The Sixth Labyrinth (The Child of the Erinyes Book 4) (78 page)

Seaghan’s voice was hoarse. “Has it been worthwhile, this wee game you’ve played with Curran’s wife? It’s no’ yourself alone, you know. The shame is on me as well, for I should have put a stop to it and I didn’t.” He slammed his fist against his open hand. “I wouldn’t blame Curran if he never brings her home.”

Aodhàn’s eyes closed, shutting out the day’s miserable gloom. Would she defy her husband and come to him anyway? He pressed his palms against his throbbing temples and succumbed to tortured inner hope.

“Have you nothing to say? No excuse you want to bandy about? Aren’t you going to explain again how Morrigan must be free to be her own woman?”

Aodhàn clenched his jaw and gave Seaghan a warning stare. “I’ve told you you’re right. I’m to blame. Not you, not Morrigan, not Curran. If I could change it, I would.”

The flush on Seaghan’s cheeks deepened. “You should never have started this. Now you’ll suffer the same fate as she.” One massive fist shot out and collided with Aodhàn’s chin, propelling him backward.

Aodhàn landed with such force that for a moment he could do nothing but helplessly gasp. He rose on one elbow and touched his jaw, thinking it might well be broken.

Bright hot rage flared. He leaped to his feet and lunged. Seaghan deflected Aodhàn’s right fist, but the left came up at the same time, swift and clandestine, an uppercut that landed against the white scar on the brawny fisherman’s cheek.

Seaghan staggered, but instantly reclaimed his balance. With a growl and a stunning punch, he sent Aodhàn tumbling across the table and into a chair, splintering it to bits. Kicking aside the table, creels, and dishes, he crashed like a bull, blind to everything but his need to obliterate.

Cold determination cleared Aodhàn’s vision. Anticipating his maddened foe, he struck at Seaghan’s face and belly, leaving him bent over, his teeth and lips stained wetly crimson.

In the end, after a bout that virtually destroyed the interior of the blackhouse, the adversaries lay bloodied, bruised, and exhausted. Pain crept out of the shadows, laying a wide assault.

Dragging himself off the floor, Aodhàn spat blood. “Curran brought her to
me
,” he said. “She’s been mine since the earth began, and she’ll be mine when it’s done.”

Seaghan stared at him, panting.

Aodhàn wheeled and left, heading north.

Clouds scudded before a moaning wind. In time he came to the foot of an incline where a burn expanded into a pool. He splashed cold water on his face and lay there, too tired and sore to rise.

On Barra, before Lilith and their daughters were killed, he’d been an immaculately groomed, expensively garbed man. It was an effective method of keeping the inhabitants at arm’s length. Now he looked like one of them, his hair long and unkempt, carelessly drawn into a knot to keep it out of his eyes. His beard was untrimmed, his clothing rough and dirty.

You have much to redress,
whispered the voice in his head. The old voice, the one that violated his sleep and spoke from the sea.

“No one knows who you are anymore.”

See yourself
, the voice said, not without pity.

The pool became a mirror to the past, showing him his original face— the arrogant Gold Lion of Mycenae, so selfishly brazen he’d tricked a country, thwarted a goddess, and perverted the world’s destiny to satisfy his own ends.

A transient breeze disturbed the surface of the pool, and all at once Chrysaleon was the mysterious Taranis, he who visited a chieftain’s daughter in her tower bedchamber, luring her into torment and attempted suicide, which might have been a better death than the one she actually suffered.

We’ve been at Cape Wrath,
Morrigan wrote in her letter. Aodhàn knew why. He’d seen how his story affected her. Some buried part of her was bewitched still.

Had she unearthed any sign of Eamhair, of Taranis? He could only hope she wouldn’t discover how much he’d altered the facts.

No matter how brutally their incarnations concluded, they all anchored Aridela closer to him— including this one, where Menoetius seemed to have every advantage.

She wasn’t content with her wealthy, handsome husband. If she were, she would not have allowed Aodhàn to kiss her, and she surely wouldn’t have kissed him back.

At first, when his memories returned, he’d known true fear. What if Olivia changed her, made her Curran’s, body and soul?

But it hadn’t happened.

He
was
winning. Slowly perhaps, too slowly, but he felt it in every breath. He would win, if he just kept fighting.

Damn Curran. Aodhàn had been so close to bringing Morrigan around to his way of thinking, but he was helpless with them so far away.

His bastard brother had gone beyond forgiveness when he got her pregnant. God, how Aodhàn hated that mewling infant, the constant reminder that Aridela had given herself to another man. Never, ever, in all the thousands of years they’d journeyed this thorny trail, had she borne a child to Menoetius.

Did it mean the end was near? Both relief and fear coursed through him at the possibility. He wasn’t ready to give in, yet he was so tired.

His fist struck the reflection, dispersing Taranis in a flurry of ripples. “I’ll have your daughter and the entire world,” he snarled. “You’ll be swept away like a housewife brushes crumbs from her kitchen floor.”

All perception of gods and goddesses, of Athene and the old ways, was vanishing. History books patronizingly referred to those deities as myths, and knowledge of lands where women ruled was already lost.

Curran would fail. Athene would fail. A bit more time— that’s all he needed. Athene would diminish. At some point, she wouldn’t have enough power to bring back Menoetius or those other sycophants, Selene and Themiste. Perhaps Athene herself would die.

Then he would drink sweet revenge, as sweet as the old gods’ nectar.

That thought, so like something Harpalycus would say, forced a bitter laugh from Aodhàn’s throat.

Drawn-out prickling hunger sent him stumbling, reliving the moment in the forest when he’d breathed in the scent of her skin, a subtle perfume that carried somehow from life to life, one body to the next. The musky aroma made him feel he was plunging into a warm chasm, like a womb, where nothing existed but liquid darkness. Her scent alone brought Crete to life with punishing intensity— right up to the last moment.

He veered away from that memory.

A stone tripped him. He fell into pine branches, trying to silence her rejection as needles scraped his face.
I’ll never be separated from my child
.

Of course she would attempt nobility. This era of prudish hypocrisy leant itself to such things. On Crete, she could have as many lovers as she wished. Not here, where women must be chaste and faithful all their lives, to one man alone. Aye, she had to choose, and there was only one choice this culture would accept— Curran, simply because he’d found her before Aodhàn.

Nauseated and dizzy, he pushed away from the sticky trunk. Beyond a stretch of grass there was an embankment of obsidian-like stones, layered and jagged as shark teeth from eons of pummeling. They formed a precarious barrier between ocean and land.

Aodhàn crawled onto the edge. Below, the surf roiled like a foam-mouthed pack of wolves.

You want me. You want to suck me into ice and darkness
.

Lightning flashed in one blinding arc after another. An almost uncontrollable desire to jump flamed then diffused through his muscles. He clutched the slippery rocks. If he were gone, Morrigan could come home to Glenelg and spend the rest of her life raising wee Currans and Morrigans. Middle age would leave her matronly and stout. Would she remember, or would she bury the name of Aodhàn Mackinnon?

The bitch goddess had done this deliberately. She had guided Curran to Morrigan. She had caused a child to start growing. She had stolen Aodhàn’s memories then cruelly brought them back when it was too late.

The cold elegance did not escape him. Lilith had shared the same bonds with him and
their
babies, after Aodhàn had ordered Greyson to kill Daniel, so this life was in every respect an eye for an eye.

Glimpses of joy will be ripped from you
.

The sea thundered, launching white tentacles up the rocks. He could jump. A few minutes of sharp pain. Then emptiness, silence, and peace, until the next time. A new start. A fresh, unblemished slate.

But Athene might cause him to be reborn immediately. Then he would grow to manhood as Morrigan became a grandmother, the reverse of what the bitch had done this time. What must he look like to her? No doubt his age made it easier for her to reject him.

He imagined pointing a revolver at Curran, squeezing the trigger, watching blood flow from a hole between lifeless eyes. Aodhàn groaned, reveling in the joy of the fantasy.

But he knew everything that had transpired on Barra and up to this moment was his punishment for ordering Daniel’s death. Greyson, his instrument of murder, had gone mad. Lilith and the children moldered in their graves; Aodhàn was merely existing, almost dead himself.

He didn’t dare harm Curran. He simply didn’t dare.

Promise nothing will come between us, Chrysaleon
.

Aridela had extracted that vow on Crete, before the blazing autumn star had risen in the heavens, before he thwarted his oath of death. Before he himself had come between them.

Yes. Face your truth.

“You caused it!” he shouted into the driving rain. “You’re to blame!”

He collapsed against the rocks, suffocating in that moment when Aridela’s neck had snapped and she had slumped, lifeless, against him.

The sound of crashing waves faded. Before him lay not Scotland’s green, dewy coast but the arid island in the Mediterranean where it all began.

Flanked by a wary Menoetius, he stepped into the palace courtyard at Labyrinthos. Sunlight beat against the paving; he could feel yet the blinding heat ricocheting from those stones. Sensations and images flooded him, of carved pillars supporting gigantic stone awnings, of vibrant frescoes displaying black bulls and blue flittering birds. He’d heard of Crete’s magnificent architecture, but the reality left him awestruck.

A line of women approached, richly garbed in open-breasted blouses and tiered skirts covered with shiny hammered disks and shells. In the center stood Aridela, Queen Helice’s daughter.

He would carry that fateful moment with him forever, no matter how many centuries passed. A million couldn’t dim it. Her black hair, dusky skin, and enormous eyes were flawless perfection, yet while those surface attributes were what had initially captivated him, it wasn’t hair, skin, or eyes that made her unforgettable. It was the innate royalty, the pride and majesty that called to his, the courage, passion, and wit, the spirituality, and most especially, her loyalty— once given, immutable. An amaranthine being, she bound him to this day. He was her willing, eager prisoner.

Legend called her the daughter of Velchanos, Athene’s son and lover.
Daughter of the Calesienda
.

And oh, the bull leap, the way she had laughed as she’d landed on its haunches then cast herself into the arms of her half brother.

Prince Chrysaleon had recklessly declared she would be his. He would win her, no matter what he had to do.

Would he, had he known the full price?

He heard again Themiste’s echoing prophecy.
Curse the usurper, the changer of the Way. He shall follow without rest, without joy, without relief, until the final devastation of the heavens. He shall follow begging, but love will run from him, and he will receive only sorrow and regret until the world is old and tired, and razed by war.

Alexiare had also tried to warn him.
Selene said you and I would follow, and that we would beg for death.

Curses mean nothing to me
. Chrysaleon’s unwavering insolence sent a shudder through the older, wiser Aodhàn.
Have you forgotten my grandfather’s motto? Fortune favors the bold.

Rain beat against the coast. Cold wind buffeted him. Aodhàn’s arms strained as his psyche warred, one part trying to thrust over the edge, the other clinging to life and hope.

Yes. For you, I would do it again
.

What if Olivia died? Morrigan would be freed of her maternal obligation.

Curse it though; she might never recover from the bothersome child’s demise. That wouldn’t work.

Fortune favors the bold. Favors the bold
.

What if Morrigan died? Aodhàn could kill her then himself. After a hazy interlude of nothingness, both would be reborn somewhere else. They would find each other in the magical way that always happened. Morrigan wouldn’t remember Curran or Olivia. She would have a new name, a new body.

Athene’s gift of forgetfulness used to his own advantage.

But would it unfold that way? So far, every time he’d tried to trick or defy Athene, it was he who paid, and, indirectly, Aridela.

He had killed her once. For all he knew, that was the act that sent them on this pitiless journey.

In the first life after Crete, the life of flailing ignorance and mistakes that was Cape Wrath, he hadn’t known there were limits on what he could do. Remembering his reckless stupidity in that incarnation made him wish he could drive a stake into his brain.

He had done everything wrong that could be done wrong at Cape Wrath. He had worsened the curse upon himself, and her, threefold.

But he’d learned from his mistakes, in that life and every life since. Each blunder and subsequent punishment changed his course, refined his purpose.

There were unbreakable rules to Athene’s game, the foremost being that he couldn’t kill Menoetius, and he couldn’t reveal the past. Those two edicts were embedded in his very soul.

Not since Crete had he killed Aridela, but every instinct warned him that if he couldn’t kill Menoetius, then surely the punishment would be a thousand times worse for attempting such a crime against the Goddess’s beloved daughter.

In the life on Barra, he’d attempted a different ruse by ordering Greyson to kill Daniel. With Daniel dead, nothing stood between him and Lilith. They married. For eight years, there was no retribution.