Wild Magic (31 page)

However, the Lord of Cantara, if he had been expecting to be offered a seat at the high table, was about to be sorely disappointed; for when he entered the chamber confidently at the side of Rui Finco, who strode up to his rightful seat at the left hand of the Duke, Lord Issian was discreetly shown to the row where the Vingo clan were seated so that Favio and Fabel were forced to stand to allow him to pass. Saro saw his father’s face darken with loathing as the southern lord pushed by and knew his thoughts at once.

Saro got to his feet to allow Tycho to sit beside his brother; but the Lord of Cantara took one appalled look at the white, hairless, sluglike creature in the wheeled chair and sat down abruptly and without a word between Saro and his uncle.

Tanto’s eyes flashed his fury and a moment later he dug a spiteful finger into Saro’s thigh. It was a momentary touch, but even so, a welter of bile burned through him.

‘Sit back so I may address the Lord of Cantara.’

Saro would have given much to be seated elsewhere entirely, but he leaned back as far as he could.

‘My lord,’ Tanto began in his new, high, wheedling voice.

Tycho pretended not to realise that he was being addressed thus.

Tanto coughed and spoke louder. ‘My lord of Cantara.’

It was impossible to ignore him: others were shifting in their seats, craning to listen to the exchange. This was, after all, the hero of the Allfair, the man who had almost died in trying to save Tycho Issian’s daughter from dishonour at the hands of Eyran brigands; a man, moreover, who had once been the flower of Istrian manhood and would, it was rumoured, never walk again and never father children of his own. It was a scandal, a disgrace: a tragedy of the first order.

Tycho inclined his head as graciously as he could manage. ‘Tanto Vingo: an honour to see you again.’

‘What news of your daughter, my lord?’

Tanto’s voice rang out across the Council Chamber so that people stopped in the middle of earnest discussions and looked around to see who had called out so loudly. Tycho forced down all signs of the delight he felt at this so very public question: he could hardly have engineered the situation more neatly if he had been seated at the head of the table.

Pitching his voice to carry much farther than was necessary to cross the space between him and Tanto, he replied: ‘There is no news, my boy. No news at all. I fear she is dead, or worse enslaved by those filthy miscreants who stole her away and murdered her companion. I have slept not one full night since she was taken from me. I sacrifice to the Goddess every day for a sign of her survival, but I have yet to be rewarded.’

‘They are monsters!’ Tanto cried. ‘Surely we cannot sit quietly by and see such an act unavenged. Were I fit and able, I would carry the Lady’s flame to their shores myself; but as you can see, their venomous blades have reduced me to this miserable state. My brother, however, has avowed time and again that he wishes nothing more than to take up sword and shield and cross the seas to the Northern Isles in order to requite the harm done to your family and to mine.’

Saro did not have the time or the opportunity to protest this horrible untruth, for the Lord of Cantara turned to him with blazing eyes and embraced him with a sob.

At once, his whole being was invaded so that he knew every vile thought and desire of this man whose outward appearance was one of such gentility and piety. There was no care for his daughter there; no wish for justice, dignity nor fairness at all. The beacon that burned so brightly inside the southern lord was neither devout nor honourable: it was an inferno of lustful desire that would threaten the very balance of the world, would see every man on Elda dead and trampled underfoot, if he would gain his prize. And at the heart of that ravening appetite was the image of the woman who had in the middle of the carnage at Katla Aransen’s pyre, on the ashy black shores of the Moonfell Plain, reached out and touched the stone that hung around his neck, and had by that touch and by the means of some weird power she held rendered its simple magic lethally destructive. But the woman he had seen then – as pale and beautiful as a frosty day, with her fine silver-gold hair and sad green gaze – was carried in the soul of the Lord of Cantara as a barely unrecognisable harlot, a lewd and shameless voluptuary who paraded her nakedness before his eyes, proffering first her rose-tipped breasts to him and then spreading her long white legs to afford him a shockingly sacrilegious, heart-stoppingly unholy view. Then there came a bright hallucinatory flash of King Ravn Asharson as he had appeared at the Gathering, handsome and impressive in his Eyran robes, with his long dark hair, his lean muscles and sharp eyes, and the woman shining in the candlelight beside him with her hand resting possessively upon his arm; and then that pretty picture was replaced by an image of the same man ripped and eyeless and covered in running gore, hung upside-down from a pole while Tycho, with his fingers knotted in them up to the knuckle, pulled his entrails from his still-living flesh.

With a gasp, Saro broke contact with the southern lord, but the images surrounded him like a miasma through the course of the next hour, revisiting him in greater detail, both violent and profane.

So it was that he barely registered the Lords of Jetra babbling on about the indignities that had been visited upon the South, by the desecration of the garden they had made for the Swan, by the insult to the Goddess implied thereby. While the Duke of Gila complained of his failing revenues and lack of resources to fund the well-being of his people, let alone an army, he saw again cities burning and men screaming, and the green-eyed gaze of the woman superimposed upon them. When Cera spoke in his light, clear voice of the necessity to consider their position carefully and not rush into any foolish decisions, he saw her open her legs to him. As Rui Finco rose to his feet and demanded justice on behalf of his friend, and by extension to every man, woman and child in Istria; as he carried the chamber to a veritable frenzy by the most passionate and eloquent speech in the annals of the Council; as the vote was taken and carried by a vast margin; as the Lords of Forent and of Cantara were assigned joint command of the fleet that would bear arms, holy fire and the word of the Goddess to the Isles of Eyra, and as his own name was announced as the Lord Issian’s personal lieutenant, Saro sat blind and deaf to the proceedings, wrapped around by a disorientating haze of abominations. The last vision that presented itself, before a hail of well-meaning compliments, pats on the back and shaking of hands assailed him and dislodged it in a welter of relative normality, was of the Lord of Cantara beside the tall, pale man called Virelai, in whose arms lay the nomad woman, standing atop a mountain overlooking a plain on which a mighty battle was taking place. Hundreds of feet below a great horde of Eyrans and Istrians fought and fell, charges were made and repulsed. Flights of arrows flew like crows. Swords rang and spears flashed. Blood flowed and horses screamed. And then there fell a moment of supernatural silence as Lord Tycho Issian held aloft the very moodstone which Saro Vingo bore now about his neck and, summoning all the power he could channel from the magician, his cat and the unconscious woman, blasted its white rays out across that dark landscape and laid waste every other living being in sight.

Fifteen

Bindings

‘What is it, my love? You look so sad.’

Ravn crossed the chamber in two strides and wrapped his arms around his wife. Instead of leaning back into his embrace in her usual passive fashion, the Rosa Eldi turned to face him and her wide green eyes were troubled. But just as she was about to speak her mind, the white ermine robe which he had commissioned for her at immense expense slipped seductively down off one smooth, pale shoulder, exposing the top of her breast. She caught at it in consternation, but the moment had already imprinted itself on her husband. She watched Ravn’s gaze drop, saw how it was drawn automatically to the falling edge of the fur: how his pupils flared wide and black and his hand rose to cup the exposed flesh.

Seeing him thus, desire rendering his handsome face bland and generic – a man, any man; Ravn Asharson, King of the Northern Isles no longer – its tide coursing through him to erase all marks of his true personality as thoroughly as the waves might carry away the driftwood, footprints and crabshells that had laid their character on a strand, to leave behind no more than a featureless expanse of sea-washed sand, she felt an enormous sorrow. As his hands pulled down the other side of her robe so that the velvet pooled about her feet; as his hot mouth fell again and again on her neck and she felt him grow hard and urgent against her, she felt that instead of possessing his spirit, as she had believed to be the case when she had first ensnared him; rather than sealing their connection, tying their bodies and souls into a single inextricable knot, she was losing him – the essence of him – once again.

And that was not all.

The truly bizarre matter in all this, though, was that even as they fell upon the bed and his mouth met hers, she felt she was losing herself, too. In all the lessons of love the Master had taught her in his icy fastness at the top of the world, not one had concerned the sensations she might experience during the acts that might be performed upon her. And so she had expected none, and had passed through each successive encounter – with Rahe, and then with the men to whom Virelai sold her on their travels – untouched by the experience. Until now.

On the ship which had carried her safely away from the Moonfell Plain, she had found that Ravn’s touch awakened something in her. At first, she had thought this some effect of the rhythm of the waves beneath the hull of the vessel; or some proximity of the ocean’s great swell. But then, when they had made dry land and were ensconced in Halbo’s well-walled castle, whatever it was had announced itself in a myriad of different signs. She had become aware of a curious sense of her own displacement whenever her husband was not at her side for, despite all the ease of the northern court, where people largely spoke their mind and did not ring around their words and actions with hieratic posturings or meaningless ceremony, she knew in some deep place in herself that this was not and could never be her true home; though whether she owned such a place it was impossible to say. But when he was with her somehow she felt more at her ease, more complete in herself. Then she began to notice that if she observed Ravn speaking with another woman, let alone laying a hand upon her arm or shoulder, even in the least suggestive manner, she would feel a twinge in her chest or gut – a chill like a cold wind whistling among her bones. And when he lay with her – each night, or early in the morning, at snatched moments in the afternoon, or before they dressed for dinner – the touch of him made her skin burn, as if her blood were rising up to meet his, as if it would sear away any physical barrier between them so they could mingle as one entity. Moreover, with increasing frequency, she would often find herself swept away in the tide of passion. The most extraordinary sensations would ripple through her, possessing her, overriding any consciousness she had to match her exertions to her husband’s so that her breath came in the same great heaves, her incomparably pale skin flushed pink from top to toe, and her cries – those of a distant seabird skimming lonely seas – echoed his own. At times, it seemed, she lost herself entirely and became that bird, at the mercy of strange new elements, swept here and there by salt and stormy winds. And sometimes she exulted to feel herself so lost and powerless. But the temptation to slip beneath those dark waters and never return was hard to resist.

When she came back to herself after these bouts of desire she was frightened. She had been lost all her life, and through no fault of her own; what would become of her now if she allowed herself to slip beneath those waves forever?

And so this time, as his mouth closed upon her and the two of them fell naked and urgent onto the fur-covered bed, she fought her own will. For her own sake – as well as his own – she would have to lift some measure of the enchantment she had thrown over her lord and bring him back to himself. Then, she would learn more of the actual nature of the man to whom she was bound. Then, and only then, she would learn the extent of her powers, and his response to her as a woman, rather than the sorceress she believed – and feared – she might truly be.

The banquet that night had been thrown in honour of the marriage of the Earl of Black Isle, a pitiful rocky outcrop in the eastern channels between the mainland and the Fair Isles, and the daughter of Ravn’s oldest and most trusted adviser, the Earl of Stormway.

They had done their best with Breta Bransen, but they had not had the best material to work with in the first place. Stormway’s daughter might have been a prepossessing girl, being wide of shoulder and hip and as tall as any of Ravn’s warriors. But she carried herself with such contrition for her size that she appeared almost hunch-backed, she stooped so badly. Her hair – a pale, sandy colour much like her father’s, and with the same wiry unconcern for any confining style – had been plaited into a series of braids that had then been tied with silver ribbons about her head and threaded through with little sprigs of pale blue flowers. On another woman it might have looked both girlish and charming; but on Breta it looked more as if she had been pulled backwards through someone’s kitchen-garden and taken half its contents with her. The wiry hair escaped its bounds in little strands and clumps, marring the elegance of the braiding, and the flowers were becoming limp in the dry heat of the hall-fires. They had swathed her in a dress of pale blue linen, the colour of Sur’s calm sea, for luck; but the linen had crumpled and stretched hideously. Above it, Breta’s large, lumpy face was a perfect picture of misery.

She had not wanted to marry at all, let alone Brin Fallson, the Earl of Black Isle, a man with a sweating head and a laugh like a distressed donkey. It was not that he was cruel or unpleasant – she did not actively dislike him in any way – but he represented for her the final affirmation, if such were needed, that all the love and wit and gentleness you could possess would never make up for a lack of looks in this world. Not to mince words, she was plain; and that one unfair accident of birth – whereby she had inherited the sturdy looks of her beloved father, instead of the fey beauty of her mother – weighed heavy in the balance against all her other fine attributes in the eyes of the man whom she truly craved. She had been in love with Ravn Asharson since the age of seven, though to him she had never been more than a slower, weaker, more foolish playmate with whom he played his castle-games of hiding and ambush, stag-and-hounds, wrestling and duelling. She had borne his teasing, his thoughtlessness and his bullying with resignation, but time had neither erased nor eased the pain of knowing that her adoration was not one whit returned. She had conceded to herself some time ago that Ravn would likely never look upon her as an object of desire, but she had hoped in time that friendship and generosity of spirit would win him over. In fact, she thought now, he had probably never even looked upon her as a woman, let alone as a potential lover, until her father had presented her at the Moonfell Gathering. For Ravn, he had been kind then: even praising the cut of her dress, rather than laughing in her face, but it had been a humiliating experience all the same.