The Sixth Labyrinth (The Child of the Erinyes Book 4)

by Rebecca Lochlann

Lifting his face from his knees, he glanced at her without surprise then stared at the rolling sea. He was weeping. She knelt beside him.

  “I’ve seen the stoning,” he said. His voice was breathless, his pupils enlarged, as Morrigan’s had been when she’d used the mushroom. “Like I was there.”

  In his hands was a bone with a dark claw at one end. It was a seal bone, a toe from a front flipper. Diorbhail had seen many, growing up.

  “Did you take it all, Master Curran?” she asked, gripping his forearm.

  He smiled, yet tears continued to build and spill down his cheeks. “Aye.”

  She was frightened. There had been enough mushroom in the bag for three people.

  He blinked repeatedly. He grinned then frowned, and his hands restlessly turned the bone, over and over.

  “Why couldn’t I stop them?” He faced Diorbhail, his expression achingly puzzled. “I fought the Saxons. They were fearsome warriors, but I was never defeated. I was Arcturus’s friend, his champion. But when it mattered most, I failed.”

  The tears in his eyes made them intensely blue, like no blue Diorbhail had ever seen. They were familiar. Beloved. She swayed towards him.

  “Selene,” he whispered.

  Next thing she knew, he’d grabbed her and was kissing her, the desperate kisses of a long lost lover.

  “I left you,” he was saying. She could hardly hear him through her own need. “I left you, and… our baby. Oh, Selene.”

  Vaguely she realized he was on top of her, drawing up her skirts.

  “No… no,” she said weakly. “I promised.”

  “I’ve missed you. I need you. Selene.”

  Diorbhail remembered lying with the boy in her village. She’d known it was wrong, that he wasn’t the one for her. As clearly as she had known that then, she knew Curran was the right one.

  Morrigan’s husband.

  She felt herself rising to his caresses, losing all sense but immediate, overwhelming eagerness. His mouth was everywhere, on her neck, over her breast. Selene, he said. She knew the name was hers, long ago, somewhere, in some other place and time. Curran, in thrall to the mushroom, must be seeing that place. Diorbhail was torn between wanting to know what he was seeing and simply wanting to join with him, to cast aside questions and problems.

  Help me, she thought, not knowing who she cried out to, only knowing she could not do what was necessary on her own.

  A new sound invaded their delirious breathing— a shrieking, demanding, imperative call. It pulled her back to the cave. To her vows.

  She put her hands against Curran’s collarbones. He didn’t respond immediately. She had to shove him hard before his eyes opened and he blinked again, almost as though he didn’t quite recognize her. He propped his hands on either side of her, pushing himself up.

  There was movement off to the side, but it was not the lighthouse keeper. It was an owl, a wee, wee thing, skittering and fluffing its wings, crying insistently as if to say Do not ignore me!

  Curran stared at it as well. His breathing was labored; he blinked and squinted as though he couldn’t focus. He faced her again. His gaze roamed over her. He frowned and rolled off.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not myself.” He rubbed his eyes.

  She wanted to weep. “Thank you,” she said to the little owl. It stopped its mad pacing and tilted its head. Then it flew away.

  She sat beside Curran, not touching him as the hours passed and he traveled in and out of vision, speaking then falling into long silences. “Rosabel,” he said once, then a moment later, “Rosabel, stop asking me.” He wept as though his heart was breaking, and she felt hers break too.

  The tide crept higher, splashing just below the lip of the cave, but Curran showed no sign yet of returning to his unaffected self.

  “Is she his lover?” he asked. “Aodhàn’s? Has she… has she given herself to him?”

  “No, Master Curran,” Diorbhail said with conviction. “Morrigan is yours. She is faithful to you.”

  She wasn’t completely certain of this, but surely she would know. There was something between Morrigan and Aodhàn, and it was disturbing, but… no. It hadn’t gone that far.

  Not yet.

  He slumped and didn’t move or speak for so long she began to doze, sedated by the continuous murmur of the sea. She jerked into wakefulness when he said, after a long silence, “What seems the end is only the beginning.”

  She clasped his forearm; deep shudders ran through him. How she wished he hadn’t taken the mushroom without talking to her. She could have given him a little, just enough to help him remember, not to crash over him like an avalanche.

  “The mark… of the bull’s horns. Velchanos. The god’s mark. Wherever she sends me, I will wait… I will wait for you, Aridela.” He breathed in ragged gulps of air.

  “Master Ramsay?” She spoke low to keep from startling him. “Curran?” It made her feel strange, trembly and daring, to use his given name.

  He faced her but his stare held no recognition. “Where are you?” After a moment, his eyes squeezed closed. “What have I done?”

  “Come back,” Diorbhail said urgently. “You’re in Scotland. Can you hear the sea? Everything is fine… you’ve a bonny wife and daughter. Be at ease, my love.” She stroked his hair. After a moment, he rested his cheek on her shoulder and held her, and seemed to find peace.

  A half hour later, he woke at last. He was embarrassed and shocked to be holding her in such an inappropriate manner.

  “I… I don’t remember coming here,” he said, his gaze veering away. He blushed endearingly.

  Oh, how she loved him. Severing it was like slicing off her hand.

  Neither of them must ever suspect.

  * * * *

  The next day, Curran asked Morrigan to walk with him on the cliffs. He held her hand and asked, “Are you better?”

  “Aye,” she said. “I don’t know what it is about this place. It’s affected me in ways I cannot explain. I am sorry, Curran. You’ve married a madwoman. My brother used to say I was cursed by the color of my hair. I’ve always felt strange and wrong, with my dreams, the way I faint. My head seems to separate from my neck and float away. Everything echoes, then I wake up and time is gone.”

  He’d asked Eleanor not to tell Morrigan about the condition she suspected was causing the swoons, headaches, and dizziness. She’d called it “concussion.” Curran wanted to think about it first and how it might affect her.

  So he said, “Strange? Aye, indeed, if you mean rare or extraordinary.”

  She smiled. “You always know what to say.” But unlike other times, when she’d sounded almost annoyed by that, now she sounded grateful.

  They walked on as the sun burnished the water to crimson tips broken up with deep black troughs.

  “Diorbhail says my dreams are memories of other lives I’ve lived,” she said. Her gaze was anxious. “She says I’m coming close to the end, and that’s why I’m having more of them; that’s why they’re becoming stronger.”

  Curran breathed in deeply. The secrets were building into a precarious, leaning tower. Yet he said nothing. He hadn’t had time yet to try to make sense of all that had happened to him the day before. He put his arm around her and said, “Maybe we should go.”

  “Well.” Her smile brought out the dimple in her left cheek. “It’s your turn. Where to?”

  He thought awhile. Since they’d left Kilgarry their lives had been rough and dirty, their food garnished with sand. They’d been hounded by mayflies, and spiders were too often discovered in their bedding. Real bathing had been impossible. Plus there had been a great deal of rumination. He was ready for a complete change of scene.

  He grinned. “You’re going to need a ball gown.”

  Inside, as she returned his smile and demanded to be told what that meant, he thought, I will follow you, my Morrigan, wherever you want to wander.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “YOU ARE TO blame and you know it.” Seaghan�
��s feet were squarely planted, fists on hips. His face bore a dull red tinge and his lower jaw protruded. “Curran is not the fool you think him.”

  Aodhàn sighed and stared out the open door. The old tic beneath his eye, that flaw he carried into every life, fluttered annoyingly. “I know,” he said. But it didn’t matter if he defended himself or agreed: Seaghan wasn’t listening.

  There was fear beneath the anger in his friend’s stance. Glenelg’s previous laird had destroyed the entire township on a whim. Could a provoked Curran Ramsay do the same? Curran, the man with no enemies? Who would have thought he could strike— or nearly strike— his young wife? The gossip wasn’t clear on that point. He’d packed up his family and carried them off to an unknown destination. There had been no word since until today, a letter in Morrigan’s hand, briefly informing Beatrice and the others where they had been, and that they were now on their way to London. We don’t know when we’ll return, it said. Fionna had shared the letter with Seaghan, and Seaghan had told Aodhàn the gist of it, right before blaming him for the entire mess.

  Seaghan’s voice was hoarse. “Has it been worthwhile, this wee game you’ve played with Curran’s wife? It’s no’ yourself alone, you know. The shame is on me as well, for I should have put a stop to it and I didn’t.” He slammed his fist against his open hand. “I wouldn’t blame Curran if he never brings her home.”

  Aodhàn’s eyes closed, shutting out the day’s miserable gloom. Would she defy her husband and come to him anyway? He pressed his palms against his throbbing temples and succumbed to tortured inner hope.

  “Have you nothing to say? No excuse you want to bandy about? Aren’t you going to explain again how Morrigan must be free to be her own woman?”

  Aodhàn clenched his jaw and gave Seaghan a warning stare. “I’ve told you you’re right. I’m to blame. Not you, not Morrigan, not Curran. If I could change it, I would.”

  The flush on Seaghan’s cheeks deepened. “You should never have started this. Now you’ll suffer the same fate as she.” One massive fist shot out and collided with Aodhàn’s chin, propelling him backward.

  Aodhàn landed with such force that for a moment he could do nothing but helplessly gasp. He rose on one elbow and touched his jaw, thinking it might well be broken.

  Bright hot rage flared. He leaped to his feet and lunged. Seaghan deflected Aodhàn’s right fist, but the left came up at the same time, swift and clandestine, an uppercut that landed against the white scar on the brawny fisherman’s cheek.

  Seaghan staggered, but instantly reclaimed his balance. With a growl and a stunning punch, he sent Aodhàn tumbling across the table and into a chair, splintering it to bits. Kicking aside the table, creels, and dishes, he crashed like a bull, blind to everything but his need to obliterate.

  Cold determination cleared Aodhàn’s vision. Anticipating his maddened foe, he struck at Seaghan’s face and belly, leaving him bent over, his teeth and lips stained wetly crimson.

  In the end, after a bout that virtually destroyed the interior of the blackhouse, the adversaries lay bloodied, bruised, and exhausted. Pain crept out of the shadows, laying a wide assault.

  Dragging himself off the floor, Aodhàn spat blood. “Curran brought her to me,” he said. “She’s been mine since the earth began, and she’ll be mine when it’s done.”

  Seaghan stared at him, panting.

  Aodhàn wheeled and left, heading north.

  Clouds scudded before a moaning wind. In time he came to the foot of an incline where a burn expanded into a pool. He splashed cold water on his face and lay there, too tired and sore to rise.

  On Barra, before Lilith and their daughters were killed, he’d been an immaculately groomed, expensively garbed man. It was an effective method of keeping the inhabitants at arm’s length. Now he looked like one of them, his hair long and unkempt, carelessly drawn into a knot to keep it out of his eyes. His beard was untrimmed, his clothing rough and dirty.

  You have much to redress, whispered the voice in his head. The old voice, the one that violated his sleep and spoke from the sea.

  “No one knows who you are anymore.”

  See yourself, the voice said, not without pity.

  The pool became a mirror to the past, showing him his original face— the arrogant Gold Lion of Mycenae, so selfishly brazen he’d tricked a country, thwarted a goddess, and perverted the world’s destiny to satisfy his own ends.

  A transient breeze disturbed the surface of the pool, and all at once Chrysaleon was the mysterious Taranis, he who visited a chieftain’s daughter in her tower bedchamber, luring her into torment and attempted suicide, which might have been a better death than the one she actually suffered.

  We’ve been at Cape Wrath, Morrigan wrote in her letter. Aodhàn knew why. He’d seen how his story affected her. Some buried part of her was bewitched still.

  Had she unearthed any sign of Eamhair, of Taranis? He could only hope she wouldn’t discover how much he’d altered the facts.

  No matter how brutally their incarnations concluded, they all anchored Aridela closer to him— including this one, where Menoetius seemed to have every advantage.

  She wasn’t content with her wealthy, handsome husband. If she were, she would not have allowed Aodhàn to kiss her, and she surely wouldn’t have kissed him back.

  At first, when his memories returned, he’d known true fear. What if Olivia changed her, made her Curran’s, body and soul?

  But it hadn’t happened.

  He was winning. Slowly perhaps, too slowly, but he felt it in every breath. He would win, if he just kept fighting.

  Damn Curran. Aodhàn had been so close to bringing Morrigan around to his way of thinking, but he was helpless with them so far away.

  His bastard brother had gone beyond forgiveness when he got her pregnant. God, how Aodhàn hated that mewling infant, the constant reminder that Aridela had given herself to another man. Never, ever, in all the thousands of years they’d journeyed this thorny trail, had she borne a child to Menoetius.

  Did it mean the end was near? Both relief and fear coursed through him at the possibility. He wasn’t ready to give in, yet he was so tired.

  His fist struck the reflection, dispersing Taranis in a flurry of ripples. “I’ll have your daughter and the entire world,” he snarled. “You’ll be swept away like a housewife brushes crumbs from her kitchen floor.”

  All perception of gods and goddesses, of Athene and the old ways, was vanishing. History books patronizingly referred to those deities as myths, and knowledge of lands where women ruled was already lost.

  Curran would fail. Athene would fail. A bit more time— that’s all he needed. Athene would diminish. At some point, she wouldn’t have enough power to bring back Menoetius or those other sycophants, Selene and Themiste. Perhaps Athene herself would die.

  Then he would drink sweet revenge, as sweet as the old gods’ nectar.

  That thought, so like something Harpalycus would say, forced a bitter laugh from Aodhàn’s throat.

  Drawn-out prickling hunger sent him stumbling, reliving the moment in the forest when he’d breathed in the scent of her skin, a subtle perfume that carried somehow from life to life, one body to the next. The musky aroma made him feel he was plunging into a warm chasm, like a womb, where nothing existed but liquid darkness. Her scent alone brought Crete to life with punishing intensity— right up to the last moment.

  He veered away from that memory.

  A stone tripped him. He fell into pine branches, trying to silence her rejection as needles scraped his face. I’ll never be separated from my child.

  Of course she would attempt nobility. This era of prudish hypocrisy leant itself to such things. On Crete, she could have as many lovers as she wished. Not here, where women must be chaste and faithful all their lives, to one man alone. Aye, she had to choose, and there was only one choice this culture would accept— Curran, simply because he’d found her before Aodhàn.

  Nauseated and dizzy, h
e pushed away from the sticky trunk. Beyond a stretch of grass there was an embankment of obsidian-like stones, layered and jagged as shark teeth from eons of pummeling. They formed a precarious barrier between ocean and land.

  Aodhàn crawled onto the edge. Below, the surf roiled like a foam-mouthed pack of wolves.

  You want me. You want to suck me into ice and darkness.

  Lightning flashed in one blinding arc after another. An almost uncontrollable desire to jump flamed then diffused through his muscles. He clutched the slippery rocks. If he were gone, Morrigan could come home to Glenelg and spend the rest of her life raising wee Currans and Morrigans. Middle age would leave her matronly and stout. Would she remember, or would she bury the name of Aodhàn Mackinnon?

  The bitch goddess had done this deliberately. She had guided Curran to Morrigan. She had caused a child to start growing. She had stolen Aodhàn’s memories then cruelly brought them back when it was too late.

  The cold elegance did not escape him. Lilith had shared the same bonds with him and their babies, after Aodhàn had ordered Greyson to kill Daniel, so this life was in every respect an eye for an eye.

  Glimpses of joy will be ripped from you.

  The sea thundered, launching white tentacles up the rocks. He could jump. A few minutes of sharp pain. Then emptiness, silence, and peace, until the next time. A new start. A fresh, unblemished slate.

  But Athene might cause him to be reborn immediately. Then he would grow to manhood as Morrigan became a grandmother, the reverse of what the bitch had done this time. What must he look like to her? No doubt his age made it easier for her to reject him.

  He imagined pointing a revolver at Curran, squeezing the trigger, watching blood flow from a hole between lifeless eyes. Aodhàn groaned, reveling in the joy of the fantasy.

  But he knew everything that had transpired on Barra and up to this moment was his punishment for ordering Daniel’s death. Greyson, his instrument of murder, had gone mad. Lilith and the children moldered in their graves; Aodhàn was merely existing, almost dead himself.

  He didn’t dare harm Curran. He simply didn’t dare.