by Grace Draven
He ran his fingers down her sides, tickling as she squirmed and laughed and tried to throw him off her. They wrestled in the bed until she was breathless and sweating. Once more she found herself atop Cededa, thighs spread. His pale eyes had gone dark, and his hands gripped her hips.
“Fucking your sweet mouth isn’t enough, Imogen. I want more.”
The coarse remark sent a flare of heat through her body. She curled her hand around his cock, still hard despite his recent orgasm, and guided it to her entrance, slick and aroused by his nearness and his words. “How much more?” she teased and slid partway down.
The faint soreness lingering from the previous night gave way to a throbbing. She moaned, the sound echoed by Cededa.
He gripped her hips in hard hands and thrust upward, going deep until she’d sheathed his cock completely. “All of you. I want all of you.”
Outside the sun rose, its light brightening the chamber as morning warmed to noon and Cededa introduced Imogen to many more pleasures of the flesh.
When they finally left the bed, she was weak-kneed and starved.
“You might not have to eat, but I think I could eat an entire boar by myself.”
As if on cue, Cededa’s stomach growled. His eyes widened. Were she not as shocked as he by the sound, Imogen might have laughed at the amazed expression on his face.
“When was the last time your belly made that noise?”
He rubbed his midriff. “Kingdoms have risen and fallen since I last ate a meal.”
“That’s a long time between breakfast and dinner, Sire.”
“True.” Cededa rubbed the taut muscles and was rewarded with another loud gurgle. They both laughed.
He took her hand and drew her to him. “Get dressed.” He glanced at the bag she’d brought with her to Tineroth. “Do you have another shift?” She nodded. “A good thing as I don’t think the other can be repaired. Meet me at the library. I’ll return there after my hunt. We can eat, and I’ll translate some of the Partik tomes for you.”
An uneasy frisson scattered down her back, one she couldn’t place. There was something here she should know. Some bit of reasoning that was escaping her. “Sire, what does your hunger mean?”
He kissed her and shrugged as if these cravings were nothing more than trivial news. “It means I am awakening, Imogen.” He gestured to her bag. “Get dressed,” he repeated. “I’ll see you in a little while.”
They ate while sitting on the floor of the library’s vestibule. Dust motes danced in the air above them, reminiscent of the fireflies lighting the city at night. Imogen watched as Cededa picked carefully at the roasted hare he’d provided, slicing off small slivers and eating slowly.
She didn’t blame him. Who knew how his body might react to those first bits of food to pass his lips after so long? At his initial bite, she’d prepared to scuttle out of the way in case he sickened. He didn’t. Instead, his eyes lit up. “This is good.”
“You’ve a decent cook in your kitchens.” She shrugged. “Whoever that might be and wherever your kitchens are.”
Cededa laughed. “You’re the recipient of the most talented hedgewitch magics, Imogen. Niamh would have approved.”
Imogen sighed. “I miss her very much. I’m glad you met her when she was young. The sickness didn’t just take her life. It stole her spirit…diminished her.”
“I didn’t know her that well.” His mouth turned up in a faint smile. “Certainly not in the way I’ve come to know you. What I did know I admired.”
She returned the smile. “She was amazing. Thoughtful, loving, sharp as a well-honed blade and educated. I’d never known any to best her in conversation or bargaining.”
“Did she ever tell you why you were born cursed?”
Imogen shook her head. “No. She only said she was a coward for not telling me.”
He rose abruptly and offered his hand to help her stand. “If you’re done, we’ll return to the palace. Gather up the scrolls you want to bring with you.”
He led her out of the library and across the city’s main avenue. They passed the ruin of the temple that preserved the queens’ names in stone and crossed the green stretch of the abandoned arena where Cededa practiced with various weaponry each morning. When they neared the catafalque with his effigy, she made him stop.
“Every portrait, every statue, any likeness of you has been defaced. Except this one. Why?”
Cededa stared at his likeness in stone, his expression so much like the effigy’s in that moment, Imogen suffered a touch of revulsion. “It was a message. One carved in marble instead of written on parchment, guaranteed to accompany me into this pathetic existence. There was rebellion in all parts of my empire, including this city. I’d led an army to Mir. While I was gone, the mages and ministers left behind emptied Tineroth and proceeded to destroy every likeness of me, except this one. It was no oversight. No accident. They left me a sepulcher I’d never be fortunate enough to use.”
Imogen shivered and hugged herself. “Were you truly so hated?”
Cededa closed his eyes. “I remember those days. Chaos and screaming mobs. Buildings set alight. Temples desecrated. People shouting for the ministers to bring forth the head of the Butcher.” He opened his eyes to gaze upon the effigy. “I think ‘hated’ is too mild a word.” He pointed to the inscription carved on the side of the catafalque. “This is written in Scetaq, the language of curses. It says ‘Here lies Cededa, alive yet dead. May he remember. May we forget.’”
Imogen gaped at him, unease worming its way through the glow of her fascination for her new lover. “What did you do to turn your people against you?”
“Enough to live four thousand years and still regret it. Still grieve it.”
They stood in silence for a moment before he motioned for her to follow him again. This time she didn’t take his hand, nor did he offer it. He led her to one of the tall spires still intact and shrouded in a green veil of ivy. Cededa wrenched the warped door open, snapping brittle hinges with his efforts.
He took her hand, and they climbed a stone staircase that spiraled endlessly upward. When they finally stopped, Imogen leaned against the wall and tried not to breathe in great gulps of dusty air.
“What are we doing?” she wheezed on a thin note. She scowled to see Cededa hadn’t even broken a sweat from the arduous climb.
He opened another door. Light poured into the stairwell’s gloom, along with fresh air. Imogen followed him out onto a balcony and gasped at the sight before her.
Tineroth lay in the afternoon sun, a relic of broken splendor awash in the pale filtered light of a cloudy sky. From her rooftop view, she saw the green crown of the surrounding forest with its strange trees and hidden occupants. Beyond the woods, the deep crevasse with its ribbon of river.
As if he heard her unspoken question, Cededa spoke. “Once I took back the key, the bridge disappeared. When you return home, I’ll summon it again so you can cross.”
Despair rose inside her at his words. Imogen tried to brush it away and failed. She should be glad to leave. She’d be free of her bane and could return to a world populated by others, where there was noise and market days and festivals, rainstorms and changes of seasons and the renewed hope of a normal life.
None of that seemed to matter as much at the moment. The king who’d become her savior and her lover wouldn’t accompany her into that new life.
“Why did you bring me to your chambers yesterday, Sire?”
He stayed quiet so long, she didn’t think he’d answer. “So that one living person might know I was once a man. Flawed and incomplete, but still a man like any other. I bled; I loved; I warred; I married and sired children. I am more than just the Undying King of Tineroth. I am also less.
“When I take you back across the bridge and leave you on the other side, I hope I will leave a woman with a knowledge beyond the stories told, even beyond the intimacy we now share between us.”
His words brought tears to her eyes, and
she wiped them away. “Why are we here now?”
His measuring gaze held her in place. “You tell me, Imogen.”
She looked back over the city, its silent streets and empty courtyards. “So that I might see the beauty that once was.” A broken city, abandoned, empty and still regal. “Tineroth is your true wife.”
“She is my jailer and my mistress. I am bound to her, body and soul, charged with defending her from all invaders. The cost of the privilege that is immortality.”
Imogen turned to Cededa and slid her arms around his neck. He went willingly into her embrace. “I didn’t need to see your chambers or even Tineroth from this balcony to understand you or the price you pay. I saw the man within the king, Sire. Even if you had no way of lifting my bane, I’d remain grateful and happy to the end of my days that I met you, Cededa the Fair.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Did you speak much with my mother when she cared for you?”
They sat on the floor of another of the palaces numerous rooms, a low table between them. Torchlight painted sent shadows cavorting across the walls.
Cededa’s fingers hovered over an ornate game piece as he pondered his next move and ignored her attempts at distracting him. He jumped the piece two spaces and removed three of hers from the game board. “No. One of the last things I regained in my healing was the ability to speak. But she spoke to me often enough. Read to me as well. Remember when I said it’s how I learned your language?” He moved another piece onto the board, putting her most powerful player at risk.
Imogen hissed and hunched closer to the table for a closer look—a fruitless effort. Nothing hid on the board. He was a master at the game, and while Imogen played well, she was no match.
She studied the pieces. “Niamh wrote in her journal that you were burned.”
Cededa waited until she moved her designated piece and sealed her fate in this round of Senet. “I was burned. Burned until I was nothing more than an ash heap and a pile of bones.”
Her eyes rounded, horror darkening her irises. “Dear gods. Were you aware the entire time?”
“Yes.” He made his next move and conquered one corner of her territory on the board. He didn’t elaborate. Such memories were not to be shared or detailed. The agony, the heat, the consuming flames. Jeering faces and laughter, the ribald jokes and toasts with ale cups as he bellowed his pain to the cold moon until he could no longer see or hear. They had scattered his ashes to the winds and tossed his bones into the forest, a desecration of the man who’d decimated their numbers before they overwhelmed him.
He’d lain for days in a pile of leaves somewhere far beyond Tineroth, an abomination half healed, half remade and still smelling of the fires that had burned him to nothing more than scorched bone.
Niamh hadn’t fled when she found him. Instead, she’d bound him in layers of magic as natural as he was unnatural and sequestered him a private room in her home so he might renew in peace.
He welcomed the solace, the brief moments of touching the living world, even when the soul of Tineroth and her cursed waters shrieked inside his head for him to return. That compulsion could not be conquered. The city he once ruled had become the city he now served. Once he was whole again, he’d left Niamh’s house, leaving behind a key to the city and a promise to offer aid if she ever needed him. He never expected to see her again. He never dreamed he’d meet her daughter.
A light caress glided across the back of his hand, breaking into his bleak thoughts. In the torchlight, Imogen’s features were soft with sympathy. Her fingers laced with his over the Senet board. “I am so sorry, Cededa. Was it the Waters that healed you?”
He nodded. The colossal power trapped inside a tiny stream hidden far beneath Tineroth’s caves made Imogen’s bane look like child’s play. Burned to a mound of ash and blackened bone should have ended him. The agony he suffered during the burning made him beg for death, but even fire couldn’t conquer the Waters’ effects. Cededa was reborn, cinder by cinder until he stood before Niamh, whole and unmarked by his immolation, except for the memories scorched into his mind.
“The Waters are a blessing then,” Imogen said.
His hand convulsed in her clasp. “Is that what you believe?”
Her grip tightened, and her gray eyes narrowed. She peered at him intently, as if searching for the right words. “No, I don’t believe it. I believe you’re more cursed than I am.” She used her free hand in a gesture that encompassed not only the room they shared but Tineroth itself. “What blessing is there in living an immortal life caught between worlds? Alone?”
Cededa chuckled and lifted her hand, turning it to place a kiss in her palm. He could name one blessing now—he’d lived long enough to meet and fall in love with Niamh’s extraordinary daughter. He lowered her hand but kept it clasped in his. “I ruled an empire, one built by my grandfather and expanded by my father, but empires are more slippery than eels and harder to control. I needed more time to expand my lands, consolidate Tineroth’s power, bring other kingdoms under my rule. More time than a single mortal’s lifespan.”
The recollection of that far-off age, when he’d been consumed by avarice and ambition, held a pain greater than his immolation by mercenaries intent on stealing the Waters. “Imagine my joy when we discovered the Living Waters. I’d have ten lifetimes, twenty if I wished, to expand my empire. I’d be king of the world, not just the lands I’d inherited or conquered so far.”
Imogen frowned. “There’s nothing noble in carrying on a legacy of conquest.” She eased her hand out of his grip, and he let her go.
Cededa arched an eyebrow. “You know nothing of empires, Imogen.” She blushed and looked away. “A monarch who chooses ideals over power isn’t a monarch for long.” Experience had taught him that.
She must have caught the regret tainting his declaration. “Was it worth it? Drinking the Waters?”
“No.” She made to ask another question, then closed her mouth abruptly. “Say or ask it, Imogen. No use in hiding your desire to do so.”
She hesitated before forging ahead. “When did you become Cededa the Butcher?”
His insides froze at the question. He expected it, had always expected it from the moment she crossed the bridge and begged his help. Who wouldn’t want to know how someone came by such a grotesque title?
He dropped his gaze to the Senet board, moved his king through her defense wall and crushed her army in the game. When he looked up once more, he caught her eyeing him warily.
“After I led soldiers into Mir and destroyed yet another rebellion. I made a lesson of the city.” His voice was soft, toneless. “We left none alive.”
Imogen fisted her hands in her skirts. He heard the gasped trapped in her throat. She swallowed hard. “The women?” she whispered. “Children?”
He shook his head. “None left alive,” he repeated. “It took us three days. The canals and the fountains, even the river ran red with blood.” Only Tineroth’s screaming for his return had ever drowned out the screams of the dying that still rang in his mind.
Imogen lunged away from him, knocking the table with her knee hard enough to make the Senet board and spill the game pieces onto the floor. He watched, unmoving, as she scooted back on her haunches, desperate to put space between them.
The Butcher. He’d given her the truth, if not the answer she probably wanted. Not a hyperbolic title risen from the dramatic retellings of a popular fable, but a name earned and deserved. A part of him withered away at the sight of her scuttling back from him, revulsion twisting her features. He knew what she saw—the monster of legend, the reason why each of his images, except the catafalque, had been destroyed, why his people had finally revolted and why his greatest sorcerers had wrenched Tineroth from her anchor to the world and cast her into oblivion, and him along with her.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Feeling as if she’d suffocate, Imogen lurched to her feet and bolted from the room. The palace walls and cloisters warped in her blurred
vision, and she careened against a set of pilasters, nearly tumbling down the stairs in her headlong rush to escape.
As if it heard her distress, the sentient mist appeared, spilling onto stairs, sliding under her feet and rising to encompass her in a cool cloud of faint light.
“Please, I have to get out,” she implored her ghostly escort.
She cried out as the floor fell away, and she was lifted by invisible hands. They carried her to the doors and outside, setting her down gently. Imogen barely choked out a “Thank you” before collapsing on the palace steps. Tears followed; great, wrenching sobs that grew in strength until she screamed her anguish into her skirts.
Her screams turned to moans. She had bedded a monster. Called him beautiful and taken his seed into her body. The thought made her stomach heave, and she hunched over her knees, dry-retching until her ribs ached and her throat burned.
The sculptor who’d carved the effigy had known The Undying King far more than the woman who now shared his bed. Imogen wiped her cheeks on her sleeve. He hadn’t told her anything she shouldn’t have already guessed. He’d been named The Butcher. Only her willful blindness had made her shy away from delving too deeply into how he’d inherited such a title.
The quiet, reserved man who skillfully and lovingly introduced her to the intimacy between man and woman and who generously offered a means by which she might live a fruitful life didn’t seem the type who’d spend three days slaughtering innocents. An image of the marble effigy on the catafalque flashed in her mind’s eye. The cruelty, the calculating malice—etched deep in frozen marble. That man, however, oh yes. That man would commit such atrocities and laugh as he did so.
Her tears slowed and finally dried, leaving her eyes nearly swollen shut. A dry breeze fluttered her skirts and stirred the overgrown weeds that spilled over the steps on which she sat. Behind her, the eroded hulk of one of Tineroth’s many nameless buildings cast its long shadow over her and the cracked street. The memory of Niamh’s words sounded in her mind like a dirge.
