Bride by Command (27 page)

“All right,” Jahn said suspiciously.

“Don’t come in until I tell you it’s safe to do so,” she said. He could not be here when she unleashed her anger, as she would in a matter of heartbeats. One. Two. Three . . .

“Ana,” Jahn said, and then he looked into her eyes and took a step back. What did he see there? Did he finally see who she truly was?

Morgana waited until the door was closed behind Jahn and his sentinels, and then she let loose a scream. A pulse of blue energy followed, as her fury was released, and in that heartbeat the home she had found in this palace turned to glass. A large portion of the bed and everything upon it; the chair where one of her husband’s former lovers had been sitting not so long ago; a wooden chest filled with what little she owned; the carpet beneath her feet. The icy glass climbed the walls but did not touch the ceiling. Instead, the transformation took stone and pictures to a certain point and then stopped, like moss growing up the side of a tree. All here was cold and fragile and destroyed.

Tears ran down her face, and they were cold. Her heart still felt cold, even though she had released her destruction. How could she have been so foolish as to think it was gone? She took a step toward the door, and beneath her feet what had once been a fine rug crumbled to dust.

She ruined everything she touched.

She could not stay here.

 

 

FOR
hours, Kristo had been lying in the small bed in the insufficient chamber Danya had arranged for him. He didn’t sleep much, never had, but tonight his mind was busy with plans for the days to come. Morgana was here; he knew it. Felt it. He needed it to be so. But where was she?

A shriek from a distance teased his ears, and he smiled. A burst of cold energy from somewhere below froze his heart in the same way another man’s might be warmed.

He sat up, laughing in delight. Not only was his daughter here in the palace, as he had seen, but she was apparently angry at something or someone. The power he had neglected had grown strong on its own, and tonight, as he searched for her, she’d unleashed it. Now that he’d sensed her power in such a strong way, she’d be easier to find. She was as good as his.

“Don’t worry, dear,” Kristo said as he reclined once more upon his hard bed and crossed his arms over his chest. “Daddy’s here, and he’s coming to save you.”

JAHN
stood in the hallway, four wide-eyed sentinels watching him closely to see what he would do next. They were determined—duty-bound, in fact—to protect him, but none of them had ever thought they’d have to protect him from Morgana.

The inhuman shriek that broke so sharply through the heavy wooden door and the stone walls made him cringe. In all his imaginings of how his wife might react to the truth, he had never even considered this. The strange thump and crackling sound that followed made him reach for the door handle, but Blane’s quick hand stopped him.

“We should wait a moment, My Lord,” Blane said in a lowered voice. “We should wait for her word, as she said.”

Jahn did not want to wait, and yet . . . he was afraid of what he might find on the other side of the door. The shriek had been Morgana’s, and yet it had not. That unearthly sound had been as alarming as the chill he had seen in her eyes when she’d ordered him from the room. The eyes he loved had gone paler than ever before, and were a blue gray. In that instant they had looked as if they were sculpted of ice.

“Morgana!” he called, throwing off Blane’s stilling hand.

He was answered with a strained “You can come in now, if you must.”

Jahn pushed the heavy door open. Not an easy task, as something impeded its swing. As the bottom of the door moved inward, the clear crystal which grew in and on the floor crumbled to dust and fell away with a strange crinkling sound that sent shivers down his spine.

Behind him, one of the sentinels whispered a vile swear word that even Jahn would not repeat. Men accustomed to battle, some who had fought monsters, stepped away from the scene before them—they stepped away from Morgana.

She stood, unchanged, in the center of a room that had been transformed. She was pale hair and sunny dress and warm skin at the center of a circle of iciness. A profusion of crystal surrounded her. Bluish and clear and unnatural, it covered the floor, climbed up the walls, and possessed the furnishings. Jahn walked into the room and the substance beneath his boots crumbled. What appeared to be hard crystal fell to dust beneath his step.

At his command, the sentinels remained in the hallway. He did not have to tell them more than once.

“Ana,” he said gently, studying her eyes to see, with relief, that they were once again the warm green he knew so well. “What happened?”

“I thought it was gone,” she said, as tears fell down her cheeks. “I thought you had chased the curse away, but instead it was only sleeping, and your lies brought it back.” Anger grew in her eyes, eyes which remained green and warm. “Did you enjoy your little charade, My Lord Emperor?” She gave him an exaggerated curtsey.

“It wasn’t like that,” he said, as the crystal-like substance crunched beneath his feet.

“I refused your offer and insulted you, and you made me pay. You got your revenge. I suppose I should’ve expected as much.” There was a flash of iciness in her eyes, but it did not remain. “The game is over, My Lord Emperor. Please, send me home. I am suitably and regrettably humbled, as you no doubt intended.”

Jahn stopped while he was still several feet from his wife. “You
are
home.”

Morgana laughed. She laughed harshly and cried at the same time. “I am
not.
I’m a plaything like your friends Melusina and Anrid once were, nothing more.”

“You are my wife,” Jahn argued.

She looked him bravely in the eye. “No, I am not. Our common marriage, which was sufficient for a sentinel, is not at all binding for an emperor. You knew that all along.”

“We will have a proper ceremony . . .”

“We will not.”

“Ana . . .”

She shook a finger at him, and for a moment he wondered if ice wouldn’t fly from that fingertip. “Do
not
call me Ana. You lost that right the moment the game you played was over.”

“It’s not a game!” Jahn argued.

Morgana crossed her arms over her chest and cocked her head to one side. “Is it not,
Jahn Devlyn
?”

“Perhaps the charade began as a sort of amusement, but I fell . . .”

“Don’t say it,” Morgana commanded. “Don’t you dare. Love cannot be built on nothing but lies, and everything we have is false. You lied about who you are.” She waved one hand at the destruction around her, and then—for emphasis, he supposed—she slapped her hand against the bed behind her. The bedcovers and the pillows fell to dust just as the crystal beneath his boots had. A portion of the bed remained, but it was damaged beyond repair, only half of what it once had been. Her blue dresses, one pale and old, the other dark and all but unworn, had been hanging on a room divider, and like everything else they were crystallized, their form forever changed. “I lied about who I am, too, though in another way. Tell me, My Lord, can you have a wife, an empress, who has the power to turn your allies and your enemies to dust when she loses her temper?”

“We will find a way to undo what has been done to you.”

“Nothing has been done to me!” she shouted. “This is who I am! This is the woman I thought I had left behind when you claimed me, but I was wrong!” She walked past him, headed for the door and the waiting sentinels, who backed away as she approached them. “I cannot remain here a moment longer. I’m leaving tonight,” she said softly.

Jahn grabbed her arm and pulled her back to him. “You’re not going anywhere.” One bridal candidate was dead, and another had barely escaped a murder attempt. Morgana wasn’t safe, not until they knew who was behind the violence and stopped them. As if he would be willing to let her go even if he believed her to be safe.

Morgana glared up at him. “How do you know I won’t turn you to dust here and now?” she asked quietly, no doubt trying to hide her threat from the sentinels.

“Your eyes are green,” he said, unafraid.

“Aren’t they always?” Morgana snapped.

“No,” Jahn said. “They turned to an icy blue gray before I left the room at your instruction.”

“That doesn’t mean . . .”

“You won’t hurt me,” he said, alarmed by the coolness of her flesh and the horror in her eyes. Was that horror for his lies or for what she’d done here—for what she still might do?

“You don’t know that.” Morgana tried to escape his hold, but she could not. She stared at his chest and pulled on her arm for a moment, then stopped and leaned into him. “I hate you,” she whispered.

“No, you don’t.”

“You played with my life and made me love you, you pretended to be someone you’re not, and you made me be someone I’m not, and none of it was real. My mother was wrong. Love is horrid, and no woman should wish for it, much less wait for it to come to her. Love will break your heart and soul, if you let it.”

Jahn grabbed her chin and forced her to look at him.

“Checking to see if they’re still green?” she snapped.

“No, I just want to make sure you hear me well,” Jahn said. “I love you. You’re my wife, my
empress.
I don’t understand what just happened, but we’ll find a way to fix it. We’ll find a way to fix it all.”

“Hear me well,” Morgana said coldly. “I can’t love a man who lies to me for sport. I am not your wife or your empress.” Her eyes filled with tears. “And I can’t be fixed. Let me go.”

She asked for the one thing he could not give her. “No.”

Jahn kissed Morgana’s cool forehead and left her standing in the middle of the ruined chamber. He ordered the sentinels to guard her room. She was not to leave, nor was she to have any visitors.

He locked her in the room they had shared, and as the bolt clicked into place, he waited for another unearthly shriek. Instead, all he heard was the deepest, darkest silence he had ever experienced.

 

 

WHEN
she was alone, Morgana dropped to the floor, her legs too weak to bear her weight any longer. She hid her face in her skirt for what felt like a long while, hiding from the destruction around her, trying to still the furious beating of her heart.

It had been foolish of her to think the curse was gone. The curse which had made her believe she had to hide from everyone and everything had just been sleeping, waiting for a rush of anger to unleash it, waiting for betrayal to bring it all back in a fast, unstoppable wave. At least she hadn’t killed anyone this time. If she had, it would’ve been Jahn, and even though she truly did hate him at this moment, she didn’t want to see him dead. She just wanted to be far, far away from him and his lies.

Tidbit after tidbit fell together in her muddled mind, and with each realization she gasped or sobbed. Her stepfather had surely known, when he’d sent her away, that Jahn Devlyn was no sentinel. No wonder he had not come after her!

Melusina and Anrid, women she had come to consider friends, had been Jahn’s paramours, back in the days when they’d been painted ladies in tight clothing that barely contained their wares. She imagined that when Jahn spent time with them, they wore no clothing at all. Morgana lifted her head slowly. It wasn’t as though she’d thought Jahn to be an untried virgin, but no woman wanted to meet her husband’s former lovers, nor did she wish to know that his taste had been so questionable. It gave her some solace to know that he had sent the women away when they’d come to Arthes as man and wife, that he had told them he planned to be a faithful husband, but that solace was not enough to wipe away the picture in her mind. The tricks they spoke of, the way they had longed for the emperor and a return of his attentions . . . she did not want to know that they had been speaking of her husband all along.

No wonder his “friends” the sentinels had been so accommodating; no wonder he’d been able to obtain housing in the palace. She’d thought those men were her friends, too, and she’d lost them in an instant, just as she had lost her husband. Had they laughed at her for her foolishness? Had they been kind to her only because it was required of them?

But worst of all, the very worst, was knowing how well and how completely Jahn had lied to her. There had been many opportunities for him to tell her the truth, if he hadn’t been lying once again when he’d told her that he did indeed love her. If he’d fallen in love with her along the way, he could’ve confessed everything and asked for her forgiveness. No, she had been sport for a bored emperor. She had been his amusement, no different from Melusina and Anrid and who knows how many others! Thank goodness she had not told him of her recent suspicions. He would never let her go if he believed the next emperor of Columbyana was growing inside her.

Morgana ran a hand across the stone floor. The cold crystal there disintegrated where she touched it, but solid stone remained beneath. The same would be true of the walls, she imagined, and of the door. Only a portion of the bed had fallen to dust. When Tomas had died, she hadn’t stayed behind to study the destruction around him, other than to watch a blade of grass turn to dust. She did recall that Tomas had been solid crystal. He had been changed through and through. Were humans more vulnerable than stone and wood? Was her curse
intended
to take human life, or had Tomas suffered more before he’d been the cause, the subject, of her cold attack?

“I don’t want to be a killer,” she whispered. “I want to be a wife and a mother, I want to be a friend. I want to be a woman men don’t shy away from in fear.”

But she was not that woman. Morgana looked at the locked door, wondering how long it would be before she found a way to escape this all-but-deserted level of the palace. Again she sobbed as a new thought came to her. Apparently there was once again a witch on Level Seven.