Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (23 page)

She recognized this voice. Its sinister articulation, the way it addressed a person’s insignificance with every barbed inflection, could not be mistaken.

No!
she screamed, yet what came from her mouth was a garbled sound and a dribble of spit. Pathetic as her resistance was, she managed to slump her lead-limbed self on her side and tried rocking her useless flesh off the slab. How she would save herself, or squirm to freedom past the blurry figures standing in the doorway, was the most desperate of dreams. Three or more abductors were present, though she knew only two—even if she could not clearly identify them. Two lean shadows, one paler than the other: the nekromancer and his dead twin.

“I say, you can’t be here! I don’t care—”

Then came a quick flash of white power and a breath of frost, as if all the lockers had opened. She couldn’t make out what was happening until the fleshcrafter dropped to his knees before the table, thrust clearly into her view, and she watched him shrieking and fighting against the hand that held the scalpel for a speck before plunging the tip swiftly into his eye. The instrument struck his brain, and he did a quick jig and then fell on his heels.

Upon his death, Mouse struggled harder, despite the reality that she would not escape. Not with this poison slowing her body; not against a man who could command flesh and bone. The Raven wanted her, and she had been marked to be his since their meeting. Nonetheless, her spirit was admirable even in defeat.
He will not have me!
she raged, tragically hopeful that the narcotic paralyzing her flesh made her impervious to the nekromancer’s magik; this might have been true, yet she was ultimately at his mercy. She was nearly at the edge of the table.

“Vortigern! She will fall, you worthless corpse!”

One of the shadows near the door moved so fast that her faltering eyes saw only the smear of black. Suddenly she was in the cold spicy embrace of the dead man, looking into his sad face, which was drooped with an expression that she sensed was regret.

That was the last Mouse knew before the darkness.

VII

THE BREAKING OF LIES

I

D
usk ran in purple streams across the sky, and the Wolf heard the rumbles of hunger in his Fawn’s belly. Morigan did not ask where he was going. She just watched him with wonder as he leaped over the precipice and carelessly skidded down the mountainside. Straightaway, she missed the heat and throb of his body and noticed how cold it was so high up in Kor’Keth. The magik of Eod kept even the hint of winter away, trapped as if behind the wall of these mountains, though she could sense its insistence to be free in the hollow howls from above.

What would happen if King Magnus and his great magik were no more?
she pondered, and the dream of the brother kings and the black voice was scratching at her insides with fear again. In the bliss of these past hourglasses, she had neglected to tell Caenith of her dreams. She certainly should and would make a point of it when he was back. She decided to make the most of her time alone and shuffled off to find a bush to pee in, offering pardoning smiles to the finches as she soiled their home. Once that was taken care of, she found the bark flute that Caenith had used earlier and went to the pool to wet her throat.

By the kings, you look like a bush witch
, she thought as she caught her unkempt reflection in the water. She undressed herself and slid into the pool, which was covered in smooth stones and deep enough to rise to her breasts. She washed the leaves and grass from her hair and floated on her back, watching the stars pop out in the sky. Although her hearing was muffled in the water, she sensed the Wolf’s return: a wave of heat, a wash of bestial odor. She walked from the pool, beading with sensuous trails of water; a glistening ivory treat for the huge monster that panted on the shore. She felt no more embarrassed about her nudity than the Wolf did as he snapped and stretched and moaned his way back into a naked man. The transformation was no less interesting to see a second time. When he was back in his skin, heaving on all fours, she noticed the blood on his chin, neck, and chest and the large dead lizard in his shadow. The corpse had long fore and hind legs, a crest of sharp ridges to its face, and looked quite like a scaled, horned colt.

“Spinrex meat,” barked Caenith, his voice still throaty and not yet completely a man’s. “I shall make a fire to cook it for you. I have had a few young already.” He hiccupped, coughed for a speck, and regurgitated what looked to be a bone onto the grass. Even at this, Morigan was not disgusted, only intrigued. Caenith wiped the drool off his bloody beard. “Do pardon me.”

His eyes began eating the Fawn, who was as lovely in the evening light as a spirit of moonlight and fire. He resisted the call of the beast to nip her dewy breasts or kiss the shadow between her legs, though it pained him.

“You should dress yourself. I shall wash up. Make myself presentable, as they say.”

He lumbered into the pool. While he splashed and shook water from his hide, Morigan slipped back into her garments. Morigan had stoked many a fire and she picked some of the larger stones from the pool to make a pit for the flames, and then gathered leaves and dry twigs. By the time Caenith joined her, civil in his pants and boots, she had sparked the fire to life. He settled behind Morigan, fencing her between the mountains of his legs, warm and clean smelling if with a hint of damp hound. Quickly he set to cooking the stick-speared spinrex he had brought, abstaining from a spit and turning the beast himself. He held Morigan to him with his other arm and she ran her hands over the veined limb that entrapped her; she felt so at ease with him, despite there being so much unsaid.

“You built a strong fire,” said Caenith.

“Thank you.”

She indulged in their intimacy, in the night songs of insects up in there small slice of nowhere, before speaking of her dreams.

“I need to tell you what I saw. In my dreams.”

Caenith nudged the nape of her neck with his nose. “I had not forgotten your mention of these visions. Please, my Fawn, go on.”

Arranging the details was not difficult, and the bees seemed eager to help, filling her memory with flawless recall of blood, rape, and ritual sin. The words fell from her.

“When you found me, I drifted in nothingness for a time. In this strange place that I think is called the Dreaming.” Caenith inhaled as if from surprise, though shared not from what. “These things in my head—
bees
, I call them, for they buzz and hunt for information as those insects do pollen. In the Dreaming they are silvery, a swarm of lights, and they led me to terrible memories. Ones that were not my own. I think—no, I
know
—whose heads I was in. First Magnus, and then Brutus.”

Caenith did not conceal his shock. “The immortals?”

“Yes, yes. I am sure of it. I felt them, this bond that they share like a mother’s cord that had not been cut. Brutus’s rage was bleeding into his brother, making him do the wickedest things. I don’t…I won’t repeat the worst of it, not that you couldn’t stomach it, but I doubt that I could again.”
Queen Lila is pleading, her beauty distorted with swelling and bruises, her golden hair matted in blood
. Morigan pinched her eyes and willed the bees to stop their harvesting. They could have gone deeper into recall if she chose, but she was afraid of how vividly she would remember. “The Everfair King raped her, his own queen. Against his will, I feel, for there was such a twisted sorrow between them. That’s all I’ll say.”

“My Fawn,” said Caenith, placing the smoking spinrex on the grass and trapping Morigan with both his arms. “I am sorry that your gift brought you such horrors.”

“That’s not the last of it, nor the worst,” replied Morigan. “The cord that connects them. The bees wanted me to follow it. I didn’t have much of a choice and I was taken to…”
A blood-sluiced hall of organs, sex, and writhing flesh
. She swallowed her bile and continued. “Brutus’s court, I think. I always
believed the Sun King to be a noble man, a keeper of nature. Or so it is told. He’s become something else, Caenith. Something
evil
. Or there is something evil that has twisted him to that end. A shadow over his soul. Black and ageless. I have never felt so small. And it spoke to me, this shadow. Threatened me. It
knew
that I was there.”

“What did it say?” grumbled Caenith. His coddling had hardened, his heartbeat quickened. He wanted to kill this thing, whatever it was.

The bees had no problem reconstructing the words of the Black Queen; Morigan echoed them as if in a trance.
“Begone, little fly. This is not your place. These children are my flesh, my puppets, my slaves. Come to my Dreaming again and I shall trap you in my web and suck out your insides. Flee, little fly, flee and await the coming of my reborn son, the Sun King. Await your turn with his gift and worship me as I rise eternal to the throne of Geadhain.”

Morigan, trembling, took a breath afterward and did not want to speak. Caenith held his silence, too, though his twitching body betrayed his agitation. Slowly, his ire cooled, and he hugged his Fawn. He purred into her ear.

“History does not teach the West the oldest legends of Geadhain, and even in the East there are few who remember, or remember more than myth. The oldest tales of the land speak of a time of an endless winter and before that endless darkness—a nothingness where life was
dreamed
into being. I find this curiously similar to your wanderings with your bees and your insights. As for this…
thing
that would claim the throne of Geadhain and who—rightly or wrongly so—calls the immortal brothers her children…she is a monster I have not heard of. For the kings have no mother to speak of. At least none that is known. And my memory is long.”

“About that, Caenith,” whispered Morigan. “I had a second journey in the Dreaming. Much nicer than the first. The bees took me to see my mother, to walk among memories I had forgotten. There was a book that she and I would read together. A book of Eastern tales. Stories from the Untamed, stories of Alabion. One story, I never read. Mother would not have it, told me it was too sad. But the picture stands out. A black wolf, larger than any bear, standing atop a cairn and howling—I think with sorrow—at the moon. I saw a single word, too, a name, before the page was turned.”

The Wolf flinched as she uttered it. “Caenith.”

Morigan said no more and gave Caenith time to sort out a reply. The fire was dancing bright, and she turned her glorious bracelet in it, watching the leaflets come alive. Caenith’s hand spoke first, stopping her admiration by clasping her wrist.

“An offering, like this that you wear, I have given once, and only once before.”

“To whom?” asked Morigan.

“To my bloodmate, Aghna. She-wolf of Pining Row. A hundred lifetimes of men have passed since her death, and I did not think that I would ever forge another gift for the Great Hunt.”

A hundred lifetimes
, thought Morigan.
Is he an immortal, too?

He answered this question ere she could voice it. “Most of our kind age slower, as magik things do, but they still fall to wrinkle and time. I…do not. I am condemned to see those that I care for waste to bone. It is my curse to lay stones over those I love and sing to the moon,” Caenith said with a sigh. “When Aghna passed, I swore—against her wishes—that I would never run in the Great Hunt again. Until the wind of fate, you could say, unlocked my door and blew you into my den.”

Morigan could not find her voice; she was consumed with doubt.
So that’s it. We are doomed before we even begin. What are you thinking, girl? Running amok with an ageless wolfman. Bees in your head. Kings and dark voices. This whole world is going to shite, and you’re along for the ride. I don’t think anyone has ever been so magnificently fuked
.

“I can taste your soft despair, my Fawn. It is like sour currants on my tongue. Do not think me hasty, or merely feeding the beast in my pursuit of you. I pondered, deep and long as a mountain spring, about what I was to do with you. Could I build another cairn? Or should I merely walk the night alone, as I have for so long. In the end, I could not resist your pull. For it was stronger than Aghna, stronger than my spirit to resist. I am a lord of fang and claw. I rule; I am not ruled. And yet I submit myself to you.” Caenith released her hand, swept her hair away, and kissed the back of her neck, and her cold composure steamed away. Between kisses he continued. “The well of old magik is bottomless within you. It is a power that will not be denied. Do not fear that you will walk this world alone. Do not fear the kings or nameless
monsters. I shall stand with you, and you will stand with me. I do not think that even death could separate us once we have chosen to be together.”

Not a line on your face, nor a freckle to your skin
, remarked Caenith, and started to lick and bite in passion, moving from her neck to her ears and shoulders.
You could be ten years younger than you are. I can’t even place your years, and my nose never lies. I would not be surprised if the world worked slower for you, so that it might savor your beauty, as I am. I would not be surprised if the lifeblood of fate itself keeps you youthful as I at last grow gray. You are a wonder, Morigan Lostarot. The world has never seen such a creature. And you are mine, and I shall never, ever surrender you
.