Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (28 page)

“I would,” he confessed.

“Even Magnus, as unquenchable as my love is for him, was never a choice. He is elemental to me. He cannot be denied, and much as I hate myself for it, I would not want to. Now here I am, with my old and not-so-faithful friend. Where have you been? I have missed you. Dearly so.”

Thackery took a while before he answered, and when he did, it was a tired wheeze. “If we are breaking truths today, then I would say that after I finished the charter with our king, I had felt that there was nothing left for me to do. No more for me to achieve. No more distractions while I waited for the end, where at last I might see my Bethany and Theadora again. When I saw you and Magnus together, your harmony reminded me of a love that had been ripped from my heart, and it brought me as much pain as it did joy.”

The queen came off her rock and held Thackery; her arms were as warm and golden as sunlight. “Thackery, what are friends if not comforts to your sadness? Do not feed your darkness selfishly. We have seen what can become of a man once that path is taken.”

“Brutus.”

“Yes.”

They separated, the queen returning to her seat, and their friendliness hardened to steel.

“I shall assume that our king is not dealing with the mountainfolk of Mor’Keth,” said Thackery.

“You are correct.”

“He has gone to face Brutus, then?”

“Yes.”

Heavily, Thackery pondered this. It was what he suspected, but hard to accept. A battle of the immortals; the end of a peace that was thought unbreakable.

“I’d have him castrated and chained for a century, were the choice mine or the fault wholly his,” she continued. “However, there is the presence inside him to consider. I was not convinced until the young witch showed me. I would not have thought to absolve him of any of his darkness. I think it is controlling him, or has incited his natural brutality. I shall have to tell Magnus. But I worry that it will give him mercy toward his brother, which is not a quality he can afford in the circumstances we face. I have seen Brutus… what he has become. Before, he was a king among beasts. Now, he is a king among monsters. He will not share the same pity as Magnus does for him.”

“Then you haven’t told him yet?” Thackery tapped his head.

“No,” replied Lila. “Though I felt his cold concern wend its way through me while the witch and I were together. He will ask soon, and I should have an answer ready for him.”

“You sound as if you are unsure as to what should be said.”

“I have never lied to my bloodmate,” she asserted.

“There has never been a situation so dire that would require a careful application of the truth,” countered Thackery. “A king must be strong and free of doubt. A king at war must be an unstoppable wrath. He cannot question; he must only conquer.”

The queen did not or could not reply.

“I mean not to salt the wound,” continued Thackery. “But you haven’t had the opportunity to ponder the details of the Black Queen’s threat to our young witch. The fiend is in the fine print, they say, and I would draw your attention to how the dark voice referred to our kings. Well, one of them, as it were.”

Not wanting to hear it, the queen turned her shoulder to the sage. Thackery came off his rock and brought it to her ear anyway.

“
My son
. It called Brutus its son. I know of no father or mother that bore them. They are a gift from Geadhain herself. Or so the world believes. Have you been told different, Lila? Or do we all share the same
truth
?”

Again, she kept silent. Thackery placed his weary leathered hand on Lila’s trembling shoulder. “While you debate what single small truth to keep from your bloodmate—this very thing that could well be the pebble that keeps all the rocks of Kor’Keth from collapsing into ruin—I would ask you,
as your one true friend: consider that your faultless king may indeed have been keeping secrets from you.”

With a tender squeeze and those hard words of truth, Thule left the queen there alone, perhaps the loneliest woman in Eod. A woman whose faith in a love of a thousand years was cracked and seeping with doubt.

II

Morigan is aware that the Wolf is curled around her, in that place where her body is kept. An echo of his heat she carries with her, wearing it like a knitted blanket. Tonight, the Dreaming is warm and the bees are jubilant, dancing as on a summer’s eve. They are obedient now, trained as pets, and they do not rush off but wait to be led or whisper places where they could take their mistress. The bees can still taste the sweetness of the one who earlier embraced them
.

“You like love? We can show you love,” they promise, with their speech of tinkles and chimes
.

“I do,” agrees Morigan
.

The silver bees swarm and sparkle around her, and then she is funneling through the grayness as a current of ether. In moments, the bees have traveled eternity and deposit Morigan from the Dreaming in a flash of light. Her tongue is a dry rock in her mouth, as parched as the scorched and sandy waves around her. She smells the stink of sweaty hides, both mortal and beast, and sees herself in a throng of half-naked men riding four-legged equestrian lizards, and hundreds of veiled, shrouded women, of which she is one
.

(I am a daughter of the desert. I am one of the Arhad.)

“You like this, Mistress? We shall show you the nectar of this one,” coo the bees. Morigan’s pets celebrate by warping the desert with folds of silver light, and she is in and out of many places—many histories and dreams of this woman—in a single blink. Suddenly, she is inside with the cool wind of a desert evening rippling the tent in which she and the other veiled women and bawling children hide. So much noise, for the children scream like broken instruments, and her fingers are cracked and bleeding from the weaving of baskets
.

(These tanned hands are familiar, thinks Morigan.)

“Fine work,” says one of the elder wives, and she hates the woman for even speaking to her and more so for commending her on this dreary task. “Do you want nothing more? Is this all you are, a slit for breeding and hands for nursing and mending?” she wants to roar at the elder wife. Instead she smiles and nods in thanks, loathing herself a little
.

Another ripple in the Dreaming, and she is around a shadowy campfire on a night when the desert is not so harsh. Tonight it is her turn to teach the half-truths of her people. She is telling a gathering of grubby urchins—men not yet warriors and women not yet brides—of their place as the curators of Kor’Khul, and of the ancient pact with the land that they honor
.

“Once the sands were woods and streams,” she tells them, “and today much of that beauty remains. But only the Arhad can find it; only we can claim the harvest of the sands. We hunt the hidden life; we search for the forgotten springs. We find the forests of cactus and papyra that remain in Kor’Khul’s sacred glades. We shepherd the flocks of noble spinrex and grow strong men on their milk and meat. Those who hide in stone-walled villages fear us, for we can survive in what they cannot.”

(That voice, I know that voice, thinks Morigan. Even if the guttural words—like a language of spitting and hacking—are unfamiliar, though understood by her supreme awareness in the Dreaming.)

A third silver ripple, and she is squatting in sand while squeezing the udders of a spinrex, which squirt a dairy-scented, buttery fluid toward a pail, but mostly onto her cumbersome dressings
.

“Lilehum!” barks one of the tenders—men who watch and guide but do not help with common duties. He follows up his reprimand with a slap across the back of her head that cascades her sight with stars. She apologizes and takes greater care while milking; it is easy to weep unnoticed behind her veil, and she does so
.

With the fourth ripple in the Dreaming, the vision within the vision is over, and Morigan is back and marching in the desert, knowing almost everything that one could know about her host. As muses to their tribe, the women rattle the dusty air with their songs while the march goes on. Odes to the greatest shepherds, hunters, and chieftains. Songs that praise the strong and brave. Hardly a mention is given to the wives who wean and raise small children and the larger ones that think themselves men, she only hears of her place as
a number, a footnote to the glory of a certain Arhad. The greater the hero, the more wives he is granted to proliferate his wonder. For her people wed to breed, and they breed to thrive, as many are lost in the desert
.

“We are the flowers of the desert, wombs to the strongest seed,” sing the elder wives with pride. “The rivers of life through which our people flow.” She joins them in their harmonious indoctrination, cursing herself for feeling so different. “If I am so unimportant, why would I be missed? Why can I not make a life or a choice of my own?” she has always wanted to ask. Yet she knows better, and joyously sings of flowers and wombs and the red miracle of life that she is destined to bring, enslaved by the music and beat upon by a vengeful sun. The elder wives have chosen this rare, woman-honoring tune for a reason. Tomorrow there is to be a wedding, and her stomach curls and bites as if there is a lizard trying to chew its way out, for the marriage is hers. She is woefully watching the dunes, wondering how far she could run before a spear found her back when her ferocious husband-to-be caught wind of her from his spinrex, far ahead at the chieftain’s side. He is a man as bushy as a black-maned sand cat, all size and hungry teeth; he wholly repulses her
.

“He will be the one to throw the spear,” she thinks, and seriously considers taking her chances. In the end, the stumbling, whipped-along ghosts of the shamed wives who have attempted her very fantasy before shock her into submission. She would rather live as a slave than as a beaten, circumcised, and sewn-up thing: a creature that is given the lowliest tasks that the Arhad can arrange; for a society of shepherds and nomads, there are surprisingly many ways to generate the filthiest of wastes. Besides, she will be her husband’s sixth wife, as he is a mighty warrior, and once he has sweated himself inside her a few times, he will surely tire or look for another. At least, that is what she hopes
.

Come the cold kiss of night, the Arhad camp in a cleft between two buttes that protect them from the wind while howling with a forbidding music. She falls asleep with the squealing whelps and finds a single happiness in knowing that she will soon have a larger tent to be shared with fewer, regardless of the price. Her sleep is bitter and filled with dread, and she is awoken before the sky is tinted orange. The elder wives wash her and dress her in white; this morning her face is exposed, and they comment on how lovely she is—many are surprised, as they have never seen her features before. “Your husband will be proud to own you. Be sure to give him many children,” beseech the elder wives
.

Before the dawn or ceremony can begin, before she is even led outside the tent, a storm begins. A wrathful manifestation of sand, wind, and thunder that flaps the fabric of their shelter like a sail on wild seas. She hopes that it will tear the tent down and sweep them all away. At worst, she prays to the old spirits of the land to delay the ceremony, to allow her one more day of this pretense of freedom, this small bit of herself that she has as an unwed woman. But the spirits do not hear her—they never have—and the storm passes as it came, clearing to golden skies
.

(This was an omen, the bees tell their mistress. A sign of things to come. All is not lost. Love, we promised. Love to last a thousand years before it is tested.)

She is dragged out of the tent and into the desert. Many have gathered for the ceremony. Without her veil, she feels bare. She is not used to attention, to the famished stares that the men she is not to marry give her, though she knows enough to see it as lust. Her husband-to-be wears the grin of a pleased man. He is naked to the waist and has painted himself with the striped markings of a male spinrex today. She feels that he could be the lizard-stag itself was he only on four legs, not two. At his side is the gnarled chieftain of the Arhad and his flock of wives and sons. No other women are present, save these elder wives and those that brought her: this is a sacred ritual, and once they are sworn, they will celebrate the river of new life as her new husband takes her before those who matter. As if it is an honor to lose one’s flower before a council of perverse watchers. In that moment, the sickness of what she is about to endure crawls up her throat like vomit. Perhaps she could run. Perhaps a spear to the back would be a better end. In that moment, her nameless husband smiles as if challenging that thought
.

My fate, then, she thinks. I surrender to you. I have lost
.

She bows in the sands before her husband, trying not to gag on her fear or from the stink of spinrex musk that he has coated himself in, and waits to repeat the words that will bind her to her new master. As the chieftain speaks, she knows nothing but the incessant reek and the shadows of the great buttes growing longer and longer in the sun; a rank darkness swallowing her, a hopelessness without compare. It is her turn to speak now, her turn to repeat the vows, and she pauses for an instant thinking that she hears something. A rumble
.