Death's Mistress dbd-2

by Karen Chance

  Drummers began a slow, measured beat that echoed around the silent grounds. From across the small hill separating the course from the castle, a parade appeared. The nobles of the court, lords and ladies clad in their glittering best, walked in lines behind the tall figure with the silver-blond hair and the golden circlet of office.

  The king paused in front of the stands, speaking to the crowd. A pointless exercise. They all knew why they were here. But the voice droned on and on, like the sound of the insects buzzing around his ears. He ignored it in favor of staring up at the rotting pieces of flesh that adorned the corners of the stands, all that remained of the few this court boasted with the strength and will to act.

  Vítus had been captured along with him, but he was not a prince. No war hung on the outcome of his fate, and there was no one to speak for him. His family had gone running like the rats they were, bowing and scraping and pleading with the king to save their own skins, to protect their lands and titles. They had left Vítus to the king’s mercy.

  He had been there to witness that mercy, while his own fate still hung in the balance. Had been forced to watch as the king unsheathed a plain battle sword, its water-marked blade gleaming mirror-sharp. It had caught the light, sending a spike of painful radiance into his eyes. But he’d refused to close them, refused to look away even for an instant, lest it be taken for weakness.

  And so he’d seen the sword descend, the neck sever in two, a pulsing arc of pure fey blood shimmering in midair like a spill of rubies. It had all been limned in a flare of red, a slash across his vision, burning the image into his memory. It reminded him of the gleam thrown off by the setting sun just before it slips below the horizon. The difference between day and night, between what was, and what will be.

  The crowd gasped at the first execution some of them had ever witnessed. But they quieted again as the king stepped past Vítus’s body and stopped before Ölvir. He had been manacled kneeling, as the damage to his legs from the battle was too severe to allow him to stand. His hands were bound before him in cold black iron attached to heavy chains. The metal leeched his strength, and if left in place long enough, it would burn the skin.

  It wouldn’t have time to mar his.

  He’d straightened as the king’s shadow fell over him, first his back, then his neck, looking up proudly, tangled black hair falling over his shoulders and sticking to his cheeks. The damage to his face was ugly, and still only half-healed. Only one eye opened enough to see out of but he had stared up at the king without flinching.

  He had not begged for his life or for mercy.

  He had been offered neither.

  The High King finally finished his platitudes and the nobles took their places, in a ring of special seats set close around the stands. They’d been there when the executions took place, too, ensuring that they went home with their finery splattered with the blood of traitors. It had been a clear message, as if any of the puling cowards had needed it.

  The king stripped off his outer shirt, folded it and set it neatly on the thick gold grass next to the platform. His circlet of office went on top, and he smoothed his hair back over his skull, knotting the tail in a neat, quick movement that kept it off his face. Finally, he walked up the steps to the platform, stopping in front of the rack.

  He bent and picked up the whip by the handle, leaving it to uncoil as he straightened, the braided leather slithering over the wood with a dry, scaly sound. He said nothing further as he paced to the required distance, as he drew back, as the whip snapped through the air with a crack. It would be the first of many.

  Blood was soon dripping down the prisoner’s back and legs, oozing from his tightly bound wrists, adding a new pattern to the reddish brown stains beneath him. The Domi had lobbied hard, or so he’d heard, for the maximum sentence: five hundred lashes, likely deadly even for a fey. But the king had bargained it down to two, still trying to prevent a war.

  Fool. It was obvious to everyone but him. They were already in one.

  CHAPTER 5

  Someone slapped me. I flinched, and the brightly lit scene shattered and fell away, leaving me staring blankly at a cobweb on the underside of the porch’s ceiling. I was sprawled on the couch with Claire standing over me, a hand gripped around my wrist, her face pale and frightened. Her other hand was raised, but I caught it in time. My cheek already stung enough.

  “I’m all right.”

  “All right?” she demanded shrilly. “Your face went slack. You wouldn’t talk. You were barely breathing! For over a minute, Dory!”

  “I saw something—”

  “I’m sure you did! You’re lucky it wasn’t the last thing!” She held up her uncle’s little bottle. “How much of this did you have?”

  “Not that much.” I sat up, feeling too warm and vaguely nauseous. I could still smell the blood, hot on the air, hear the eerie silence of the crowd, feel the sharp bite of stripes I’d never taken. But that wasn’t what had me struggling to my feet.

  “Sit down!” she snapped, trying to press me back. “I’m going to get you some water, and you’re going to drink all of it!”

  “I sawsubrand being punished,” I told her, pushing past to the railing.

  “That stuff will make you see anything, if you drink enough of—”

  “You were wearing green. An apple green dress. It was hot and you were sweating. You looked like you wanted to be anywhere else.”

  She stared at me, her flame red hair glowing in the light from the hall. “How did you—”

  “I see memories, Claire.”

  “But you weren’t there! Dory, are you telling me you can see other people’s memories? That you can see mine?”

  “It wasn’t yours I saw,” I told her, scanning the yard. I concentrated on the distant rain, the metallic smell of it, its elusive, seductive whisper—and at the presence hovering just behind it.

  Claire frowned. “Whose, then? Because Aiden wasn’t—”

  “subrand?” It leapt out of me on a breath, curled at the end into a question.

  Claire clutched my arm. “Dory! He’s in prison in Faerie! He isn’t here!”

  “I didn’t see the beating from your perspective,” I told her harshly. “I saw it from his. And I only do that when someone is close.”

  “How close?”

  “Very.”

  It was hard to tell what might be out in the garden, or in the darkness just beyond. The storm was almost here, and the breeze was increasing. I watched it run a circuit of the yard, high in the trees, slipping under the green leaves and turning them over so that their lighter undersides caught the moonlight. More leaves turned as the wind raced along the fence, until the yard became a silver flag unfurling with a rustle against the dark green storm clouds.

  But if there was a person in all that, I couldn’t see him.

  Claire was shaking her head. “Nobody will be here for a couple of days at the earliest, I promise you. Even if he’d somehow escaped, he couldn’t be here.”

  “The fey timeline differs so much from ours that there’s no way to know how much time has passed there since you left. They could have had weeks to look for you.”

  “No, they couldn’t.”

  “Claire! I saw you a month ago and you weren’t even showing! And now you have a one-year-old—”

  “Nine months.”

  “Whatever. The point is—”

  “That time is running faster here right now, giving me a head start.”

  I turned from staring at the garden to look at her. “Come again?”

  “The fey have the timeline variations charted out. It’s one of their major advantages over us. They always know exactly when they’re going to arrive in our world, and we never do in theirs.”

  “How the hell can you chart something like time?”

  She pushed up her glasses, the old signal for nervousness. Or maybe it was just the heat. The air was thick with rain, muggy and hot like an encompassing blanket. Smothering. Like the daysubrand
took two hundred lashes, and learned nothing but how to hate.

  Like he’d needed the lesson.

  “Caedmon has this room in the palace where they keep up with it,” she told me, sitting back down. “There’s this big thing on the wall. It looks sort of like a map with two rivers. One is our world’s timeline; the other is theirs. And they each have their own riverbed, you know? Sometimes they go pretty parallel, while in others, one will bow out in a big loop, taking a lot more time to get back anywhere near the other.”

  “So sometimes time runs faster here, and sometimes it runs faster there?”

  “Yes. I checked yesterday, and it will be a while before anyone can come after me.”

  “How long?”

  “It depends on how long they look for me in Faerie before thinking that maybe I slipped through. The current bend in the river—if you want to call it that—isn’t huge. So yes, a few more days. Maybe a week if I’m lucky.”

  I stared at the yard, unconvinced. “Then why do I feel like I’m being watched?”

  “Probably because you are,” she said sourly. “The fey have spies all over the place, and not all of them are human.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “They can use elements of our world to spy on us. The Blarestri are descendants of the fertility gods, the Vanir—or so they claim. It allows them to connect with plants, animals, that sort of thing.”

  “What about the Svarestri?”

  “They’re descended from the other, rival group of gods—the Æsir, who influence things like the weather.” She wrinkled her forehead. “I’m not sure what they can do. They weren’t a popular topic at court.”

  “I can understand why!”

  She shook her head. “It goes back a lot farther thansubrand’s ambition. There was some war, a long time ago, between the two groups of gods. The Æsir won, and their followers ruled Faerie for ages. Then one day, they suddenly disappeared, with no warning, no explanation. It left everyone to sort things out for themselves. So, of course, there was another war.”

  “And the Svarestri lost.”

  “Not… exactly, no. Nobody really won that time. They were too evenly matched, and it just ended up being a slaughter. I don’t know much about it because none of the older fey who were there want to talk about it. Anyway, after a while, the Svarestri settled in the lands they’d been able to hold, and the Blarestri did the same in theirs. And they’ve just gone on hating one another ever since.”

  “But Caedmon let his sister marry one of them?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Not just anyone, the king. And I don’t know about ‘let.’ Efridís was determined she wasn’t going to marry beneath herself, and because she was princess, everyone at her own court would have been beneath her. Caedmon went along with it, thinking the marriage might improve relations between the two camps, foster goodwill and that sort of thing.”

  “But it hasn’t.”

  “Nothing is going to do that! All the Svarestri care about is getting back into power. It’s like they’re obsessed with it. I think they made the marriage because they thought if Caedmon died childless, their prince would rule everything. Only now Aiden is in the picture.”

  “And the Svarestri are scrambling.”

  “They don’t have to—they have Efridís!” Claire got up again, like she just couldn’t keep still. She’d always been the peaceful one between the two of us, but now her nervous energy skittered around the porch, like the distant lightning. “I don’t know how that woman can be Caedmon’s sister. She belongs with the damned Svarestri—she’s as ice-cold as they are. And I tell you, Dory, if she comes after my son, I’ll kill her myself. I swear I will!”

  “Why do you think she’s—”

  “Because she stole the rune! She wants her evil son to inherit, and for him to do that, Aiden has to die. That’s why she really came to court. She told everyone it was to visitsubrand, but that was just an excuse. She wanted Naudiz, and she knew no one else could get to it.”

  “How did she get out with it?” I demanded. “If only three people had access, it shouldn’t have been much of a mystery.”

  “There was no damn mystery at all! The caretaker of the vault was suspicious when she just dropped by, unannounced and with no escort, but he could hardly refuse her entrance. But he checked everything as soon as she left, and Naudiz was missing.”

  “So everyone knew she’d taken it?”

  “Yes, but not what she’d done with it.”

  “They didn’t search her?”

  Claire laughed angrily. “Oh, they did. And you should have heard the uproar over that! But Caedmon insisted, and of course they didn’t find anything. Or in her belongings, either. Then she left in a huff, saying she wouldn’t stay where she was insulted. And a few hours after she’d gone, after she was already to the damn border, they found out how she’d done it. She’d handed it off to a traitor in Caedmon’s guards, probably one of the bastards who tried to kill him—they never found out who all of them were—and he took off with it.”

  “And met her later to pass it back. Clever.”

  “That’s just it,” Claire said, leaning back against the porch railing. Red curls blew about her face, bright with reflected light from the house. Framed against angry green-black clouds, she looked a little otherworldly suddenly. “He didn’t.”

  “Didn’t what?”

  “Meet up with her. He also didn’t take it tosubrand, if that was the plan. Caedmon thinks it might have been. A person who can’t be killed can escape from anywhere, even the best-guarded prison.”

  I suddenly felt like buying this guard a beer. “Where did he go, then?”

  “The guards at the nearest portal recorded him going through an hour or so before the stone was discovered missing. He didn’t have authorization, but he knew a couple of them, and anyway, he was a fellow guard. They let him through.”

  “A portal to where?”

  “To here. To New York,” Claire told me urgently. “Caedmon thinks he’s going to try to sell the rune, that he double-crossed Efridís. The thing’s worth a fortune, and I guess it was just too much temptation.”

  “That was a lucky break.” An invinciblesubrand was not something I wanted to contemplate. He was already too close to that for comfort.

  “Yes, but it still leaves Aiden unprotected! Naudiz is here somewhere, and I have to find it before the damn Svarestri do. It’s the only way to ensure that—”

  She stopped, because the temperature plummeted about fifty degrees in an instant, like we’d suddenly stepped into a deep freeze. I looked down to see a pattern of ice creeping over the threshold, curling across the wooden planks of the floor. The day’s absorbed heat had kept them soft and warm against my feet, but suddenly they were hard and cold and slippery with frost.

  A glance out at the yard showed a swirl of small flakes spiraling out of the black sky, gilded by the glow from the house. I got up and walked down the steps, catching one on my palm. It melted immediately in the heat from my body, leaving a small wet spot behind. I smelled it, just to be sure. Water, ice.

  It was dog days in Brooklyn, and it was snowing.

  A few small flakes landed on my lips, feather soft. More drifted in the open side of the porch, collecting in Claire’s hair and shining, golden bright, on her lashes. “What is it?” she asked, frowning.

  “Get in the house,” I told her, my heart rate speeding up.

  “You said it didn’t matter—that the wards protect the porch as well,” she said, even as she gathered up the kids.

  “The wards were designed to stop magic,” I reminded her, a chill spreading through me that had nothing to do with the temperature. “Not the damn weather.”

  Like an exclamation point to my sentence, a fist-sized hailstone slammed through the porch roof, punching through the tin like a baseball through paper. It hit the old steps right in front of me, splintering into a thousand shards that flew everywhere. Pieces as long as my finger embedded in the railing,
the side of the house and my flesh.

  “Dory!”

  My leg buckled, a sliver the size of a penknife sticking out of my knee, blood welling up darkly around it.

  “Go!”

  I didn’t see if she obeyed, because a wash of hail-laden wind gusted across the porch the next second. It shattered every window behind us, forcing me to dive for the floor. That was just as well, since at least it gave me something to hold on to when the porch whited out the next instant, caught in the grip of a blizzard in the middle of summer.

  I felt around blind for maybe a minute, until my hand grabbed something cold and hard. It took me a second to identify it as the chain to the porch swing, because it had already frozen solid. I used it to pull myself into a crouch, turned around and headed for the approximate location of the door—only to have the wind pick me up and throw me through it.

  The door opened out, not in, but the force of the gale was enough to punch a Dory-shaped hole through screen, wood and glass, bringing the storm in with it. I slammed into the wall, then skidded on a wash of snow and ice half the length of the hall. I only stopped myself from sailing out the front by grabbing the banister for the stairs.

  The icy wind blowing through the back door almost ripped my hands off it, but I held on and struggled to my feet, staring around desperately for any sign of Claire or the kids. Screaming for them was an exercise in futility, but I did it anyway. And couldn’t even hear myself over the screech of the wind and the sound of the house coming down around my ears.

  But I heard the earsplitting crash when a hailstone the size of a wrecking ball smashed through the ceiling. It tore through three stories to hit the stairs right beside me, obliterating the bottom steps and the floor beneath them. After it came a swirling mass of snow, filtering down to pile in drifts in the hall, supporting the rectangular mass slowly working its way through the back door.

  And not only was it an unnatural storm—it wasn’t a natural cold, either. The air smelled strange, like the updraft from the bottom of a deep ravine, dark and sunless. I could feel the air growing colder around me, the fog of my breath thickening like smoke, my muscles tightening, becoming unresponsive. And I’d been in here all of a minute.