Veil of Shadows

by Lindsay

  “Do not speak so to me, Christopher,” she warned him, but her heart was not in it. “I would hate to have…your lips burned off with irons.”

  “My lips burned off?” He laughed at that, and she was forced to join him.

  “It was all I could think of that might hinder your music-making,” she said, face flaming.

  Perhaps it was the wine, but she truly was capable of enjoying herself without Cedric.

  Then, her heart dropped. That was what he had intended all along. To show her that she did not need him, so that it would not hurt her when he left her. On the dais, Danae"s hand rested on Cedric"s shoulder, and he made no move to push it away.

  Cerridwen marched through the rest of the steps mechanically, and when the music stopped, she bowed to her partner. “I thank you, Christopher,” she said, her voice strange and strained to her own ears.

  “You do not like the dancing, I think.” He bowed again, this time in deference.

  “Perhaps that one is best saved for later, when too much wine makes more complicated patterns impossible. For now, though, it is boring.” She fanned herself with her hand, feigning warmth. The disappointment that had settled in her chest would keep her cold for many nights to come, though. She was certain of that.

  When she looked back to the dais, Cedric and Danae had gone.

  The Palace was dark, except for the room at the center. Low flames burned in oil lamps there, and mounds of plush cushions littered the floor. A side table was set with wine and two goblets. If Danae had imagined that Cedric would not guess that her plan had been seduction all along, she was terribly naive.

  “This is very…welcoming,” he noted with a wry smile. “I assume that this has all been done in my honor?”

  Danae came to stand beside him, slid her hand between his wing and his shoulder. “It is only the welcome you deserve.”

  As quickly as she had sidled up to him, she retreated, going to the side table to fill the goblets. “I am surprised at your desire to stay in the woods with that…with your Queene and mate.”

  She thought she was being clever. He curbed the urge to grip her by the hair and pound her face into dust on the table. “She wishes for some normalcy. To have a real home, away from the prying eyes of Court.”

  “There are no eyes here.” Wine deepened Danae"s voice, and she came forward to press a cup into his hand. “Do not worry that any will see.”

  “Only you, and your spies.” He lifted the goblet to his lips. “Is this poisoned?”

  “You do not trust me?” She pouted up at him.

  He slowly lowered the cup, then dipped his finger into it and brought it to her lips, tracing the bottom one in a lazy arc. Never breaking contact with his gaze, she opened her mouth to pull his finger in.

  He pulled his hand back and tried not to show his disgust. “I trust you.”

  “That is a most dangerous thing to say to any Faery,” Danae said with a smirk. “You have been away from our kind too long.”

  She took a few steps back, the tip of her tongue pressed to her upper lip, and giggled. “Why are you here with me?”

  He took a sip of the wine. It would have been so satisfying to tell her the reason. I am here to kill you, he would say, and then, before she could fully comprehend, he would plunge a dagger into her heart.

  The wine burned some sense into him. “I do not know.”

  “We can discover that together, then.” Danae reached for the ties that held the front of her dress closed.

  Before he could stop his hand, he covered hers, and she gasped in shock. “I am sorry, I cannot do this.”

  He could not touch her. Not only because the very thought turned his stomach, but also because he could imagine the hurt in Cerridwen"s expression when he returned to her. The guilt would crush him.

  He would turn and walk out. If his feet would obey him. He tried, found himself glued to his place. “What have you done to me?” It could not have been poison, not to work this fast, and certainly not if she had tasted it herself.

  From his finger. The cup itself…

  “Corpse Water,” Danae said, sounding far too proud of herself. “You truly have forgotten the old ways, to fall for such a child"s trick.”

  Corpse Water. Water that had been used to wash the blood from the dead after a battle. Once it was on the target of one"s spell, their will was no longer their own. He would be powerless to whatever Danae asked of him.

  “You did not think I would…what? Align myself with you? Bed you? Offer to make you King to rule at my side if only something could be done about your pesky little mate?” Danae laughed. “And I would spill all of these secrets to you so that you could play along and expose them, as my final denouement? You must truly think me a fool.”

  “I meant to kill you,” he said through clenched teeth. “I meant to spill your blood here and muffle your screams with one of these ridiculous pillows. And then I would hack your body to tiny pieces and feed them to your crows!”

  “I would not threaten the Sisters so,” Danae warned, no hint of mockery in her words. “But you are so eager for blood. You surprise me. Ah, well, I will help you slake that lust, but you will not kill me. That is a command. Go to Cerridwen, now. Take her back to your little sanctuary in the woods. Lie with her, tell her you love her. Tell her she is—” Danae snickered

  “—beautiful. And then, kill her. Before first light.”

  “I will not!” But the horror in him would not be enough to conquer this spell. “I will not do this!”

  “Oh, you will. You will, and without a Queene to inherit the throne, I will simply have to take on the role once more. Things will return to normal, then.” She took her own cup and reclined on one of the cushions. “One small favor? A command, really, so you will be bound by the spell. Obviously, you cannot tell anyone, Human or Fae, especially Cerridwen, what has transpired here. I would like her to feel ultimately betrayed in her last moments. The way she betrayed me, by taking Bauchan"s life.”

  “You and Bauchan?” Cedric laughed bitterly. “I should have known. You make such an ambitious pair.”

  She hurled her goblet at him, but he could not move, not until she allowed it. It struck him, splashing wine across his robes. “You can mock me now, but you will not laugh so easily when you have her blood on your hands!” She took a deep breath and lowered her voice.

  “Go. Do it now.”

  He tried to force himself to stay. To dig his heels in and resist. His body, under the control of Danae"s cruel command, ignored him.

  He emerged from the tent, his brain screaming at him to do anything that would prevent him from finding her. But the thoughts did not come easily—Fling himself in the fire? Throw himself on the sword of a guard?—and then they stopped coming altogether.

  There. In the crowd. Her shining white dress and her hair like liquid copper. A sob of despair fought its way up in his throat, where it lodged painfully, bound there by Danae"s will.

  Cerridwen caught sight of him, and a smile came to her face. Then, it died. She had noted his absence. She thought he had betrayed her. She moved away, through the crowd.

  He followed.

  Cerridwen made her way to the path out of the clearing. The light and noise pounded pain behind her eyes. She had had enough of celebrating.

  She closed her eyes and used the other sight, as Cedric had taught her, and felt her way toward her camp as a glowing heartbeat that grew stronger with each step she took. The noises of the celebration grew fainter. She abandoned the other sight, embraced the clean, cool night in the forest.

  Cedric was behind her. She heard him following, quiet, brooding. She could not face him. He had done something he was ashamed of; she had seen it in his face as he had come down the steps from the Palace. The hollow pain behind her ribs teetered on the brink of true sadness.

  As long as she could ignore it, it would not push over that edge, and she would not have to endure yet another heartbreak.

  “Cerridwen,
wait,” he called after her, and there was such desperation in the sound.

  Swallowing her tears, she faced resolutely forward. She would not look at him.

  That was the way the walk went. He would call to her; she would ignore him. The pain in her chest would grow tighter and tighter, until she thought she would burst, and then she would force it away, until he called for her again. He stopped a few times, and she wondered if he would turn back and go to Danae. Panic flared in her then, for although she did not want him to follow her, she did not want him to go to Danae, either. But each time, he would start again, pleading with her to come back to the feast.

  At the campsite, he stopped by the guards. Probably to order them to take her back to the festivities. She would love to see them try.

  But when he approached them, he seemed…held back. As if he could not force his legs to move. When he opened his mouth, no sound came out at all.

  She paused on the top of the steps and turned. “So, you do have some sort of a conscience!”

  She did not wait for his reply. Inside the tent, the little servant girl napped on a blanket on the floor. “Get up!” Cerridwen ordered, prodding her with her toe. “Get up and go to the feast!”

  The girl blinked up at her wordlessly.

  “Go!” Cerridwen howled, and that set the girl scrambling out of the tent, just as Cedric came in. “I will not go back there!” Cerridwen cried at him. She pulled off one jeweled slipper and flung it at him. “I will not sit there while you leave with her, in full view of everyone!”

  He calmly dodged her other slipper. She pulled at the pins in her hair, but there were too many, and they were hard to find. She tugged at the sleeve of her dress, but it had taken more than one pair of hands to help her into the gown. She had no hope of removing it on her own.

  Her anger fading into tears, she sank to the floor. “I was humiliated.”

  Why was that easier to admit than her true feelings? Before she had come here, she would have died rather than say something like that out loud. The prospect of telling him the truth was far more degrading. How could she say that she did not care what the Court thought of her, no matter how desperately he wanted her to? That everything she did was only to please him, and it was all worth nothing if he were to pursue Danae?

  She would drink poison before she would admit that she loved him with no hope of it being returned.

  He took a step toward her, halted, then took another, the planks of the floor creaking as he moved. What made his steps so heavy and reluctant? “Am I really so disgusting to you, that you have to force yourself to approach me?”

  “I think you know that that is not true.” He knelt beside her, lifted his hand slowly, as though it weighed two hundred pounds. When he laid it on her shoulder, she barely felt it.

  “You know what she did,” she said, unable to control her tears. “You know what she did, and you still went with her—”

  “And nothing happened!” He stood, stormed away. But his steps stopped as abruptly as if he had walked into a wall. He turned back to her. “We argued. I told her that I did not think it was right for her to stay on the dais, as if she were still ruling over the Court. She left in a rage, and I followed her. Then, she threw her wine at me. That was all!”

  She looked up and saw, to her shame, that wine stained the front of his robes.

  “You cannot believe that I would…” His fist clenched. “Cerridwen, Danae is a thing of pure evil. She has done more than you know, she has—” His words cut off abruptly. He swallowed, closed his eyes. “You must believe me when I say that there are more plots afoot.

  That you are in danger. And that I would never do anything, willingly, to hurt you.”

  “I know you would not.” He had sworn to her mother that he would keep her safe, and he had protected her faithfully this far. How he could think that she would doubt him, after all that he had done, baffled her.

  “But you thought I would, what, couple with Danae? Take her as my mate?” His words scraped from his throat so that they sounded raw and painful. “I would never…”

  She looked up, into his eyes, his beautiful, clear blue eyes, expecting to see anger in them, but there was none. There was anguish.

  “As far as my feelings are concerned,” he continued, looking away from her, “I am not looking for a mate. I am…content. With the one I have already.”

  “What, another that you did not tell me about, from hundreds of years before I was born?”

  She almost laughed. And then he faced her, and his meaning became clear.

  Her breath left her without seeming to go anywhere. Everything in her froze, and she was certain that if she looked at the tree of her life force, she would see the bubbles of her energy suspended, motionless.

  “Cerridwen, I have fallen in love with you.” He did not sound happy about it. “I tried, please believe me, I tried to keep my distance. I would never wish for you to think that I had tricked you. I was as unhappy about your mother"s announcement of our betrothal as you were. I was prepared to leave the Lightworld, the Underground, entirely, to escape it. But then, circumstances being what they were, throwing us together…and you seemed so—”

  “Pitiable?” Her long-held exhalation followed the word out, making her sound somewhat hysterical. “Did you pity me? Do you think you need to protect me, and your obligation has turned to love?”

  “I admire you!” he shouted, his anger returning to him. “I see so much in you that you kept hidden in all of your years underground, living as a pretty but useless object. I see you facing tasks so daunting that previous Queenes, even your mother, would have shrunk from. And I admire that. I love you! I do not know how these things happen! I cannot dissect my feelings quite so easily as you seem to be able to! Either accept it or—” his expression changed suddenly, flickering to a burst of hope that was strangely incongruent with his next words “—

  tell me to go. Order me to leave here and never return! Banish me, and send me as far away from you as you possibly can!”

  Her head swimming, her lungs caught in the vise of a fear that this was not really happening, she fought her way to her feet. Hampered by the folds of the gown, she fell toward, more than walked, to him.

  Whatever conflict had held him back before seemed to have resolved itself as his arms opened to catch her and haul her up against his chest. He crushed his mouth over hers, unrelenting, so that she could not breathe, for an entirely physical reason this time. Gasping, she broke their mouths apart, caught his gaze and bent her head to his again. Only then did she realize he held her up, and she flared her wings to help him balance.

  His hands splayed on her back beneath her wings, his thumbs brushing the dangling ends of the laces that crisscrossed between her shoulder blades. He managed to get hold of one without dropping her or breaking the connection of their mouths, but he could not pull it free.

  He moved forward, to the thick center post of the tent, and pushed her back against it, pinning her between himself and the wood. Then, before she could protest, he reached between them and ripped the front of the dress open in one swift motion.

  Stunned and a bit frightened by the sudden violence of the action, Cerridwen was jolted into rational thought once again. What was she doing? This had seemed like such a terrible idea just that morning. Why could she not control herself now?

  Then, his mouth moved to her neck, and those rational thoughts fled. She groaned, clawed at the post above her head.

  There was no art in this, no seduction, and the blatant, brutal nakedness of the act sped the blood through her veins, the energy throbbing at the center of her. He bunched the voluminous folds of the skirt around her waist, and the shock of the cold air against her wet, heated flesh pulled a whimper from her throat. He tore at his own garments, until they fell open. He lifted her again and pushed inside her. She was as eager for him as she had been that morning, more so after the torturously long day spent craving him. Still, her flesh was untried, and sh
e cried out at the intrusion, digging her fingers hard into his shoulders, biting her lip to stifle another cry. He smothered her in another kiss, gripped her tight around her waist as he began to move inside her, the almost painful hardness of him tugging free of her body before plunging back. She lifted her hips, tried to match his movements, yet wanting him to cease, wanting him to stay buried inside her. She ground herself against him, arched, pushed away from the beam at her back.

  With a groan, he staggered backward to sit on the bed, and she wrapped her legs around his waist. He braced his hands at the small of her back and she leaned into them, pushing herself tighter against him. Gasping, panting, she folded her legs on either side of his and used them to raise and lower herself, as he flexed up, deeper and deeper into her. But it was not enough, and she thought she would scream at the frustration that built within her, the feeling that intensified and swelled, the way her energy had built up and built up between her hands before it became too much to bear, and she had thrown it, bursting to light, into the air.

  Already this was too much to bear. Already, she wished she would burst.

  She cried out in desperation, begging without words, and he pushed her off him, onto her knees beside the bed, and before she could complain at the desperate emptiness at his withdrawal, forced into her again, his hands covering hers, pinning them to the bed. His every thrust pushed her face into the bedclothes, pinched and crushed her wings, but she did not care. He slammed into her, over and over, and she shrieked with each breath that jolted from her panting lungs. His fingers twined with hers, his breath heated her sweat-slicked skin to boiling. He laid his head on her folded wings, his movements faster, frenzied, until he pushed against her so violently that it was painful and shouted her name.

  The tension in her did burst then, and she gripped the bedclothes, screaming, every part of her aflame.

  Just as quickly as it had begun, it was over. He pulled her onto the bed and collapsed beside her, breath rasping as though he had just run harder and farther than he ever had in his life.