by Tara Janzen
The biggest difference he noted in her in his new and painfully sober state was her age. Young she was, but not so young as he’d thought, no teenaged priestess.
“How old are you?” he asked. Not the first question he’d planned on asking her, nor the most important one, but the one that came to mind.
“One hundred and twenty-five times has the Earth gone around the Sun since the day of my birth.”
He blanched at her answer. He’d long ago learned that in the cosmic scheme of things, human lives were some of the shortest, just as he’d also learned that longer-lived species usually had an arrogance to match, most times for good reason. One hundred and twenty-five years was a very long time for someone who looked no more than simply five-and-twenty, long enough for her to have learned things he probably had yet to imagine. He rubbed at a new pain in his temples. One hundred and twenty-five friggin’ years.
“That’s more than I would have guessed” was the best reply he could manage.
“My tribe is long-lived, dread lord, on my father’s side.”
Given the circumstances, he took heart at her continued use of the term “dread lord.”
Christe, but his head was splitting.
“And who is your father?” With a death-witch priestess for a mother, he could only wonder at the man who had sired her.
“An Ilmarryn Magia Lord. Tamisk is his name.”
Morgan lowered his hand from his eyes and immediately wished he hadn’t. The room was starting to soften around the edges, a Carillion illusion. He could almost feel the wine shrinking up into itself and evaporating out of his cells, a circumstance bound to leave a wasteland behind.
“And your father made these?” He lifted his tracking bracelet. Though unfamiliar with the witch Vishab, Morgan had heard of the Ilmarryn, the desert faeries, but only as myth. They were said to live in a Lost Forest on the edge of the Sand Sea, and of course, they only came to Pan-shei to steal naughty children. Given his experience with the Quicken-tree in his past, he’d wondered if there was more truth to the tales than Pan-shei mothers might know, and it seemed he’d been right. If perchance he survived sobriety, it would be good to know whose chains held him.
“Aye. ’Twas Tamisk,” She confirmed his suspicion. “He feared I could not otherwise hold you.”
“He was right,” Morgan said, then wondered if he’d spoken the truth. He could have eluded her, but at what point in their escape would he have left her to the skraelings, or to deal with the Third Guard alone? Even at Ferrar’s, where she would have been relatively safe, he wouldn’t have been inclined to leave her—especially after they’d kissed.
His gaze slipped to her mouth, and not for the first time he wondered what had made her open herself so completely to him. She’d hardly seen him in his best light, this ancient princess-priestess with the enchanted lineage. Yet when they’d kissed, her hands had settled on his waist, not to push him away, but to hold him. Her body had moved close to his, creating a warmth he had felt seep into his skin.
And her mouth... Sweet Jesu, her mouth had fit his as if they’d been made for each other.
Looking away, he dragged a hand through his hair. If he did survive his withdrawal from the wine, mayhaps he’d have the chance to kiss her again. But not now. Now he needed help. The sick bay was starting to move in unnatural ways.
“Get... get Aja for me,” he commanded, willing her to obey before he disgraced himself by crumbling to the floor. He’d held on to his mind all day and wasn’t yet ready to relinquish control.
“No, milord. I will do.” She sounded very sure of herself, showing more confidence than he could offer, what with the room slipping off to one side and doing a slow melt that left him without purchase on the floor.
He lunged to catch himself on the counter before it slid completely away, and found himself caught by her instead.
“Shhh, now, Morgan. Be still.” She was warm and amazingly solid, her arms coming around him, holding him. He instinctively followed suit, folding her into his embrace and lowering his head to her shoulder. She smelled so very good, and the mere act of holding her stopped the room from sliding away. He closed his eyes in relief. Enchanted lineage, indeed.
He heard the buckle on his scabbard being released, felt the weight of the sword lifted from his back.
“Let’s get you down before you get hurt.” Her voice was a sweet breath in his ear. “Careful now.” She leaned over and released the bay’s examining table from the bulkhead. Another touch on the sensor pad positioned it. He felt the edge come up against the backs of his thighs, but he didn’t want to lie down and let go of her. Her tattered cloak was softer than goosedown, the warmth and shape of her body a comfort he wanted to keep close.
“Morgan,” she said, nudging him onto the table.
He didn’t have the strength to resist, so he gave in—and took her with him, tumbling down onto the bed.
She let out a surprised gasp, filling his arms, and a fleeting smile touched his lips. He wanted her, even in his delirium, and his time was running short. He could feel the fell end drawing near.
“Are you sure you don’t have any Carillion wine?” One dram would soothe him, just one dram would see him through, and they could spend the rest of the night making love instead of fighting for what might be left of his life.
Lord, it had been so long since he’d made love with a woman, truly made love. There had been a sweet maid back in Wales when he’d been but a boy. Eiryl had been her name, his first, and his eldest brother’s betrothed. She’d searched him out one night in the small room he had claimed over the buttery, looking for love and kindness she rightfully feared she would not find in Damian’s bed. Within a fortnight they’d been discovered, and he’d been sent packing off to war, to fight in the Crusades by the Lionheart’s side. Many a time since then he’d wondered if Damian’s oldest son was his own. Eiryl had never said, and when he’d come back from the Crusades, broken, she’d been content enough in her role as Damian’s wife.
Morgan... Morgan, wake up. ’Twas a whisper out of the past.
’Twas Eiryl.
Morgan looked to the far side of the sick bay, and there she was, her fair skin paled by moonlight, her long dark hair tangled by the wind and the rain. A storm had been brewing all day.
“Morgan, help me, please. Save me.” Eiryl ran to him and threw herself down on his pallet, sobbing. “I canna many him. I won’t. I swear.”
“Damian?” he asked, trying to shake the sleep from his head and comprehend the nearly impossible fact that his brother’s betrothed was in his room in the middle of the night, and even worse, she was on his pallet—the beautiful Eiryl of Powys, with her flashing dark eyes and sweetly curved figure, was practically lying on top of him. He threw the covers back, intending to leap up, but she grabbed his hand and held him back.
“Aye. Nay. I won’t marry him. He’s cruel and old, ever so old.”
There was no gainsaying the truth of her complaints. Damian was old, nearly thirty, and for certes he had a cruel streak, but no more so than any lord trying to hold the Earl of Chester at bay.
“Eiryl, I—” He didn’t know what to say. In truth, he hoped he was still asleep, dreaming. He rubbed a hand over his face and had to admit that he felt awake. Then Eiryl rubbed her hand up his leg and any doubts he might have had fled on a surging wave of arousal.
“Why couldn’t it be you, Morgan?” Eiryl whispered, her hand trailing higher and higher, until she held him within the smooth, warm grip of her palm. “You who are so beautiful, so young and strong and sweet? You are sweet, aren’t you, Morgan?”
She answered the question herself, taking him in her mouth and bearing him back down on the pallet where all he could do was groan in pleasure, and, by the second pass of her tongue, pray he didn’t pass out before she finished with him.
“No wine, but a potion.” Avallyn struggled to a sitting position and pulled a small vial out of a pouch on her belt.
Still fee
ling the touch of Eiryl’s mouth, Morgan forced himself back to the present and squinted up at the liquid stuff. ’Twas green and mossy inside its glass shell, looking more like pond water than a potable potion.
“More binding spells?” he asked, his voice gruff with the fleeting pleasure of memories. Eiryl had been the first to take him in such a manner, and now, thousands of years later, he wondered what it would take for Avallyn Le Severn to be the next. A hopeless hope, he was sure, but once envisioned, the image was hard to dismiss.
“Nay,” she answered. “More a loosing spell this is, brewed by Tamisk to contravene the wine.”
“Your father is a great mage then?” Aye, to have her mouth on him anywhere would be a blessing, even in his present state, which he feared was taking another turn for the worse. He smelled smoke, and the tremors shaking his body were growing claws, tiny claws of pain snagging on bits of his tissue and bone. ’Twas a distinctly Carillion torture.
“An adept of the Books of Lore,” she answered, “including your book, the Red Book of Doom, the Fata Ranc Le.” Her voice was barely discernible over the growing noise and heat, over the chaos he felt streaming toward him from the far side of the sick bay.
Fate Ranc Le.
Fate. With effort, he concentrated on the desert woman’s words. It hadn’t been his book, but Ceridwen’s. His cousin’s red book with gilded marks on its cover. He’d kept it with him one night in Wroneu Wood, and truth be told, ’twas on that night that his life had begun to unravel. He’d held the book and looked through its pages, until he’d reached the end of the writings—but not the end of the book. His hand had rested on the first blank page, and he’d known magic for the first time. Fate, he’d learned that night, was a fiery thing.
His book, Avallyn had said. For certes it had felt like his when he’d held it, but he’d left the book with Lavrans and never seen it again.
You were sent here to be mine, dread lord.
Was that what he’d written in the book that night, during those strange moments when the flames had shot from his fingertips and raced across the page, leaving words in a language he could not read, when his whole hand had felt alive with a power he’d never known before or since?
Too much ale, he’d told himself, a drunken vision, but in his heart he’d known—and Avallyn knew as well, mayhaps knew more than he did of all the moments of magic that had touched his life.
You were sent here to be mine, dread lord. He knew she spoke some truth, but to what end? The one threatening to consume him before the rising of another day? Or one that began with her moss green potion?
Of a sudden, a sharp pain dug into him. He gasped, doubling over on his side, then jerking his head back up, the smell of smoke strong in his nose. His heart raced. Battle was upon him. In the distance he saw a ring of fires, and all around him were the sounds of swords clashing and horses snorting, of men crying out and the rush of arrows loosed by longbows. The sounds of battle from a long-ago age.
’Twas Llywelyn at the Conwy, fighting his uncle, Dafydd, for the Perfeddwlad. Morgan had been with him, sent by Damian less than a sennight after his return from the Holy Land. ’Twas the last time he’d ever tried to go home. He’d sworn himself to Llywelyn and never looked back.
Fires were burning in the camps, sending great clouds of smoke out over the estuary. Morgan leaned low over his garron’s neck and urged the horse into the water. Dafydd was on the run.
A pikeman went down on his left, skewered by an enemy arrow. A swordsman came out of the smoke on his right, charging straight at him. Morgan lifted his blade and kicked his horse into a run to meet the charge.
“Llywelyn!” he cried. “Llywelyn!”
“Shh, Morgan.” Avallyn slipped off the bed, keeping one hand firmly on his chest, trying to calm him and herself and hold him on the examining table at the same time. Not a moment past, he’d been lucid.
No more. Fever burned through him, and he was trembling again. His eyes stared sightlessly into the shadows darkening the cabinets on the far wall. His breaths were rough and ragged, as if he was expending great effort, making her wonder what vision held him in its grasp.
Shadana. She couldn’t lose him now, couldn’t lose him to the god-rotting wine after they’d escaped half the Warmonger’s army.
“Llywelyn,” he moaned, and lashed out as if his sword was in his hand. Falling back on the bed, he moaned again. “Eiryl.”
One-handed, Avallyn broke the seal on the vial, then released him to cradle his head in her arm.
“Come now, sweet prince.” She tipped the vial and let a portion splash into his mouth.
He choked, then gasped, clutching at her, his fingers digging into her arm.
Sweet Mother! She watched in horror as green smoke roiled up and poured out from behind his clenched teeth. His eyes flew open, one agonized flash of blue before they rolled back up into his head and his body stiffened like a stone.
Be judicious, Tamisk had warned.
Judicious? She’d killed him.
“Morgan,” she said, then louder,“Morgan!”
She shook him and he went completely limp in her arms, collapsing back onto the bed. Her breath stopped in her throat. She’d killed him, the Prince of Time. Shock held her frozen in place.
Then she heard it, a soft groan. He rolled over onto his side and released a slow, smoky breath.
“Damn you, Tamisk,” she whispered, washed through with relief. The mage could have warned her about the smoke.
She smoothed her hand across Morgan’s brow and ran her fingers down the length of his hair. The time-rider scar was there on his neck, a thin line seared into his skin. His forehead was damp, the fever breaking. His trembling had stopped. The next sound he made was more of a sigh than a groan, and he visibly relaxed deeper into the bed.
’Twas faster than the dreamstone would have worked. She had to concede that much to Tamisk. And there was naught in a dreamstone sleep to deal with the wine.
With the vial open, she touched a drop to her tongue and got another surprise. ’Twas dragon wine, gwin draig, with a trace of shampberries and enough haesa to turn the concoction green and mossy.
“Bagworms,” she muttered. The mage had cut the dragon wine with Carillion, giving the prince a bit of his own. No wonder it had worked so quickly. He would dream the night away, dragon dreams and dreams of time, and dreams of his past. Could be no worse than what he’d faced without the potion, a raw rehashing of his memories. Memories could trick, but the dragon wine would show him only what truly had been and, if his luck didn’t hold, mayhaps a glimpse of what was to come.
She couldn’t wish him that. With a lifetime’s knowledge of the journey she faced, she could not claim any comfort in the knowing. For him, ’twould be worse. Yet for now he slept, and in the sleeping was at her mercy.
And mercy it would be, if she didn’t find the other mark she sought. He could return to Pan-shei, none the worse for having been freed of the wine.
With a careful hand, she undid the snaps on his jacket, then the zipseam on the shirt he wore beneath. The wide swath of Ferrar’s bandages covered a goodly portion of his chest, but she needed to see only the area above his heart.
His skin was warm beneath her hand as she worked the bandages free at the top and, one by one, pushed them aside. No hesitation slowed her. She would know if he was the prince as foretold—and on the fourth bandage, she did.
The mark was there, the leaf of a rowan tree, and something else besides. The scars she’d thought to find on his face banded his torso in a manner that stilled her hand and made her breathing slow.
Dear sweet gods. She moved more of the bandages aside, until his chest and abdomen were completely revealed. How had he survived such wounds?
“They’re bad, ain’t they?” the wild boy said behind her, his voice instantly recognizable.
“The worst I’ve seen,” she admitted, and she a veteran of a hundred battles in the north.
“He’s a prince, ye
know.”
She turned to face the boy. “Aye, I know.”
He was watching her from across the sick bay, his gaze holding hers with solemn resolution.
She understood his silent message: Morgan was his lord, no matter his sept vows. So the boy might think, but they were in the desert now, and the Priestesses of the Bones did not so easily relinquish their sworn souls. She made a subtle gesture of dismissal used with the acolytes of Claerwen, and the boy responded with a bow and retreat.
Still desert-born then, she thought, despite his years of thievery with the prince. She watched him go before returning her attention to Morgan.
He murmured something in his sleep, a whispering of love and light in an ancient language, and she leaned closer to hear.
“—sic itur ad astra.” Such is the way to the stars.
Her brow furrowed. ’Twas a saying chiseled into the stones above Tamisk’s tower door, and again in Ilmarrian along the portico of the White Palace and in the great hall of Claerwen. Morgan’s speaking it made her wonder if the mage had brewed the prince’s dreams to order. She’d had no intention of leaving him, but if Tamisk’s hand was in too deep, she dare not. Best she stay close and temper what she could. Dreaming among the stars was no slight thing, and had oft been known to take a man much further than he’d meant to go.
Chapter 10
Corvus stood on the viewing platform of his warship, a rover twelve times the size of any Class G, overlooking the alleys and byways of Pan-shei and the pile of rubble that had once been a Quonset hut. The smell of scorched tea hung in the air.
“Prisoners?” he asked.
“Three, milord,” the freshly minted captain of his Home Guard replied, her predecessor having not survived his last summons to the Hall of Tombs. “Including the thief’s landswoman.”
