Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (36 page)

V

Is this normal?
asked Morigan.

Nothing about us is normal…not anymore
, replied Caenith.

The two were in their secret glade, lying on a nest of Caenith’s old vest and his new shirt. They had been kissing and exploring each other, letting raw bolts of emotion tear into the other. Morigan couldn’t say how long it had been, except that it was still night. Come a point, Morigan caught the large fingers that were playing with her hair. She could feel the Wolf’s purring fascination at the softness and color of it, and not from the bees—who
were no longer needed—but from a new channel of communication that was undiscovered before tonight.

Should we stop, Caenith? I’m starting to lose touch with what’s happening
.

As you wish
, answered Caenith.

Speaking in their heads was more convenient than using tongues, especially when those organs could be used for better ends, which Caenith proved as he licked his way off his bloodmate. He hoisted her up. She smelled of every sacred and golden thing in the world—sunlight, meadows, sweet sweat, and honeysuckle—and it took great restraint not to taste her again. From her star, from her constancy, he drew the required self-control.

You’ve tamed me a little, and somehow made me stronger
, he surmised with a smile.

Likewise, the Wolf’s bloodlust and bravado was tingling its way through Morigan’s nerves, pumping her heart and flushing her breasts and loins.

This is how you always feel, isn’t it? This rush, this power?
she asked.

Yes
.

Well, since you can’t have me, you can fight me
, she brashly suggested, pulling out her dagger.
Show me how to use this. A part of me is Wolf now, and I would like to know how to scratch with my metal claw
.

Caenith slipped behind her, nudging her feet apart, showing her the arch and spring her legs should have to keep her mobile in a fight. After Morigan learned the basics of positioning, Caenith found himself a hefty branch and trimmed it to a small quarterstaff, which was more of a rod in his great hand, and the martial training began.

From then on, the lessons came and went quickly, for Morigan was an apt pupil. In her step, there was a new nimbleness, an extension of her natural grace toward more sinister motives. When she thrusted, it was as swift and well aimed as rifle shot; when she parried, she could riposte like a coiled snake. She wasn’t the sort of fighter who would deal sundering blows, not a brute like the Wolf; she was a more elegant predator: a black cat stalking the shadows, or a swooping taloned bird. Soon, so much time had fled that the deep of night blushed with dawn. The two were sweaty and spent as if they had made love, and in a way, they had, tossing shouts and violent surges of
emotion back and forth, or in moments where Caenith pressed his muscles against Morigan and manipulated her limbs through sweeps and drills. Once they realized the hourglass, the night’s training ended, and Morigan stripped off her top, unbound her crown of hair, and joined her naked bloodmate at the pool to splash the perspiration from herself.

Once bathed, they dressed. She watched him struggle into his clothing, perhaps the only act he performed without dexterousness, and grinned at his awkwardness. For his incivility was a piece of her now, that animal in the skin of a man, that man who wrestled with his animal. And while she didn’t feel any fangs or fur, she was irreversibly transformed. Wilder, yes. Braver, as well. Quicker, too, if she had to guess, for she’d never held a proper weapon before and yet she felt that she could carve up a man like a shank of beef, if she chose. Perhaps her nose worked a bit better than before, or was it just that Caenith’s musk and sweat remained on her skin from all their closeness? When she licked her lips, she could taste the bitter salt of his sweat, and she could hear the whisper of the grass under Caenith’s feet as he walked over to her.

I am a new woman. A new creature. I am myself and yet so different
.

He offered his bloodmate a hand. They stood and watched the dawn rise to glory.

VI

It was a splendid day by the cave, a rare conjunction of cottony skies and gentle breezes rustling the green roofs of Alabion. Elemech and Ealasyd found themselves in the sunshine, blinking like moles, as it had been a while since they had last poked their heads outside, since Eean’s passing. Everything they needed was within the cave: lichens, lizards, water, and moss. Mother Geadhain saw to provide them with resources never far from home. But Elemech was waxing maternal again, and she’d seen the beautiful weather in her pool and decided to take her younger sister out for some of Alabion’s pine-spiced air. Sadly, the magik of the day could not improve her
little sister’s mood, and the girl sat near the cliff’s drop, looking out over the woods with a frown.

“Come away, Ealasyd. You know we are to be careful when Eean isn’t around.”

The girl tramped from the edge and kicked her way across the grass toward her sister.

“I miss Eean,” she complained, and shoved her rump next to Elemech on the rock on which her sister sat. Elemech held her, and they watched the horizon of foliage and clouds. A flock of blackbirds suddenly cawed and broke the tree line, flying west.

“An omen,” declared Elemech.

“Of what?”

“Get me that rabbit, and I shall show you,” said Elemech, pointing to a fluffy white hare that nibbled the discarded fruits of a blackberry shrub. Kindly Ealasyd, as innocent as a child’s wonder, had a way with animals, and they never shied from her. She picked up the hare, kissing it and ruffling its fur, and brought it to her sister.

“Here,” said Elemech, extending her hands.

As Ealasyd passed the animal over, she had an inkling of what her sister was to do by the coldness that ran through her features. In a single painless twist, Elemech broke the creature’s neck, and then set its soft body on her lap beneath her budding belly, like a remorseless mother who had committed infanticide. Ealasyd fell to her knees.

“Why! Why would you do that?”

“Death, death is coming. Or something like it. You asked me a question, and I have given you an answer.”

“Your lessons are always so cruel, sister,” sniffled Ealasyd.

“You can’t have kindness without the cruelty. The world has to balance itself out. We’ll have rabbit tonight, with pepper and red willow root. It will be so lovely that you’ll be thanking this white fellow once he’s in your belly, and we’ll sing a song about his sacrifice.”

“You—you promise?”

“I promise.”

The sisters helped each other up and headed into the viny curtain of their home. As they went into the darkness, Ealasyd discovered her cheer.

“I think I shall make something! Our walk has inspired me! I’m feeling the urge!”

Elemech smiled, icy and beautiful. “I’ll let you play with your crafts until the hare is ready. Then I’d like to see what stories your crafts have for me. I have a sense they will be
grand
.”

X

THE FORGOTTEN

I

“T
he Hall of Memories is just beyond,” announced Thule.

After traveling familiar musty hallways and passing the spot where she and Caenith had fled during their first visit to the library, the five of them had arrived at the heart of the Court of Ideas. Here the dusty shelves parted to a natural cavern supported by limestone pillars and aglow with the same starry mesh that was rampant elsewhere in the palace. When cast upon the green rocks, the radiance was eerie. Their footsteps seemed hollow and echoing, and there was a humming of danger or magik that all could sense, regardless of their attunement to the Arts. Caenith prickled more than most. Since arriving at the palace, he had cringed at nearly every smell, whisper, and sight, all of which were grander than those to which he was accustomed.

Earlier on, they passed a serving girl whose dress was slightly rumpled and who shyly bowed to the queen in their entourage. While others might have noticed only that, Caenith saw the faint greasy fingerprints near the wrinkles on her clothes; he picked a strand of short brown hair from the collar at her neck; he smelled the sweat and saliva of a man who had rubbed his beard there and could identify a pungency of semen creeping out from under her dress. A flush was in the girl’s cheeks, and if his ears weren’t deceiving
him, he thought he could hear within her a crackle of a second heartbeat, the first currents of new life.

You’re with child
, he realized, and quickly went on to explain his findings to Morigan. What exceptional senses he already possessed appeared to have been honed to microscopic degrees. He was sniffing under the skin, into secrets and souls. As he walked behind the queen and her sword, he might as well have been standing in a draft of the golden woman’s emotion. Her mood was as plain to him as his own. Digging deeper, simply allowing his senses to wander, the queen’s sweat had the vinegary sharpness of worry, and his lightning eye picked out the evocative way that she rubbed her palm—where there lay a scar so old as to be nothing but a pale wrinkle, which his eyes could see nonetheless—the place where Caenith and Morigan’s scars still twinged. The queen was thinking about her bloodmate. About the ritual she had seen. About what she might see inside this strange Hall of Memories, where the wisdom of ancient sages and the Immortal Kings had been transcribed for eternity. She was worried that she might witness a truth she didn’t find agreeable, a revelation tied to her mate, which is why she caressed and reminisced upon her long-faded wound.

All this he knew from the smell of her fear and the subtleties of her mannerisms. He wasn’t sure if he could shut his omniscience off, nor did he find it all that distracting, having lived with a thousand sensations in his head at once for many an age.

I am myself, only better
. He smiled at his bloodmate.

Once they crossed the cavern, they came upon a group of steel-bearing Watchmen. Around a dozen fellows were gathered outside a limestone arch that leaked light like a shuttered furnace. Most of these men Caenith had heard; they had chased Morigan and him from the Court of Ideas before. His new senses informed him of their familiarity by their scents. The Watchmen snapped their spears and backs to attention as Queen Lila approached and hindered no one as the company wove past them into the dim, narrowing corridor of stone. Caenith’s ears twinkled with music—bells and xylophones of crystal—and the radiance was brighter to him than anyone as they emerged from shady confines into a hall of pure light. Once the spots sparkled away, Thule announced their arrival, though weakly, as he was struck by wonderment.

“The Hall of Memories.”

They stood in a song. From the queer hum that shivered in the grand room to the vertical walls of open-ended tubing that whistled and burped puffs of magik, every aspect of this place was in musical motion. A tintinnabulation came from the pipes or was carried in the dew of the shimmering mist that rose to the top of the room, where more cylinders and convolutions were stacked like coral and the deepest heights were lost in a congestion of golden fog. Glass ran under their feet, and a universe of pale space and whiter constellations spun beneath it, drifting and pulsing in tune to the symphony of the hall. The company wandered in the musical cosmos, gaping and quiet, led by Queen Lila toward a crystalline bench in the center of the chamber that was nearly imperceptible in the luminance. Caenith spotted it, and he noted the mossy fragrances of extreme age that filled his nostrils like dander. This was not a natural smell, but his perception of it, of the conglomeration of magik, time, and history distilled in the smoke and sorcery of the chamber.
The spice of antiquity
, he decided.

“My king has always likened magik to music,” said the queen as they walked. “Both are higher Arts; both arise from passion. When he created the Hall of Memories, it was to record the Art of the Wise. The memories of sages, witches, and fair rulers, as well as poets, philosophers, and heroes, so that he—and others—might ever reflect on their achievements. Those who would contribute each made the journey here at one time. Sometimes, it was the last journey they took, and their record would serve as their final testament.”