“Begone!”
Although it was said as a word, to Morigan at least, it came out as something else. The oddness that came from her throat could have been a song, as there was a melody to the undulations, though for now the notes seemed distressed. Kanatuk had heard the noises that the great swimming beasts under the frozen sea made: hypersonic and hypnotic when they were peaceful, shrill when they were not. This reminded him of the latter. A cry from a cornered and dangerous monster. Across the chamber and up through the ceilings and walls the spellsong wavered, unhindered by matter. When the sound reached the Ironguards—wherever they were—it drove into their ears like swords. They dropped their weapons and fell, screaming, to the ground. A speck later, they were snoring in heaps upon one another like spent pups. Far above Morigan in the charterhouse, Elissandra sensed the ripple of tremendous power approaching, and her smugness wilted as she realized that she had underestimated so much of what this maiden was capable. She had time for a shout of surprise as the invisible energy speared her head. The agony lasted only a speck, and then the mistress of Mysteries was slumped and dozing on the floor.
The darkness seemed eerily calm when Morigan looked up. Her Wolf-sharp eyes could pick out the pale faces of her companions, gathered and staring at her.
“What the fuk was that?” exclaimed Mouse.
“I don’t know,” muttered Vortigern. “But I do not hear our pursuers.” Try as he could with his nekromantic senses, the sound of footsteps had faded in the charterhouse. Replaced by the sound of…Snoring!” he said, astonished. “I hear snoring. Plenty of it. I think every soul in the building beside ourselves is asleep!”
“What did you do?” gasped Mouse.
Morigan thought of an answer for a circumstance she could hardly explain herself. She was angry at their chase and filled with the passion of the Wolf. She tapped into something: emotion and force. Was that Will, as Thackery had spoken of? Was that magik?
“Magik?” she squeaked, uncertain.
“I misjudged you, Miss Lostarot,” Alastair said with a smile, ever foxier as his white teeth flashed in the dark. “You are every bit the party. We’ll have time to ponder our little miracle later. The sewer access is just ahead. We can be spans away by the time Elissandra wakes. What a delight it would be to slip her fingers into a glass of water, but alas. Hurry ho!”
The felicitous nature of their escape was lost on no one, and the miracle as proclaimed by Alastair was at the fore of their minds. Well after they had entered the slippery stone intestines of Menos and were almost blindly sloshing among filth, the question burned. For Morigan, it was a slightly different conflict, however, and what she did not tell her companions was that if she needed to, if she was pushed, she could do whatever that inexplicable act was again.
IV
“Mistress Elissandra.”
Heavily, the mistress of Mysteries stirred from what felt like the winter sleep of a bear. She was numb with comfort until she apprehended that one whole side of her body was asleep and her chin was wet with drool. Men were upon her: large faceless fellows with cross-shaped slits in their helmets and full dark armor that fit with leathery sensuousness. They took her to a chair while her swimming consciousness pieced together events, times, and places. Thinking was quite hard at the moment; she could not recall having been afflicted by such grogginess or a pressing desire to sleep. Outside the rain had stopped, and a shy beam of moonlight had squeezed through the pollution and was casting a pale pall over the classroom in which she had fallen.
That’s right, you fell, she remembered. She did something, that witch. Old magik. An invocation of the moon. How could she? Is she the one Malificentus spoke of? The child of the Fates?
Elissandra pushed off the hands of the two Ironguards who had found her and stood up. She regained her composure with a toss of her head and a smoothing of her garments. The Ironguards were anxious for orders. There was an escapee on the loose who had yet to be detained. But Elissandra issued no commands. She paced along the line of moonlight on the floor and appeared wandering in thought. After much time had passed, one of the Ironguards took the liberty of addressing her.
“Should we go after her?”
Elissandra shook her head and looked to the moon, as if it were speaking.
“No. I am to see her again. Alone. Please understand that there can be no witnesses.”
The luminance of the moon seemed to pour over Elissandra, and she whitened to a dazzling saturation. At first, what the Ironguards were beholding was lovely, made more so by the feathering of magik over their skins. That was until the feathers began to scratch and itch, and a terrible heat began in their stomachs. The Ironguards only snapped fully from the enchantment when they realized that they were on fire. By then it was too late to raise their rifles, for their eyes had popped in their sockets and their fingers were scarcely matchsticks.
Elissandra left the smoking corpses and drifted from the room. She had an appointment with the Daughter of Fate.
XVI
CHASING DOOM
I
After hearing the king’s extensive praise of the flowers in the Valley of Fair Winds, Erik was a little disappointed. As the army rode between the great mossy crags, the hammer struggled to spot any blossoms above them. Nor did he see any flowers along the rock-strewn path. The wind was sweet as the king had promised, though perhaps not as sweet as a mist of honey, and not as cool as a clouded sky should permit. In fact, he found the air quite hot and tugged often at the straps of his armor. Looking around, he could see that many of the Silver Watch had removed their helmets or gauntlets entirely. He didn’t care for this laxness and the ragtag air it conveyed, and those soldiers he caught with his reproachful stares put on their armaments at once. At war, a soldier was never to remove his protections, not even when he believed himself to be safe, for death held no courtesies or pardons toward the living for their unpreparedness. With that vigilance in mind, he focused his watch upon the king, who rode beside him.
The king had engaged in no more communication than was necessary today: a series of hand waves, nods, and short answers. The deeper tension to the king’s austere self could only be noted by those who knew him as well as themselves. A distance to the stare, the faintest wrinkle on his marble forehead. Erik wondered if this was the same weakness that he had addressed in the woods rearing itself again or another concern altogether.
“My King, may we ride alone?” he asked.
Magnus responded by moving out of the line and into the shadow of the crags. Erik followed, and the two riders trotted around tall fractured stones; the echoing of their mounts’ hooves made the silence between them thicker. While it was only a suspicion, Erik sensed that his king was angry.
“You are preoccupied,” he stated.
“Yes,” replied Magnus curtly. “We are nearing Mor’Khul. My stomach winds itself in knots when I consider the choices that must be made there.”
“Choices?”
“Of how viciously I shall punish my brother. The line between love and hate is thin, they say. Yet with Brutus and me, the emotions bleed and confuse themselves even more. Even the hate is a passion.”
The lone wrinkle on the Everfair King’s brow pronounced itself further. “I have been contemplating dark, dark torments, Erithitek. Artistries of pain. I won’t tell you the sickness that I dream, for it would taint whatever innocence remains in you. I shall tell you that in these fantasies, I am there with Brutus for every scream and every plea. I weep and I laugh. And when he is so miserably broken—a heap of meat and tears—I feed him my blood to heal him. It continues like that, the delicious cycle of horror, of me unmaking and making my brother.”
Here the hammer had worried that his king was sliding into the doldrums of mercy, when the opposite had occurred. He had sharpened his hate to a vicious edge. This was good, thought Erik, the king had finally become a weapon.
Clip-clop, clip-clop. At the pace of their masters’ phlegmatic moods, the horses
trotted along. For almost an hourglass, the skies darkened with them, and when the king’s cold voice came, it was as unsettling as the first peal of thunder.
“Have you come to a decision on my proposal?”
Erik had not. The mystery surrounding the king’s plan did not sway his opinion for the better, either.
“No.”
“Do you not think yourself up to the task?”
I can protect Queen Lila. I would take a sword for her, thought Erik. He and the king had no secrets but one, and he was gruff with his reply.
“I have sworn my soul and service to you, my King. However, it is difficult to accept a duty that has not been explained. You are asking me to leap blindly, which is unwise for any man to do.”
“I am asking you to have faith,” the king threw back.
Magnus’s cold emerald eyes almost tossed Erik from the saddle, and it was no trick of the mind, but the winds grew fiercer and the clouds rumbled on high. The men stopped their steeds, and the king asked his question a second time.
“You have faith in your king, do you not?”
Erik huffed in his saddle. “I do.”
“Do you have faith in yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Of course you do,” Magnus said, grinning. “Therein lies your true value as a man and as a warrior. You are not some trained beast, soullessly obedient to my commands. You are a thinking, breathing extension of my wishes and your Will. When I am lost, as I was in Meadowvale, you led me from my gloom. When I am cruel, you remind me to be kind. When I am mad…well, you do not fear the madness of an Immortal King. You pick up steel and come at him.”
He knows, thought Erik.
Both Magnus’s smile and the wind grew colder. “I know, Erithitek.”
Yes, but how much? worried Erik.
“You stood outside my chambers,” continued Magnus. “You would have heard Lila’s anguish. A weaker man would have run. A stronger man would have run. A man of duty, who defended the king’s virtues even as the master himself forgot them—that is the sort of man who serves me. I saw the shine of your steel in my doorway, and in that moment, I might have accepted your justice. For your impudence, I could just as well have blasted you into a thousand splinters of ice.”
The emerald stare flickered, and a ripple of lightning ran overhead. Against his thighs, Erik’s mare strained like a penned colt in a flaming barn. Erik was no more immune from the weight of this moment, from the crushing perceptions that the king had laid upon him. The king resumed talking with a sinister softness.
“Still, as time fades the scar, and I think of how I am to protect my legacy and of who would care for the queen without me…I see one man. I see you. The only mortal in my lifetime to have come at me with true grit and steel: an ally, a son, and a friend. Only the ones that we love can hurt us so deeply. The paradox is as bitter as it is beautiful. For a father is to be outdone by his child—it is nature, even if I am not a part of that cycle. Thus, when I ask you to do what I know is in your heart to do, and you do not leap at the prospect, I begin to dwell upon your hesitation. The hourglass is dark, and my mind weaves constant conspiracy. Do not give me a reason to doubt your faith in me, or in yourself. Here and now, there can be only one answer to the question that I shall ask you.” Magnus paused, then said, “If I am to fall, and if Eod thereafter is to suffer the same fate, will you protect Lila? Will you see her safely to Carthac?”
Despite the lightning and thunder, the sky had yet to crack and weep. For the elements were bound by the king’s feelings, and the storm would come when he had his answer. Perhaps a bolt of fury would fly to smite the man who had nearly treasoned against him.
“I shall,” vowed Erik.
The rain began.
Without a second glance, the king urged his beast and rode off through a torrential curtain to join the wavering line of white riders. Erik allowed himself to lose track of his king, which was easy in the downpour. In wet solitude, he examined himself so somberly that he could have been another gray stone in the valley. He thought of honor and mercy, and whenever flashes of the pale golden queen rose, he took those monumental virtues and smashed them upon the images. He buried his shameful lust. Magnus had offered him redemption, and he would earn it with his duty. His king had shut out love and made himself into a weapon, and so too would he. When Erik was empty and ready to serve, he nudged his steed forward. He found the king’s shadow through the rainy veil and fell in beside him, looking south with the same ruthlessness as his master did.
II
She’s a flower in the sunshine,
A wonder to behold!
And if I drink ‘nuff courage
Den I may be so bold!
To take ‘er hand,
Would be so grand!
No more chores!
Though I’ll keep my whores
And remind the Miss,
That dem potatoes do need peeling!
These ‘ands do need some ‘ealing!
It’s tough to till!
And tougher still,
To get off my behind
Bless my life!
I ‘ave a wife!
Oh Gods, she ‘as a knife!
As annoying as Rowena found him, Galivad had a smashing voice: strong, medium-timbered, and capable of sustaining long notes. In another time and place, he could have been one of Eod’s finest performers, and he certainly had the grimy bearded miners that rode in the rattling wagon with them cheering as if he were a master bard. Hourglasses ago, before he started, one of the workmen had handed him a weary lute—all busted strings and sour notes—which he tuned to perfection in sands. There was skill in him, and it behooved Rowena to know from where.
The occasion to ask him did not come till far later in the day, after the cart had bounced its way far down the Iron Road and stopped for the night. They made camp on gravel beside the road and fetched kindling from the nearby copses of ash that cast their swaying shadows over a witch’s moon. Fires were built and roaring, small game hunted and roasted—nothing quite like skewered badger, thought Rowena—and kegs were cracked open. Those who labored hard relaxed with equal vigor, and soon bard Galivad’s songs were no longer needed, for the night was roaring with a drunken chorus. Eventually Galivad, his feet heavy from drink, stumbled over to Rowena. She was sitting with a few other folk upon the blankets that would be their bed for the evening. Galivad gave Rowena a rosy-cheeked smile that failed to charm her and dropped himself like a sack of potatoes to the ground.
“Fine singing, fair sir!” applauded a merry plump chap who was beside Rowena. “What is your name, sir? For you are surely famous.”
“Corybantes Thorpe. Though you may call me Cory, good sir,” beamed Galivad, and he slapped Rowena on the back. “This is my sister, Merriweather Thorpe. Merri, she prefers. A bit darker than my fair self, but Mother did fancy men of different port and call, so this is what she got. We are not artists, but procurers for wealthy masters and their queer tastes in the Southlands. Merri, well, she performs quite the dance with that sword of hers. My instruments are those of more subtle charismata: the gifts of gaff, haggling, and song.”
The story continued, growing more embellished and fanciful. It was a miracle to Rowena that anyone believed Galivad’s rhetoric, though his golden looks and rakish smile seemed to win any skeptic over. Again and again, Rowena shrugged off Galivad’s broad hand, which had a tendency to linger on her when given the chance. While Galivad was enjoying himself and the ruse, at least he appeared to have remembered the identities Maggie had given them, which was one less bother for her to worry about. Already the ferry had taken a detour from landing at Blackforge, as the lookouts claimed to have spotted smoke in their telescopes. That inconvenience had cost them a day’s pursuit, then more time still as the ferry was forced to dock south at Riverton. One of the strangest places Rowena had seen, Riverton was a mash of bilge parts and ship hulls that people somehow lived in, poking out like little moles from naval compartm
ents or hosting their shops and taverns on sloshing, slanted decks in a topsy-turvy parody of what was normal. Still, it was in Riverton that luck finally graced them, and they learned of a convoy of feliron miners headed to Menos. Not long after that, they had paid their way onto the wagons, using Queen Lila’s generous fates. We all have armor that hides who we are and different masks for different occasions, thought Rowena many a time, as she looked at these free men who were to toil alongside whipped slaves. Out here, they were gay, while in the dark hollows of the earth, where their skilled fingers could do what a slave’s could not, they were surely as grim as the masters of the mine were. She knew that sense of duality well, and even as she smiled and idly chatted with those who would bend her ear, the soldier in her was ever focused on the mission. Regarding that, Queen Lila had yet to be notified of either the smith or the living sage, and that weighed on her mind. Still, she had but one farspeaking stone to use, and she would not waste it until she had spoken with the men she and Galivad pursued.
“What are you thinking about, my dear Merriweather?” asked Galivad.
He must have finished speaking a while ago, for the portly fellow had rolled over and gone to sleep. Others around them were curled up in blankets as well, and the revelry was fizzling out to sloppy laughter and snoring.
“All that frowning and you will wrinkle such a beautiful face,” said Galivad.
She could not tell if he was serious. “The hourglass is late. We should sleep,” she replied.
Rowena lay down and wrapped herself in her cloak. With a sigh, Galivad placed himself beside her. As Rowena’s eyelids were growing heavy, Galivad began to hum a soothing tune: something about a girl chasing a falling star. He sang it often, and it had become the final sounds that would sweep her off to dreams. Tonight she resisted the pull of sleep and forced herself to ask the question that she had been nursing for days. Rowena shifted so that they were facing each other; Galivad stopped his music from the surprise.
Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) Page 45
