by Grace Draven
Sickened and horrified by the growing slaughter, Imogen didn’t notice when the door behind her opened and a silent figure crept in. Her only warning came too late—the scrape of a sole on the dusty floor. She turned in time to catch a glimpse of a man’s gaunt, vulpine face before he struck her with a gloved fist. Black stars exploded behind her eyes, and she saw nothing else.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Shaken by the ferocity of the Undying King’s attack on his forces, Dradus fled the battle and took refuge in the shadow of a temple. Visions of finding treasure houses filled with gold faded before the white-faced juggernaut decimating his troop. Hayden would have to accept the idea his cousin and the trade agreements tied to her were lost. Dradus’s only interest now was creeping out of Tineroth with his head still attached to his shoulders.
All his machinations revived when he caught a glimpse of dark hair fluttering from a high window and a woman’s hands gripping the window frame. Niamh’s cursed fosterling. It had to be, but even if she wasn’t, it mattered little. She dwelt in a sheltered building, a sure sign she was of value to the Tineroth king.
With the aid of a few spells, it had been easy enough to reach the upper floor, despite the broken staircase. Cursed or not, he took no chances and struck her unconscious. He eyed her, crumpled at his feet. This was indeed the long lost princess of Berberi. Others might not see the resemblance, but Dradus had been an advisor to Hayden’s family for many years. He recognized Selene’s features in the shape of her daughter’s mouth and her stubborn chin.
He lifted her, careful not to touch any part of her where bare skin was exposed. He dragged her limp frame to the window. Outside, the fighting continued unabated. Dradus incanted another spell, and his voice thundered across the city, sending the already panicked horses into a frenzy.
“King Cededa!”
The entire courtyard froze, as if caught in the spell’s enchantment. Bloodied axe and sword still in hand, Cededa half crouched, prepared to face off against his next opponent.
He took a running leap, cleared several bodies of horses and men, and raced for the temple, a murderous rage evident in his stride. He halted when Dradus jerked Imogen’s head back, exposing her pale throat to a knife’s blade.
The mage smiled, triumphant. He was right. He possessed the bargaining chip that might well get him and what remained of his troop out of Tineroth alive. A good thing he was skilled at bluffing. If the king even suspected he had no intention of killing his hostage, they were all dead.
“Put down your weapons, Your Majesty and surrender. Otherwise I kill her.”
Cededa eyed Dradus for a long moment, and even from the safety of both height and distance, Dradus shuddered under the touch of that cold-blooded gaze.
Axe and sword fell at Cededa’s feet with a discordant clang. Those Castagher soldiers still alive and uninjured closed around him. He didn’t fall at the first punch or even the third kick. By the sixth, he was on his knees. At a dozen, he fell and lay still, bloodied and defeated.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Imogen wakened to a splitting headache and the rhythmic creak of wheels. She cracked open one eye, squinting as the light worsened the throbbing in her skull. As she grew more alert, she discovered her hands wrapped and bound, every part of her skin once bared now covered. Even her hands were bandaged. She sat up slowly, startled when a man in dented armor struck the side of the wagon and ordered her to be still.
Oh gods, the invaders. Horses and injured men surrounded the rickety wagon in which she rode. A river roared beneath them, and the statues of the ancient Tineroth kings loomed above her as the procession marched across the bridge and away from the city.
She pushed herself up, ignoring the same soldier’s harsh reprimands, gaze sweeping the crowd in search of Cededa. If the gods answered prayers, he remained safe in the city.
Her prayers went unanswered. She glimpsed flashes of pale hair splashed with red in the group following her wagon.
Imogen tottered to her feet and jumped from the wagon. The men walking behind it leapt out of her way as she rolled on the hard stone. Gasping from the shock of hitting unforgiving ground, she stood, swaying unsteadily. “Cededa!” Her cry echoed over the wind whistling across the bridge and the river thundering below it.
Stripped to just his trews, the Undying King had been reduced to a stumbling wreck of bruises and welts. Purple and black patterns of fists and boot heels mottled his torso, and his hair stuck to a battered and bloodied face. He stumbled behind a horse, tethered to the saddle by a length of rope that cinched his wrists so tightly blood trickled under the knots. The rider yanked on the rope, sending Cededa to his knees where he was dragged across the rough stone until he lurched to his feet once more.
“Stop it!” Imogen wove an unsteady path toward her lover. “Let him stand!”
She never reached him. A firm hand on her elbow whirled her about so that she faced the man who’d struck her senseless. He bowed briefly, eyes icy with both curiosity and disdain.
“He’s of no concern to you any more, Your Highness. Please return to the wagon.”
Imogen stared at the stranger, angered and astonished. What was he talking about? This man had hit her hard enough to rearrange her eyes and now he addressed her as if she were royalty. While his expression held only contempt, his voice was one of deference and civility. Had the world gone mad?
“Get your hands off me,” she snarled and yanked her arm out of his grip. The soldiers who’d jumped out of her way earlier closed ranks again, blocking her view of Cededa.
She wrestled the stranger as he grabbed around the waist and hauled her back to the wagon. Her desperation to reach the king gave her added strength but she was still no match for her captor. He slung her none too gently in the wagon. Red-faced and breathing hard, he glared at her.
“Be still, Highness, or I’ll be forced to do what I did in Tineroth.”
Imogen gathered every bit of moisture in her mouth and spat. He was quicker than she expected and dodged her shot. “Do that again, and I’ll gag you.”
She opened her mouth to hurl at him every epithet she’d overheard in the marketplaces but halted at a panicked cry from the end of the procession.
“The bridge! It’s fading! Run!”
Chaos ensued as those in the back of the line surged forward, crowding those closer to the front. Imogen’s captor leapt into the wagon with her and shouted at the driver to move it. The wagon bounced and rattled. Imogen held on to one side as it careened from right to left, knocking against horses that raced for the safety of the land. In the mayhem, the orderly ranks of marching men broke as they ran with the horses for safety. The rider holding Cededa’s rope raced past them, his captive no longer tethered.
Imogen saw him then, standing alone and still as the bridge vanished behind him. “Cededa!” She screamed his name, stretching out her bound arms as if she might catch him before the span disappeared beneath his feet. His bloodied mouth turned up in an enigmatic smile, and his voice whispered to her over the thunder of hooves.
“Farewell, my beauty.”
Her desolate cry carried through the gorge as the bridge disappeared and Cededa fell silently into the chasm to the river below.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Summer lay fully upon Castagher. Imogen stood on her balcony and watched the sun set on the harbor. She’d never been this close to the sea before and admired the way the water turned to liquid fire in the sun’s reflective light. Ships rocked on languid waves, and farther out, in open water, Castagher traded on its newly acquired shipping lanes.
A door opened and closed behind her, alerting her to a visitor. She recognized the click of her cousin’s boots on the floor and braced herself. “I’m out here, Your Majesty,” she called to him.
The clicking grew louder, accompanied by the scent of rosemary and beeswax candles. Imogen turned to Hayden as he took his place beside her. Charming, handsome, and with a sharp wit, Hayden of Castagher oo
zed insincerity. His overtures of friendship rang false, and his gaze on her made her feel like a moth trapped in a spider’s web.
“Out on the balcony again, I see.”
She summoned a smile with effort. “I have one of the best views in the city. Seems a shame to waste it.”
He acknowledged her compliment by preening. “True, but can’t you find a moment to join me in the main hall? We’ve a talented bard to entertain us at supper and a harpist from Minos. The best harpists come out of Minos, you know.”
Imogen honestly didn’t care if the harpist came from the royal stables and brought fiddlers from the catacombs with them. They’d had this conversation in various incarnations several times. Hayden had tried to coax her out of her room and join him with his court in the great hall.
She indulged him once, and that had been enough to know she was feared by the courtiers and unwelcomed in their midst. Her curse, weakened by Cededa’s touch, had returned full strength once she left Tineroth. Even had she been made free of Niamh’s bane, none would trust her enough to test it. While she found the courtiers’ reactions to her a perfect excuse to avoid meals in the royal hall, she was more isolated and alone in Castagher’s court than she’d ever been in her life.
“Please extend my apologies. You know I’m uncomfortable around so many people in one place. Nor are they comfortable around me.”
Hayden’s mouth thinned. “They’ll hold their tongues if they know what’s good for them.” He sighed and leaned against the balcony’s ledge. “You’re a lot like your mother, you know. She had this sweetness about her. A sweetness that hid a stubbornness worthy of a mule.”
Imogen offered him a tight smile. She’d known early on that she was Niamh’s fosterling, and while she’d been curious about her parents, her foster mother’s distress at the questions she asked had made her reluctant to push for more. Niamh had been a strong and giving parent despite the dark beginning they shared between them. Only now, learning of her through Hayden’s recollections, did Imogen regret not knowing Selene.
Unlike the rest of his court, Hayden showed no fear of her touch. He grasped her gloved hand and bent to kiss her knuckles. A cold shiver made her fingers twitch. “If you change your mind, tell your maid. Someone will escort you to the hall.”
“Thank you, cousin.” Now go away.
He paused at the balcony doors. “Solstice will be here in a few days. Castagher celebrates with a festival by the water. I want to take you there.” He frowned. “You can’t stay in your rooms forever, Imogen. Consider my invitation.” A threat and a command wrapped in silky words.
Imogen nodded. “I will.” She waited until he closed the door behind him to wipe her hand on her skirts.
Solstice. She had great plans for that day. Despite the trappings of luxury and privilege, she was a prisoner of Castagher and Hayden her jailer. He had sent soldiers to abduct her and bring her to him. She had been the proof he required to claim rights of trade from Berberi, the bride promised to him when he was merely a child and she a babe hardly a week old.
She had listened, numb, when he explained why a small army had scoured two kingdoms to find her and deliver to his care. Even his knowledge of her curse didn’t deter him from planning their union. She wasn’t a beloved bride, merely a means to an end, as many aristocratic women were in matters of marriage.
She despised Hayden for his single-minded ambition and casual disregard of her feelings, but she reserved her greatest loathing for Dradus, his sorcerer. Sly, deceptive and calculating, he made Imogen’s skin crawl with revulsion. He’d earned her enmity when he used her to break Cededa, intensifying it to hatred when he revealed how he found her on their return trip to Castagher.
“I raised Niamh’s body from the grave for a little chat.” He smirked at her horrified inhalation. “You can learn a lot of from the dead if you ask the right questions. The witch told me where to find you.”
“You’re fouler than the bottom of a privy pit,” Imogen spat. “I hope she curses you from her grave.”
His smirked deepened. “Like she cursed you?” Imogen froze, and the smirk turned to a full-blown shark’s grin. “She didn’t tell you, did she? Took her secret to the grave.” Dradus folded his hands under his chin. “Niamh of Leids became the castoff mistress of King Varn when he married your mother. A woman scorned is a dangerous creature; a sorceress scorned, a lethal one. She laid a death geas on your parents, but something went wrong, and you inherited the curse. You killed two wet nurses, a maid and your parents before someone figured out you were the assassin.”
Imogen wondered when all the air had suddenly been sucked out of the room. She couldn’t breathe. Dradus watched her with a reptilian gaze and the smirk she so badly wanted to strike off his face with one killing blow. “You’re lying,” she said. “Niamh would never cast such a geas, if only because she loved me and liked children. She’d never put me at such risk.”
She did believe; however, in her foster mother’s need for revenge. Niamh’s journal revealed how much she loved Varn. Broken-hearted, enraged, she might well have sought vengeance against him and the woman he took to wife.
The mage shook his head. “Niamh didn’t know Selene was pregnant. When she discovered what happened and that Varn’s sister planned to have you drowned, she stole you away and disappeared.”
Niamh, who had devoted her life to raising and protecting Imogen, had been the reason for her curse. Tears clouded her vision, and Imogen forced them back. Never would she cry before this piece of filth.
Her foster mother had begged her for forgiveness on her deathbed. Deep inside, where Dradus couldn’t see, Imogen wept. For herself and a life so profoundly altered by another woman’s revenge, for Niamh who willingly sentenced herself to raising a child who wielded death in her touch, and for the parents she never knew who welcomed their firstborn into the world and died because of it.
Imogen had fled Dradus’s presence and avoided him now as much as possible. Hayden favored him; she wished him dead and remained wary whenever they crossed paths. His questions regarding Tineroth and Cededa held all manner of traps designed to catch a slip of the tongue or glean a secret. Imogen silently thanked Cededa for never telling her where the Living Waters pooled in Tineroth. Dradus would get nothing from her.
He often told Hayden his studies called him to other cities and towns, and he disappeared for several days, returning with a frustrated scowl and more probing questions for Imogen. She suspected he returned to the gorge in the futile hope of resurrecting the Yinde Bridge and a second crossing into Tineroth. He believed Cededa dead, killed by his own magic and the river that accepted his plummeting body. Imogen didn’t naysay him, though she fervently hoped he was wrong.
All her plans, her desires, her reason for not falling into despair rested in the belief that Cededa had survived and returned to Tineroth.
She abandoned the balcony for her room. Long shadows stretched across the floor, and her maid Lila circled the room, lighting lamps to chase away the darkness. She eyed her mistress as one might a barely tamed beast—cautious and ready to take flight at the first hint of attack.
Imogen quelled the urge to roll her eyes. Lila was no different from any of the others. Her fear of Imogen’s curse hadn’t lessened with time or Imogen’s friendly overtures. She curtsied nervously, nearly setting her skirts on fire with the lit candle she carried.
“’Good evening, Your Highness. Will you be wanting your supper in your room tonight?”
The question was virtually rhetorical at this point. Since she’d first arrived at Castagher, Imogen had only eaten in the feasting hall three times, each occasion an interminable evening characterized by rude stares, whispers and insincere smiles.
“Yes, Lila. Thank you.”
The maid bobbed another curtsey before fleeing the chamber. Imogen waited until the door closed before pulling a travel sack from under her bed. In it she’d stuffed a water flask, a few days’ worth of pilfered oat cakes and a
dress discarded by the palace’s head laundress. To these, she added a heavy cloak and a small purse containing four skells of silver, enough to buy a horse and ride to the Castagheri border. The sack went back under the bed. Thank the gods her maids were lazy and didn’t bother to dust under there. All she could do now was wait.
The days before Solstice crawled on feeble legs. The entire city prepared to celebrate, and for once Hayden didn’t insist Imogen join him in the upcoming celebrations. Death’s handmaiden among a drunken crowd of celebrants presented too much of a risk. Imogen occupied herself with studying the map she had tucked away in a book of poems. She had memorized every detail but studied it a final time before tossing it in the fireplace’s grate where the flames greedily devoured the parchment.
She thought of Niamh once more. She might have discounted Dradus’s revelations as lies, but Hayden verified most of them.
Stricken by her lover’s change of affections from his mistress to his new wife, Niamh had gone mad. The need for vengeance had overridden any sense of reason or compassion, and she’d leveled a dark power against King Varn’s wife, never knowing until too late that her bane had stricken the unborn child Selene carried.
Death ran like blood through Imogen’s tiny hands, striking down any she touched, including Selene, Varn, the midwife and three nursemaids. By the time Niamh discovered the devastation her curse had wrought, Varn’s sister had stepped in and instructed the newborn be taken out of the castle and drowned in the nearest well. The maid assigned to the hideous task never saw the blow that struck her down or the fleet shadow that gently lifted the sleeping infant from her cradle and vanished with her into the night.
