Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (40 page)

What’s going on?
he asked.

Nothing to worry over, my Wolf
.

“It is time to tell you what brought me to Eod. Of the sins that I ran from,” Thackery said, trembling; he wavered between tears and rage.

“Sins?”

Thackery nodded and reached for Morigan’s support. As she touched his hands, she had flashes of a black city, like an evil crown rising up amid jagged mountains. “I come from a long line of sinners. Wickedness is in my blood, though I have escaped my calling to it as best I can. I thought I could be forgiven if I helped others escape their fates.”

She finds herself in the body of a spry Thackery, whom she remembers. He is in a shite-rank tunnel dripping and sloshing with filth. He glances back to the desperate grimy faces that follow behind him in a chain and offers them a smile of hope
.

“Thank you, Whitehawk,” they whisper. “We can never thank you enough.”

“You smuggled people.” Morigan’s face wrinkled in recall. “And a black city, I could feel the stain of death thick upon it. What is that horrible place?”

At the realization that the witch was reading him, he did not pull away. He squeezed her hands tighter. “Good. This will be easier for the telling if you sniff what you need from my soul. You have seen true, Morigan. The black city is Menos, a distillation of every evil man has conjured on Geadhain. I was a shepherd to those who dreamed the impossible dream of living outside their station, of being more than cattle for the iron masters and sages. My dear Bethany was the first I saved. Though I did so selfishly, out of love, and I would be cast from Menos for doing so.” Tears glimmered down his face now. “I disgraced my name; I damaged my sister’s pride; I caused so much harm in breaking from my family. But what worth is a name soaked in blood? At least I had Bethany. She believed that I could be more than what I was born for, and she was right.”

At the opening of light, shining like a door to the afterworld, Thackery and the refugees stumble into a pond and a clean starry night. Many of the refugees have never seen a sky that is not gray or streaked with poison. Some flounder and gasp at the sparkles of light—stars—that hang over them. Past the pond, under a shaded embankment of weeping trees, Thackery knows a brown-cloaked maiden crouches, as natural and invisible to the eye as one splash of color among the rest. He knows where to find her; his heart pulls him to the willow, beneath which she has hidden many times now. When they near, Bethany appears from the foliage like a nymph and embraces him
.

“Twelve little birds,” she says, counting the folk splashing out of the water. “Twelve you have given wings to tonight, Whitehawk. Twelve lives and souls.”

He does this for his own justice, and for the crimes of his blood. However, most of all, he does this because he loves her. Because he believes no woman as special as she should ever be in chains
.

“Who was she? Bethany?” asked Morigan.

“Bethany,” muttered Thackery, and sneered the next sentence. “My wife and my pleasure maiden before that. I never touched her, I’ll have you know. Not in Menos, not until she asked for it as a free woman. In Menos you can beat, rape, or kill your whores, but it is
unseemly
to marry them. I didn’t want to do anything but. I wanted her to want me. And when I saw that what I thought I valued was of no worth to her, I threw it away. She called me Whitehawk, after the bird that takes over abandoned nests and raises any eggs it finds there as its own. That is how she came to see me, a Thule—the most vile of the vile—as a parent to the lost. As a person to be emulated. I never felt so proud as I did with her. She made me a greater man than I ever could have been alone. Braver. Stronger. Kinder. What price can one put on lessons like those?”

Morigan slipped her hands from Thackery’s. She didn’t want to steal his past; certain details were his pains to share. “What happened to her, Thackery? To Bethany and your child, of whom you never speak?”

Thackery fished for words, which did not come to him. In the long silence that followed, Morigan’s bees buzzed in wild circles and pricked at the inside of her head.
Let us out! Let us out!
With their anxiety, the shadows in the room swam like eels, and the sense of dread returned in a throat-choking thickness. A premonition, surely, but a portent of what? Thackery’s past? It couldn’t be. Before she could calm her hive or make sense of the signs, Caenith’s uproar added itself to her unrest.
There is trouble, Morigan. I can feel it in you. I know the quickening of your heart, the sickening of your stomach. That is instinct, Morigan. The hunter’s compass. It warns and steers us from danger. You are in danger, even if you know it not. I am coming
.

As Caenith’s river surged in her, adrenaline clenched her guts, and she bolted up, kicking over the tray. She fumbled to spin sense out of the alarms shrieking inside her. From outside, a woman’s shrill scream of challenge came, shocking them both even more.

“Thackery Hadrian Thule! Fallen master of Menos! Bastard to your bloodline! Will you stand and answer for your disgrace?”

Aghast, the two ran to the window and looked down. Near one of the courtyard’s grand fountains, with the statue of an athletic nude pouring a jug of water, stood a woman in a dark coat, her arms flung to the sky as if in
prayer. They didn’t recognize her immediately, though after much squinting, they thought it could be the white-haired old widow who lived across King’s Court from Thackery.

“Mistress Hattersham?” exclaimed Morigan. “Why is she going on like that? How does she know you? The
real
you?”

“It’s him,” spat Thackery, his features contorting with hatred. “I don’t know how he’s here; how it’s even possible. Stay here; the wards on the tower should keep you safe.”

“Safe? Thackery!”

Alas, her shouts only trailed the man, who was gone faster than she thought he could move.

“Come, coward! Face your destiny!” shrieked the mad Mistress Hattersham, her voice so shattering that it was a stone to the glass cage in which Morigan kept her bees. Morigan stumbled and caught herself on the windowsill as her minions spun free, siphoning the dew of fate in the air, at last condensing the doom she felt—and its ties to the sage, to Menos, and to the dark lineage of Thule—into a substance that they could feed their keeper. As the bees returned with that nectar and infused their queen with it, Morigan tumbled from the world.

She is in the cabin again; the one where the shadows of Alabion’s trees claw over the house. Never has she watched in this way before: floating as bodiless as a snake of air, circling a scene outside a host, observing as she sees fit. She was correct in saying that her power as a witch was blossoming. Casting aside this irrelevance, she looks to see what the bees have brought her. Little Theadora has just come running to her father after being scared by a man in her window
.

(I remember this, yes. Show me. Show me how the fates meet.)

“Sorren,” spits Thackery, with the same wrinkled snarl that she saw him do in the other world a moment past, only with a name this time. Breaking glass sounds, and from the milky shadows of Theadora’s room steps a man: slender, handsome, and pale, dressed in black and with the cool blue gaze of a Thule
.

Here, in the Dreaming, Morigan can see past his exterior charm to the tentacles of shadow that writhe about his soul and to the color of that soul itself, which is black. He is death and ruin and everything foul and wrong with a man. He is one who breaks the unbreakable order. Who twists life. A nekromancer
.

“Uncle,” he says, with a tip of his head to Thackery
.

In what is unexpected from such a gentrified man, there is no preamble, no more dialogue before the violence. As a creature of spirit, outside time, Morigan sees the shadowy feelers lash out and entangle Bethany like a spider’s treat, most heavily about her joints, which are then moved—as though she is a puppet—by the nekromancer’s curling black soul. The black threads pull, and Bethany bats her husband away (while weeping, screaming inside at her uselessness) and jigs off to the hearth to fetch what the nekromancer has bade: a knife. While Thackery shouts at his wife to stay near him, he cannot see the immaterial or the black threads as Morigan can. He does not know if Bethany is mad or terrified. Regardless, he has his child to protect, and he calls to his Will—his love—and streams with white and gold light. In the cabin, the stars that Bethany and he were dancing to not so long ago are reborn in puffs of crystal light, though they are sharper this time, golden caltrops or angry suns, and they whirl about the cabin
.

What happens next is blindingly fast, though Morigan perceives it all. First, the stars launch themselves at the nekromancer, only his aura of tentacles and wickedness blooms like a bubble of oil, and the galaxy of lights is gobbed in tarry magik. In specks—and she slows time down to observe—the globules stretch and vibrate and bristle with unlife: transforming into oil-soaked birds of pure darkness and filling the cabin in a cawing swarm. Immediately, in a torrent of blackness, the birds flock to Theadora and are pecking at her soft eyes and flesh. Thule is knocked aside by their rush, and Theadora’s screams are muffled under a pile of shadowbirds; the child is so covered that she could be a black caterpillar, only Morigan dreads what metamorphosis has occurred
.

“For Lenora!” cries Bethany, and Morigan can’t decide what appalls her more: how Bethany thrusts and carves the blade into her gut or the pangs and wails of sorrow from her that rack Morigan’s spiritual self. Unbelievably, this is not pain, only regret that her love has ended so cruelly. On the floor, Thule is sobbing and slipping for balance on the oiled guano of the shadowbirds that feed on his daughter. He watches his wife begin to pull out her insides and he careens into madness. The horror overwhelms his physical clumsiness, and he is buoyed up as the light of his rage inflates him and radiates throughout the cabin. In the center of the room, he hums like a star. Spears of sunlight blast from Thackery. With a piercing whistle, the nekromancer calls his shadowbirds
to protect him, and they spiral about him and come together to form an inky cocoon
.

Seeing the truth of Thackery’s Art as she does, Morigan is lost for a speck in the intricacy and beauty of Thackery’s star, shining so hot with love and anger. It could be a poem or a song written in light, with its golden runes and coronas and pulses
.

The light fades
.

With its drooping struts, raining shingles, and groaning frame, the smoky cabin will not support itself much longer. Before the nekromancer can strike again, Thule clutches Theadora’s carcass and stumbles to his wife’s hand; he does not stop to examine either of them, as that could destroy him. Morigan can see the black cocoon unraveling behind him; the tentacles are unseen no more but alive and snaking toward Thackery. Yet there is a wash of light, Thackery’s star is born anew, and when the tentacles strike, they only collapse the corner and subsequently the roof on the precariously porous dwelling
.

Thackery has transported himself, and Morigan does not stay to find out if the nekromancer has survived the trivial inconvenience of a house crumbling on him, for she knows he has. She has to move quickly through the Dreaming to catch Thackery, for spells of translocation, of moving matter through time and space, are the highest of the Arts; they rarely are precise and are only undertaken with the greatest precautions—of which none have been employed. She worries, then, where his terror and confusion have taken him, if they have indeed carried him and the remains of his family to a place where he can at least bury them in dignity
.

Alas, the gray mist of the Dreaming parts to rainy weather on a dismal rocky plain, and there is Thackery, given no mercy. No reward for his service as Whitehawk, no justice for the lives he saved. The remains of Bethany and Theadora did not survive the transit. Perhaps in his crazed mind, he had thought they might still live enough to be saved if only he could get them away from Sorren’s harm. Though clearly the bags of skin he holds, the hollowed-out faces, the fused puddle of bones, and the greasy crimson offal that are heaped on his knees tell a different story. There will be no burial; there are no corpses to bury, only meat. He has nothing. Only meat. He is nothing. He could not save his family, not even a piece of them. His worthlessness consumes him and gives rise to retching sobs. Horrible noises, stabs to Morigan’s metaphysical ear that
singe the blackness of this moment into her soul forever. Morigan has a Will here, she is no more a passenger in the Dreaming, but a captain of its tides, and she does not want to see any more
.

(This is his pain; this is what he bears and what haunts him still. I must help him. He cannot face this alone.)

To leave, it is as simple as Willing it. The bees surround her and carry her through the Dreaming
.

Morigan awoke, heaving and half draped out the windowsill. She collected herself and shouted to Caenith.
Thackery, his past. It’s caught up with him. Here and now. A nekromancer. His nephew, I think. You’re right, Caenith, something terrible is in the air, and I must
—

In the square, she spotted Thackery’s tiny gray frame approaching the fountain and its mad keeper.
No! No! That is a bad idea!
buzzed the bees. Clinging to the windowsill, she screamed at the top of her lungs for him to stop, that it was a trap—even if she was unsure how. On the ground, Thackery plodded ahead, grim and set with the readiness for blood. Morigan was shouting that he was walking into a trap, and he was quite aware of that. But he needed only to find the hand that would spring it and cut it off. Mistress Hattersham’s obscene ranting had considerably cleared out the square, and onlookers peered from gated gardens or darted for carriages to take them from the area. It was a chancy game that Sorren played, coming here to King’s Crown, beneath the Palace of Eod. During his exile, neither the boy nor his mother had shown so bold a hand, which made Thackery all the warier.