Dangerous Magic (27 page)

Twenty…thirty…Rafe tore at his watch coat and kicked off his boots, his lungs burning for air. Forty…forty-five…With a final savage twist, he was free of the heavy clothing and able to swim his way back toward the surface. Breaking through, he gasped, swallowing almost as much water as air with each cresting wave. Treading water, he sought out the gig. But the impact had tossed him upon the far side of the ship, away from an easy rescue by the crew. It may be that they hadn’t even seen him fall, but thought him still aboard or killed in the explosion.

Flames shot skyward from the ship’s deck and licked down the hull, devouring everything in their path. Heat blasted the side of his face.

He set into a powerful stroke that should pull him out from beneath the wreckage and around the rocks toward safety. But no matter how hard he struggled, the inrushing tide and the currents swirling around the reefs pushed him closer to the
Cormorant,
not farther away.

The sea sucked the warmth from his body, chilling his limbs, numbing his responses. A line snaked past him, then another. He twitched with each brush of the submerged rigging, and pushed himself to try once more for the fallen mainmast, now a blackened stump where the fire had consumed it. Against the current, he made little headway, and each stroke left him more fatigued.

As he reached for a line just beyond his fingertips, his feet tangled in the sheets lying below the surface. A wave broke on him. Blind, he flailed for the broken masthead. His frozen fingers wouldn’t respond. He sank. Kicking once, he reached the surface, but the lines and sheets tangled round his waist and with a crash heard above the storm, the ship broke free to slide into the sea. The lines grew taut. Breath squeezed from his lungs as the ropes tightened around him. He gathered what air he could and descended.

Gwenyth stood on the shore, hands clasped beneath her chin and a heavy woolen blanket draped over her shoulders, watching the bobbing lanterns of the last two flat-bottomed workboats as they plied the area around the wreckage.

Rescue had arrived almost before the ship had exploded in a fiery shower of flame; Jago’s skiff the first one to bump alongside them as he and four others fought the waves with their oars to keep them steady in the surf. He remained at the site now, even though the rest of the crew had long since retired to the taproom of Pilchard’s tavern at the harbor’s edge to warm themselves with a fire and a pint or two.

She sank to the shingle, exhaustion and foreboding weighing her down. Her face felt achy and hot; her eyes burned with unshed tears, but she couldn’t cry. The press of pain was still too great to allow such release. Guilt gnawed at her, tormented her. So many years the dreams had warned her and so many years she’d heeded them. But Rafe had tempted her to believe in a new dream, and she had cost him his life.

She closed her eyes on the sight of the
Cormorant
’s burned-out hulk pushed up out of the water. Instead, she remembered the soft sure touch of Rafe’s hands upon her body and the sweet warmth of his kisses as they lay restless in the dark. The wind whipping past her seemed to carry his scent and whisper his name, only making the loss harder to bear.

Thinking she’d spent just moments this way, she opened her eyes, surprised to see Jago’s skiff nearing the shallows, heavy with flotsam from the ship, and a body lain gently in the bow. He drew in his oars and jumped out as Gwenyth rucked her sodden skirts around her knees and raced toward him, the stones of the shingle biting deep into her feet. She reached the boat as Jago pulled it up onto the beach beyond the tide line. Rafe lay unmoving, his face upturned to the stinging rain.

“You’ve found him!” she cried.

But the stiff, hunched way Jago carried himself told her everything. He made no move to pull Rafe from the boat or aid him in any way as if haste were no longer needed. He reached out a restraining hand as Gwenyth prepared to step into the boat. “Steady on. Bound up in the fallen rigging, he was, wound tight as a fly in a spider’s trap. I cut him loose, but he’s not breathed once, though I pushed a pint or two of seawater from his lungs.”

Gwenyth closed her ears to Jago’s words, but she shivered uncontrollably with more than cold. “No! I won’t believe it! It can’t end this way. I won’t let it end this way.”

She leapt into the boat to kneel beside Rafe. His long tarpaulin watch coat gone and his shirt plastered to his chest, she desperately sought any signs of breathing. His dark hair lay matted against the pale marble of his forehead, and his hands lay relaxed across his stomach. She flinched at the sightless stare of his gaze.

Clutching his shoulders, she fought the evidence of her eyes. “Rafe Fleming, I’ll not be letting you leave me so easy.”

“Gwenyth, lass…” Jago coaxed, his voice soft with regret. He put a comforting hand upon her arm. “Let him go. ’Tis a better place by far.”

Gwenyth wrenched away. Rage and despair filled her heart. “’Tis a mighty good place here too. Where he has a lover and a child on the make.”

Jago shook his head. “So you got your babe. I wondered on it.”

Gwenyth ignored him. Pulling Rafe up, she wrapped her arms around him, willing life back into his body, but there was no reassuring beat of his heart beneath her ear.

Sitting up, she did the last and only thing she could think of. She took his chin between her hands. Focusing her gaze on him, she allowed the power of the Sight to flow through her, to take hold of her. The storm’s howl and the lash of rain faded as the soft sea-wash color of his eyes expanded to fill her vision. Instead of burning her with its brilliance, his stare gave off no warmth, no spark of any kind. But she wouldn’t look away and break her last tenuous hold on him. She poured all her strength and powers into probing deeper, finding the wandering, lost soul within the man.

“Damn you, Rafe, you can’t leave me here alone!”

There. She felt it. A presence beyond the emptiness of death. A numbing cold like the frozen pain of an icicle pierced her heart. Her lungs burned with ice and then fire. She clenched her teeth on the horrible ache in every muscle as the paralyzing cold spread throughout her body, but never did she drop her gaze from Rafe’s. Her fingers bit into the flesh of his arms. Her breath came as short, shuddering gasps. The air around her seemed to grow thick with moisture as if she knelt within a cloud of heavy fog. It smelled of damp and salt and sour winds. She heard a rush of music like the creaking of spring ice across a river.

Down she plunged, deeper and deeper, farther than she had ever dared before. Her lungs felt as if they would explode, and her heart beat wildly until it seemed as if it would leap from her chest. Warring against an exhausting desperation, her vision clouded, a black-green wash of seawater darkening to a pinprick of light, a point of hope she clung to with the last air in her body.

As she dropped into the well of darkness, she caught a glimpse of sun, a heat like a drop of heaven. A voice whispered her name, a low, deep voice velvet-edged and thick as heavy cream. She reached a hand out into the darkness, felt an answering touch of cold fingers, and remembered nothing more.

As the world dropped away, the crash of the surf became the haunting echo of fairy bells. Whispering Rafe’s name, Gwenyth sought the familiar clasp of a hand roughened by work as sobs burned her throat and loss crushed her chest in a vise grip.

She descended deep into an endless abyss, a ghostly voice beckoning and luring her on. Below, golden shimmering light speared the oblivion, spreading upward, tearing great jagged holes in the dark, leaving behind ribbons of star-shot infinity fluttering within the expanding glow.

“He is here,” came a voice gentle as a rush of wings, offering hope where there had been none.

The light enveloped her. Seared her mind with its furnace heat. Callused fingers laced with hers. Broad. Strong. And as if the door of her Sight swung open on a bonfire’s brilliance, a vision swam into focus. Like those that had come before, though far richer and more detailed. A vibrant tapestry wrought in the most vivid of colors until her senses drowned.

Rafe stood beneath an enormous fir tree, its trunk twice as big around as her cottage, its top lost in the twilight above. She trembled, desperately wanting to race to his side and experience the heat of his touch, yet terrified this was all merely dream and she would wake once more on the beach with Jago’s worthless consolations in her ears.

“Nathan is dead. The
Cormorant
no more.” Rafe’s words reverberated in her head. Beat against her skull with the same force as the rolling waves of the ocean.

She nodded, afraid to speak and shatter the illusion, for that must be what it was. There was no other way to account for this place out of time. This dream into which she’d fallen.

The angles of Rafe’s lean face sharpened, and for the first time she noticed his eyes were as black as the void lying just beyond the circle of light, and his mind, once easy to read and open to her if she chose to intrude, was now locked against all invasion. A wall upon which her Sight broke and was turned aside.

He stepped in front of her. Close enough that if she leaned forward their lips would touch in a kiss. But one meeting of their eyes and she was frozen in place like a rabbit caught in a hawk’s triangulating stare. She tried to look away, unable to withstand the ferocity burning within his gaze, but he caught her wrist, his touch ice cold. Placing her palm upon his chest where no heart beat beneath her hand, he demanded, “What have you wrought with your defiance, Gwenyth? What power have you unleashed in your desire to hold me here with you?”

The strength of his stare sent a lancing pain through her head. An axe blade to the base of her brain. She wanted to fall to the ground, but he held her upright. Refused to allow her surrender.

“Look to your future,” he commanded.

Visions burst and cascaded across her consciousness like a hurricane wave. Engulfing her. Tossing her under. Slapping her down each time she sought to break free of the overwhelming torrent. One barely fading before another took its place.

A group of mourners huddled around a grave, the burnt remains of the
Cormorant
jutting like bones up through the water just beyond the churchyard.

Her own cottage aglow with lamplight and crowded with women. There stood Eliza Scobey and Polly Landry. Sarah’s tall thin form beside the bed. Betsy Faull holding a swaddled bundle, a tiny pink fist beating the air.

A woman wrapped in a long woolen cloak standing alone and mist-shrouded upon the headland above the village, watching the sea and the roll of approaching storm clouds. The welcoming glow of cottages beneath her strung like jewels amid the gathering dusk.

A child. Her child. Hair, a feathery dark nimbus framing her tiny face, eyes washed gray-green as the petals of a woodland violet seated cross-legged upon the hearth rug tugging a string for a tabby kitten. Gwenyth behind her at her loom, calm and smooth as polished marble. Cold as the snow swirling white across the landscape beyond their window.

Years rushed past like water through a sluice, tumbling and spinning and gurgling into a life patched together like the ragged edges of a quilt.

The child grew to be clever, strong and beautiful while Gwenyth aged, hair white about her stooped shoulders. Movements slowing. Hands crooked with work and with weather. Yet always shrouding their peace crouched the memory of what might have been. The sorrow of what they’d lost.

“You gained the next Witch of Kerrow. Isn’t that what you wanted? Your heart’s desire?” Rafe asked.

Was it? It seemed like so long ago she’d struck her devil’s bargain with him, arrogant in her belief she could separate head and heart. She understood now. Without risking love and then heartbreak, there would have been no child. Rafe had been the price she’d had to pay. But she could still back out. Naught was writ in stone.

Rafe or her child?

Inevitable doom descended upon her. How could she make such a choice when either way she experienced a loss of a part of herself? She cradled her stomach as if sheltering the growing baby.

Surfacing once more in Rafe’s chilly embrace, she felt the tension thrumming through his body. Crackling along his skin like lightning. The changes she sensed in him earlier growing tenfold as if his earthly ties weakened and an older magic began shaping him into something more powerful.

As far back as she could remember, she’d been a slave to this prophecy. The pattern of her life clearly set out like yarns upon a loom and no choice but to continue the design. Yet if she were to save Rafe and keep her child, she must tear out these stitches and begin anew, thus altering the destiny chosen for her by the gods.

She struggled to speak, her throat closing around her denials. So, in the quiet stillness of her heart, she willed her desire into the void as if gripping the black center square of her tapestry.

“Look at me, Gwenyth.”

She squeezed her eyes tighter.

“Look. At. Me.” Rafe’s words struck against her head until she must open her eyes.

She obeyed, but this time she fought against the darkness. Battled the endless black beyond this sliver of golden light. Shaped the pattern in her mind as the visions washed through her once more, and she was carried away.

An empty cheerless room altered to become a curtained bed where lovers wrestled, moonlight spilling silver across a carpeted floor, trees whispering in the spring breeze.

The pale and worried faces of women transformed to Rafe kneeling beside a bed, his smile warm as summer, as he handed Gwenyth her newborn babe.

The haunted eyes of a solitary child became father and daughter walking side by side down to the shore, the child’s face upturned to catch the light of a rising sun as Rafe swung her laughing up onto his broad shoulders.

The grief of a woman standing alone upon the headland shifted to become excitement as a ship tacked into the shelter of the harbor, the cream off its prow white as milk, her man standing arrow-straight at the bow.

The images retreated until once more only Rafe’s face remained, skin stretched taut over his bones. His eyes, steel-bright and sharp as obsidian, knifed into hers with an unflinching remoteness. The weight of her failure settled about her shoulders, dropping into her stomach. Shadows clambered back over her mind’s poorly erected bastions, crowding closer. Light faded against the relentless void of death.

It wasn’t enough. She was losing him.

Rafe dropped her hand and stepped back, a distance of inches that may as well have been a schism of miles as she felt herself being drawn back to the surface. “Let me go,” he said, his face settling into grave lines. “Let me be at peace, Gwenyth.” He began to fade like mist struck by the sun. Soon he’d be gone completely.

“No!” The scream began in her chest. Ripped up through her throat. She reached out to Rafe with her Sight, only to be met with a tangled labyrinth seeking to pull her in, the shielded maze of his mind dragging her inch by inch into the nightmare of desolate emptiness. If she didn’t break the connection between them, she would not survive. There would be two graves within the Kerrow churchyard.

“I’ll watch over you if I can,” Rafe whispered just before he disappeared completely. “I’ll love you no matter what.”

And then he was gone.

She was free.