The Immortal Prince (49 page)

“I don't have time to wait,” he told her. “Get dressed.”

“But I think…” She never got a chance to finish the sentence because at that moment a chillingly familiar voice called to them from the yard outside.

“Cayal! O
Cay-al
! Come out, come out, wherever you are! Tide's turning, brother. It's time for you and me to have a little fun!”

Still naked, filled with a dread that left her nauseous, Arkady rushed to the window and looked out of the shutters, only to have her worst fears realised.

“Come on, Cayal! Be a sport! Don't make me come and get you!”

Standing in the yard, very much in command of the situation, surrounded by a force of nearly two dozen feline Crasii, including those Arkady had brought from the palace, was a Tide Lord. The torches the Crasii were holding illuminated the yard with fitful light, but there was no mistaking the figure standing out there, taunting Cayal.

It was the Lord of Temperance himself, Jaxyn Aranville.

Cayal was more surprised by Arkady's reaction to the appearance of Jaxyn than he was by the arrival of his old enemy. Clearly, she recognised him. He sighed, thinking Jaxyn had more than a knack for finding himself the comfiest nest possible when the Tide was out. It bordered on a magical power.

My husband has a friend…Jaxyn,
Arkady had told him.

Tides, a palace, a place full of secrets…Just the sort of bolthole Jaxyn has a nose for.
Cayal should have realised then who she was referring to.

“You know him?” he asked, pulling his shirt on.

“It's…” She hesitated, obviously debating something within herself and then turned to look at him and said flatly “Jaxyn Aranville is my husband's lover.”

Cayal wasn't surprised, not by the news Arkady's husband had a male lover (which explained quite a bit about Arkady), or that it was Jaxyn. Even older than Cayal, there was little left that he hadn't done, or people he'd done it to. The Aranville name…well, that was something he'd probably stolen either by killing the real Aranville or simply borrowing the family name to get a foot in the door at Lebec Palace. It wasn't a particularly difficult thing to do. Cayal had done it any number of times himself, in order to secure a comfortable niche to wait out a Low Tide. “He does get around, our Jaxyn, doesn't he? I take it you had no idea who he was.”

“Are you kidding? I'm still getting my head around
you
being a Tide Lord. Trust me, I'm a long way from coming to grips with the notion I've been harbouring one under my roof for the past year.” She shook her head and straightened up, probably unaware that her naked body was limned in firelight from the torches in the yard. “Still, I suppose that explains why he was also so good at getting the Crasii to work for him.”

Tides, she is beautiful,
he thought, only half-listening to her.
And totally dismissive of it.

In eight thousand years, Cayal had never met anybody less impressed by their own appearance than Arkady Desean. If she dressed like a duchess, it was only because she treated her role like a job, which to her it probably was, given what she had just revealed about her husband. She appeared to be totally without vanity, which fascinated Cayal.

Among the Tide Lords, vanity was more than just a common trait. It very nearly defined them.

“You said Jaxyn would already have his eye on the land he planned to take over…,” she began.

“I'd start practising my grovelling curtseys, if I were you,” he advised and then he added in a less ominous tone, “but probably
after
you get dressed.”

As if she'd only just realised she was still naked, Arkady wrapped her arms around herself, shivering.

“Come on, Cayal!” Jaxyn called from the yard. “I know you're in there!”

“Please, Cayal! Don't go out there!”

He was touched by her concern, which shocked Cayal, because he was rarely touched by anything, these days. It had been a very long time since anybody cared about what happened to the Immortal Prince. Perhaps that's what he found so beguiling about this woman. It wasn't just her beauty. Or even her intelligence. This woman had risked everything—her home, her title, perhaps even her husband's position in court—just to help him escape being tortured.

And it wasn't as if there was anything in it for Arkady Desean. While Cayal liked to imagine he was a competent lover, no woman would have risked what she had, just for the dubious pleasure of a night in his bed…

No…with eight thousand years of memories to call on, Cayal couldn't remember the last time any living soul had willingly risked so much to help him.

He stepped a little closer, taking her by the arms. “He can't hurt me, Arkady. Well…that's not strictly true. He can hurt me. But he can't kill me. And it's a while yet 'til High Tide so I'm fairly certain it's in his best interests to see you back to your husband in one piece. You really don't have to worry.” When he could see his reassurances were having no effect, he kissed her forehead. “Get dressed. I'm sure you don't want the sleazy little bastard finding you naked.”

Looking very cold and mightily unhappy, Arkady nodded and hurried back into Maralyce's bedroom. Cayal turned to glance out the window. The Crasii who'd accompanied them from Clyden's Inn had all followed Jaxyn here, which explained why Chikita had appeared earlier to report on the lack of pursuit. She wasn't responding to Cayal's command, but Jaxyn's. He would have sent her up to the cabin to check that he and Arkady were still here. Approaching himself—with the Tide on the turn—would have alerted Cayal to his presence.

“You're only making this harder on yourself!”

Cayal felt no particular fear at the presence of his nemesis. With the Tide so low there wasn't much either of them could do that would cause the other trouble. Even at High Tide, it was debatable who was the most powerful. Cayal liked to believe it was he, just as he was sure Jaxyn liked to imagine he was the stronger of the two. They'd never really had reason to put the matter to the test until now.

Perhaps, for the sake of every other living soul on Amyrantha, it was a good thing the Tide was still on the way in. This might get very nasty.

“Cayal.”

He turned to discover Arkady had dressed in record time, although she was still tucking in her blouse and her tangled hair showed the evidence of their wild lovemaking. Maralyce probably didn't own a mirror, but even if she had, with Arkady's lack of vanity she doubtless would have deemed it unnecessary.

“I'm sorry, Arkady.”

“For what?”

“For dragging you into my world. You don't belong here.”

She shrugged fatalistically. “Given that's my husband's lover out there, whom you assure me is planning to take over Glaeba and enslave us all as soon as he's strong enough, I think I was dragged into your world long before you came along.”

“I'll burn it down if I have to, Cayal!” Jaxyn shouted, sounding a little impatient. “And then Maralyce will get mad. You know what happens when Maralyce gets mad.”

Arkady glared at the door. “Why is he
doing
that?”

“You mean standing out there yelling, instead of breaking the door down?”

She nodded, obviously puzzled by Jaxyn's willingness to wait for Cayal to emerge in his own time. “He has a score of Crasii with him. They'd tear this place to shreds if he ordered them to.”

“But then he'd have to explain to Maralyce why he destroyed her house,” Cayal said. “Trust me, nobody in their right mind pisses that lady off. Not even a Tide Lord as strong as Jaxyn. Besides, this is all part of the game.”

“You think this is a
game
?”

“Jaxyn does.”

“I will never understand you.”

He wasn't sure if she meant him or all Tide Lords in particular, but it didn't really matter. This was the end of the road for the Immortal Prince and the Duchess of Lebec. However pleasant an interlude they had shared, however beguiling she was, however selfless, there was no future for them.

Not now.

Maybe
…The thought died almost before it was born. There was no
maybe.
Cayal had had enough of immortality and with the Tide on the turn, he might soon be in a position to do something about it. Getting himself beheaded wasn't the only plan he'd come up with to end his torment, just the only one that might have a chance of working at Low Tide.

Arkady wasn't a part of his suicidal dreams. If anything, she was a threat to them because she represented the only glimmer of hope in a life almost totally devoid of it.

Jaxyn turning up now is a good thing,
he told himself, turning for the door.

“Aren't you even going to say goodbye?”

He glanced over his shoulder at her. “You're assuming I'm going to lose? Thanks for the overwhelming vote of confidence.”

Arkady wasn't so easily fooled by his glib answer. “I don't think you care enough to win, Cayal.”

“I care enough to wipe that smug expression off Jaxyn's insufferable little face.”

She shook her head in amazement. “All the power you Tide Lords claim to command, and that's the best you can find to rouse you?”

“There might have been something else.” He shrugged, looking away. “Once. Not any longer.”

“No wonder you want to kill yourself,” she said unsympathetically. “I would too, if that's all I'd been reduced to.”

He was shocked by her callousness, and then suddenly he smiled. “Tides! Are you trying to
goad
me into wanting to live? That's incredible!”

“Why incredible?”

“That you'd care enough about a complete stranger to do anything so foolish.”

“I rather thought we were beyond being strangers.”

In answer, Cayal drew her to him, kissing her, surprised to find himself wanting her again, and wanting her to understand him. She slid her arms around his neck and kissed him back, stirring emotions in him he thought long dead, long forgotten.

For some reason, he wasn't just going through the motions with this woman. It wasn't even simple lust, the way he'd lusted for Gabriella. He'd only ever wanted Gabriella to love and admire him. He found himself wanting Arkady to
know
him, and that was about the most frightening thing that had happened to Cayal in the past eight thousand years.

To cover his uneasiness at the effect she was having on him, he pulled away from her. “This isn't goodbye, you know. We'll meet again.”

She searched his face for a moment before answering. “As equals? Or when you and your kind have enslaved us all?”

“Slave or not,” he told her, kissing her again, unable to resist the temptation, “I will never be your equal, Arkady. I could never aspire to anything nearly so lofty.”

“I'm getting impatient, Cayal! Do I have to start killing things to get your attention?”

“Tides!” Arkady exclaimed in annoyance. “Whatever else you do this night, Cayal, will you shut him
up
?”

“Gladly.” He took her arms from around his neck and held them by her sides, his eyes locked on hers. “But you have to wait until I leave the cabin. Don't come out with me. And don't
ever
give Jaxyn so much as a hint that you might feel something for me other than contempt. He'll find a way to use it against you, sure as the Tide's on the turn.”
Or worse,
he added silently to himself,
he'll find a way to use
you
against me and once the Tide is up, that could prove catastrophic.

“Will you be all right?” She studied him closely, more reflected on her face than she imagined. But then, Cayal was very good at reading faces, even closely guarded ones. He was eight thousand years old, after all. He was good at everything.

“I'm immortal, Arkady.”

“That's not what I meant.”

He shrugged. “I appreciate your concern, truly I do, but don't waste your time trying to fix what's wrong with me, Arkady. Believe me, I'm broken beyond repair.”

“I don't believe that, Cayal,” she replied, her eyes suddenly glistening. He suspected she was too proud to cry in front of him, and too smart to cry in front of Jaxyn, but that she had any faith in him at all left him speechless. “I
won't
believe it.”

“Then you're a fool,” he told her gently, kissing her one last time, with aching tenderness, fairly certain that the kindest thing he could do for Arkady Desean was to step out of her life completely and never see her or speak to her again. She would be safer. And probably happier.

Nothing good ever came of a Tide Lord loving a mortal.

The unbidden thought startled him and made him step away from her, as he realised just how close he was to allowing himself to feel something he'd long ago decided was more pain than it was worth.

“It's not going to be pretty if I have to come in after you, Cayal!” Jaxyn called, his impatience growing by the minute.

“Be careful, Cayal,” she warned, softly.

He nodded dumbly, not trusting himself to speak, not sure what he might say if he replied.

So instead he turned his back on her and finally opened the cabin's small door. Squaring his shoulders to face down Jaxyn, he stepped outside, leaving Arkady, and all the conflicted emotions that came with her, behind him.

The Immortal Prince finally emerged from the cabin, just as Jaxyn was seriously starting to weigh up the advisability of going in after him and risking Maralyce's wrath if anything was broken. But there was no need. Cayal stepped through the doorway, still wearing his linen prison garb, but otherwise unchanged since the last time the two of them had met, which was longer ago than he cared to recall.

Jaxyn was a little disappointed. Although he knew nothing could have changed about him, Cayal's greater height, his breadth of shoulder, even those sharp blue eyes of his, so rare in Jaxyn's country of birth, all combined to irritate Jaxyn in a way he couldn't explain. Perhaps his ambivalence toward Cayal
was
motivated by simple jealousy, as Diala had suggested once, but Jaxyn considered himself above such petty emotions.

The truth was far more simple and it boiled down to this: essentially, Cayal had ruined immortality for Jaxyn.

Until this wide-eyed princeling came along, Jaxyn had been the most noble of the immortals. Highborn and proud of it,
he
was the one the others looked to. When Syrolee and Engarhod decided to set themselves up as the Emperor and Empress of the Five Realms, it was Jaxyn they turned to for advice on how a royal court was run. The others looked up to him, their simple peasant minds taking their natural awe of the highborn into immortality with them.

And then the Immortal Bloody Prince came along. A mere accident of birth, that's all his wretched title was, and given Tryan had wiped Kordana off the face of Amyrantha eight thousand years ago, it was a pretty empty title at that.

But Cayal looked like people imagined a prince
should
look—Diala took great delight in pointing that out to Jaxyn every chance she got—garnering far more respect than he deserved on his appearance alone. And then, as if to rub salt into Jaxyn's open wound, it turned out the lucky dimwit was able to manipulate the Tide. Not just manipulate it. Master it. He was as strong a Tide Lord as any of the immortals. Probably rivalling Lukys, if the truth be told.

The unfairness of it all set Jaxyn's teeth on edge and meant the two of them had been at odds from the moment they'd first crossed paths and nothing much had happened in the intervening millennia to resolve the issue.

“Well, well, well,” Cayal remarked, smiling condescendingly, a gesture Jaxyn was certain he meant purely to irritate. “Hear you're some nobleman's girlfriend, these days. My, how the mighty have fallen.”

“Where's
your
girlfriend?”

“Who? Oh, you mean the duchess? Inside, waiting for you to rescue her. You should mark this day, Jaxyn. Your arrival was the first time I've ever seen anybody actually glad to see you.”

Jaxyn was sceptical. “You mean you
haven't
been sampling the delights of the lovely Duchess of Lebec? I find that hard to believe.”

“She talks too much.” Cayal shrugged. “You're welcome to her. Ah…but your tastes lie in a different direction these days. What happened, Jaxyn? Run out of women who don't puke when you touch them?”

“You think you're so damned clever, don't you?” he snapped, a little surprised at how easily Cayal could rile him. “But at least nobody's trying to hang me, Cayal, and if you don't stop moving, I'm going to have one of the ladies here disembowel you.”

Cayal had been inching his way around the yard as he spoke, moving away from the cabin. He stopped. “You think I'm going to let you take me back to Lebec?”

“I'm very much hoping you're going to resist, actually. I'd enjoy watching a couple of dozen Crasii tear you to shreds.”

“Not on my claim you won't,” Maralyce declared, emerging from the mine, her face filthy, eyes glittering angrily in the torchlight.

“Maralyce!” Jaxyn declared with mock enthusiasm. “How nice to see you again!”

She dumped the rope and pick she was carrying on the ground and glared at him. “Thought something on the Tide smelled rotten. What are you doing here, Jaxyn?”

“Come to collect your houseguest,” he told her. He and Maralyce had never really gotten along, either. He wasn't sure why. That she would tolerate Cayal under her roof periodically when she rarely admitted any other immortal into her home—that alone was enough to irk him. “Cayal's been a naughty boy, Maralyce. Didn't you hear? They want him for murder. Already hanged him once. I think they're planning to keep on trying until they succeed, which should be entertaining, don't you think?”

“Get off my claim.”

“Not without my prisoner.”

Cayal actually laughed at him. “I'm not your prisoner, Jaxyn.”

“We'll see about that.” He took a step toward Cayal, but before he could do much more than that, the wind picked up, dust swirling about them, stinging his eyes and forcing the Crasii to cover their faces. The force of the unnatural gale extinguished a good half of the torches the Crasii were holding. Several others sputtered and died on the ground as the felines dropped them in a desperate attempt to protect their eyes from the swirling gravel.

“Don't take your eyes off him!” Jaxyn cried angrily, calling on his own power to quell the sudden gusts. Within a moment, the wind had died, but when the dust had settled, Cayal was gone.

“Idiots!” Jaxyn screamed, turning to backhand the nearest feline, who staggered under the blow but made no attempt to resist it. Cayal hadn't gone far. Jaxyn could still feel him on the Tide, and given the smug look on Maralyce's face, he'd probably taken refuge in the mine.

“Find the duchess and watch her!” Jaxyn ordered the Crasii. “I'm going after him.”

“You wreck my mine, and I'll have your hide, Jaxyn,” Maralyce warned, as he snatched one of the few remaining torches from another feline and turned toward the dark maw of Maralyce's endless tunnels.

“Go to hell,” he told her as he stepped up to the entrance.

He bent down to enter the mine.
All that power to burn and she wastes it living like a pauper, digging underground in a mine that must be so big by now the whole damn mountain is in danger of caving in, hoarding gold she never bothers to spend.
Maybe that's why she and Cayal get along so well.

They're both fools.

 

Jaxyn was barely a hundred feet into the first tunnel when a length of rusty chain came hurtling along the passage, striking him in the forehead. He was dabbing gingerly at his bleeding temple as it healed when he heard a faint noise and glanced up, barely dodging the next missile, which flew past so fast he couldn't tell what it was.

It was then that he realised the torch was making him a perfect target in the darkness. Tossing it aside, he closed his eyes to give them time to adjust and to allow him to better sense Cayal ahead of him. He couldn't pinpoint him exactly—with the Tide so low he was barely able to sense the disturbance the other Tide Lord created—but he
was
there, some way ahead, probably setting traps at every turn.

It was stupid, Jaxyn realised at that moment, to have followed him into the mine. Cayal was the aggressor here. He held the high ground.

So we'll just have to change the lie of the land,
Jaxyn decided, opening his eyes. Jaxyn waded into the Tide, weaving a wall of air around his body until it was almost solid. He wouldn't fall victim a second time to Cayal's flying debris.

Stepping forward, letting the silent darkness envelop him, Jaxyn concentrated on the Tide, rather than the mine, hoping to detect some warning surge that Cayal was drawing on it. It was an optimistic hope. At best, he'd get a fraction of a second's warning before something fell on him. On the other hand, once he located Cayal, who was already much deeper into the tunnels than he was, a fraction of a second might be all he needed.

A scraping noise ahead caught his attention. He ignored it, fairly certain it was Cayal trying to distract him. The Immortal Prince wasn't stupid. Foolish, sentimental and squeamish by Jaxyn's standards, perhaps, but hardly stupid. He was too clever to make a noise he didn't want Jaxyn to hear.

The darkness was suffocating the deeper into the mine Jaxyn went. The chill night air was soon replaced with warm, rancid dampness. The tunnel sloped down for a time and then came to a junction. Three tunnels led off the main branch. He stopped, letting the Tide tell him where Cayal was hiding, rather than wait for a betraying sign. Cayal must be quite a bit ahead of him by now, the ripples in the Tide created by his passage were diminishing with every passing moment. Jaxyn hurried into the tunnel on the right, certain that's where he could feel him.

This tunnel plunged down sharply. Jaxyn took it at a run, partly in his haste to corner Cayal and partly because the slope of the tunnel allowed him no other option. Afraid he might plummet through some hidden vent, he tried to slow his progress by keeping his hands on the sides of the tunnel, scoring little more than a few spectacular splinters for his trouble.

The shaft went on and on, seemingly without end. Just when he was beginning to wonder if Maralyce had tunnelled to the very centre of the mountain, he almost tripped on a fallen beam as he rounded a corner to arrive at the next junction.

Lit by a score of sputtering torches, this was an unnatural cavern quite a bit larger and much lower underground than the first junction, with nearly a dozen tunnels leading off it. The walls had been magically wrought, the granite cut away in large slabs, the polished jagged surface glittering with mineral deposits of mica, pyrite and feldspar in the torchlight. The blocks cut from the cavern must have been huge, which made Jaxyn wonder what Maralyce had done with all the dirt and rock she'd been tunnelling out of this hollow mountain for the past few thousand years. Perhaps the next mountain over wasn't the result of natural formation but was actually Maralyce's slag heap. Jaxyn smiled at the thought and then froze as he caught a hint of Cayal on the Tide, off to his left somewhere. With the extra tunnel entrances, it could have been any one of several down which he had vanished.

“Cayal!”

His voice echoed off the cavern walls but he received no response. That didn't surprise him. Cayal was hardly going to make this easy for him.

“I'll find you, Cayal!” he warned. “It's not as if we don't have the time!”

Again, there was no answer. Jaxyn frowned. He was lying about having the time to waste hunting his enemy through the mine. Truth was, he needed to get back to the surface before Maralyce took it upon herself to dismiss the Crasii and let Arkady go.

Cayal was still moving away from him. Jaxyn could feel him growing fainter and fainter, the ripples in the Tide less and less easy to detect. If Jaxyn didn't move soon, he'd lose Cayal altogether.

Perhaps that was Cayal's intention. Perhaps he'd led Jaxyn down here not to fight him, but to get him irretrievably lost. Right now, Jaxyn was fairly certain he knew the way back, but how much deeper did the mine go? How much longer would the chase go on?

Shaking his head, Jaxyn cursed himself for a fool as he realised he was walking right into Cayal's trap.

Still, a trap was only a trap when you didn't
know
it was a trap. And a smart prey could turn a trap around and use it on the hunter.

With a thin smile, Jaxyn abandoned his search for Cayal on the Tide. He was in one of the three tunnels to the left. That was near enough for his purposes. There wasn't enough power in the Tide to bring the mountain down on top of them, but there was certainly enough to weaken the supporting beams to all three tunnels and there were plenty of other potential hazards hanging from the cavern's ceiling. The weight of the mountain over their heads should do the rest.

Jaxyn dropped his air-wrought shield and drew every drop of power to him he could find, turning his attention to the beams at the entrances of the tunnels on the other side of the cavern. It was hard work, with the Tide still so tenuous, and he was sweating from both the effort and the underground heat by the time he heard the first creaks of collapsing timbers.

The ground rumbled as the tunnels to his left gave way. The mine belched a cloud of thick, choking dust, out of which soon emerged a figure covered in dirt and grime, bent over double, coughing up dust until he puked, wiping his streaming eyes. One arm hung uselessly at his side and there was blood pouring from a cut over his left eye.

“All hail the Immortal Prince!” Jaxyn declared with a sweeping bow.

“Go to hell, Jaxyn,” Cayal replied, still bent double, his face contorted with pain as his broken arm began the painful healing process. Already the cut over his eye had stopped bleeding.

He didn't have long, Jaxyn guessed, bracing himself, before Cayal was recovered enough for this to get very, very nasty.