Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3)

by Christian A. Brown

  Tonight, after they’d finished their session of teasing and torment, Lila lay in the crook of Erik’s armpit. Resting her tawny head upon his great scarred chest, she played—not romantically, only absently—with the curled hair around his dark nipples. Once more, without lust, she looked up and pondered his hard, square face, his unruly beard, his broken nose (which matched his slightly curved, cumbersome, and still erect prick), and the dark jewels of his eyes as he watched the creaking ceiling. One of Erik’s hands cupped her breast, rubbing it with the same apathy that she expressed while caressing his stone-hard thigh with a silky leg. Satisfied by their refinement of the art of sex without love, Lila remembered the night the dam had finally broken, and all their anger, pain, and desire had transformed into a new kind of suffering.

  Hourglasses before, angry that they could not end themselves, Erik had left her in their dingy quarters: chipped commode, stained sheets, buckled bed, and an air of mothballs, fish guts, and mouse turds. Far from fitting arrangements for a queen, but by then she was only a woman. She’d made peace with that devaluation many weeks past.

  So she’d fluffed the sheets, washed herself in a rusted tub, then had put on a flimsy, cheap undergarment and slipped into bed. The outside world had sounded merry. She’d heard harpists and clapping and a murmur of conversation that tugged at her heart because it was mostly laughter. She hadn’t been able to recall the last time she’d laughed; it seemed inconceivable that she had ever known how. She’d assumed Erik was among those celebrating, or drinking at least. She’d imagined him sitting in the shadows, dour as an old warrior at a ballet, and telling the women who might approach him, “Begone, wench.”

  He had been drinking a lot in those days. All down the long road through Fairfarm, particularly while traveling the sotted shores of Riverton and on the ferry ride across the Feordhan, her companion had developed his fondness for the taste she had introduced to him—liquor. Even in the Salt Forest, he had carried two waterskins and drunk from the one causing more urination and dehydration than his own wisdom had dictated. Aye, he had sulked and drunk away what no amount of poison—save fatal venom—could have smudged from the mind. She had preferred the simpler remedy of sleep, which, even if haunted with screams, explosions, and Magnus’s pale face, had been a deep enough void that she’d recalled only hints of terror. Mostly dark and forgetful, sleep had been her only escape from what she had done. She’d closed her eyes and had been unconscious almost instantly.

  Heavy footsteps had roused her from a nightmare of burned, broken, bone-jutting hands pulling her into a pit of rubble. She’d felt relieved to see Erik leaning over the bed, swaying from drink. However, she might have welcomed an assassin and his blade with the same sighing acceptance. “You’re drunk,” she’d said.

  “I am.”

  They’d broken and pissed on the rules of civility by murdering a nation, and she hadn’t felt herself in a position to judge him. She had wondered only whether or not she should give him the side of the bed nearest to the lavatory door. He had not become ill often; sickening him required as much alcohol as it would take to bring down a bull. But when the drink had sickened him, he’d heaved until blood ran from his mouth. She’d wanted not to play nurse and bucket-serf all evening. “Should we switch sides?” she’d asked.

  Erik had performed a one-legged dance pulling off his boots. He’d struggled out of his shirt, then had stared at the crumpled pile of his belongings on the floor. A panting shadow, he’d neither turned to her nor answered. Ignoring her had already become habitual for Erik; for him to acknowledge even half of what she said was miraculous. She had figured that in order to cope with his grief, in order to avoid strangling her in rage, he had decided to block out the poison of her voice. Sometimes, she’d seen the flicker in his eyes of a passion she’d taken for bloodlust when he’d stared at her. It must have been murder he’d felt for he could not possibly have still loved her. Once, flecks of blue had dotted his irises, but his corruption had since turned them black.

  As he’d seethed in silence, in the thin, dusky light of the room, she’d noticed the corded muscle of his back and the gnarled flesh upon his broad shoulders, wounds he’d sustained when he’d saved her from Menosian terrorists in the Faire of Fates. She had not witnessed beauty in some time, had become almost unable to recall what it looked like, now that her march through life had become somber. But Erik’s scars had beauty. The scratches left by shrapnel and sorcery had healed imperfectly, leaving bold white lines on his brown flesh—a writing almost as fine as the oldest scripts housed in the Court of Ideas. What would this book of flesh say if its scars were words? she’d wondered.

  “You’re staring at me,” he’d said, turning around. His eyes had glowed with a beautiful darkness.

  Maybe tonight he’ll strangle me and end this sick charade of life, she’d thought. A sacrifice like that would have been within his code of honor, and would have allowed him to live on and absorb the guilt of her murder into the already pulverizing weight he carried. Thoughts of beauty, suffering, and blood had shaken a bit of prose loose in her head—something once read in the Court of Ideas. She had found herself mumbling the words, “Iron song, blood song, burning in my veins. Iron song, blood song, heathen woe my name. A gash of glory, and ye decry. Fear deep the love of death, have I…”

  “What is that?”

  “A poem. I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud.”

  “You did,” he’d said, climbing onto the mattress, unsettling everything with his mass before flopping on his back; he’d reeked of sweat and whiskey. Staring at the roof, he’d asked, “What does it mean?”

  “Ode in Blood is a love song, believe it or not,” she’d replied. “A tribute to the beauty and allure of battle.”

  “Beauty is a lie,” he’d hissed, his manner that of an angry beast.

  She would have been a fool to stick her finger into his cage. Gradually, as though their old decorum had been part of a fantasy she’d once read, their demeanor between each other had hardened into the coldest ice. Erik had begun to say anything he wanted, to act with the brashness of a young man, and to behave with often dangerous violence. Never toward her, though her safety had come at the expense of a bloodied, toothless inebriate or a pack of groaning, crippled men that Erik had left somewhere. As darkly as his temper might have manifested, as beclouded as he might have become from drink, never, ever had he harmed her. She’d wondered if the shade of the honorable man he had once been had stopped him at the brink of rage. Daring to push him while he had been under the influence of darkness, in that moment she’d managed to coax forth the man he had hidden, by touching him on his shoulder.

  Erik had snatched her dainty hand, rolled onto his side, and his anger had vanished. His rage had risen into a different kind of fire as he had beheld the golden queen wearing a shift made as thin as paper by her sweat, her curvaceous figure rendered in soft moonlight. She’d felt his eyes wandering over her hips, her bounteous breasts. She’d felt him dotting her long neck with phantom kisses. His desire to touch her candy-red lips and ruffle her golden curls had become as powerful as a vibration. “Beauty is a lie,” he’d repeated.

  She’d waited, trapped in pounding, drawn air, for something to happen; she hadn’t been sure what. Slowly, he’d taken the hand he’d claimed and had pressed it to his hammering heart. He’d left her hand there, and she’d trailed it, lower, to the throbbing snake that had wanted to burst from his pants. “Will you lie to me?” he’d asked.

  Noble even under a carnal spell, he had offered her a choice—to remove her hand, rather than adding another layer of damnation to their souls. If only refusing temptation had been so easy, she would have never listened to the whispers of Death and leveled the Iron City. She’d added one more sin to the pyre of torment and loathing as she’d freed all of Erik’s meaty weight from his pants. She had never touched another man’s hardness, save for the cold icicle of the Everfair King. Erik’s meat had been incredibly hot, and differen
t: the crown of it wider, the rod of it squatter, the balls heavy. Erik and Lila had shuddered from her exploration of his flesh, then had separated for a moment to shuffle out of their garments. The first thing he’d done, as they’d rolled together, was to press them close, so close: hot to hot—which she’d never felt with a man, as Magnus had been only cold. As if a woman on fire, her shame had peaked with the flames rushing along her skin. She had longed to touch him; she had wanted to press caramel to dark brown skin for more years than she’d known.

  Staring into his gaze, she’d seen how deeply she had corrupted him, how powerfully and entirely her love had bewitched this man. Memories—flashes of wood rafters and twirling shafts of light, even distant scents of hay—had come over her as he’d stroked the side of her face. In tune with him, her fingers had played over the rippled tissue on his back. Had that been the instant he’d realized he loved her and would give up everything for her, including his honor and soul? What then had this moment meant for her? Redemption? Realization? She hadn’t been able to resolve that question, for tenderly, he’d entered her mouth with his tongue and slipped his erection into her womanhood. A perfect fit in each place, like oiled chocolate into molten caramel. Sheer delicacy and bliss, she’d felt, and the revulsion and heat in her body had consumed her in a violent, shuddering fever.

  That was their first night, and the most sensual of their dalliances. Since then, they’d used sex as a recreation for forgetfulness. In a slight turn for the better, Erik now drank less, though still regularly, and she slept with fewer terrors, though still fitfully. During the evening hourglasses, he took on hazardous jobs: the kind for which laborers weren’t asked for proper papers, as they usually ended up injured or dead. While she never asked, she had an idea about what kind of work he did—protection and brutality for hire. Lately, with the horns of war wailing from west to east across Geadhain, men had much need of procured violence.

  When Erik went off to break noses and bones, and on the days when Lila could drag herself from bed, she had taken to doing a bit of charity work at the Order of St. Celcita. The sisters at the old basilica found Lila quite useful, with her knowledge of nursing, herbology, and potion-craft. The latter was a passion of hers. Back in the secret groves of the palace gardens, there were plots of some of the rarest plants on Geadhain—herbs that would now die without her knowledge and care. Carthac’s market, even its most exotic brokers, had a dearth of green mysteries. Still, the most basic plants one needed to aid with restlessness, pain, and tremors could be found. She used her herbology to tend to the dying and the ill.

  She felt no squeamishness toward her charges. When she helped those who suffered to feel a shade less terrible, it was not under any illusion of piety—for she could never be redeemed. Instead, she wanted her eyes rubbed with the sand of suffering, so that she might never forget her crimes. Those who lingered near the veil of death evoked the strongest feelings of remorse in her. At times, she imagined them to be those she had doomed in Menos. She assumed Erik was similarly possessed by hatred and depression while wetting his fists with blood.

  “I should be leaving shortly,” said Erik, suddenly.

  Another moment, and he was up making noise: stomping to the lavatory, splashing water, taking a piss, walking around the room on a treasure hunt for his garments. Sleepily, Lila listened from the bed. Eventually, Erik’s shadow and tidier self hovered nearby, and she woke herself to see him standing over her, a bit sinister with his frown, dark clothing, and half-cloak. She repositioned her body in the sheets—into an alluring pose, from the way his mouth hung—and they played a game of stares before speaking.

  “Will you stay in for the evening?” he asked.

  “I think I shall see if I am needed at the Order.”

  “Be safe.”

  What he meant was, stay unseen, speak to no one. They were, after all, hiding in plain sight. Clever but risky. Fleeing to Carthac, using the same path Magnus had instructed his adopted son to take should the queen be threatened, might seem the riskiest road to travel for two genocidal fugitives avoiding justice. Excessively paranoid about the arrangements, Magnus had long ago ensured that any assistance available to them would come through anonymous partners—men who did not know from whom the coin came, men who would be loyal out of fear of that same anonymous, potentially wrathful sponsor. At roadside inns, Erik had whispered passwords to faceless strangers, who then gave him horses, supplies, and coin. In total, it had taken around a month to reach Carthac. First, they had trotted south through the long, empty green hills of Meadowvale, hardly encountering another soul; then, they’d made a push through the withering Salt Forests. They’d arrived in Carthac thanks to the generosity of no less than three unnamed shadowbrokers and perhaps a dozen merchants, who would know it would not be safe to remember the large warrior and his hooded companion.

  Surely, Magnus didn’t even suspect they were in Carthac. They certainly hadn’t reached out to any of the king’s most powerful allies in the city—the council of aldermen—for fear of his getting wind they were here. Even in Magnus’s most devious moments, he would likely not suspect they would head to the City of Waves. It seemed probable, given the lack of wanted posters about the realms and bounty hunters hounding them, that Magnus hadn’t mounted a pursuit. In a sense, knowing that was worse than being on the run, for it implied the king thought she and Erik were either irredeemable or inconsequential.

  While Lila’s mind wandered, Erik left, giving her neither a kiss nor a wave goodbye. After all, they were not lovers, only fellow sufferers. If he’d stayed, it would have been to roll with her in angry, savage forgetfulness. There would be more of that when he returned in the early dawn, drunk, and bearing the spiced and not unpleasant body odor gained from crushing skulls. Until then, she could ponder the notes of his smell, his fragrance of violence, which reminded her of an Arhadian clove she’d sniffed in her childhood a thousand years past. Before getting out of the sheets, she took a sniff of herself and smelled violence upon her flesh as well. They were in her nature now: blood and death. Her body, at last, had become as tainted as her soul.

  III

  At the base of the sea wall that protected Carthac from the Straits of Wrath, the Order of St. Celcita occupied a partially demolished basilica. It looked close to collapse, with its one ruined dome, two standing towers, and two fallen ones. The towers that remained erect looked as flimsy as bushels of straw. Lila wondered if it would be her destiny to die beneath their inevitably toppled mass. Against the grim sky and gray wall, the ivory basilica appeared as if it were made of clouds and faint light. Holy. It felt holy to her, every time she beheld it. Feathers of mist floated about the towers, and the sea beat upon Carthac’s wall like an unyielding drum: it was a pretty and impressive scene. She stood and pondered.

  Her trip to the hospice had been unremarkable. Once out of the noisy quarter where she and Erik lived, she had taken a slink down bricked streets, past cube-shaped dwellings with shuttered windows and chimneys piping smoke. She had passed an alley cat or two, and a few singing drunks, though hardly another soul more. Things had seemed rather quiet in the City of Waves. Wryly, she wondered if tales of a face-smashing thug who kept the peace for rich masters were making the rounds.

  Chastising herself for thinking fondly of Erik—she was meant to suffer, not fawn—Lila focused on the basilica, which always required a small rousing of courage to approach. The peaked and ruined towers, which rose like talons toward the sky, and the shattered dome, fallen in like a broken egg, gave her a frightful shiver whenever she neared. If this was a place of divinity, then it stood to reason that here she would also find a gateway to the infernal—although she no longer feared the voice of a dead warlord or the whispers of Death. She had scraped from herself the mercy and love that her attackers had twisted to make her obedient. No more would she be controlled. She hardly knew what fear was anymore. What then spooked her? This was not terror, but…

  Lila couldn’t find the word, a
nd the wind swept down over the wall, bringing with it a sudden hail of water. A peal of thunder also rang, and she hurried toward the basilica. Quickly dashing between tombstones and around rusted fences, Lila managed to reach the shadowed arch of the Order’s sanctuary just as rain began dousing the land behind her. From her place of shelter, she watched the weather turn the grave markers slick and black, frowning as it blazed the sky with white rage. Storms reminded her of Magnus, and dwelling on the king summoned unwanted thoughts of Erik, too. She felt moodier today, less set in her resolute darkness than usual.

  “Siobhan,” said a woman.

  Sister Abagail’s voice was as cracked and ancient as a grandmother’s. When Lila turned, though, she saw a thin, spectacled lass in a black frock. Religion seemed such an odd convention in an age of technomagik—these women, with their peaked hats, half veils, and gloved hands, struck Lila as especially anachronistic. Abagail and her sisters were relics of the past, which is perhaps why Lila had felt so drawn to them in the first place, being a relic herself. “Sister Abagail,” said Lila.

  The two women coyly watched each other, like cats deciding if the other were friend or foe. Lila sensed that the sister saw through some degree of her deception, which is why they often engaged in this contest. Then Abagail smiled. Friends, it appeared. Abagail gestured Lila forward into the ornate vestry where she stood.

  “Come on in out of the rain, Siobhan. We have enough sickness to tend to in here already and don’t want to have to make up another cot for you.”

  If only you knew, thought Lila, who hadn’t sniffled from a cold in a thousand years.

  While the two walked together at an easy pace through spacious dark halls, the fallen queen glanced at the surrounding remnants of a dynasty of yore: tapestries enchanted with witchstitch, torn, yet still garishly red and bright despite their age; pedestals displaying busts of burly men with chipped faces. Lila knew the tale behind these fallen generals, these men who had wanted to be kings—the Lordkings of Carthac. They had been descendants of some of the oldest houses of Menos, the founders of which had come and settled in Carthac when it was barely even a hamlet. The masters had been fleeing some enemy or retribution for their sins—no one knew the exact history anymore. The lords had lavished wealth on the sea-folk, turned a backwater hamlet into a byzantine metropolis. These ancient masters built the wall of the city—a dark reflection of Eod’s achievement. This structure did not exist solely to protect the city from privateers—it also served to seal in the wealth that the populace trawled from the sea: fish, weeds, and ores from the furthest deeps (and, it had been said, even a wonderstone or two, although none was found after the masters fell).