The Danger of Destiny (6 page)

The self-titled wizard made his way to the rider whose horse had been injured by Varens's arrow. The skittish mount wasn't buying any of his rider's efforts to soothe him. He was hock deep in a busy river, and he had a cloud over his head and the scent of blood and predators stinging his nostrils.

“Wild-eyed” did not even come close to describing that horse.

Mouth pulled down, the Black Mage studied the blood oozing from the shallow gash on the wounded creature's shoulder. The mage removed his riding glove with short, tugging jerks. Then, leaning sideways in his saddle, he placed his hand flat on the quivering animal's injury.

He began to talk, his tone a soft croon.

It took the Black Mage all of eight seconds to heal the wound.

Once finished, the mage bestowed upon the animal a few comforting strokes, then straightened in his own saddle. He spoke to the rider, deliberately raising his voice so that all could hear him. I didn't know what he was saying—the language barrier prevented me from following—but Trowbridge sucked in a hard breath at his words.

“What did he say?” I whispered.

My mate didn't answer.

The mage's words had vastly cheered the rider of the injured horse. He handed his reins to another and splashed his way to Varens's body. There he unsheathed his knife, then sank to a crouch beside the corpse.

I wanted to close my eyes. I couldn't.

I had to see.

The cavalryman lifted his arm high, poised to bring it down in a strike. He held the blade in a grip better meant for hammering than for scalping.

Sweet heavens, he's taking the boy's teeth.

I whimpered in horror and Trowbridge's arms tightened around me painfully.

Once finished with his gruesome task, the Royal Guardsman straightened, pocketing his tokens with a satisfied grin. He cast a question to his mage, whose response was a languid wave in the general direction of the rapids. The rider put a boot to the boy's body and pushed him in the swifter-moving current.

I closed my eyes.

A droplet of warm water splashed on my cheek and dribbled to the seam of my mouth. I licked it away and tasted the salt of Trowbridge's tear.

And I forgave him.

For not being my white knight on the white horse and for being rational in the face of danger, instead of recklessly courageous. For crying silently as he held me in a punishing grip.

I nudged his hand. He wrapped his fingers hard over mine.

The River of Penance accepted the Fae token and carried Varens downstream. With stunned disbelief, I watched that boy's progress over rocks until he was carried around the bend of the water. Then, I looked down to Trowbridge's hand, tightened so rigidly into a fist around mine that the veins on the back of it stood out in angry relief.

One of the archers began yelling at the group, repeating the same phrase.

“What is he saying?” I asked.

Trowbridge's voice was rough. “‘Drop your weapons.'”

The redhead appeared to be deliberating the wisdom of doing so. And to me, it seemed that as long as she held up the rest would too.

“Let it go, Ophelia,” Trowbridge said. “Be smart. I'll find you. I'll find all of you.”

The Black Mage cocked his head at the redhead and clicked his teeth, and within a splash or two he and horse were a monument of arrogance parked a hair's breadth away from the redhead's arrow.

Flickers of reflected red light dappled his face.

He studied the woman for a long, long moment. Then, without breaking eye contact, he pointed upward to the cloud seething overhead. Lazily, he sketched a wide circle with his finger. Immediately the dark mass started to turn—its movement sluggish at first, though it gained momentum with each circuit.

When the cloud swirled like a whirlpool in search of a likely sinkhole, a nubbin appeared at the bottom of a mass. This button sprouted a tail, which in turn became a directionless thread of twisting wind.

The Black Mage turned his hand palm up.

A rumble of thunder, a protest of magic being condensed and compressed, then the whole twisting funnel streaked downward like one of the archer's arrows. It landed square on the center of the wizard's palm.

Was it showmanship? Or did the magic need to lick his life lines and test the shallow depth of his heart line? The twister of wind danced upon the mage's skin for four long seconds.

Then he flicked his head and the entire cloud of magic and thunder simply poured itself downward, like oil poured through a funnel, to disappear into the wizard's open hand.

A cruel smile tweaked his mouth.

He made a fist, then nudged his horse forward toward the woman who'd dared to defy him. She stumbled backward until she and her toddler stood perilously close to the foot of the rapids. She could go no farther, though she kept her arrow primed on the mage, who smiled down at her from his mount.

Cool as ice, the Black Mage leaned sideways in his saddle. He stretched to hold his fist—the one that had swallowed that terrible cloud—over the head of her child.

The boy looked up and wailed.

The redhead's resistance snapped. The Raha'ell woman turned her bow horizontal, and with defeat weighing her shoulders, she dropped it. A moment later, the rest of the Rha'ells followed suit.

The Black Mage threw back his head and laughed.

Then he opened his fist.

It was empty.

 

Chapter Three

The Black Mage departed soon after, leaving the tiresome duty of prisoner patrol to those lesser beings.

It took some time for the guardsmen to rope the captured Raha'ells together—a perplexing problem when there were so many staggered heights—and took longer still for the Fae to retrieve their gruesome bounty from the dead. But eventually, the place of the Raha'ell ambush was empty, except for the floating detritus of forfeited bows and arrows.

When the sounds of the forest resumed, Trowbridge rolled off me. We didn't look at each other. We did not speak. There was too much to say but no useful words to fit the complicated emotions stirred. I'd lost some faith in Trowbridge and found most of it again, but I'd never see him quite the same way. But then again, I suspected I'd never see anything in quite the same light again.

It's not every day you witness a genocide in process.

That's what it had been, even if my brain had difficulty accepting it.

I want to go home.

*   *   *

We waded into the River of Penance. The first body was the old man's. His mouth was bloodied and open, his missing canine teeth an affront. My mate bent over him. Trowbridge murmured something—his tone too low for me to catch it—then closed the man's eyes.

He left the old man's body where it was, then turned for the next.

A few feet farther downstream, a woman's body lay lodged in some bulrushes. Trowbridge didn't reach out to touch her as he had the first body. Instead, he squatted on the backs of his heels, arms resting on his thighs, his shuttered gaze fixed on the quill embroidery work on her quiver of arrows.

Girding himself, I thought.

Who was she to him? A friend? Or worse—a lover?

Oh, please not that.

Sickness washed over me as I crouched beside him.

The dead woman's dreads were long and the river's current strong. Undulating ropes of hair streamed over her face, offering brief glimpses of a cheek, a nose, a sharp chin, and a defaced mouth. The angle of her head was wrong; I thought her neck might be broken.

The words were wrenched out of me. “Why do they take the teeth as trophies?”

“To sell them.” His tone was flat, all emotion leached from it. “Most of the Fae shoot blanks. Owning a wolf's canine is supposed to make them potent.”

I wanted to touch him but didn't because he was holding himself so rigidly, the thought came to me that he'd splinter apart on contact.

Trowbridge said in a low voice, “It doesn't add up. If they had to travel into the Faelands, why weren't these women and children escorted? They're the most vulnerable members of my pack. The most precious…”

He lifted his shoulders, and his heated scent swirled around us.

I'd never asked how many people he'd left behind. I hadn't wanted to know because then we'd be talking about individuals, not a collective group known as the Raha'ells. And if I asked about his Merenwyn pack, Trowbridge might mention a special person—a friend who became a brother—and I would feel his grief and that would feed my guilt.

That's not all, is it, Hedi?

Okay, here was the bigger fear: that there would be a name he might gloss over, a hole in the story that would pinprick my feminine intuition. I'm selfish and possessive, and I can't bear the thought of him loving anyone else but me.

I stared at the dead woman.

Don't be the girl who took my place.

I'd sent Trowbridge to this realm to heal, and by my Creemore calendar it had taken him six months to get better and find a way home. What I hadn't understood was how much faster time passes in the Fae world. A single Earth day is the rough equivalent to eighteen in Merenwyn. While I'd morosely witnessed the passage of three seasons in Ontario, Trowbridge had lived through
nine
winters in Merenwyn.

That's a long time to live with a cold bed.

My mouth was dry. “How many Raha'ells did you leave behind?”

“Fifty-four. Almost fifty-five. Johnet was pregnant.” He rubbed his hands over his scalp, shaking his head in a mixture of disbelief and anger. “Where were my warriors?”

I thought of the redhead standing in the river, her bow primed. And of the dead woman by our knees who'd died clutching an arrow. “They were here,” I said quietly. “Every woman and child stood their ground.”

He lifted his head to stare blankly at the riverbank.

Don't cry again, Trowbridge. I'll break into pieces if you do.

But when he turned to look at me, his eyes were dry and flat of light. “Yes, they were,” he said, reaching forward.

He parted the woman's dreads.

“Who was she?” I asked, my heart thudding in my chest.

“Saranna. She's—she was—Gerrick's mate.”

Relief swept through me and then a well-deserved flush of shame.

Killing Saranna was two for one for the Faes, I thought bitterly. If one mates goes, the other follows. It was a double heaping of sorrow for the Alpha of the Raha'ells.

Trowbridge thumbed the deceased young woman's eyes closed with exquisite tenderness, then brushed his thumb sideways across her forehead.

A ritual?

“May your soul find its way to the hunting ground.” Gently, he cupped her jaw, then rotated her head until it was more or less realigned. “That's the best I can do for you, Saranna,” he whispered, his thumb stroking her cheek. “Happy hunting.”

He sat back on his heels.

“We can stop to bury them,” I offered quietly.

Trowbridge inhaled, then shook his head. “Can't.” He reached to slide the dead woman's quiver off her shoulder.

“Why?”

His tone hardened. “Because Qae's nearby.” Water sheeted as Trowbridge rose to his feet. He emptied the quiver of a quart of water, then slung it over his shoulder. He snagged a bow caught in the bulrushes and ran his hand along its dripping wooden curve.

“Cracked,” he said viciously, dropping it back into the Penance.

“Trowbridge, I'm sorry. It's—”

“Save it,” he bit out.

“Don't.” My tone matched his for hardness. “Don't let the foulness of what happened here become a wedge between you and me. I know you're sad and angry but—”

“I'm not sad,” he ground out. “Maybe later I'll be sad, but right now I have to find a bow that wasn't made for a kid or a woman and a place to spend the night. And I don't want to talk, okay? Not about the ambush, not about a fucking cloud that disappeared into that bastard's fucking palm. Not. Right. Now.”

The back of his corded neck was slick with sweat.

Okay,
I thought.

But Trowbridge spun around to glare at me. “The cloud is new, okay?
New!
The Black Mage never had power like that before. My people were chased by hounds and hunters, not some Fae magic shit that ran them to the ground.”

“He's gained some power he didn't have before.”

“Before I left, he was a cruel bastard, but now he's a magic-strong cruel bastard. He never had power like that! If he had, he would have used it. Which means—”

“He's picked up a few more spells,” I finished for him, “and the wards the Old Mage placed over the Book of Spells are degrading.”

My mate's tone turned stiff and accusing, “You told me that the wards would hold as long as the Old Mage's soul lived.”

“That's what I understood,” I replied carefully.

“Well, surprise, surprise, he—”

“Lied.”

“Will you stop finishing my sentences?” he asked in a savage voice.

My chest tightened.

Did he blame me? Did he think that I set this all in play? I swung away from him, the need to put some space between us urgent.
I didn't cause this. It's not my fault the Old Mage lied.
I spotted another bow farther downstream that had been snagged by the long spar of a felled cedar that jutted into the river. I picked my way toward it, my cloth-bound feet sliding on the algae-slick rocks.

I could feel Trowbridge's gaze on my back.

“Be careful,” he finally called. “Don't go out of sight.”

Don't talk to me.

I slogged through the water, edging very slowly along the spine of the log to stretch for the bow. Were the people who stole teeth and got their jollies out of terrifying children
my
people?