Power & Majesty (35 page)

Velody made her mind up quickly. ‘Crane, remove the sword. Kelpie, open a vein.’

Crane hurried through the gate. Kelpie whirled around, fury on her face. ‘
What
?’

‘I need him alive. If there’s one thing I’ve learned this nox, it’s that sentinel blood can heal skysilver wounds.’

‘We don’t give our blood to scum like him!’ Kelpie was horrified. ‘It’s a sacred gift, only meant for the Creature Kings.’

‘I’m a Creature King and I want your blood,’ Velody demanded. ‘In him. Now!’

‘I won’t do it!’ Kelpie screamed.

The sword blade slithered back through the palings as Crane drew it out from the other side of the fence. Dhynar fell forward onto the ground, blood gushing from the wound in his stomach.

‘Am I your Power and Majesty or not?’ Velody thundered. The Creature Lords were not the only ones who had to learn to obey her.

Kelpie was shaking with rage, but she took her steel knife and sliced into her own wrist. She went down on her knees and thrust her bleeding wrist against Dhynar’s face.
He gasped like a starving man and his mouth locked over her. Kelpie gritted her teeth as he suckled from her wrist.

Crane returned with Kelpie’s bloody sword, heading directly to the kitchen steps. ‘Do you have any rags?’ he asked Delphine.

Silently, Delphine went inside and returned with a handful of torn cloth. Crane began to clean the sword.

After a few minutes, Kelpie shoved her other hand in Dhynar’s face and broke his grasp on her. He rolled over obediently, and she clutched her wrist to her body. ‘That’s it,’ she snapped. ‘I’m not giving him any more.’

‘Will he live?’ Velody asked.

‘If I don’t get tempted to stick another blade in him.’

‘Good.’ Velody eyed Dhynar’s four courtesi. ‘What do you have to say for yourselves?’

‘Our Lord is beaten,’ said the white-haired courteso. ‘We submit to the service of the Power and Majesty.’

The other three nodded in hasty agreement.

‘I see,’ said Velody. ‘Good choice,’ she added. ‘Two of you can help your Lord to his feet, and the other two can lead the way. We want our fallen sentinel, and we want him now.’

Their names were Shade, Lennoc, Grago and Farrier. Without their Lord to lead them, they were utterly submissive. Velody didn’t trust them an inch.

Kelpie was angry. Her whole body language screamed fury. She hated that Crane had been left behind to protect Delphine and Rhian, she hated that all four of the courtesi had been brought on this march to the spot where Macready had been left in a pool of his own blood, she hated that they were being slowed down by the stumbling, powerless figure of Dhynar, Ferax Lord, and she hated that Dhynar had not been allowed to die. Most of all, it seemed to Velody, Kelpie hated taking orders from anyone who was not Ashiol.

Overhead, the sky was bleak and angry. The quick movements of the swooping figures battling the storm
spoke of urgency and desperation. Velody was trying not to look up, trying not to imagine how differently the battle might be going if she and Ashiol were up there in chimaera form, putting her training to good use.

Where was Ashiol? What had they done to him to keep him away from her this nox? She dismissed the fleeting idea that he might have been in on this plan to force her independence. The flames of the seven hells would have to freeze solid before Ashiol Xandelian voluntarily relinquished control over anything.

Was he dead? Was Macready?

Kelpie sucked in a breath as they turned into a narrow alley off Via Leondrine. Velody, still unused to the duller senses of the sentinels, took longer to smell the blood. It didn’t take sentinel senses to see the ugly dark smear on the uneven cobbles though, or the marks that showed where a badly beaten body had forcibly dragged himself along the ground.

Macready lay just beyond the first curve of the alley, his body crumpled where he had run out of strength. His clothes were in tatters, clawed and scratched from his body in thin strips. Every inch of his visible skin was bleeding, with hundreds of tiny wounds and several larger, angrier gouges. Kelpie was the first to reach him, tears streaming down her face as she turned him over. His face was unrecognisable beneath the swelling, the blood and the claw marks. His eyes were closed.

‘He’s still warm,’ she said. ‘But Velody, there’s no pulse.’

‘There is a pulse,’ corrected Lennoc, the white-haired courteso with calm eyes. He tilted his head a little as Velody swung around to stare at him. ‘He lives,’ he said.

‘He’s not breathing!’ Kelpie said in a ragged voice.

Velody’s eyes fixed on the strange, pinkish irises of Lennoc. ‘Feed him,’ she said in a low voice.

‘No!’ snarled Dhynar. The two smaller of his courtesi held him against a wall for support. He was recovering more slowly from his skysilver wound than Velody had,
perhaps because Kelpie had stopped the blood infusion so soon. Crane, Velody remembered, had encouraged her to be greedy. She half-thought he would have let her drink him dry if she had wanted it.

‘Did you say something, Ferax?’ Velody asked coldly.

‘You do not order
my
courtesi to do your bidding, Lady Power,’ he growled. ‘That is not your place.’

Velody made eye contact with the two young men who supported their Lord and master. ‘Let go of him,’ she rapped out.

They obeyed without question, opening their hands and stepping aside from Dhynar. He half-slid down the wall and steadied himself with his own hands. ‘You can’t do this!’ he all but wailed.

Velody turned back to Lennoc. The albino had a strange face, delicate but unpretty. ‘Please feed him,’ she said again. ‘Just a taste of your blood.’

Intelligence gleamed in Lennoc’s eyes. ‘As you wish, Power and Majesty.’

The courteso went to Macready, kneeling beside Kelpie. He sank teeth into his own lower lip, then leaned down to press his mouth to Macready’s. When he drew back, he gathered more welling blood on his finger and pushed it gently inside Macready’s mouth, touching his tongue.

Kelpie turned her head away as if she could not bear to look.

Shade, Lennoc’s dark-eyed partner, moved next. He copied Lennoc’s gestures entirely, biting blood from his own mouth, bestowing a bloody kiss on Macready’s unconscious lips, and pressing a bloodstained finger inside the sentinel’s mouth.

‘Why are you doing this?’ Kelpie asked resentfully.

‘Lord Dhynar took us in when Lord Lief was killed,’ said Lennoc calmly. ‘Our loyalty is to him, who saved our lives. He is our Lord, for as long as he breathes. But she is our Lady. She is the Power and Majesty, and our Lord gave oath to her, as did we all.’

Shade, who rarely spoke, nodded in agreement.

Velody only had to glance at the two younger courtesi, Grago and Farrier, and they left the side of their Lord and master. Both bit into their own wrists with surprisingly sharp teeth, and took turns to hold them over Macready’s mouth.

Macready twitched once and his mouth opened a little further.

‘She doesn’t even have any power,’ Kelpie said in frustration. ‘You’re all obeying her like she’s done something special.’

Whose side are you on, sentinel?
Velody thought angrily, but she didn’t need an answer to that. She had always known it. Kelpie resented the idea of serving another woman.

‘Farrier and I have never known a Lord but our Lord Dhynar,’ said young Grago, who must have been all of eighteen. Fifteen, Velody revised, remembering her earlier guesses about Crane. ‘But she is our Lady. Our Power and Majesty.’

‘She saved his life when you would have taken it,’ added Farrier.

Kelpie had nothing to say to that.

Macready’s body shone with fierce energy as the combined blood of four courtesi did its work on him. He panted as if he had been running hard.

‘Do you really think you can rule us with bribes and kisses?’ Dhynar sneered, more in control of his body now. ‘Do you think tender mercy will give you an edge over Garnet’s strength and cruelty?’

‘My flesh is unmarked,’ Velody said. ‘Your courtesi obey my commands, and your life was mine to spare this nox. Are you so sure that my heart is tender, my Lord Ferax?’

Curled up in Velody’s favourite chair by the fire, Delphine was doing her very best not to chew off her manicured nails. She splayed her fingers on her lap, silently reminding
herself how much the shaping and polishing had cost her. A ridiculous extravagance for someone who made her living stitching ribbons and winding garlands, but she had spent half a week’s income on it, and it was hers to protect.

Velody’s protectors were falling like rose petals. The Ducomte Ashiol was missing, Macready was probably dead…Delphine had seen the face of Velody’s new world this nox and it was horrifying.

They toy with each other like cats and mice, and sometimes they die.

Crane, hovering in the doorway of the workroom, looked as nervous as Delphine felt. He had checked the perimeter of the house several times, and refused to admit that he was shaky from his earlier blood loss. Delphine knew she should tell him to sit down, but she didn’t want to dent the boy’s ego. Right now, he was the only thing standing between herself, Rhian and whatever new dangers the Creature Court had to offer.

At least they left me something pretty to look at
, she thought, and stifled a crazy giggle.

Rhian was coping. She had remained inside while all the drama was going on and Delphine could not be sure how much she had heard or seen, despite the fact that Rhian’s bedroom window overlooked the backyard. Delphine could only hope that Rhian had not witnessed the one scene she herself was desperately trying to forget—that of Velody writhing beneath Crane, her mouth locked over the wound in his throat and desperately suckling.

Rhian had allowed Crane’s presence in the house, but would not make eye contact with him, or acknowledge his existence. She sat with her feet tucked up under her on an old pattern-strewn couch at the far end of the workroom.

The kitchen door crashed open. Delphine yelped even as Crane whirled around with both blades drawn.

An albino man—one of the Ferax’s courtesi—carried the limp figure of Macready in his arms. Crane fell back, allowing the man to bring Macready into the workroom.

It was on the tip of Delphine’s tongue to order them out, to keep this new stranger away from Rhian and let them dump the corpse in someone else’s house, but Rhian was already moving. She swept the patterns from the couch on which she had been sitting and motioned for the albino to bring Macready to her.

A nursemaid was required then, rather than a hasty funeral. Delphine watched helplessly as the albino laid Macready’s body gently on the couch.

‘He will heal with sleep,’ he said.

‘What else can be done for him?’ asked Rhian, in the cool and practical voice she had not used in years.

‘Nothing but that, demoiselle. He may have a little fever—cool it if you can, though it may not make a difference. He will live.’

Rhian turned her attention to the patient. Macready was bruised and bloodied in so many places that Delphine could not stand to look at him. Rhian had little trouble with it.

‘We’ll need clean cloth and hot water to tend these wounds,’ she said. After a moment’s pause, she looked up and met Delphine’s eyes. ‘That means you.’

‘Oh, right.’

This strange new Rhian would take some getting used to. Delphine turned to the kitchen, allowing a small ember of hope to burn within her for the first time in as long as she could remember. It wasn’t a strange new Rhian at all. This was the Rhian who had been banished by more than a year of panic attacks and fear. Still, Delphine made sure to herd both Crane and the albino into the kitchen ahead of her. No need to press Rhian too hard.

Velody was waiting in the kitchen. ‘Thank you, Lennoc,’ she said tiredly. ‘You and Dhynar’s other courtesi should take your Lord back to home territory now.’

The albino was surprised. ‘You do not wish us to take to the sky, Majesty?’

Velody blinked. ‘Without your Lord?’

‘We serve the Creature Court and the city of Aufleur, Lady, as well as our Lord.’

She nodded. ‘You and Shade take to the sky. The other two can help your Lord down to the Arches and keep him there. I don’t want him prowling the streets this nox.’

Lennoc nodded solemnly. ‘We shall ensure he rests, Lady.’ It might have been irony.

‘You do that,’ said Velody. She might have been amused.

The albino courteso bowed his head for a moment, and left just as that cranky female sentinel stormed into the kitchen. ‘What about Ashiol?’ she demanded, her tone of entitlement making Delphine bristle.

Velody sounded close to breaking point. ‘I don’t have the faintest idea where he is, Kelpie. Do you?’

‘If you’d let me use my knives on Dhynar and his scum we might know!’

‘I’d like to manage without torturing people if at all possible.’

‘Even if it means Ashiol’s death?’

‘Seven hells, Kelpie, he should be able to take care of himself! I’m the only person in Aufleur who has the animor to subdue him, and I haven’t even seen him since this morning.’

‘It would be easier for you with him gone,’ Kelpie accused.

Velody didn’t even bother to retaliate. She just pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and sank down on it. ‘I’m not an idiot. I’ve seen the state of the sky. We have four Creature Lords and more than a dozen courtesi in the air, and even I can see that they’re losing the battle.’

Kelpie’s lips were thin and pale. ‘Last time I saw the sky this bad, it lasted the whole nox through until dawn,’ she admitted quietly. ‘At the end of it, Garnet died. He was the best we had, and the sky took him. The Lords can’t hold the sky alone this nox.’

Velody buried her face in folded arms. ‘I’m powerless for now, so we need Ashiol. That’s hardly groundbreaking
news, Kelpie. How about you stop bitching for half a minute and think about where we need to start looking?’

Good. If Velody was willing to tell Kelpie she was a bitch, Delphine wouldn’t have to. Delphine lit the stove, and filled the kettle from the pump. She felt less stupid and useless when she was doing something.