by Grace Draven
She wasn’t, and it had taken the words of one to guide him here. The men who dug up Niamh’s grave fled the moment they shoveled away the last pile of dirt to reveal the blanket-wrapped body. The reek of decay made Dradus’s stomach heave but didn’t deter him from his task. Dark spells muttered in fading daylight dropped the air’s temperature from chilly to frigid. His breath steamed from his mouth in wispy clouds as he spoke the words that made Niamh’s body sit up, stand and shake off the blanket.
The horror that faced him made him stutter the words for a moment, but he completed the incantation and asked the all-important question. “Where is the daughter of Varn of Berberi and Selene of Castagher?”
Silence reigned long enough for Dradus to fear the spell hadn’t worked. He could hardly look at the rotting wreck of Niamh’s body as it stood just below him in the grave’s shallow pit. Her mouth didn’t move, but a woman’s voice finally answered him in dull tones.
“Where you can’t reach her, mage.”
Dradus scowled. He’d phrased his question carefully, or so he thought. Ghosts, like the fae, were bound to tell the truth, but sometimes their truth omitted important information. “Tell me her name and where she is at this moment.”
“Her name is Imogen, and she stands before the king of Tineroth.”
His eyes widened before narrowing to annoyed slits. “You cannot lie, spirit.”
“I do not lie.”
Tineroth and her last king were nothing more than fable. A favorite tale told by mothers to children and bards to villagers and townsmen, everyone had grown up with the story of old King Cededa, corrupted by immortality and doomed to imprisonment in a city caught between worlds. Dradus had been fascinated by the story as a child. He had no time for fairytales now.
He recited another spell, this one a geas of truth. “Tineroth isn’t real. Where is Imogen now?”
Niamh’s rotting, broken body shuddered a moment but remained upright. “Tineroth is real,” she insisted. “Imogen stands before its king.”
Dradus stroked his chin as a pulse of excitement shot through him. Maybe, just maybe the ghost told the truth. His eagerness to find Varn’s daughter trebled, spurred on by the possibilities of discovering the lost city. And all the treasures hidden within her. “Who is Tineroth’s king?”
“Cededa the Fair.”
He fired off several questions after that, no longer bothered by the reek emanating from the grave or the sharp scent of smoke filling his nostrils as the soldiers set fire to Niamh’s hovel. By the time he extracted the information he wanted from her revenant, Dradus had to bite his lip bloody to keep back the howl of triumph welling in his throat.
He reversed his spells and Niamh’s body crumpled in a heap in its resting place. The stench intensified, and he backed away to whistle for his makeshift gravediggers to return. They approached reluctantly, covering their mouths and noses with their hands. “Rebury her,” he ordered. “And do it right. I may have need of her bones later and don’t want some scavenger spreading them through half the woods.”
Their muttered curses fell on deaf ears as Dradus strode back to the clearing where fire consumed the last bits of the witch’s house, sending black plumes of smoke into the sky. Caught in visions of wealth untold, he hardly noticed. He’d return Varn’s daughter to Hayden, humbly accept the monarch’s gratitude and promptly disappear with treasure to make Hayden look like a pauper by comparison. This fool’s endeavor had suddenly turned in the right direction.
The troop’s captain approached him. “Nothing much to loot and no girl to be found. What do you wish to do?”
Dradus smiled. “Mount up. Thanks to a dead woman, I know where she is.”
Frustration blunted his initial giddiness now. Niamh’s answers to his questions had gotten him this far but no further. He had ridden to the cliff’s edge, expecting to find a lost city rising up from the landscape, an easy ride to its gates, an easy conquest once he and his men stormed through them. He hadn’t expected a wind-blasted gorge or an endless forest undisturbed by a village much less a city.
Another man might accept defeat, but Dradus hadn’t risen to the status he occupied by giving up so easily. Somewhere, on the other side of the gorge, Tineroth hid in plain sight. He was certain of it, felt it in his bones, heard it in the strange, wordless cant filling his ears.
He turned his horse away from the edge and back toward the newly erected camp. Nothing stayed hidden forever. He would find Tineroth and the girl who hid there. He had time.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Imogen stared up at the remaining two spires of a tumbled-down temple. Ivy dripped from their roofs in lacy curtains, creeping toward the flat table of an altar open to the sky. “Tell me of this temple. What god did you build it for, and did you worship him yourself?”
“Not a god,” Cededa said beside her. “A goddess. And no, I didn’t worship her. I worshipped no one, except myself on occasion.” His amused look held more than a touch of self-mockery. “I don’t even remember her name. A deity of spring maybe, or fruit trees. I recall her supplicants offering pomegranates.”
“And you weren’t a supplicant.”
“Hardly.”
In the three weeks since her arrival in Tineroth, Imogen occupied her time with exploring the fabled city and killing its king with her touch. He stood at the top of the temple steps with her, looking none the worse for her fatal caresses. Dressed in worn silk that had once been finer than any ell of cloth she’d ever seen, he surveyed the fallen worship house with a bored expression.
She didn’t truly believe he could lift her curse, but she couldn’t discount what she saw. What she felt. Cededa had touched her face with a bare hand and didn’t drop dead at her feet. That alone had stunned her almost speechless. And she had touched him many times since then at his invitation. He might not possess the ability to break the curse, but his resistance to it left her almost as euphoric as he when he discovered the nature of her malediction, though his joy was a macabre thing. Never had she met anyone so thrilled at the idea of dying.
He was a mystery. Sublime, beguiling, malevolent. Cededa had been a model host to his unexpected guest, but Niamh’s words were never far from her thoughts.
“His people called him Cededa the Fair, then Cededa the Butcher.”
Even without those disturbing words, she recalled the effigy on the catafalque, the cruelty captured in marble, untouched by time or weathering. He stole her breath, and not just because of his physical beauty.
Cededa motioned her to follow him, and they picked their way through the cascade of rubble spilling across the temple floor. “The father of one of my wives designed this temple,” he said. “This one and several others throughout the city. I’ll take you to see them, if you wish. One is still mostly intact.”
Imogen’s pulse raced as it always did now when Cededa offered to escort her through Tineroth, describing the city as it had once been—a thriving metropolis bursting with life and noise. Raised on Niamh’s colorful tales of her time in Berberi, she easily imagined similar scenes in ancient Tineroth. “Oh yes, please. I want to see the entire city before I leave.” She paused, caught by his first remark. “One of your wives? How many did you have?”
The idea didn’t surprise her so much as intrigue her. Niamh might have kept Imogen isolated from the wide world, but she didn’t keep her ignorant. While the kings of Berberi and Castagher married only one woman, there were other monarchs who married several, each occupying a position in the spousal hierarchy.
Cededa’s mouth, with its natural sneer, quirked into a brief smile. Imogen instinctively pulled away when he reached for her hand. He waited, palm turned up, until she entwined her fingers with his. “Come,” he said. “I’ll show you. It’s been a long time since I’ve been a husband to anyone, and stone recalls better than I do the names of those I took to wife.”
He led her to the remains of a nave and a lone column, it’s top third broken off, but still standing. Cededa s
crubbed away the layer of lichen from part of its surface to reveal symbols carved into the stone. Imogen recognized the similarity between the writing here and that on the bridge beneath the statues. Fascinating, and for her, unreadable.
Her companion traced one line of script with a fingertip. “A monk was assigned to record the names of the women I married. This is the architect’s daughter. All I remember of Elsida was fine skin and a crooked-tooth smile. She was my thirty-seventh wife, I think.” He shrugged at Imogen’s raised eyebrows. “I’ve lived a long time and married for many reasons; none for affection.” His gaze drifted, as if he looked inward at a memory long buried. “I remember Elsida’s father better. A man of vision who saw buildings as living beings. I think he left a small part of his soul in every temple and house he designed or built.”
Imogen surveyed the temple’s shattered shell and hugged herself. If the gods had any pity, they set free whatever lingering soul thread the architect had woven into his creation when it was destroyed. She hugged herself, chilled even in the city’s humid warmth. “What are the other names?” she asked.
Cededa’s gaze turned outward once more. He leaned closer and read the names aloud, pausing sometimes with furrowed brow as if trying to recall a long-dead wife’s face. His hand rested flat atop one name. “Helena. The most beautiful woman ever born. She bore me seven children.” He read more names, and Imogen counted sixty-two wives before he paused at the last name. She took a wary step back as his demeanor transformed, reminding her of their first encounter, when he threatened to cut her throat with his glaive.
His pale blue eyes were cold, and he drew his hand away from the column as if the stone burned. “Gruah. My last wife, my judge, and my punisher.”
Caution warred with curiosity. Imogen wanted to know more of this Gruah, but every survival instinct she possessed buzzed a warning that such an idea invited severe consequences. Even if she were fog-brained, she couldn’t misinterpret the warning in Cededa’s frigid expression.
A tense silence swelled between them before she grasped her courage with both hands and changed the subject. “How many children did you have? Just the seven by Helena?” Hard to believe this icicle of a man with his deathless stare had once been someone’s father.
He blinked and met her eyes, as if seeing her for the first time. His features relaxed a little, and Imogen breathed a soft sigh of relief. “With that many wives, not to mention the concubines, I fathered armies of children.”
And outlived them all, she thought. How sad. Immortality exacted a heavy price. “Did you have a favorite child?”
The space between his eyebrows knitted into a pair of lines. “At first I did.” He shrugged. “I didn’t really know most of them. Seventeen raised revolts against me. Six planned my assassination. Two almost succeeded.” His lips twitched as she stared at him slack-jawed. “Why so appalled? Rebellion and regicide are bedmates in the game of kingship, witch’s daughter, and they usually start with one’s siblings or offspring.”
Cededa the Butcher. What had he done to earn such a ghastly title? What made his children hate him so much that more than a dozen led rebellions against him and six tried to kill him? Maybe it wasn’t him so much as their own greed and thirst for power. Hard to become monarch yourself when your parent didn’t age or die of sickness. Still, she didn’t truly believe him a harassed innocent, not with such a brutal moniker attached to his name. And he called his last wife his judge and punisher. What did he mean? An icy wash of fear sluiced down her spine.
Her expression must have given away her thoughts. Cededa’s faint amusement disappeared. He watched her the same way a hawk watched a mouse hiding in a wheat field. “Afraid, Imogen?” he asked.
His tone was dead, flat. Pride might tempt her to deny it, but no one in their right mind would lie to this man. “Yes.”
Something flickered in that piercing gaze. Regret. “It wasn’t my intention,” he said in a warmer voice.
Imogen’s fear faded as quickly as it appeared. “I believe you.” She didn’t lie about that either.
They stared at each other for a moment. Sixty-three wives, Imogen thought, and each likely struck dumb or terrified at their first sight of him. He certainly left her speechless on numerous occasions since her arrival.
Cededa stepped over a pile of broken masonry, smaller bits crunching under his boot heels. “Come,” he said. “Tineroth has a library, or what’s left of one, two avenues away.” He paused to glance at her over his shoulder. “Unless you want to see something else.”
“A library,” she breathed out in a reverent voice. If anyone ever built a temple to her, she’d ask them to make it a library. “With many books?” Who cared if she couldn’t decipher the languages in which they were written. There was magic in the feel of parchment and ink.
Again that brief smile lifted the corner of his mouth. “Scrolls mostly, but there are some books. I can’t vouch for their condition.”
As he promised, the library stood two streets away, surrounded by a garden gone wild and choked with weeds and the ubiquitous ivy. Cededa helped her over a swathe of climbing vine, his bare hand warm in hers, his body seemingly unaffected by her touch. While in much better condition than the temple ruin they’d just left, the library showed the marks of destruction like every other building she had so far explored in Tineroth. Half of a staircase led to a second floor and then a third where shelves housed what must have been thousands of scrolls. All inaccessible to her unless Cededa could fly.
He chuckled and shook his head as if he heard her thoughts. “I’ve a few talents at my disposal. Flight isn’t one of them.” He gestured to a far corner, tucked under one of the stairwells. “Start there,” he said. “The newest scrolls are stored in those niches and won’t turn to dust when you disturb them. If you find something that interests you, bring it to me, and I’ll translate.” He nudged her toward the treasure trove and left her to idly explore another part of the library.
Imogen watched him for a few moments. Had he come here when the library stood whole and undamaged? He had once been a warrior king. That was how legend remembered him, yet she fancied he might have appreciated some of the scholarly pursuits.
The scrolls were predictably undecipherable, and in some cases illegible, their ink faded to ghostly scratches on the parchment. She brought Cededa her first armful of documents to translate. He made a perch of an overturned column top and invited her to sit beside him while he read aloud.
Most were inventories of harvest yields or the results of city court rulings. One made Cededa’s eyes flash and his lips thin to a tight line. Imogen glanced from him to the scroll and back again. “What is it?”
“A writ of arrest for the act of treason. My arrest.” He flung the scroll across the vast room before crooking his fingers at her. “Give me the next one.”
She wordlessly handed him another scroll. Who called for the king’s arrest those many centuries earlier? Was it even possible to arrest a monarch then? She didn’t think one could do it now.
The rest of the scrolls were more like the first bunch, dry accounts of trade goods and shipping bills, marriage records and births. She gathered the ones piled at her feet to return them to their cubby holes. “Your world then is much like ours now I think.”
Cededa snorted softly. “I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad one.” He tipped his chin toward the opposite side of the room. “Try those over there. You might have better luck and discover something more interesting than who bought flax or a pair of oxen.”
His words proved prophetic. The first scroll Imogen extracted from a painted box and unrolled made her eyebrows climb. While the ink might be faded on documents of lading, this scroll retained the vivid hues of both paint and ink.
Pictures illustrated inside decorative frames revealed themselves with the scroll’s slow unrolling, and Imogen’s eyes rounded with each revelation. Niamh’s forthright teachings regarding bed play, even the more intimate details she’
d written of her relationship with Varn in her journal, didn’t compare to the lascivious scenes painted on the scrolls.
“You’ve found something that’s snared your attention,” Cededa called out. “Bring it, and I’ll translate.”
Imogen glanced at him and let the scroll roll itself closed. “I don’t think this one needs translating.” She picked her way to him, handed him the scroll and resumed her seat beside him. Her smile widened to a grin at his startled expression.
“They kept these in the library?” His obvious shock made Imogen clap a hand over her mouth to contain her laughter. She cleared her throat and grasped one side of the rods as he unrolled the parchment to its full length.
Each brightly painted square depicted a sexual act—sometimes between a man and a woman, sometimes between a man and a man and sometimes between two women. A few involved several participants. The painter wasn’t what she’d call an artist, and she had a more difficult time deciphering whose limbs and appendages belonged to whom. She peered closer at one of the scenes. Was that a goat?
“Look your fill?” Cededa’s dry question interrupted her perusal. His pale eyes shone in the gathering gloom. “It’s getting dark. We’ll return to the palace so you can eat. Bring the scroll with you. You’re right, it’s self-explanatory.”
“What is it? Instructions for lovemaking?”
Cededa stood and relinquished the scroll to her. “Hardly. More like fucking.” An odd shiver raised gooseflesh on Imogen’s arms at his blunt declaration. “It’s a list of services offered at one of Tineroth’s brothels. Such things were commonly posted outside the business. Odd to find one stored in the library.”
Imogen stared at him and then at the scroll in her hands. Her first glimpse of the painted scenes had elicited surprise and then a tingling warmth that coursed through her body. While she wasn’t at all interested in the finer details regarding the goat, she did want a closer look at the others. Their graphic intimacy flustered her and left her with questions Niamh had not answered in her bid to prepare her daughter for adulthood, even a solitary one.
