“By the Crafter,” she whispered, “who would have done such a thing to you, girl?” Without waiting for a reply, Grandmother made her lie on top of the wide bed’s woven coverlet.
“But your bed,” Vynasha hissed at the fresh prickle of pain.
“It was my daughter’s bed, and I can weave another, lass. Thea? Do not come in any further, little one. Yes, leave my kit there by the door, that’s fine.”
“Should I wait nearby, Grandmother?”
“Stay in your room. I will call to you should I need aid. Perhaps you could do some good and look in your mother’s books? Anything to do with burns would be a good start.”
Vynasha watched as Grandmother brought her kit to the bedside and opened a varied collection of sweet and stinking herbs, rolled bandaging and needles of bone.
“I shall not ask you to tell me how this happened,” Grandmother spoke low as she organized her tools.
Vynasha sucked in a sharp breath and spoke with an uneasy exhale. “No?”
“I already know what caused this. You see, I remember this land when Soraya helped keep our king from surrendering to his baser desires. He might have slain an entire village on a whim, that man. Too much majik in his blood, they said.”
Vynasha flexed her hands to keep from digging into the bed with her claws, her interest piqued. She had always suspected Odym had only told her part of the story. “Did everyone in the valley have majik?”
Grandmother pressed something cold as frostbite into the flesh just below her shoulder. “In some fashion or other, yes. Though it chose to manifest in different ways. Some could wield it, though with each passing year it altered their appearance. Others, like our village, found we could turn into the animals that had once preyed upon us. Many came through the mirror, like Soraya, in the first age. Before they came, majik was a wild, wicked thing.”
“And the king?” Vynasha hissed when Grandmother pressed a cloth against her back, then moved to her legs.
“The king inherited all the wild majik of his ancestors, with none of the restraint closer generations had learned. He taught his son to be wicked, even as Soraya sought to temper them both.” Grandmother’s voice was softer, not as severe, maybe even a little sad.
Vynasha breathed in the faint scent of rosemary from the pillow at her cheek and wondered aloud. “What happened to your daughter?”
“She took after my mother’s side of the family a little more than the Wolv, and the curse took her. Turn over now, lass.” The old woman’s face was shuttered as she took quick survey of Vynasha’s torso. Her black eyes froze on the amulet peeking through Vynasha’s fingers and she practically ripped it from her hand with a strangled gasp.
“How have you come by this stone?” When Vynasha wouldn’t answer, the old woman tugged on the amulet. “Tell me!”
“I—it was a—a gift,” Vynasha sputtered, surprised by the woman’s ferocity and more than a little frightened by her demeanor.
Grandmother dropped the amulet and took a step back, eyeing it with mistrust. “Mark me, girl, when I tell you that gem is evil. You would do best to be rid of it.”
Vynasha smiled bitterly and stared at the light dancing with shadows in the peaked rafters above. “Believe me, I’ve already tried…”
“What do you mean? Has it claimed you, then?”
Because she was weary from keeping secrets, from Grendall, Ceddrych and herself, she confessed, “If you mean my majik is out of control without this amulet, then yes.”
Grandmother was at her side again. “Majik has always threatened to consume the strongest. Too much will burn you up from the inside out.” She looked at the burn scarring Vynasha’s cheek and trailing down her neck with pity. “You were burned before the curse tried to take you.”
The curse took her, Grandmother had said before.
“What do you mean?”
Grandmother shook her head and returned her attention to tending the rest of Vynasha’s burns. “Majik bleeds from this land and Soraya’s curse twists it to what it was never meant to be. Some of us have enough ice in our veins to cool the majik infecting our blood.”
As she wrapped Vynasha with rags lined with poultice, the old woman was careful not to touch the amulet, though her eyes lingered on it. Indecision crossed her wrinkled features before she added, “That gem did not come to you by accident. It is unfortunate that the key has claimed you. Such a fate I never wished for my own daughter. After I’m finished we must dress you and you are to never allow anyone in this village to see it or your life is forfeit.”
“ANYTHING OF MERIT in your mother’s tomes, lass?” Grandmother’s voice floated softly nearby, pulling her out of medicine-fueled stupor.
“Nothing about these sort of burns among hexes and curses.”
Vynasha blinked past wafts of thick herbal poultice smoking from a pouch about her neck. The girl sat atop fur cushions nearby, yellow-leafed books spread around her. Candlelight played tricks with the shadows in and out of her mind.
“Perhaps this is something we have no knowledge of,” Grandmother replied.
“I’ll find it,” Erythea insisted.
“Have you read the volume about blood majik? Remind me to mend the binding on that one, it is so old.”
“Mother didn’t approve of blood spells and you know it.”
Grandmother grumbled under her breath and her full skirts made a brief appearance at Vynasha’s bedside before she bent lower to pick and tweak her patient’s bandaging. “These burns should have healed already. Some black majik has taken hold of you, child.” As she turned around, she added, “Make haste, Thea. Your father will not approve.”
Upon mention of Baalor, Vynasha stirred and pushed past the pain in order to sit. The room spun with splotches of gold and black until her vision settled on Erythea’s open-mouthed terror.
“Grandmother!”
“Lie back in that bed this instant, foolish creature!” Grandmother’s hands were gentle yet firm upon her shoulders.
Vynasha shook her head. “No, I promised my brother I would wait at home.”
“You shall surely break your promise, if you want to get well. If your fool brother had any sense he wouldn’t leave you in the care of those fools in the first place. Thea, put away the books for now.”
Thea took Vynasha’s hand in her smaller, tight grasp, wisps of pale blonde hair rushing into her face. “Don’t worry. We’ll find a way to heal you.”
Vynasha shut her eyes against the child’s undeserved compassion. As Erythea fled the room, Grandmother leaned in with more of the stinking plant dulling her senses.
The old woman’s grip replaced her granddaughter’s and Vynasha flinched at the harsh bite in her voice. “Do not fight us on this. My son will understand your reasons for being here. But remember, do not under any circumstances trust him. For that matter, brother or no, you would be wise to use caution with all you tell Wanderer.”
Majik infused her skin with a deeper sense, reminiscent of Grendall’s restrained touches, charged with desire to escape, to be set free.
Take it off, it whispered seductively in her ear as she dug her claws again and again into the tender flesh of her thighs. The amulet anchored her to the straw mattress and she wished for the wild power of the curse to return.
She spoke to her mother, to her father and sisters in the dark, wishing for impossible things. And somewhere between living nightmares, where the fire burned her family up and Grendall’s beautiful face crumbled to ash, calloused hands took hold of hers. With incredible strength, those hands kept hers from digging into her bared flesh or the strange bed. Instead those hands squeezed back, pulled her back.
Vynasha opened her eyes and found him sitting on the edge of the bed with her, his cold features unreadable.
“Did Wanderer leave you to suffer alone like this?” Baalor’s deep voice cut through the silence.
“No.” The raspy quality to her voice made her flinch, long to retreat into herself. Yet something in
Baalor’s icy demeanor demanded more. “I was scarred like this before,” she confessed.
“Before the curse took you,” he growled and threaded his fingers with hers.
Vynasha looked down at their joined bloody hands, where her claws had pricked him. His blood reflected an almost black shade of crimson in the candlelight, while hers shone a luminous violet. Her blood, so clearly reeking majik, spilling into his, seeking to infect him the way Grendall’s had with her.
She dug her heels into the mattress, pulling away in vain. In spite of her burns and the drugs yet clouding her senses, she couldn’t let him see. “Can’t!” she gasped aloud. As she ducked her head, her thick dark hair fell into her face like a curtain.
“Vynasha!” Baalor tightened his grip in retaliation, shifted so his torso pinned her to the bed. “Look at me,” he demanded.
Tears leaked from her eyes. “Can’t! You’ll kill me,” she sobbed.
“Why would I kill you?” he asked, incredulous. His grip slackened somewhat, enough for her to pull her hands free and push against his chest. He didn’t budge, trapping her hands between them instead, digging her claw tips into hard muscle.
“Because of what I am,” she rasped.
“Look at me,” he said and she couldn’t ignore the pleading in his tone. He smiled a sharp-toothed grin. “Can’t you see I am only trying to help you?”
Vynasha retracted her grip on his flesh and other than a flicker of something in his green irises, he didn’t complain or speak of pain. “Do you feel anything?” she wondered aloud.
“I feel you,” he replied.
To this, what could she say, or do? Vynasha looked into his eyes and a sudden need filled her, stronger than any she had known before. “I am afraid,” she whispered, watching as his eyes seemed to burn brighter, closer to the wolf underneath his human skin.
“I know.”
Vynasha smoothed her fingertips over the fabric of his shirt and watched the black of his pupils expand, the tick in his jaw as it clenched together. “Will you tell the village?”
“Tell them what?” He shifted slightly, so he no longer pinned her to the bed, and lay beside her. She didn’t notice the burns now, could barely string thoughts together to marvel at him.
“That I’m a witch,” she simply said, believing the truth as well as she could accept it.
Baalor’s eyebrows arched and he laughed aloud, startling her. His teeth gleamed white and he calmed her with a gentle graze of his hand to her bandaged cheek.
“I don’t see what’s so funny about this,” she grumbled.
Baalor’s laughter settled into an easy smile. “Your face when you called yourself a witch…” He shook his head, but his smile persisted and he held up his hand, stained by traces of her violet blood. “You think I care whether you use majik or not? More than half the folk in these mountains have mixed blood.”
“But you talked about majik in front of the others like you hate it.”
His smile turned menacing and he pulled away, leaning back on his elbow while his hand claimed hers once more. “Of course I hate it, dark majik at least. Wild majik is too unpredictable to use. Most former casters have died trying to wield it, or killed those around them. Majik is the root of all evil in this land, my dear, the curse saw to that.”
“But your wife…” She paused when she saw the raw pain in his face.
“My wife was human, born with wild majik. Her people cast her out of their village and I found her, brought her here. She gave me Thea, and then her precious spells ate her up. She couldn’t fight the curse…” He sat up, turned away and hunched his shoulders as he leaned over his leg.
“Majik didn’t kill your wife,” Vynasha said, suddenly unafraid, yet very certain she had no right to speak such words. Perhaps it was this house, rife with the after-effects of his wife’s spells, that told her otherwise. There was darkness in this house, but majik couldn’t be of sole blame.
Baalor looked back at her from over his shoulder. “How can you claim this, Vynasha, when you are living proof of the cruelty of majik?”
Vynasha bit her bottom lip with her sharpened teeth. “What do you mean, proof?”
He straightened and barely grazed the bandages wrapped over her arms, her cheek.
“Oh,” she gasped, having forgotten about the burns, about Grendall’s dream and her reason for lying in this bed. How could she forget?
“Your brother begged the Council to keep me away from you.”
“So why don’t you?”
“Wish I knew,” he said with a low chuckle and roll of his shoulders. “You keep showing up on my doorstep, you know.”
Vynasha ducked her head, pressed a free hand to her belly and wished for it to calm. “Grandmother insisted I stay.”
“I would have dragged you back here myself if you hadn’t listened.” His voice was hard, in spite of his casual manner. “You shouldn’t be alone in this village at night. Despite what your brother told you, it isn’t safe.”
“Why?” she couldn’t help but ask.
“Not everyone in this village views majik the way my family does. Some of the mirror folk in particular blame it for their hardship. I can keep you safe.”
“If I help you, you mean,” she said with disgust and more than a little disappointment.
Baalor leaned into the bed, pressed into the mattress beside her, filling her senses the way he had the night before. “I know you think I’m a monster. But all I want is to take back the land from the Beast. I want Thea to have a choice, not let the curse choose her fate as it did my sister.” He looked at the carved bedroom walls, lost, and in that moment she could clearly see him for the first time.
Erythea was right when she claimed he wasn’t afraid of majik. Baalor was a father, a man who had lost his family just like Vynasha. Fear for the family he had left was what drove him now, a passion as dangerous as blind hatred of what they didn’t understand. Vynasha understood and recognized the hunger inside him, the same thing driving Ceddrych out to search for Wyll in the frozen night.
Vynasha pushed up, ignoring the pain as she turned his face toward hers. “I will do everything I can to help you, for Erythea. But you must do something for me.”
“Anything,” he vowed.
Not anything in his power, she noted, or whatever he could, but anything. His sincerity and severity compelled and frightened her. She hesitated, looked from his thin but firm lips, surrounded by a short beard the same silvery shade as his hair, to the unspoken promise in his face.
“Leave my brother alone. Let one of the twins come for me when he returns, but don’t ask him any questions or call him out in front of the village again.”
“Upon my honor and my clan,” he agreed. He stroked her cheek below the new burns, a heaviness in his faintly glowing eyes. She sucked in a sharp breath as he placed a kiss that was rough and tender on the corner of her jaw, just below the bandage.
“Good,” she said, breathless. Her eyes fluttered shut and she let him ease her back against the feather pillow, happy.
She didn’t dream.
Candlelight burned behind her eyelids, the heat of its flame so near it made her jolt awake. Erythea’s bright blue eyes met her on the other side of the flame, the stench of melting wax filling her nose.
“Thea?”
Erythea shifted the candle, pulling it back with a faint flinch and soft-spoken apology. She shifted a thick vellum book in her arms. “Sorry to wake you like this, but I couldn’t sleep. I was looking at the blood spells, like Grandmother told me, when I heard Father,” she whispered between short breaths.
Vynasha pushed up against the headboard, grunted against the rub of raw skin and leaned forward in spite of the bloody candle. “What happened?”
“Someone came to the door. They didn’t speak loud enough for me to hear. But Father cursed and left without waking us. Something terrible happened, I know it… I—I’m afraid for him, Vynasha. There are people who could hurt him.”
&n
bsp; Vynasha dragged her legs over the side of the bed. “I’ll go look for him.”
“No!” Thea hissed, reaching out, but invariably pushing the candle forward.
Vynasha jerked beyond the flame’s light with a low growl and again, Thea cowered.
“Sorry,” Thea mumbled. “But you can’t leave. You’re still healing and if Grandmother finds out…”
“Grandmother won’t find out,” Vynasha whispered in return, standing and lifted the trunk lid at the foot of the bed. “Help me, and put that candle down before you spill wax on your hand.”
Or me, she thought with a shudder.
Baalor’s sister was a size too large, but Vynasha found boots, undergarments and a fresh woolen skirt and vest to slip over her bloody tunic and bandages. Her hands had been scrubbed clean of Baalor’s blood, she noticed, and wondered how long he’d watched over her while she slept.
Thea paced with her mother’s book clutched to her chest. “I should go with you.”
“No,” Vynasha hissed as she closed the trunk lid, silently praying Grandmother wouldn’t skin her hide for taking her daughter’s things. “Leave the candle. We don’t need it,” she instructed Erythea. Together they crept downstairs and she tugged on the thickest pair of boots by the door she could find.
“Grandmother won’t like this,” Thea whispered while bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet.
“Stay here. I’ll come back.” Vynasha exchanged a last, firm look with the girl as she stepped over the threshold into the snow, her brother’s cloak over her shoulders once more. Icy wind shot through the warm clothes to her bones, but helped bring her senses to life after Grandmother’s numbing poultices.
A bare sliver of a moon hung in the clouded sky overhead, offering little light, but her cursed animal senses sharpened. She could discern the outlines of trees, hear the faintest crunch of pawed feet on snow and voices from the nearby village. She had not taken five steps beyond the Iceveins home before a pair of small boots followed. Vynasha reeled around and grabbed Erythea by her cloaked shoulders.
Scarred Beauty Page 11
