Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (21 page)

“That one looks interesting,” says little Morigan, as the page flips
.

She points to a highly contrasted image of a gigantic black wolf standing atop a stone heap. The wolf’s head is tilted up, his jaws gaping as though howling, and even young Morigan, without her adult sensibilities, can see that this is some portrayal of sadness, grief, or rage. The text opposite the picture is quite flowery, with certain letters grand and curlicued and the rest of it quite small and spidery to her eyes
.

“What does it say, Mum?” she asks
.

Mifanwae is quiet as her eyes devour the script and does not answer until Morigan asks again. “Nothing, my love. Let’s find a different story. This one is too sad for your tender ears.” Mifanwae begins to flip the page, but holds her attention on the picture for a speck. “There is one pretty bit to this, though, my love. How he buried her. That is so much kinder than the rituals we have; so much more natural. I think…if I am ever to leave you, I want you to have a place like that where you can go to see me. I want to be able to see the moon, clear and bright over my grave. Sorry, dear, listen to me go on so glumly.”

Morigan can sense her young self’s confusion, and there wriggles the first seed of doubt that her mother will be with her forever, as she always has been. “You will get your wish, Mother,” thinks Morigan
.

Mifanwae kisses the concern away and flips the page. Now Morigan—the real Morigan, not the ghost of her past—sees why the bees extracted this memory. For one of the embellished words catches her eye, something that would have had no meaning to her as a child, yet is sharp with importance to her presently. “Caenith,” it reads, and her head swells with implications of finding the smith’s name in a book of faery stories. A singular name, one she has never heard of before, and she knows that this is no coincidence
.

Now that the bees have served their queen, the scene clouds over in grayness. Morigan floats in the Dreaming, pondering. The kings, the wicked voice, Caenith, tales of yore, and strange bees, all these things are connected. At least here, she can sense that correlation. She is sure of it
.

“I need to speak to Caenith. I need to understand why this is happening,” she demands
.

The bees obey and hum louder
.

IV

Calmly as a leaf on a spring stream, Morigan bobbed her way back to consciousness. She felt fingertips of soft grass upon her cheek. She heard the music of flowing water and the songs of birds or other small-minded creatures that the bees in her head had no interest in harvesting. Nor did she suspect that her servants would do so without her command anymore. Quiet. A perfect peace that she had not felt since…

Since my mind exploded into a net for all of Eod to swim through
.

Trying to stand resulted in a nauseating spin. In a whoosh, a warm, man-spiced wind was upon her, holding her waist and arm; his powerful heart pounding against her like a surf.

“Caenith, I need to talk to you.”

“Ssh, my Fawn. You are still waking.” Water was trickled into her mouth from what felt like a flute of bark as she clung at it. “You have slept as the bear does come winter. Stretch before you run out into the world again.”

He did just that for her: moved her arms and legs, and rubbed the pins and needles from them while Morigan focused on where she was. A sun-wet, soothing plateau faded into view, with finches hopping bushes, wildflowers swaying, and a babbling pool tended by mossy-stone guardians. Slowly, while whispering appeasements into her ear, Caenith turned her about on the rock plateau, and she saw the vista of pastel-blue skies, tanned steppes, and the chalkiness of Eod laid out beneath them as if it were all a distant picture. They were near to the edge of death, only a few strides off, but she felt safe with Caenith’s arms around her. They dawdled in that dreamy moment. She didn’t allow herself to relax too much, but held fast to the wisdom and terror of her dreams.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“You wanted quiet, and I would not take you to the hollow cavern under Eod again. Who knows what you would hear there. This little nook is where I come when I want to forget the things that trouble me.”

Little nook? A cliff on the path to nowhere? What troubles do you have, Caenith? Are they as unbearable, as unusual as my own?
worried Morigan. She turned in his arms, frowned at his disarming handsomeness, and what first seemed like a caress of his sensuous lips ended in a prodding examination
of the sharp canines that hid behind them. Caenith did not protest her poking. When she was done, she spoke without reservation—what was the point with one so strange as Caenith?

“I was hearing voices…voices that were not my own. Thoughts of…well… everyone around me. Not only thoughts, but pictures, feelings, and passions both fair and foul. I could not plug whatever well had opened in me. After I fell, I remember you catching me. And then I dreamed. Two dreams that I remember. Though I have never dreamed so clearly in my life before. I would call these visions, not dreams, for they were as crisp as you are, here and now.”

Caenith nodded, as if he understood perfectly what she meant.

“I want to know what you have done to me,” said Morigan, with the forcefulness that her romance-heady head had squandered lately.

“My Fawn,” murmured Caenith, and reached out to touch Morigan’s neck and shoulders ever so delicately with his fingers, as if she might break. “I am as amazed as you are that we have found the other. For I thought that the old magik was mostly lost.”

“Old magik?”

“The spirit of Geadhain. The voices in the leaves. The song on the wind. The power that flows within all things. I am a creature of this power, and so, I believe, are you. When two children of Geadhain meet, just like the raw flint to stone, there is a spark. I believe that I have had the honor of awakening that spark in you,” said Caenith, and he resisted the urge to nip at her, for in the breeze she smelled of all the ancient and wonderful herbs of Alabion.

“You have such a hold over me,” he continued. “A yearning that is as fierce as the song of the Gray Man himself. I did not know I could still feel so deeply. Yours is a pull stronger than anything I have tasted in my long years, and certainly a power greater than any of your kind.”

“My kind?” Morigan pulled on Caenith’s collar. “Please, Caenith. The voices, the dreams. Do you know what sort of magik this is? What you have awoken in me?”

“My mind is always racing, chasing smells and memories, and I have hunted the question of what you could be, Morigan. In the East, when the forests were young by men’s years, there were once children with powers similar to yours. Perhaps one special child each hundred seasons would
be gifted to the woods, and these children were wonders even in Alabion. Enchanters and enchantresses were they, of dreams, futures, pasts, fates. All the unseen workings of Geadhain were at their command—energies that not even the greatest sorcerer can tame. Each of these wonders was born under the fullness of a new moon, and always to a lonely woman and without a father: save for the gray lord of the night—the moon, that is. Children of the Moon, they were so named. Your mother has passed, and I smell no other males upon you except an old element-breaker who is not of your blood.”

Caenith let the statement hang, allowing Morigan to digest his information.
I am a creature of old magik…a Daughter of the Moon…an enchantress of dreams and fate
. Acceptance was astonishingly easy. It was a relief, actually, finally to understand the whirlwind of events: the bees and voices in her head, the strange and intoxicating man-beast whose name she saw in faery tales and who ran like the wind. Which brought to mind the matter of the man himself.

“What…what are you, then?” she asked.

Caenith grinned, baring all his sharpened teeth, and bowed her to the ground, pinning her tiny wrists under his massive hands with the gentlest of force and sniffing her up and down her body. Though her heart was throbbing, she wasn’t afraid. She understood that this was an animal behavior not meant to harm and more likely associated with mating. In a moment he was in her face, huffing. His eyes were gray and swallowing as storm clouds, and his beard had the sheen of a fine black pelt; when he released her hands, she petted it and it felt much the same.

“Do you not know?” he asked.

“You…are…a…wolf,” muttered Morigan, in amazement of the answer so clear to her. The bees in her head suddenly sang, and her words continued to flow. “You are two
creatures
, yet one spirit. A man and a wolf.”

“Correct, Daughter of the Moon,” growled the Wolf.

In that moment of truth, of her seeing him for what he was, the Wolf was snared by the beauty of the daughter. Morigan felt his passion engulfing her; his warm, stone hands squeezing her tender thighs; his body stiffening to rock—she had never been so eager to be crushed. They rolled on the grass. His mouth wandered her body, tasting, nipping, and licking her swanlike neck before finally meeting her mouth, and they kissed as if the other was
the very air of survival. How easily they could have lost themselves, ripped off their clothing, thrown away all their worries, and fit together as a puzzle of flesh. Both the animal and the man in Caenith lusted to tease and eat the maiden’s delicacies until their bodies collapsed in sweaty exhaustion. But he had made a promise to himself and to Morigan, and that responsibility pulled him back from the brink.

“No. I must be a man,” apologized the Wolf, and withdrew himself to an arm’s length as if for her protection. “I have thought long and hard about how I am to pursue you, about which customs honor the woman you are. As a man, I shall honor your virtue. If we are to be together, then we must complete the Great Hunt. I would not disgrace you by taking your innocence. You, who are as white and pure as the spill of moonlight upon a silent lake. I shall not bathe in that wholesomeness before we are bound. I shall not rudely take what you have chosen to give to no other. I must earn that.”

Morigan blushed and stood up. She didn’t ask how he knew or smelled her virginity. Twenty-six years had passed, and she found the company of men a spectacular disappointment. Aside from some disinterested manual handling or heavy petting ending in his wetness and her regret, she was, physiologically speaking, a whole woman who did a much better job at keeping herself entertained on lonely nights.

“I have embarrassed you,” muttered the Wolf, and he was behind her again, surrounding her in a strength that she wanted to caress. “Please, look at me.”

When she turned, the Wolf was upon his knee. Between his fingers he held a shining circlet that was so lovely that Morigan forgot her shame.

“I offer you this,” declared the Wolf. “Part of Great Hunt is an offering to one’s mate. That much can never be changed. Nor should the ceremony that binds us be.”

“Ceremony?”

“An oath of blood. The same that our ageless kings were once said to swear. But that is the end, and this is still the journey of our knowing the other. Every choice you make will take us nearer to that end. Now you must decide if you will accept this offering: a symbol of the sacrifices and contemplations that come with every choice. As a Wolf, this would be for the taking of a life as food. Today, it represents the loss of some of your innocence, and
my respect for you and the Green Mother for making that choice. What say you to my offering?”

A million questions lay unanswered, a heaping of troubles lay ahead, and yet Morigan only paused because she was so taken by the poignancy of this moment: its absolute importance in the future of her life. Indeed, there were nightmares of kings doing terrible things. And yes, pledging her soul to a man—who was not even a man—whom she had known for three days was a recipe for madness. But the bees were buzzing with contentment. They knew that this was natural, that it was meant to be, and she trusted these arbiters of all truth and intuition more than she ever trusted herself. Morigan took the bracelet.

“I accept your offering.” The Wolf’s face lit and she thought that he would leap at her. “Yet first, I have a request.”

“Anything, my Fawn.”

“I would like to see…what you are. The second body that shares your soul. Show me your fangs and claws,” she commanded.

Perhaps it was the steadiness of her voice, how she ordered him to bare himself as if he belonged to her, or that animal impression of ownership that made the Wolf’s heart roar to comply. He did not shed his skin but for the whitest moons of the year, and even then, so far from the city and never in front of another. In a sense, he was as much a virgin as she. With an unaccustomed shyness, he found himself undressing before the Fawn, confused for a speck as to who was the hunter. The flare of her nostrils, the intensity of her stare that ate at him for once.

I have chosen well for a mate. She is as much a Wolf as I
, he thought, kicking off his boots and then shimmying his pants down to join the rest of his clothing. No bashful maiden was Morigan, and she did not look away from his nakedness, but appreciated what she saw: every rough, hairy, huge bit of him.