“I smell you, Silk,” she croaked in a broken voice. They’d had to damage her vocal chords, too, for the sweetness of her song had snared many an unwary man in the past. No more. “You smell pretty, Silk, very pretty.”
The witch had been tortured, abused, and imprisoned for over a century, but she remained unbroken. She carried some internal fire that retained a modicum of power. It infuriated Webster he’d been unable to break her entirely, and even more so that she aroused a primal fear in him.
“Pretty perfume,” she grated. “Have you come to romance me, Silk? Have you come to sate yourself in me with your feeble prick?”
Webster frowned, his gorge rising. In the early years he and the guards used her, enjoyed doing to her whatever they wished, for having one chained and helpless was very sweet, very seductive, very gratifying. Like a tree carved with the initials of lovers, her body was etched with a spider web of scarred initials sliced into her flesh by the guards who had pleasured themselves with her over the years.
Shadows upon shadows, scars upon scars.
The filth of her disgusted him now, the sockets of burned out eyes, and her ravaged lips. Ribs and hip bones protruded. There were rarely fresh initials carved on her body nowadays. Even so, he felt a rising pressure against the crotch of his trousers.
The witch laughed as if she knew. It was a dry, breathy rasp.
“You know why I’m here,” he said, thankful his voice remained steady.
She made smooching noises at him and laughed again.
She was not, he had concluded long ago, quite sane.
“You know why I am here,” he repeated through gritted teeth. “Are you toying with us, or is it true? Ten years have not yet passed.”
She stilled and every muscle in Webster’s body tensed.
“I do not toy.” Her tone no longer mocked but was cold and full of menace. “My beloved rises.”
Her pronouncement was like a thunderclap. Without another word, he turned to face the door, suddenly overwhelmed and claustrophobic, barely able to contain himself while he waited for the guards to open it. He could not escape her presence soon enough. When the door opened, he hastened out, not awaiting his escort, not pausing in the antechamber. He made straight for the corridor and the lift.
Before the great steel door could close behind him, however, her rasping voice reached him. “Webster Ezmund Silk! My beloved rises, and he will make you eat your own entrails!” The door slammed on her hysterical laughter.
Webster closed his eyes and clenched his fists at his side. No matter how many times he’d heard her repeat this threat, cold dread slid through his gut like a serpent.
He shook himself and entered the lift. He threw the appropriate levers and the car lurched upward, leaving behind the gloom and the constant drubbing of the turbines. Once he was above, he’d bathe and order the clothes he was wearing burned. He could not tolerate the stench of her that clung to him, so overpowering that it almost suffocated him in the small space of the lift. Afterward, he would meet with his fellow ministers and plan for the emperor’s awakening, whether it was time or not, for the witch had spoken.
No, he thought after some reflection, not just a witch, but a goddess. A goddess of a far more ancient and earthly pantheon than the ones the old realm had worshipped. As Aeryc and Aeryon and their cadre of fellow gods rose to primacy, the ancient goddess and her sisters fell and were denigrated to the level of mere witches, relics of a forgotten past. But to believe she was less than a goddess, and an insane one at that, was a fatal error that Webster did not intend to make. It was why he kept her so elaborately imprisoned. Not to mention that she was, unfortunately, inextricably linked to the emperor.
As the lift chugged upward, its mechanisms clacking and whining comfortingly, he recalled her name, somehow extracting it from the dusty regions of his mind among other discarded memories. Yolandhe. Yolandhe of the sea.
In the Present:
YOLANDHE’S ISLAND
“I remember when I first set foot upon your shore,” Amberhill told Yolandhe as they lay together beneath the furs in the cave. “The climes were colder. There was more of a sharpness in the air.”
“That was very long ago, love, when much was different, but I’ve not changed and my island remains.”
“Foolish and arrogant was I to be sailing among those islands alone,” he said.
“But then you would not have found me.”
Amberhill chuckled. “No, then I would not have crashed upon your shore. I remember Tolmarth was always fond of saying to me . . .” Who was Tolmarth? Had he known a Tolmarth? And if so, what had he been fond of saying?
Amberhill blinked in confusion. He’d been recovering well from the injuries suffered when the gig broke up during the storm, but he still tended to have these lapses. Sometimes he forgot himself and recalled memories he could not have possibly experienced. His head must have got a worse rattling than any of them thought.
Yolandhe did not push or request him to complete his sentence. What had he been speaking of, anyway? It did not matter, as Yolandhe now pressed herself against him and kissed him. Memories did not matter, only the present.
Yap paused at the cave entrance only to hear the familiar sounds of Yolandhe and his master rutting. His master had recovered—that much was abundantly clear as a lusty cry issued from the cave’s mouth. When rare opportunities came for Yap to address their situation with him, he put him off, promising to think on it and then returning to Yolandhe’s arms. There were times, Yap suspected, that his master forgot he existed.
So Yap continued to catch fish, collect clams and mussels, and steal seabird eggs from rocky nests. He built himself a rickety lean-to along the tree line using driftwood, timbers, sails, and rope from the wreck of their gig. He soon investigated farther afield, the bottoms of his bare feet as tough as they had ever been during his pirate days. He even explored into the interior of the island, overcoming his fear of ferocious beasts, but only startled birds from brush to branch. If there were any other animals, he was sure his clumsy stumbling about scared them off. But maybe, he thought, there weren’t any because it was a long swim from the mainland.
It took Yap one day to cross the island, and even when he paused somewhere in its middle he could hear the incessant heave of waves, smell the brine. Rather than grating on his nerves, it was reassuring as his feet sank into deep moss and trod across the knuckled roots of evergreens.
He found a stream trickling down from a rise, and after scooping some handfuls of water to his mouth, he decided to climb up the rise to see what he could see. There were a few such small mounts on the island. He vaguely remembered seeing bumps on the island from sea, aboard the Mermaid.
For years, Captain Bonnet had followed a trail of rumors of sea king treasure. Mounds of gold and jewels, it was said, and the captain’s persistence paid off. They’d found an unbelievable cache of treasure entombed on the island, much to their woe. It had been hidden beneath one of the mounts. This one? He could not remember, it had been so long ago. But he was no longer seeking tombs. He must not.
Ferns and brush snagged his legs as he approached the base of the mount. He started to circle it, looking for a way to climb to the top. He stumbled out of a prickly patch of brambles onto soft moss, hissing at the bloody scratches on his legs and ankles. It took him a moment to realize he’d come to a path. A lightly traversed path, but a path all the same. It was overgrown and narrow, but it led up the hill, which was his goal.
The path wound up, at first gently, then over a boulder field, where his bare feet grasped at granite. Yolandhe had probably made it. If not her, who? He hadn’t encountered anyone else on the island. At one point he had to scrabble up a ledge, and when he succeeded, he sat on it panting and rubbing sweat out of his eyes. He had risen enough that he could see the ocean through the tops of trees that sloped away below him.
&nbs
p; When he caught his breath, he pushed himself up to resume his climb. To his surprise and trepidation, the path led through a cleft of rock and into a large cavern. A shaft of sunlight poured in from behind him, and he groaned when he realized what he had found: the tomb of the sea king.
His first impulse was to run away. He and his crewmates had been severely punished for disturbing this tomb once before, and he was not anxious to raise Yolandhe’s ire again. Yet, he could not help but stare. The light that streamed past him sketched out the mid-section of the intact ship, but the stern and bow fell into darkness. He remembered the bow particularly, with its dragon’s head and red painted eyes. Chests and barrels and pots gleamed with treasure. Across the chamber, other fainter shafts of sunlight poked through the earth, revealing yet more offerings to the dead king. One of the holes must have been the one Eardog fell through, the one they had used to haul out all the treasure.
Stairs of carved stone plunged into the cavern gloom below. Their natural appearance must have camouflaged them from pirate eyes the last time.
Before he even realized it, he was descending down, down, down the stairs, drawn instinctively to treasure. Either his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, or ghost light now limned the shapes of chests and barrels and precious cargo. And of course, the ship of the dead one.
When he reached the bottom step, he marveled, as he had the first time, that a ship had been either magically brought into the cavern, or brought in piece by piece by hand to be reassembled. To his mind, either method was an impressive feat.
He was pulled to a nearby chest overflowing with coins and jewels and strings of pearls. A giddy feeling burbled in his throat as he sorted through the booty. He was overcome by a sense of madness he hadn’t felt in many a year, and he laughed. He laughed until a gold dagger with a ruby on its pommel came into his hand. One he recognized. One he had drawn out of his mouth on Yolandhe’s beach. He shuddered and allowed the dagger to clatter upon the other treasure. He wiped cold sweat from his brow and blew out a rattled breath. “No, no, this stuff’s not for old Yap,” he told himself.
He resolved to turn around and march back up those stairs without giving the cavern and its treasures a second look, but just then, a voice thundered from above filling every crevice, every alcove of the cavern: “Are you going to plunder my treasure again, Pirate?”
Yap whimpered, thinking the dead king had come to life. He slowly rotated and looked up. There, at the top of the stairs, shafts of sunlight streaming past him and half-blinding Yap, stood Lord Amberhill and beside him, Yolandhe.
“Well?” Lord Amberhill demanded, his voice once again filling the cavern. “Speak now or suffer judgment.”
“No! No, sir!” Yap cried. Then he wondered about Lord Amberhill claiming the treasure as his own. “It’s cursed, sir.”
Yolandhe’s light silver laugh trickled down to him. “Leave the small man be, my love,” she told Lord Amberhill. “He has repented. He returned the treasure he had taken.”
Repented? Is that what she called it?
“Yap, what are you doing here?” Lord Amberhill asked in his normal voice.
“I was just lookin’ round and came to the opening. I swear! I had no idea it was right here. What are you doing here, sir?”
“Yolandhe tells me I’ve an inheritance here, and I must say this is most unexpected.”
Inheritance?
“Not just an inheritance,” Yolandhe proclaimed. “You are the sea king reborn!”
In the Present:
YOLANDHE’S ISLAND
“The sea king reborn?” Amberhill asked. “Is that what you said?” Whatever caused his frequent episodes of confusion might have also impaired his hearing and comprehension.
“It is what I said,” Yolandhe replied, and with a subtle gesture of her hand, light hissed to life throughout the cavern—dirty stubs of beeswax candles and dry reed torches flared along the cavern walls, clam shells filled with rancid oil and crude lanterns shielded by tarnished punched bronze flickered with tentative flame. The light allowed Amberhill to see the enormity of the cavern and his “inheritance,” as well as the size of the ship with its gleaming red eyes. At the bottom of the steps, Yap had fallen to his knees and flung his arm over his face as if to ward off a blow.
It was the first show of real power Amberhill had seen from Yolandhe. Yap had called her a sea witch, and now Amberhill could see it was no exaggeration. He had great discomfort with any woman who held such power. Discomfort mixed with intrigue by the danger of it. He gazed at Yolandhe anew. She was neither beautiful nor homely but deceptively average. Back in Sacor City, he would not have given her a second glance, but . . . It was all in the way she held herself. Her manner. He could not quite put a finger on it, but there was something terribly hypnotic and arousing about her, something he felt with his entire body, especially when she sang. When she sang, he lost himself in her.
She took his hand and led him down the stone steps to where Yap knelt. Was Amberhill mistaken, or was the pirate fighting back tears?
He is truly afraid. But Amberhill did not dwell on his servant’s state of mind, for it was as if he stood among constellations, the way the lights shone in the vastness of the cavern. They revealed the riches all around him. From a chest, he plucked a silver coin impressed with a ship on one side and a dragon on the other, its tail wrapped around its neck just like his ring. The silver was icy smooth between his thumb and finger.
“Did you say this is my inheritance?” Amberhill asked Yolandhe, still in disbelief. In all his widest ranging avaricious dreams, he could not have imagined so much treasure collected in one place. It made him light-headed. To think, as the Raven Mask, he had plucked a brooch here, a necklace there, from the possessions of the wealthy just to retain his estate, and all this time this hoard was sitting here waiting for him.
“I did,” Yolandhe replied. “It is your birthright.”
“I still don’t understand.”
Yolandhe sighed as though tired of explaining to a child, and the cavern echoed with it as if exhaling its own breath.
“You are descended down the line of kings,” she said, and she pointed at the ship. “His blood runs thick in your veins. You are Akarion incarnate.”
“Huh.” Once just low level nobility and just this side of poverty, Amberhill was now descended from kings and richer than some nations. He almost laughed wondering what he was going to do with it all. Where would he stash it? I will fix the estate and then some, he thought. He could create his own kingdom.
The ruby eye of his ring winked in the light. The gold slithered around his finger. He found himself drawn to the ship. Yolandhe did not stop him. Yap sobbed. There was a ladder nearby, rickety with age, but he leaned it against the ancient hull between two of the oar ports. The oars jutted from the sides of the ship symmetrically positioned as though those who manned them had heeded the commands of the coxswain to the last.
The decking bowed and creaked beneath Amberhill’s feet. The bier of the dead king stood just behind the mast with its ragged sail still unfurled though listless. The king’s bones were layered in moth-eaten furs. A helm with intricate geometric patterns protected his leathery skull. Thick braided hair and beard of faded red bristled from beneath the helm and wreathed the skull. At his feet lay a shield and a pitted iron sword.
“So lies Akarion,” Yolandhe said.
Amberhill had not heard her climb aboard.
“And so stands Akarion,” she added, gazing at him.
“I am not he,” Amberhill replied.
She did not answer.
“I am Xandis Pierce Amberhill of Sacoridia. An aristocrat, thief, and the owner of a fine if unintelligent stallion named Goss that will be the foundation of my breeding farm. I am not this Akarion.”
“I know who you are,” Yolandhe replied. “You wear his ring.”
“A pirate wo
re this ring before me. Did that make him Akarion reborn, too?”
“No. It rejected him and found you.”
Amberhill struggled between the gratification of learning that he had royal blood, and the need to remain his own man. He gazed at the ring, the facets of the ruby afire, lively in the wavering light. He could claim all this treasure and his birthright, but such possessions, and such status, required a great deal of responsibility.
Without it, Amberhill could remain the master of his own desires, free to go where he wished, do as whim dictated, even scale walls to steal the jewelry of noblewomen. As a king, he could never be so free. He’d be collared by duty.
He noticed Yap had drawn closer to the ship. “What say you, Yap?” he called down. “Am I the sea king reborn?”
“I dunno, sir, but all this treasure is cursed. Keeping it can come to no good.”
“Even if it is mine by birthright?”
“I wouldn’t touch it, sir.” Yap shuddered.
“Those memories I get,” Amberhill said to Yolandhe, “those false memories belong to Akarion, don’t they.”
“They are not false.”
He noted she did not deny to whom they belonged. Amberhill did not like another wielding such influence over him, especially from within, never mind from without. The invasiveness of it irritated him. He could not believe it of himself: to be considering whether to reject all that treasure, he who had purloined the wealth of others for so long to rebuild his estate. But no amount of treasure was worth allowing another to alter his memories or gain control over him in any way.
“Akarion can have his ring back,” Amberhill said, sure this would prove to be the solution. He took one last look at the treasure he was giving up and slipped the dragon ring off his finger. Akarion’s skeletal hands lay across his breast. One finger looked disjointed as though someone had tampered with it, no doubt Yap’s old captain who had stolen the ring. Without another moment’s hesitation, he pushed the ring onto Akarion’s finger, gold clicking against bone.
Mirror Sight Page 29
