
The surface of Markim’s steel table chilled Catling’s back. She stared up at the gray ceiling and the snaking tubes of luminescence, warm light streaming across the cavernous room’s entire length. Her other trips to the table were face down as Markim and his needlers designed the woads, the marks of power blooming on her back. This time he would have his way with the rose around her eye, smoothing out the petals, mending the tatters, and adding contours with shades of garnet. If and how the enhancement would affect her shield, she couldn’t predict. Her power might magnify, evaporate, or remain unchanged. She didn’t care. What had she to lose now?
Her mother was dead, her family dead, and Whitt gone to craft a life in the south. Lelaine had preached the truth like an oracle
. If Catling wished to keep her daughter safe, Rose was gone too, taken by the Slipsilver, her little body in the waterdragons’ care.
Rose’s true destination was not a place of Catling’s choosing but one that presented itself. Raker and Jafe each possessed a unique flavor of madness, but they’d never failed her. The fenfolk were kind and generous despite the primitive life they chose, and Leena was a mother.
Had she chosen, Catling would have preferred Kadan and Minessa’s home in Mur-Vallis, her lost sisters and their families wherever they’d landed, even Whitt though he was in no position to care for a child. But life rarely indulged her desires, and hope was as constant as dew in the sun.
Markim peered down at her, inches from her nose. He’d strapped her head so tightly to the table she expected to leave with a dent in her skull. Her wrists and elbows, waist, thighs, and ankles were also buckled in place, ensuring she wouldn’t move when he began to cut. “Last chance to change your mind.”
“I consent.”
“Once I start, I won’t stop.”
“I consent.”
“Never tried anything like this before.” The scalpel glinted in his hand.
“I consent, Markim.” She shut her eyes and exhaled.
He sliced and she whimpered. The blade outlined her eye, sliding across the bone of her brow and cheek and nose. She flinched, and he pressed his hand flat on her face, holding the skin taut where he worked, carving the petals. Tears and blood pooled in the corner of her eye, trickled down her temple, and dripped over her ear.
The knife clattered into a tray, and he began scraping grooves in her face. The pain seared her skin, her nerves firing, her voice screaming and crying but never pleading to stop. Her hands knotted into fists, fingernails driving into her skin. A memory invaded her head, Keela scraping at her eye, grating the skin from her face.
“Almost done.” Markim patted her arm.
Metal instruments clattered, and he positioned a small bristle of needles on her cheekbone. The mallet hit and she arched her back, the strap at her waist digging into her stomach. The sharp taps drove the tiny points through her skin, circling her eye. Tapping, positioning, tapping, positioning, tapping until she lost count.
He stopped, and she cracked her good eye, blinking through the tears. He bent over her face, admiring his work as if he were a painter and she a canvas, her pain immaterial. “Red luminescence,” he said and shuffled away.
The color of blood, of roses, of death. A part of her knew, should have known, and yet when he returned with the dripping cloth, she cried out for all the losses she’d endured, all the deaths that scored her heart and peeled away her hope. She wept for Keela, for Wenna and Zadie, Scuff and Piper, and Rabbit and Bruiser, for Bromel and Wister and Brid and Tum, for Qeyon, Chava and Mireld. He held the cloth to her eye, soaked in distilled luminescence, and red death sought the thin cuts, the raw skin, the hundreds of tiny punctures. It flowered in her veins, branded her heart, and claimed her as its own. As she lay there, unable to resist, death etched borders around her emotions, defined its role in every life, and illuminated her vision. She surrendered to death’s companionship, accepted its amoral nature, and exhaled, her body limp.
Markim removed the cloth and released the strap. He opened the buckles and helped her up. She slumped on the table’s edge, shaking and gasping, her head hung. The skin around her eye stung, swollen and tender.
“Some time in the violet pool,” he said.
She nodded, too fragile to speak, and fell from the table to her feet, clutching his arm. They crossed the barren floor, and she crawled up the steps to the steel pools. The violet luminescence, the hue of healing, shimmered and stirred, the light alive with movement. She stepped in, and the light retracted as it always did, then reversed and closed around her. Sliding down the smooth edge, she immersed her body and then her face and head. The pain vanished, her life sighed, and she began to heal.
***
Raker sat on a crate, whittling striations into a bird’s wooden wing no larger than his thumb. Jafe leaned into his pole, pushing the raft between the soggy hummocks and filtered lace of the mossy canopy. Reptilian caliph trunks soared from the water like the legs of a giant beast, sinuous and smooth. Their roots formed archways to nowhere and green branches vaulted above the glittering channels. Fire-winged birds flitted in the filigreed witchwood and a tawny lynx padded over a fallen tree.
The goddess stretched across the raft at Raker’s feet, slinky as a cat, her vaporous gown swirling behind her. She slid a hand up his leg and rested her head on the raft, her quicksilver hair floating in the ripples. “My warning proved fortuitous. In the future, you mustn’t argue, Raker. Why trouble yourself resisting me?”
River wraiths trailed them through the trees like unhurried ghosts, curious about the new child asleep in Leena’s arms. She was dark-haired, scrawny, and fair, a conspicuous contrast to the fenfolk’s white locks, larger frames, and green-patterned skin. Leena’s child napped in a basket lined with fur, a sheer veil of camgras draped over him to discourage stingers.
Raker tugged the fishing line that trailed in the purling wake. The bulbous eyes of two young crajeks blinked to the surface, eager to thieve a meal. “We don’t need this child. What are we supposed to do with her?”
“You are a collector of lost children.” The goddess slipped off the raft’s edge, dissipated, and reformed at his side, her arms encircling him. “This one has vision. Perhaps she and I will align. I might mentor her.”
“A frightening thought.”
“You are infinitely cynical, Raker. It’s part of what I adore about you. You’re unimpressed by the trappings of the world, impossible to lure into temptation.”
“I left that world when they took my eye.”
“An unfortunate loss. I didn’t plan it that way, but I’m pleased with your perception. How would we converse otherwise?”
“We wouldn’t.” He would miss her, but he possessed no illusions about their relationship. She used him, indulged him, needed him. “You wish us to raise the girl?”
“For a time. Everything changes, doesn’t it, my love? Who knows how all our choices and the happenstance of time alter our paths. Today, preserving her is part of our plan.”
“Your plan.”
“The planet’s plan.” She tickled his earlobe with her tongue. “You owe a debt.”
“You could have let me die. Sometimes I would prefer that you had.” A year ago, a crajek had ripped apart his leg, and Catling had saved him.
“Stubborn!” The goddess flew through him, and he braced himself, the heat of her desire driving a flush to his face. She reappeared behind him, her chin on his shoulder. “It’s not the child, truly, but the mother who will bring the reckoning. The child is the reward for her sacrifice.”
“Ransom?” He tightened his eye, shaking her off his shoulder.
“My, you think I’m cruel.” She pouted. “Those are the tactics of Ellegeans and Cull Tarr. I wish only to preserve, to reestablish balance. You must keep her safe.”
“I would prefer to be left out of your schemes.” Raker watched her turn gossamer, a web of dew drifting off the raft, fingers raised to her lips in a tantalizing kiss.
“Whose schemes?” Leena asked.
Raker looked over his shoulder. Jafe and Leena smirked at him, used to his conversations with ghosts. He jerked his chin at the child. “Can you care for another?”
Leena shrugged. “One for each arm.”
“We will try not to feed her to the crajeks.” Jafe grinned and propelled them deeper into the swamp.
Chapter Twelve
Three days had passed since the incident, and Catling remained with the Poisoner. Vianne tatted lace, her busy fingers assuaging bouts of unwelcome anxiety. Everyone’s mood spoiled with impatience, Lelaine’s most of all. The queen ordered a council, commanding the presence of all four doyen, the ambassadors, the captain of the city guard, and Kadan, who temporarily served as her eyes and ears at
the conclave.
Thus far, Colton’s report told Vianne nothing she hadn’t already gleaned. The assailants were decidedly Cull Tarr, a conclusion based on their immunity to emotive and sensorist influence. Either that or they understood Cull Tarr methods for building resistance. Of greater interest, it appeared Catling had wrapped her hands around one of them and demonstrated that they were as susceptible to influenced death as the next man.
“How long might it take to hone an immunity to influence?” Gannon asked the ambassadors as if he’d pilfered the question right out of Vianne’s mouth. He shared a glance with the queen before every occupant in the room turned for the answer.
Linc deferred to Kest. “It depends on whether purity has been practiced since birth or undertaken later in life.”
“Purity?” Lelaine asked.
“Freedom from the stain of luminescence,” Kest clarified. “Once it enters the system, it’s hard to extricate, though, over time, the effects weaken. True purity requires abstinence from birth.”
“And your level of purity?” Vianne asked, her lace unmoving in her lap.
Kest faced her. “Since birth.”
“And you,” she asked Linc.
“As well.” He smiled amicably, the man far too personable for a Cull Tarr. “We assure you, the Shiplord had denounced this plot. We believe the men who attempted to capture your influencer were converts.”
“Explain your reasoning,” Lelaine said.
Kest leaned back and steepled his fingers. “A pure Cull Tarr assassin would not have failed.”
Whether the response was a statement of fact or arrogance, Vianne couldn’t guess. She assumed the later.
“Whoever they were,” Colton said, “they wished to remain anonymous. Witnesses reported that one of them killed his wounded accomplice.”
Farlanders' Law (The Rose Shield Book 3) Page 9
