Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (61 page)

“The girl you were mourning, you were close to her?”

“I was not mourning.”

“You were,” asserted Vortigern. “I have seen grief. I am grief. This cursed body gives me senses and strengths that a sane man would never wish for, yet I have them regardless. I can smell the salt of tears upon your cheeks.”

Mouse would not be pitied; she proudly strode ahead. “My past is none of your concern. I have been gracious enough to indulge your questions, and you will hear no more from me.”

“Sit down,” said Vortigern.

While there was nothing threatening or malicious in his tone, Mouse obeyed the order instinctively, as when a master barked a command to his servant. Another shrouded heap was across from the dead man, and she sat on a gently rounded surface with hard metal bits, which she presumed was a chest. In the presence of Vortigern, she was aware that she was influenced by an uncanny patience and that her actions were unusual, while having no willpower to change any of it.

“You were mourning her, so she must have been important to you,” said Vortigern once she was settled.

“Yes, she was all that I had…family. I suppose.”

“Family.”

Vortigern slipped off into some gloomy memory, and Mouse—by whatever queer intuition—was afraid of what he was revisiting. He shared it with
her in a speck, when he returned with his swallowing black stare from which she could not draw herself.

“I had a family…when I was flesh and blood, not this thing that you see before you. I was a rich man. Not with coin and power, though I had those, too, but with true riches. Love. Hope. A future as bright as the skies Menos has never seen. I had a woman who stirred my soul like a song. I had a child who was…so beautiful. Yet here we are. Everything was lost, and I am a gray and dead monster.” Vortigern bared his teeth as if a wave of pain ran through him. “You do not believe in pity, I can see that. Neither do I. Thus I would ask that you understand, without pity, as I explain to you this nightmare to which I have woken. What can be worse than an eternal emptiness, you might think? What is graver than a fog over the mind, where pain is felt, but its source never remembered? Such is how I existed, for so long. Haunted by phantoms without name or shape. Only now…I see what I have lost. I
know
what I have lost. At times, that can be worse than a walking death.”

Mouse was taken by the unprecedented urge to reach for and console the dead man; she had to sit on her hands to stop.

“The witch,” continued Vortigern, his face lined even heavier by regret. “She returned that knowledge to me. All of it. Whether that was her intent, that is how she left my head. In shambles mostly, as each piece is like handling a double-edged sword. The memories cut no matter how I try to hold them.” Vortigern fumbled with his large pale hands as if to catch the intangible.

Mouse could no longer restrain her sympathy. “I am sorry about your loss.”

“It’s not all grim,” said Vortigern. His fathomless eyes reflected a strange twinkle in the sudden lightning.

“It’s not?”

“My daughter, Fionna. She
lives
.”

“She does?” whispered Mouse.

“Yes.”

He rose from his chair and slowly strode toward Mouse. “She couldn’t do it, Mother. The Iron Queen is not so
iron
after all. I would not have believed that kindness existed in her, but perhaps even the blackest soul shines once with light. By whatever frail virtue, she could not finish the deed. Though I
might never have guessed what became of my daughter until you brought us here.”

“M-me?” stammered Mouse. “What have I to do with any of this?”

Vortigern was before her now, and time slowed to a heartbeat. Vengefully, thunder and rain shook the attic, and yet this moment, which should have been terrifying to Mouse, was not. Indeed, the tension was made calm by the dead man, who knelt and caressed Mouse’s face with his icy fingers. She did not flinch, and the way he touched—with utter delicacy and care, as if she were a painted egg—told her that she had mistaken his affection entirely. While it was the touch of love, it was not the touch of a lover, and instead the touch of…

Mouse quivered.

“You are beginning to see,” the dead man said with a smile, his yellow teeth no longer hideous to Mouse. “Even before the witch restored my truths, I had wondered who you could be. Who this young woman was that looked so like my Lenora. How do we know each other, you and I? For there is a pull, and I alone do not feel it. Why do I burn to watch you and hold you? This is the flame of love. Here.” He laughed and tapped his chest. “In a dead heart, I feel it. While time has taken much from us, it can never take the love one has for his child. I remember you, Fionna.”

Mouse was shaking her head, as if the truth could be banished so easily. When that didn’t work, she tried to bolt upright, but the dead man caught her and held her in an embrace. She struggled, much weaker than she could have.

“Please do not run from me,” he pleaded. “Not when I have waited so long to see you.”

“F-father?”

What came from Mouse was a pitiful sound, and it broke each of them like a hammer to glass. The dead man could not weep, but he shuddered still, and Mouse sobbed enough for them both. Her hands, which were limp and trapped, clung to the dead man, and they held on to each other as if they could fall or fade away. As if all could be lost again. On and on the thunder played and the world raged. But they had found an anchor to cling to while the world spun to chaos; they had found family.

III

Mouse and Vortigern returned to the classroom wearing uncomfortable, guilty smirks that had Kanatuk thinking they had been fooling around in a closet somewhere. Although Morigan could sense the change in their demeanors, she did not ask about it, and left them to their quiet fascination, where they shyly sat together at adjacent desks like schoolmates, and traded not notes but glances that were more telling than words.
He told her, or she figured it out
, thought Morigan. At times, the dead man would slip a humbled look to Morigan, which warmed the witch as she kept her post by the window.

Kanatuk stayed faithfully beside her, and appeared amused enough watching the storm. Although he was not a simpleton, there was an innocence to his being, and a less perceptive observer might easily mistake him for an imbecile. But to Morigan, the bees were humming to the hidden songs of Kanatuk’s mind: drums around a campfire, throat music that cut into a blisteringly cold and snow-torn sky, and the pummeling of rain outside, all blending into the rhythm of a giant heart. He saw the world as one grand, connected organism. As far as Kanatuk knew, there were differences, but only cosmetic ones, between the white woods of his home and the black peaks of Menos. If one listened hard enough anywhere, he would hear the one beat of Mother Winter: the essence of Geadhain. Kanatuk was a calming tonic for Morigan’s mind, and she permitted her bees to harmlessly suckle on his meditation. Time floated onward, Morigan the leaf on the stream of consciousness that was Kanatuk. She only momentarily considered the strangeness of her sharing a state of being with another, as she had done so—on a much more intimate level—with Caenith. As the Wolf entered her thoughts, her river wound down a course of its own. Something hotter and wilder.

“How quaint. I don’t know who your new beau is, Mouse, but we have to move.”

Morigan and Kanatuk spun to see the speaker. Mouse was already racing toward the doorway, where a black shadow was leaning against the frame.
Aside from his skinniness and the scruff of red hair upon his chin, details on the stranger were scarce. Nonetheless, Morigan had a tingle of recollection that if not herself then someone close to her had met this man before. The notion bore flickering memories of fanfare; she cast them away as she strode to meet him.

“He’s not my beau,” said Mouse. “He is—don’t worry about that.”

“I am aware of who he is: the dead son of the Iron Queen,” said the pithy stranger. Then he pointed toward Morigan. “Here we have Eod’s finest act: the girl who picks men’s minds. I know of you, and of your dark lover. Not as harmless as your master would believe. You keep ever more dubious company, Mouse.”

All of the group had gathered around the stranger by now, and Mouse and the man were exchanging hissing discourse like a couple of serpents.

“This is your associate, I presume?” interrupted Morigan.

“Yes, this is Alastair,” Mouse said, and pointed around the circle. “Vortigern, Morigan, and Kankut.”

“Kanatuk,” corrected the Seal Fang.

Mouse waved away the inconvenience of his speaking. “Sure. Sure. Alastair, tell them what you told me.”

Alastair droned out a reply. “Skycarriages, several of them with riflemen, have landed a block or so away. We can assume that they’ve come for any number of you.” He pulled out an elegant crystal chronex on a silver chain. “I’d say…hmm…five sands before they’re storming the building.”

“We can’t be taken again,” said Vortigern.

“Brilliant observation,” replied Alastair. “I see that the Thule acumen has not been lost through reanimation. I suppose we should be off. You can take this as my favor to you, Mouse. Although I know you were hoping for false papers or shuttling, I’ll give you another hole to hide in, and that’s about the last of what I can do for you before your stink rubs off on me and I, too, reek of shite.”

“Fine,” said Mouse.

Not too kindly, Mouse pushed him from his leisurely pose and into the hallway. As he spun, Morigan saw a glint of heavily browed blue eyes, and felt a flutter of the man’s person waft off him like pollen. He was inexplicable and murky, evasive to her bees somehow, though she sensed a jocularity
to his spirit, as if life was all a fantastic game and the odds or prize never mattered. This lightness made her trust him enough to see them out of the charterhouse. For as Mifanwae was fond of saying:
a man without humor is a man who can’t laugh at himself, and that is not an honest man
. While they hurried down flickering corridors and descended staircases—headed somewhere low—Morigan wondered if this was to be her life for the foreseeable future. Escapes punctuated by the briefest instants of meaning, laughter, and love. If she had Caenith with her, she thought, the chase would certainly be more gratifying. While it was an inopportune moment to miss him, she did so anyway. She called out to him, hopeful that he would somehow hear past the Iron Wall.

I miss you
.

You don’t even know me, dear child. But you will
.

Caenith had not answered, but a woman’s sultry echo, almost a slowly spoken song. Whoever it was that had spoken in her mind tripped up her feet from the shock. She drunkenly slipped a few steps on the staircase before Kanatuk had her by the arm. From the landing below, Alastair tersely asked what was wrong with her. Kanatuk did so with far more concern.

“Can you walk?”

“Yes,” she said.

Morigan was given a railing to hang on to, and they quickly went to the others.

“A woman just spoke in my head,” she explained.

With a foxy, handsome grin, Alastair said, “What a commodity you must be, Miss Lostarot, to have the Iron sages throwing themselves out in the rain to see who can catch you first. Gloriatrix, now
Elissandra
, mistress of Mysteries. Whatever little tricks you do are but cantrips to her. Don’t be fishing for thoughts or you just might reel her in with one. We should definitely be hurrying.”

With that, he was bounding down steps like a long-legged stork. The others expediently followed but could never quite catch up to the lanky shadow, who was always a flight ahead. In short order, they arrived at a lower landing that was dark and cluttered with old furniture and possessed with the dampness and fungal spice of a basement. A buckled metal door was present, so corroded that it would not budge as Alastair wrenched on it.

“I am a quick man, I am a clever man, but I am not a strong man,” he said, sighing, and stepped aside for someone else to try.

Vortigern rose to the challenge. He grabbed the handle and gave it a hearty tug. Unfortunately, his efforts were a bit too enthusiastic, and with a sharp
tang
, he tore the metal bar clean off.

“Drat,” he complained.

For the first time, Morigan noticed, Alastair’s unflappable humor darkened. He was a shade pale as he said, “We can’t go any other way. Certainly not how I came in. Get the door open. Now.”

Vortigern attacked the door anew, pulling at it from a bent corner. The metal protested with screeching and a showering of rust, and the noise of the labor echoed high up the stairwell. Even without her prescience, Morigan could have guessed that the disturbance would serve as an alarm, and she was correct. The warning stings came as the shouts resounded from above, followed by the thundering of boots upon the stairs. She did not fear conflict as she should, but anticipated it, and had to harness the impulse to race toward the Ironguards and tackle them with her fists. These were the Wolf’s instincts as much as her own, and she was fighting their allure even as Kanatuk pulled her through the bent opening.