Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (26 page)

Caenith held the old sorcerer’s stare, unwavering. “A Wolf does many things when he is without his pack. Loneliness is its own terrible beast. It can claim even the strongest man over time, as water rubs away the hardest rock. When we are lonely, we do not listen to the voice of reason or civility. We do not hear the Green Mother. We are the animal. We are instinct. The animal, now he can be as wild as a river of blood, and in Menos, there are many who would feed that sort of urge. Many who would set it loose and watch it destroy for profit or black amusement. I have my shame for what I have done. I pretend to be nothing, element-breaker. Let the masters of El come. I shall feed them to their ancestors.”

A Wolf ? Is he mad? Does he believe what shite he is spinning?
wondered Thule, yet could not assemble a retort for this convincing con man, who was so fervently assured with what he had said. Which left Thule to consider the second, less palatable truth, wherein this great hairy thing with his cold-metal eyes and confessions as a killer of hundreds was somehow older than all the sorcerers Thule had known, notwithstanding the Immortal Kings or Queen Lila. Indeed, as Thule engaged in his contest of wills with Caenith, the unblinking stare, the musk, and the shadow of the man seemed less worldly and more otherworldly, and he broke the stare and retreated to his seat, as if hiding from a yellow-eyed predator in the woods.

“You can’t be,” rambled Thule, unable to hold his thoughts and skeptical of what he was saying. “Are you…are you the Blood King?”

“I have given you my answer,” declared Caenith.

Having said his piece, Caenith dropped his hands off his haunches and spread them over the floor, posed as a waiting, tail-thumping hound would be. The cold gray eyes lost interest in the old man and made lightning glances elsewhere in the room: to motes of dust dancing in ribbons of sunlight, a spider spinning its web in a corner, a bird flying past Thule’s window, or a dozen other instances of life in one precious speck. Caenith’s nose was just as active in honing in on Morigan’s wet, sweet scent above the usual alchemical farts and industry of Eod. All the while, Thule watched Caenith and his strange behavior and faltered ever more in his theory that this man was a fraud.

An ageless warrior? References to animal behaviorisms. What strange idioms he uses. A bloodmate? Does he mean an ancient ritual of union? Dear Morigan, what have you invited into your life? What am I looking at?
Thule sweated. He leaped a little in his seat when the cold gray eyes suddenly found him again.

“Morigan is coming,” warned Caenith. “I shall not have you speaking of my sins before I have had a chance to confess them to my Fawn. I shall afford you the same courtesy to speak of your cursed bloodline at a time when you see fit. A pact of silence between sinners, then. Do you agree?”

“Fine, yes,” said Thule, though he would have agreed with whatever the man had proposed to get that stare off himself. Caenith put on a slightly fanged smile, which chilled Thule with its hungry gleam, and rose to meet his lover. Into the room, Morigan flowed like a breath of fire and excitement. She warmed each man with a grin.

“You two appear to have sorted out your differences,” she noted.

“For now,” replied Caenith.

Thule gave a contrite smile and stayed in the security of his chair while the lovers huddled together, whispering sweetnesses to the other. Watching them made Thule’s stomach crawl with nerves, for he felt as if Morigan—the daughter he had known better than his own, dear Theadora—was a stranger to him, or had matured into something else, and in so short a time. As for the man, no longer a smith or a deceiver did he see, but a creature more concerning than either.
A Wolf. Yes
, Thule thought, now that Caenith had planted the word in their conversation. Thule was so swept up in the storm of his thoughts that it took Caenith barking at him twice to tell him that a skycarriage was here.

As guests of the palace, they would want for nothing, so Thule abstained from grabbing any personal effects and hurried down the stairs with his companions. He did not lock his door, as magik would see to that, but shut it and turned to see Morigan running wonderstruck toward a silver vessel that dazzled in welcome, with Caenith loping after her. There was a definite animal heaviness and grace to the man, observed Thule. He caught up with the others as they were introducing themselves to the half-dozen Watchmen assembled aside the skycarriage’s elegant silver-and-tempered-glass stairs, which had been folded from the vessel. The skycarriage was a remarkable achievement in artistry and technomagik. A vessel nearest in shape to a mastless ivory skiff, with a sharp prow, a thin bow, delicate metal struts that bore the weight of the craft, and wavelike curves and platinum embossing about its windows and portals. Compared to the sky terrors of Menos, this was a dove to their Crowes, and Caenith was impressed at the craftsmanship even if he was apathetic at man’s overall desire to conquer nature. As far as Caenith was concerned, the sky belonged to birds, which had the right and the tools as given by Geadhain.

“What a
beautiful
ship!” cried Morigan, clapping her hands.

“They are with me,” Thule stated, for the six stoic Watchmen had their hands to their hilts and were eyeing the excited maiden and the half-dressed brute through the crosses in their helmets. One of the Watchmen was a Watch
woman
and was absent of her helmet, though not immediately identifiable as female with her deeply tanned, block-jawed, broad-nosed face. A handsome woman, observed Thule. The impression of masculinity carried through in her tall and strong build, her cropped sandy hair, and the armor of a male soldier that she wore. She was seemingly unfussed by the inconvenience of a breastplate not tailored to her sex—which did exist, so this was a choice, then. A suggestion of femininity could be noted in the warrior’s soft brown eyes, flush with lashes, and there a glint of kindness lay, if buried under duty. Honorably, she bowed to a knee as if each of the three were a master.

“Rowena, sword of the queen.” She nodded to Thule. “Sage Thackery of King’s Crown, I am told that we must escort you to Her Majesty at once. Please.”

Rowena swept an arm toward the stairs, and Thule hustled up them, hoping to escape the questions surely raised by Rowena’s statement. However,
not even the narrow, light-bending chamber they entered, as disorienting for an instant as a house of mirrors, could distract Morigan from what she had heard:
Sage Thackery
. She bit her tongue, though, and Rowena entered behind them and led their company through an oval portal into a room with white padded benches and long windows through which they could spy the city. Once her guests were settled, Rowena politely excused herself. Thule sat across from his companions and stared out the windows, pretending as if the others were not dissecting him with their eyes, and a tense sand of silence later the technomagikal engine gently purred to life. Their stomachs did a small dip as the craft left the ground, and another dip as it bobbed unsteadily for a speck before finding its wings. As soon as the ship discovered its balance, they were off, the ground reeling away beneath them, flying as free and smooth as a bird would glide on currents of wind.

“Sage, hmm?” said Morigan. “I don’t follow these things, but I’m hardly dense. Isn’t that the highest honor awarded to those in the service of Eod? I can’t say that I’m entirely shocked. What with Master Simms and all the other little strings you’ve pulled over the years. Don’t think that I haven’t noticed. What is it, then? What did you do to earn the title?”

Thule continued his cloudwatching.

“The sprite is well out of the bag, Thule. Go on, what’s the story?” she pressed.

“Allow the man his silence, if that is what he wishes,” interceded Caenith. “We each have our burdens to speak of in time.”

What is that supposed to mean?
debated Morigan. As much as the old sorcerer kept his pouting face to the window, Morigan saw a similar guilt in Caenith’s eyes. Both of her men were nursing secrets. She wondered how dark those truths were that they thought that she, who had witnessed rape, murder, and genocide, could not handle them? The possibilities of that revelation made her slide down the couch and take a gloomy seat at the window herself.

“You two have only so long to tell me what this is all about, and then I’ll send the bees to find out,” she threatened, and then said no more.

Caenith did not reach for her, as much as he wanted to.

VIII

THE HEART OF THE KING

I

F
rom the moment that Morigan watched the sky carriage land upon a vast anchorage of sanded stone, so polished that it gleamed as white as a band of moonlight, she felt as if she had entered another world. She forgot how angry she was at her two insouciant companions, and she found much more to divert her frustration once she was down the transparent steps and out onto the landing strip. High up in the mountains of Kor’Keth, even the lightness of the air lent itself to a certain euphoria, and as beautiful as the palace had been from afar, true justice was not given until one stood near its loveliness. Awestruck, Morigan stared about. First at the fleet of sparkling skycarriages and their silver attendants arranged along the anchorage in orderly rows, or lifting off as if they were rising stars; then at the vine-wound colonnades, bustling cloisters, and further tiers of the palace rising up the mountainside to a summit haloed in sunlight, at which she could only squint. Of all the sights, this one struck her the most, the clawed peak of Eod blocking the sun.

As if the powers here hold the very bodies of the heavens in their hands. How deep down the well you’ve fallen, girl
, thought Morigan.

Someone had spoken in her daze, and then Caenith was pulling her by the hand down the anchorage as he followed the lead of Rowena and the sage up ahead. Morigan pondered what was being said between the two, for Thule was bent on her arm like an old maid.
Sage Thackery
, she scoffed, and then turned her scorn to Caenith.
And you
. Him, she found it much harder to muster any rage for, as twisted with fluttering emotion for him as she was.
Bloody love. Is this what it feels like? Recklessness and total forgiveness for the man who lies to you?
Still, she did not remove herself from his touch, and secretly they were each appreciative of that.

Rowena guided them through an opening in the mountainside guarded by two grand pillars as much vine as they were stone. Into lofty corridors they entered, finding more of this fusion of nature and magikally sculpted stone. Within the palace a brightness permeated the halls, not only from the sheer whiteness of the sandstone architecture, or from the strands of verdure with little buds of light that tumbled from the high reaches of the space, but from an intangible element of divinity that was felt, if never seen. Hallowedness was sensed in the small vestries, libraries, and sitting alcoves that she passed, with white-garbed folks who could be mistaken for peaceful ghosts wafting about each. To speak felt as if it would shatter this fragile contemplation, and the Watchmen or folk whom they passed greeted them with nods of wordless respect. Now and again conversations, soft laughter, or plucked melodies carried through the halls, though these noises were always muted, at times so low that they could be imagined, and little appeared to disturb the hum of silence other than their own clacking footsteps. In her peacefulness, Morigan quickly forgot that she was inside a mountain and was not paying attention to the wending of their travel. Whether they were moving up or down, left or right, she could not say. They were simply moving ahead through white, silver, and green spaces, surrounded in brightness and the ethereal presence of other travelers in this tranquil realm.
This place…I could be dead
, she mused without alarm.

On and on they trod, until Morigan’s sedation was interrupted by a climb up a flight of steps so grand that they were surely made for the feet of giants, where every stair was akin to a separate landing that required many paces to cross. At each end of step, a Watchman stood, motionless as a metal golem.
The chamber that awaited them beckoned with light, and the final landing rolled out to become the floor of a grotto trickling with watery music. A whole kingdom within a kingdom was around them, and amazement captured each of the three travelers, even Thule, who had been to the Chamber of Echoes before. There was too much to see at once: the rock teeth of the ceiling overgrown in bolls of starry flora; the patchy gardens of transparent bushes, crystalline grasses, and rainbow-scattering flowers clustering around the stalagmites below; or the distant wall of water that poured from a hidden vein in Kor’Keth and thundered down the walls of the grotto and into a misty abyss. Somehow, they were on an island of land within the earth, and a drop that they dared not contemplate awaited them if they were to walk to the edge of this expanse and gaze over. Thankfully, Rowena’s path did not lead them there, but straight on, toward the land’s end. A sprawling garden was ahead, pierced by a great leafless yew as twisted and white as a tree of bones. As they approached the tree, gaping from its size, the grinding noise of the water swelled and then suddenly reduced to the merest musical echo, like a chorus of whispering carolers. Morigan knew then how this place had acquired the name Thule had muttered upon entry. Hidden in the calm shadow of the tree, kneeling in grass of glass, was a slight figure with gold skin and pale clothing. It looked almost as if she was praying.