American Quest (15 page)

The young man and his guardian now pursued Charles Forte. The destruction of the bond-recherché would not be so easy.

Lifetimes had passed and yet sometimes it seemed only yesterday that Rafe and Isolde had stood in the virtuous glow, the glorious light that beckoned evil from the far corners of the Earth. Centuries ago, there had been a scourge, a pestilence that raked through the villages with death in its tines. Isolde’s parents perished. Alone and frightened, she summoned her will to fight the disease that threatened to wrack her own body. And once she survived it, she traveled to her neighbors’ crofts, and to the crofts of her neighbors’ neighbors, tending the sick and imparting the healing vitality of her own warm heart.

Rafe had assisted her. Young and able, he brought her supplies—medicine, a butchered doe, a bushel of turnips—whatever he could scavenge from the land or those who were willing to help. He did this just to look upon Isolde. To tell her tales of his inevitable someday. He spoke of when the villages of the region would escape this plague, when
he would realize his ambitions, working first in the shrieval system and then riding in constableship to the king himself. Once he earned a reasonable sum, he vowed to take Isolde away from the seaside villages, to ask for her hand.

But it was not to be.

Isolde’s deep dedication to service, Rafe’s intense commitment to helping maintain the peace, and their tender love for each other called clarionlike to dark forces. The Macul of Corrupted Compassions, Kolt, approached Isolde. Cloaked in the false skin of a gentle human form, Kolt used Rafe’s musings of “someday” to entice her.

“Why wait?” the Macul posited. “Suppose your young man could enter the shrieval system now. Nay, suppose he could enter the constableship now. Imagine, when you touch Rafe’s skin, yours are the fine, soft hands of a respected lady. You bear his children. Isolde the Fair, a beauty of face and figure, you should be the mistress of an esteemed household. A maiden like you should never be mopping the piss and puke of strangers.”

The offer had to have been very appealing to Isolde. She’d toiled hard against the formidable opponent of disease. She must have found the notion of foregoing her challenges and living in luxury appealing, especially if she knew she could give Rafe his dream at the same time.

And yet, she had resisted.

The memory of her parents still bright in her heart, she had been unable to turn her back on the sick. She had allowed that Rafe should seek his fortune of his own volition, even though it meant leaving her behind with naught but promises of that beautiful someday.

But in demurring at Kolt’s temptation, she unwittingly laid her neck upon his block.

It had been up to Rafe to save her.

They had survived, but only by means of an unclean promise to Kolt’s rival, the Macul of Love Maligned, Enervata. Through that promise, Rafe and Isolde laid down their mortality, set aside their purity, and defiled that which had been beautiful.

They continued to live through the ages. The price of this extended vitality was living century after century in forced association with each other. The once impassioned lovers now despised each other desperately.

But here, centuries later, there came once again the breath of mortality at Rafe’s neck. And Isolde’s. A whisper of an end.

Isolde and Rafe gazed into the heart of Canteshrike Grotto and watched the dance unfold, a dance in which they would never again participate.

She snorted with derision. “Unlikely refuge this should make us. They call us hideous and then forsake us.”

Rafe nearly smiled. “Your voice is healed then. You still speak at a whisper, but you no longer seem pained.”

She regarded him with a sidelong glint of yellow.

“Truth be known, you are still becoming this way, Isolde. More so, even. Your skin and plumage gleam like the forged steel blade of a dagger. Or like the ice cave walls when the moon is out.”

“Or the slimy scales of a steelhead trout!”

Rafe laughed, a sensation that had not filtered through him in years, perhaps a century.

“I speak the truth, Isolde. Do you really believe I would engage in idle flattery with you? Only such beasts as these canteshrikes would be repulsed by your plumage. They are obsessed with the silly snowy whites.”

She regarded them, puzzled, and returned her eyes to Rafe. “Thou hast ne’er taken the canteshrike way, not in thought nor in what you say.”

Rafe nodded. “I defied it, from the moment of onset. When I lost you, centuries ago, when he changed us from our human forms into these beasts and my memories of our love was still bright, I avowed then to ne’er forget. And on that first night when I watched you dance in the heart of Canteshrike Grotto, frolicking with the others, watching them pet you, stroke you, I knew then deep hatred, and avowed ne’er to adapt their ways.”

“So implausible, quite unnatural.”

He laughed, but this time with harshness. “Speak to me not of that which is unnatural. Woman, what are we if not unnatural? Once lovers, now we exist only from our hatred. Even now, you sting me with every mate you so casually take in this wretched grotto.”

Isolde tilted her head in hissing derision. “You begrudge me for my mates in this glacier? But you were the first, Rafe, to lay with another.
You had betrayed me. I showed naught but loyalty. Your jealousy is a queer beast to discover.”

“I lay with another, yes Isolde, for one reason alone: to save your life. It is as you say. You resisted temptation from Kolt all those centuries ago, but you would have succumbed eventually and Kolt would have killed you. And then came Enervata, in his intent to undermine his adversary. He presented to me the only way to save your life. To lay with another and break our bond myself. He offered immortality to us. For this I have shown . . .”

His voice trailed off, knowing that the last of his statement no longer held bearing.

He sighed, and spoke it aloud despite himself. “Eternal gratitude.”

Isolde closed her eyes. “Eternal servitude.”

Laughter from the heart of the ice cave drifted toward them. The sun descended over Canteshrike Grotto, filling it with splashes of amethyst and sapphire.

“And what of this immortality?” Isolde finally said. “That promise has proven a falsity. Replaced by a darker guarantee.”

“Yes.” Rafe stepped into a glimmering niche of the cave wall where a nest of white feathers stretched over a mossy divot. He tucked his legs under and sat.

“Yes, indeed. A guarantee of our deaths. This quarrel we have hashed century after century may become moot. Likely we will die from today’s failure, our immortality lost. We have allowed a sign to filter through to Bruce and his guardian. The first prize of the quest is within their reach.”

Isolde nodded, her eyes distant. “We failed Enervata’s request. A failing that could mean our deaths.”

“Mine for certain, but he may spare you. But do you think that our deaths would be such a terrible thing? Methinks it should have occurred six hundred years ago. You spoke before of what is unnatural. Had we simply died with our bond between us, that would have been a natural thing and ours might have been a gladder story than this.”

She cast her eyes down. “We lived on as his servants, gulping pledges from his warrants.”

“Yes. As his second, he promised me reign over much of the Earth. And to you, reign of the wild-lands. We have long since learned that his
promises bear decay. And yet we continue on in this staged immortality, fearful of the kind of afterlife that awaits us after what we have become. Such an existence asks its price when one’s soul has turned to the blackest oil.”

He paused, regarding her, and then addressed her in an ancient way long since familiar to their ears.

“Wilt thou come and sit by my side, my former love? For thee whom I have loved and thee whom I have hated, thine eyes now beest mine only comfort on this, the eve of my death.”

Isolde’s eyes glimmered momentarily, and an expression that Rafe had not seen in six centuries flickered over her.

She moved into the niche and sat with him. “Not for you speak in the ways of old. I sit here because this grotto is cold.”

He chuckled. “And because we are now shunned?”

“I’ve other kin to help me cope.” She nodded at Rafe. “Our band of merry misanthropes.”

Rafe laughed wholly now, throwing back his head with a roar. The other canteshrikes lifted their heads from the center of the cave and looked on.

He chuckled, shaking his head. “Sitting cold in a cave of ice are we. Shunned, damned, and awaiting our deaths. How did we get here, Isolde?”

He gazed at the pixieflies drifting at the far corner. “Ironic, is it not? In making us outcasts, Enervata has brought us together. Even one week ago I could not have imagined you and I might sit so companionably in a niche of the ice cave.”

She smiled. “Because we’re shunned, we share this room. That and our impending doom.”

He stroked her hair. They sat quietly together for a long while.

He sighed. “We must get back.”

She nodded, but instead of rising, laid her head on his shoulder. Her fingers played at the downy bend of his crooked knee.

And then she moved her hand up to his cheek and caressed it.

He looked down at her, and she up at him, and again there passed an expression they had not shared in six hundred years. The memory of it, so stridently evicted, came coursing back. And in her amber eyes that
had once been hazel, he saw what she had been, not what she had become.

Isolde tilted her head back and he kissed her. Felt the smoothness of her skin. Remembered. Oh, he remembered.

Rafe and Isolde had not joined together since their bond had been broken centuries ago. Now, with his fingers tangling her hair, he pulled her close, and she clung to him, silvered breasts pressed into his skin.

They shifted, sliding to the spongy moss that tufted the floor of the ice cave. Rafe felt her fingertips all around him and he entwined his legs around hers and gripped her with his talons. Two tendrils of ivy coiling about each other, impervious to the inevitable winter, reaching only for the sunrays of the moment.

She let her teeth graze his ear. “Transport me to a foreign place. Where at your hands I might feel safe. So often have I yearned for Rafe.”

“I shall transport you and in doing so transport myself.”

She swirled him, engulfing him in soft skin and satin feathers, and she pressed his shoulders into the moss. She entitled herself to him and he to her, measuring each curving plane of her body.

She spun and leaped to her feet and he was on her, teeth at her shoulder, chest to her back.

For the span of an advancing tide, they forgot. Their bodies came together as canteshrikes, but their minds flew to another world. Another time. And they could allow for love, fear, hatred, and ambition in that span, releasing these sparring anxieties into that tide.

The moon rose over the ice cave. In the center danced the flock and Rafe and Isolde were as they once were.

They returned slowly, becoming gradually aware of their burdens once again. But it seemed some of those burdens no longer pulled at them.

They lay back down on the feathered divot of moss and she nestled into him with tenderness. “I’m glad we end our lives so sweet, ’fore Enervata we must meet.”

He kissed her temple, and she sighed.

“It is the right way to end this. We have loved and we have hated, but always together. Throughout the centuries, Isolde, always together.”

“Six hundred years of service. Six hundred years of sickness.”

He rumbled a bitter laugh, then considered their plight.

An idea formed within him. “Perhaps the sickness need not end. As I ponder this, my inclination is to not tell Enervata of today’s developments. To hide that Bruce and his guardian discovered the sign.”

Isolde lifted her head sharply.

Rafe raised a hand. “How would Enervata know, but for what we report to him? The brothers are drunkards who care not to extend beyond their immediate task, which is to lay in wait for enemies.”

“You just bespoke futility toward our immortality. He would find out eventually, and death shall befall you and me.”

“It shall befall us anyway, Isolde. He’ll not show mercy. If we do not report this, perhaps we might uncover some way to thwart Bruce and his guardian and keep this slip ever hidden from Enervata.”

Isolde scrambled to her feet, eyes ablaze. “After all your flowery prose of a natural end to this journey of souls, how could you now speak with fear of death? Scraping minutes and counting breaths? Your flowery words, your empty prose, I should have swallowed none of those!”

Rafe lifted himself to stand beside her. “Your outrage derives from your own fear! I know this of you, for I above anyone know you. I will not deliberately participate in that which may mean your death, or mine. Tell him, then, if it so galls you. Report to him that I, Rafe, the leader, failed to suppress all the signs and the quest persevered. So many damnable signs. Tell him it was I and let your words be the end of it for me.”

“If you will it not, I can’t accept . . . ” Her voice caught, a momentary softness, and she swept past it with rage. “Responsibility for your death!”

“Then forfeit this misplaced suicide and let us defy him! Perhaps we might find a way to rid Enervata of our lives and of this wretched world! If not, we at least gather more moments before we die.”

Isolde sneered at him through clenched teeth. “So be it! I will share your stage, though it does fill my heart with rage. You disgust me. Coward! Our tie is severed. I despise you now, Rafe, more than ever.”

“I’VE BEEN WONDERING WHEN YOU’D COME by, Sileny. I—” Gloria stopped suddenly. “Oh. Excuse me.”

Vance regarded her from the doorway. “Excuse me. You were expecting Sileny?”