His mother sat with a relieved sigh and a weary smile, smoothing her skirts and drinking deeply. Her gaze over the rim observed me with canny alertness, however. Though a pale blue, her eyes reminded me of Marskal’s habitual suspicion.
“There now,” she said. “It’s lovely to assemble a big meal when one’s boy comes home, but it’s a lot of work to do at the last moment. Smart of me to have five daughters to pitch in.” She winked at me, exactly as Alisa had. “Call me Merry, by the way,” she said. “Marks will have told you not to bother memorizing names, but mine you should know, don’t you think?”
Not sure how to reply to that, I gave her an easy smile. “He did tell me that. How did you know, Merry?”
“He always does.” She chuckled, a sound like the fire logs cracking. “Every one of his friends he brought round, he’d tell ’em so. You’re the first girl he’s brought home, though. Do you plan to marry him?”
~ 26 ~
I choked on my wine, then set it aside so it wouldn’t happen again. “No,” I said, quite definitively. I’d pretend for Marskal, but only so far.
“No?” She pursed her lips. “That means he hasn’t asked you.”
“That means I have no intention of marrying your son.”
She frowned at me. “Well, that’s just silly. My son is the best of men. He’d have been married long since if he hadn’t been so determined to hold out for the right one.” She considered me. “I can see why you fit his standards, though. Marskal never was satisfied with farming, with the regular girls hereabouts. Always wanting to travel, always saying there’s more to the world.”
“Marskal is the best of men,” I agreed, picking the safest part of her speech to respond to. How had Marskal come to be so quiet, coming from such a garrulous family?
“Of course he is.” She nodded sharply. “Tala, are you?”
“Yes.” A simple, safe answer. One she already knew.
“And a shapeshifter. That means you can become an animal. More than one, some of you can, I hear. How many can you do?”
“Several,” I answered, the old, habitual answer coming back to save me. So much easier than explaining.
“Hmpf. So, my grandchildren by you could be shapeshifters, too?”
“I think you have plenty of grandchildren already,” I pointed out, with some acerbity.
To my surprise, she threw her head back and laughed. “That I do, dearie, that I do, but there’s always room for more—in my heart and in my home. And you’ll do, too. I see why he likes you. Not just a pretty face with an exotic pedigree. You’ll do me a favor, will you?”
“All right,” I answered faintly, feeling ten steps behind the conversation.
“I want you to—hello, Marks honey.” She took Marskal’s hand as he came up, still carrying the sleeping infant. “I was just getting to know your lady love here.”
“I see that.” He sounded wry, but he bent to kiss her cheek when she offered it. “Which is odd because I distinctly remember asking you to leave Zynda be.”
She waved that off. “I’m your mother and I know full well you’ll be gone by morning. I’m taking my window of opportunity.”
Marskal gave me a rueful smile his mother couldn’t see.
“Now, Zynda, I was saying—with all your magic, I’m counting on you to take care of my son. He’s a wonderful warrior, but reckless at times.
Marskal closed his eyes with a pained expression, shaking his head slightly. I had to laugh. “Marskal is the least reckless mossb—man I’ve ever known,” I said with perfect honesty. “He’s forever prepared, careful, and alert. An excellent fighter. I trust him with my life. Which he’s saved several times.”
“Has he now?” Merry looked pleased, beaming up at Marskal and squeezing his hand, still holding him captive. “I like to hear that. Well done, my boy.” She gazed at him, face full of love. “A mother’s fear never goes away, you know,” she said to me. “You think it will, once they’re not so tiny and fragile, but it doesn’t. You’ll see. You learn to live with it and manage the best you can. Help your mother up, dear.”
She stood, not needing his help at all, crossed over to me and kissed me on the top of my head. “There’s my blessing, Tala girl, not that you need it. Next time you come through, stay a little longer. You kids!” she called out. “Get yourselves in the kitchen and help with clean up, or I won’t say where I hid the pudding.”
Marskal hipped onto the arm of the chair I sat in, studying my face, his own expression chagrined. “I’m really sorry. I’d hoped to head her off, but I got distracted.”
“Your father,” I agreed. “I believe it was a team effort.”
He winced. “I should have predicted that, instead of hoping they’d give you some room for a one-evening visit.”
“They love you,” I replied, realizing it was true. That it was something I could easily see in all of them. “I don’t mind a bit of interrogation. Now I know where you get it.”
“A strike to the heart. Nicely played.” But he smiled at me, catching me peeking at the baby. “Do you want to hold her?”
“No!” I said it too forcefully, one of the other sisters looking over. “I mean. I’m not good with babies. She’ll just start wailing again.”
He was watching me with those quiet, too-knowing eyes. “She won’t die, Zynda.”
“I know that.” But did I? So much fear in me. Where had it all come from? I opened my arms. “Fine. But the moment she cries, you’re taking her back.”
“Deal,” he replied, with a slight smile, setting the baby in my arms.
She was warm and soft, squiggling a little and then settling again, opening her perfect little mouth in a yawn, then subsiding again. Tangled emotions rose up in me, chewing with little teeth. I looked at Marskal, feeling helpless against the tide of it all. “She’s really beautiful,” I said. “Perfect.”
He stroked my cheek. “Maybe it wasn’t fair to bring you here, but I wanted you to see this. To feel what it’s like to be part of something.”
I leaned into his hand, his touch and the weight of the baby in my arms bringing up far too much in me. There I was, the mermaid stranded on dry land, full of longing for what I could never have. I’d never thought I’d envy the mossbacks anything, but this simplicity had a lure to it I hadn’t known about. Marskal saw it all as this simple, and it… just wasn’t. Even without the ability to shift, I remained at least half other.
“Marskal,” I whispered. “We have to—”
He laid the finger over my lips, smiling sadly. “Don’t say it. Not tonight. For this evening, let’s just be. We’re having pudding and putting the kids to bed. Then we’ll break out the good liquor and maybe have some dancing. Or we can go to my place and sleep, if you’re tired.”
I swallowed back my words and fashioned them into a smile. “Liquor and dancing sounds good. You know how we Tala like that.”
He kissed me, a hint of fervency in it. “I do know that. And I love that about my quicksilver girl.”
We stayed up late, drinking the good stuff and dancing to the fiddle and drum music played by another of Marskal’s sisters and her husband. Then Marskal took me to his cottage. It was small, yes, but set next to a still pond that gleamed in the starlight. Moranu’s moon had gone nearly to new, and her dark power flowed through me as I leaned back in Marskal’s arms, listening to his low voice describe his plans for the place.
He’d been thinking about possible solutions for where we’d live—a place in Annfwn and maybe one nearer Ordnung, too. The pond wasn’t anything like the ocean, but the River Danu ran past the far boundary and we could dig a channel from it to make it into a lake deep enough for me to swim in. We could summer there and then travel over the pass to Annfwn for the winters—or even sail to Nahanau. The kids would love that.
Just tired and drunk enough not to argue, I let him paint the picture for me. One night of pretending, I’d promised after all.
We made love in his bed. The one his mothe
r promised me another sister made sure had fresh sheets, before she kissed me on both cheeks and wished me a good night’s rest. I’d had it in my mind that we shouldn’t, but I didn’t have the heart to hold him off, he was so happy to have me there. And the night wasn’t yet done.
The next day would be soon enough to begin the inevitable separation.
I fell asleep with my head tucked into my place on his shoulder, the taste and smell of him in my human senses as keen as in any form. I’d remember it forever.
A shout awakened me, and I startled. Marskal. He shouted again. Afraid and in danger.
Without thought, I slipped into tiger form. Claws at the ready to fight and defend.
Then realized where I was. Marskal’s bed. Creaking beneath my furry weight.
So easy, that shifting. As if it had been right at my fingertips. And simple to shift back. Marskal shouted again, struggling against the sheet, trying to punch. I didn’t know what to do. So I kissed him. On the cheek. Then, when he stilled, on the mouth.
I felt it when the nightmare loosed its hold, when he relaxed, then kissed me back.
“Zynda,” he murmured, and curled himself around me. I stayed that way for a while, listening to his breath deepen and even out. Then I slipped out of bed, pulled the jeweled pin from my sleeve, and used it to wind up my hair.
He found me out by his pond in the morning, wrapped in my fur cloak and watching Glorianna’s sun gild the mirror of it with rose and gold. Soft hills covered in new snow rolled white and pristine around. In the distance, cows lowed, harmonizing with people’s voices, an occasional door slamming. I couldn’t see any of them, but Marskal’s family was all around.
“You woke early,” he commented, handing me a cup of hot tea.
I smiled at him as I took it, not saying I’d never gone back to sleep. That slip into tiger form had been so natural, so easy. Like before. And yet, I didn’t yet want to tell him. Soon enough something would disturb the glassiness of the pond and the white of the hills, but I wasn’t yet ready to throw the rock.
“Breakfast at the big house still all right with you?” he asked. When I nodded, he held out a hand to help me up.
After a breakfast as hearty as the dinner the night before—with Marskal conscripted to feed two toddlers, while Shanna, Robbie and several other children asked me one question after another—we said our goodbyes. To please the kids, I summoned the staymachs with more flourish than necessary, coaxing the horses into one black with a white mane and tail and one white with black. My own bird I suggested into a more exotic palette and it obligingly manifested in a larger size, with rainbow bright coloring.
The kids applauded with glee, which at least satisfied the ones who’d hoped I’d shapeshift for them. Marskal—and surprisingly, his mother—put an end to their pleas, saying they were being rude. I found myself tempted to shift, just to play with them a little. I could give them pony rides, do aerial acrobatics as a falcon, or show them what a real tiger looks like.
Marskal’s nieces and nephews made me want to share the joy, rather than doing it only for my own pleasure. A new perspective for me, that before shapeshifting had always been about pride and pleasing myself. But I needed to try again on my own, not with an audience. I had no idea what had let go in me, that the wall had crumbled away. Maybe just time, like Marskal had claimed all along. Maybe the dark of Moranu’s moon. Maybe something else.
Most of all, I wasn’t sure how to tell Marskal.
“You’ve been quiet,” Marskal observed after we’d been on the road a while. The paved highway Uorsin had created made for even faster travel and we wove through the steady flow of carts, riders, and walkers with ease, heading south for Windroven in fair weather.
I laughed. “Coming from you, that’s saying something.”
He gave me a crooked smile. “Now you know why—with my family, I never could get a word in edgewise. I finally went for being quiet and listening as the better part of valor.”
“Ah.” That made sense. “It all comes together for me now.”
With a self-conscious shrug, he returned his gaze to the road, back to his relentless scanning for danger. “For better or worse, they made me who I am.”
“They’re good people,” I said softly. “I’m glad you took me there.”
“Yes?” He glanced at me, checking for honesty, then smiled in earnest. “Good. When I—after Uorsin fell… You know, it was days and days of dealing with the aftermath of Illyria’s black magic. She was gone, but her living dead remained.” His face had gone cold and bloodless, the gaze he focused on the road ahead haunted. “So many people I knew—friends from the guard, from town. Guys I’d grown up with and girls I’d kissed. She’d made them into her puppets and we couldn’t do anything but chop them into the smallest pieces possible and burn them. The pyres lasted for days and that smoke smell…”
He shook his head. “I thought I’d never get it out of my head. I tried to tell myself that they weren’t them anymore. That our spirit or whatever makes us alive and ourselves, that it was gone and just this magic moving them around, but even then I knew.” He blew out a long breath. “We did what we had to do, clearing Ordnung and the township of every last one, every stinking vestige of her magic.”
“Did you lose any of your family?” I asked carefully, realizing I should have thought to ask before.
“Miraculously no. They cleared out early, mostly because I was able to send them a message when we fled Ordnung, and Harlan did me the favor of passing the word for his Vervaldr to look the other way when they slipped past the barricades. I was lucky that way—as so many weren’t. But I thought I might never be the same again, that I’d never be able to break open the shell I put around my heart to get through those days. I needed something of normal life, of beauty and love so badly.”
Things fell into place for me. “And you first saw me right after.”
He gave me an odd look. “I suppose that’s true. Maybe a couple of weeks later, but that’s not my point. Before that, I went home. That’s when Her Majesty restored our lands—one of her first acts as High Queen—and she sent me home. All of us who’d been on pyre duty were given leave to go home for a few days, those of us who had a home close enough to Castle Ordnung.
“My family can be a pain, but being around them, working on the house and the land to get it livable, farmable again—picking out and fixing up my cottage—it gave me something of myself back again. That’s what I wanted you to experience last night. I thought it might help.”
“Thank you,” I said, as gravely as I could. Yet another gift he gave me. “I think it did help.”
“I wanted you to know, too,” he continued, watching the road, “what they mean to me. You tease me about taking responsibility for everyone, but that—them, other families like them—that’s what’s good in this world, worth fighting for. The thought of those Deyrr creatures coming there again—.” He broke off with a sharp shake of his head.
“Is that what you dreamed last night?”
He slid me a sideways look, rueful. “Sorry about that. And yes—I dreamed of dragons scouring the farmland, incinerating the children and you. And I couldn’t reach any of you. No need to interpret that one.”
Guilt and regret filled my heart. He shouldn’t suffer such things because of me. “You don’t have to come with me to free the dragon. I’m all right on my own.”
His face set into annoyed lines. “Don’t start down that path again. You need me to protect you. What if one of those sleeper spies—”
“We need to end this thing between us,” I broke in. “I should have said so earlier. You could have stayed at Ordnung and I could have gone on my own to Windroven. In fact, you could still go back. You should go back.”
He actually looked amused. “We both know that’s not happening, even if I hadn’t vowed to Her Majesty to guard you through to the end.”
“Fine,” I bit out, not surprised, but still annoyed that it hadn’t been so easy. �
��But anything personal between us is over with.”
I’d expected hurt or anger, but he laughed. “Good luck with that.”
I glared at him. “I guess it would be too much to ask you to respect my wishes in this.”
He looked over, studying me. “Did my family seem that terrible? Or is this about your terror of maybe bearing your own child and having to watch them die?”
My heart snapped closed, choking me. “I never said that.”
“You didn’t have to.” His gentle brown gaze held compassion. “I understand the things you don’t say. And I know you love me as much as I love you, so you haven’t fooled me.”
The cold air made my teeth ache and I realized I’d been staring at him in open-mouthed shock. I shook my head slowly. “I’m not in love with you, Marskal.”
He grinned, apparently greatly amused by this entire conversation. “Yes, you are. You might not say the words, but you show me all the time. It’s in your eyes right now. You just don’t know that’s what you’re feeling.”
“You don’t know what I’m feeling,” I shot back.
“Have you ever been in love?” he asked.
“No.” I said it triumphantly, certain I’d made my point.
“Exactly.”
I scowled at him. “You are making no sense.”
“Sure, I am. If you’d been in love, if you had experienced love, then you’d know that’s what you feel for me. As it is, you’ve been writing it off to passion, or flirtation, or whatever. The real problem is your conviction that we can’t be together.”
“I think we can’t be together because we’re nothing alike! We come from different worlds and we’ll go back to those different worlds. I will never be like one of your sisters, happily tending the farm and making babies for you to play with and whisper to sleep.”
The Shift of the Tide Page 31
