Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (37 page)

Queen Lila reached the bench and settled upon it, with her sword standing over her. She patted the space beside her for Morigan. Caenith stood by her side, mirroring Rowena, while Thule floated around the company marveling at the hall’s construction. Morigan and Queen Lila traded a long stare.

“Why am I here, Your Majesty?” asked Morigan. She and Caenith had returned this morning, knowing that they had left Thule in a state of shock and worry with their sudden disappearance. They had not anticipated any of this, as magnificent as it was.

Queen Lila waved her hand, her fingers looking as if they were solid gold in the light. “All this was created by our king’s own magik and the knowledge of women like you.”

“Women like me?”

“Yes. Enchantresses of the mind. Fugitives from the House of Mysteries. You are not the first witch of your kind to visit Eod, though certainly one of the most adept. Farcasters, seers, and mystics we sought. For a simple repository wasn’t true to what Magnus desired to store our history. Any earth-speaker could craft that. He wanted a storyteller, a theater, and a museum in one. He wanted to create a mind.”

“Is that what this is?” exclaimed Thule.

“Quite nearly, yes,” nodded the queen. “A mind of metal and magik. With piped veins of thought and crystal cells of memory. I am a learned woman and a powerful sorcerer in my own right, but the genius of its making is far past what I could engineer.”

While the queen was speaking, the bees were squirming against Morigan’s Will, eager to drink the infinite emanations of the Hall of Memories. She was here for a purpose; she was here as a tool to operate this grand machine, to find something. A memory lost or forgotten.

“You need me to find something? A memory? A thought? Of what or who?” asked Morigan.

“The king,” suggested the Wolf, with a sniff and a keen glance to the fidgeting the queen was doing with her palm again. Lila felt as if she was in the presence of two oracles, not one.

“That’s exactly it,” said Thule. He squatted before Morigan and clutched her hands. “But you must be careful. The Hall of Memories has its protections and can entrap the minds that wander too far. The king has memories for himself and himself alone. Those are the most dangerous to find—and the ones that we are after. Are you up for this task? I can only ask, and should you say no, our business here is done.”

Morigan was a bolder woman than a week ago. The hauntings in her head, the voice that threatened her, she yearned to confront it again. She was beginning to see that she had a place in these many tangled fates; she would not have met Caenith without them.

“My answer is yes,” declared the witch.

The queen nodded.

Morigan shut her eyes and unleashed her swarm. She smiled as Caenith’s hand came upon her and his river roared within, knowing that he would be
what grounded her, regardless of how the hall might try to snare her consciousness. In the thinness of reality inside the hall, her invisible magik was manifest, and those gathered gasped as she pulsed like a silver star and scattered the chamber with geometric butterflies and intricate equations of light. With the diffusion of magik, so too went Morigan’s mind. Although a piece of it remained behind, swimming in a hot red stream of love, and she never forgot what awaited her, despite the spectacular journey that engrossed her senses.

She had entered a place brighter than the hall: a glimmering vastness without end, a nexus of threads of white light. Through the nexus, she soared, fleshless and carefree as a spring breeze. Her silver servants were all around her, crawling along the thrumming strands, nibbling trapped husks of memory, which dazzled her with recollections as they were eaten—none of which were her own. In an instant, she lived a thousand lives: a farmer tilling earth who recorded the soil composition and cycles of his plants; a seamstress in a black city who smuggled filthy, terrified persons to freedom trapped in great skeins of yarn. She was a widow and a mathematician. An ascetic warrior who cast aside his vows for love. She saw a choppy sea and felt the breeze of liberty on her face; she was on a journey to cross it, an explorer. She was once a mapmaker and, at the same time, a smith, a baker, and a philosopher living in a cave. Mother, father, sister, brother. She lived every life, every passion, thrill, and defeat that those who were honored in the Hall of Memories once experienced.

When Morigan was done being a wind, and none of these memories was what she sought, she knew she had to break free from the tide of memories, to move against the current. Not an easy feat, as the nexus was designed to loop and guide a traveler away from its forbidden channels. So she summoned her swarm. They surrounded her in brilliance, and she cut against the strongest tides of light, wanting to see what they were pushing her away from. A normal mind would have fragmented and dissipated, perhaps to be gone forever, but she was no mere consciousness, and she cleaved ahead as crudely as a warship through a creek, until the currents lifted and she drifted in a new region of the hall. Here, the nexus was dark and flickering with phosphorus patches as though she was in the heart of a storm.

Here we are
, she thought, and cast her silver servants out into the storm to feed. The first morsel that her bees drew filled her unseen eye with a memory of love.

At once she knows the cold spirit of her host as the king, and the caramel beauty whose hands he holds and bleeds into as the queen. Their Fuilimean this is: done under the stars, alone, somewhere high up in Kor’Keth, where the coldest winds blow and the peaks are muffled in frost. A shadow is with them, a huge beastly thing that could be Caenith as a Wolf, though she knows it is a man—or something similar. She cannot look toward it to examine its curiosities, only ahead into the yellow eyes of her mate. What love her host feels for Lila, a river that is cold and drowning. His pull is inescapable to the woman who loves him, she knows. She pities the new queen then, for this woman is unaware of her doom
.

A love to last a thousand years before it is tested, she thinks, and sees a mouth or three prophesying just that and hints of a sinister cave
.

Yes, let’s start with this
, she decided, and the bees swarmed the memory thread and began to devour it.

Back in the chamber, a deathly silence had come over the company. No one had moved since Morigan’s flare of light and shower of magik. Caenith did not seem bothered, but calm, for he could sense his bloodmate’s travel in the unknown, her fluttering of a million sensations, no different from his twitching perceptions during a hunt, and he knew that she was safe and prowling. Suddenly, the chamber coughed and lumbered to motion, tooting and hissing steam from its pipes, filling the roof with vapors. Underneath the glass floor, the starscape spun, and a golden cloud descended upon them, a heavenly thunderhead, crackling with noise and power. Wonders unfolded within it. At first, there were too many impressions to distinguish anything specific—landscapes, battles, events, people of all sorts—and then the Hall of Memories stuck on a frame, engulfing them in a panoramic vision. From a man’s viewpoint, the watchers stared into the face of the queen. Only she was far younger, far browner, and far more innocent in her eyes. The watchers knew this ritual, for they had witnessed it last night, though there was a question as to the enormous shadow hovering over the pair, blocking the soft light of stars.

“Brutus,” Queen Lila said spitefully.

A violent red washed through the chamber, and the image folded away.

In the other realm, the place of music and memory, Morigan’s bees were unraveling the threads at the speed of thought. Quite distantly, she heard a name spoken,
Brutus
, and knew she should hunt it.

More, more. Show me more
, she demanded.

In the stone burrow of a cracked and blasted plain swept by sand and wind, she hides. Her host is the king, and this is his memory. He has made a small green fire to warm himself and is waiting for his brother to return. Somewhere out in the dusty turmoil, his brother hunts to bring them meat and the treasured roots that they can squeeze for water in this lifeless land. This is better than the Long Winter or the Wet Season, though, this Season of Dust. As time drifts by, he paces the cave, stitches up his skin cloak with a bone needle, and practices the tongues of the animals he has heard that stalk the Season of Dust or the ages that were endured before. He thinks he can do better than their caws and roars, and rolls the sounds on his tongue, making them prettier to the ear
.

(One day he will hone and share these sounds with others. One day he will teach our world how to speak, Morigan understands in her absolute awareness.)

Sometime into his exercises, Brutus returns. As always, his brother moves too fast to be seen and is simply before him. While he is pale and transcendental, his brother is all things primal. Rawness is embedded in him; it can be noted in his unkempt beard and his luxuriously oiled black hair as curled as a lion’s mane; or in his face like a mountain chiseled by lightning—carved nose, caved cheeks, and staid brow; or in the grotesque majesty of his body, a tower of twisted golden muscle, anatomically perfect, yet magnified to an obscenity of bulges and sinew. His sapphire gaze is the empty gaze of a hunter king: a remorseless stalker that has killed countless prey, and it does not soften even as it looks upon his frail brother, this dwarf to his giganticness. Nonetheless, the searing fire that consumes Magnus’s chest tells him that he is loved and in no danger from this blood-crusted, naked titan. More than that, Brutus has brought what they need for survival, and throws down the crumpled skylizard that he has plucked from the heavens amid what water-roots he has foraged that day
.

As they eat, they chat in their heads, playing with the sounds that Magnus was working on instead of their grunts and pulses of spirit, which has been all
the language they have known thus far. Except for each other’s names, which ring true in their heads
.

(How? Who told you these names? wonders Morigan. And I’ll be damned if that king isn’t twice the size, rage, and shape of you, Caenith, with a likeness that chills my soul.)

Once the skylizard is gnawed clean of meat—not even its organs left by the giant’s appetite—the brothers curl up. Large one over the small one, hot one over the cold one, and they sleep. Even at rest, they bleed fire and ice into each other and haunt the same dreams
.

Quaint. It is good to know that Brutus was not always such a monster. Where did you get your names, though, you who had no words? This is not far enough back. I need to go farther
, commanded Morigan. More of the thread was chewed, and another memory spilled into her consciousness.

This is an earlier age. A Wet Season. Her host and his brother are slogging through mire and bog, surrounded by hungry plants with serrated leaves and swatting off bloodsuckers as large as sparrows. The ones that land on Brutus, he is too lazy to swat, and they die by their own voraciousness as their stingers snap off on his brushed-gold flesh. But with impossibly agile hands he crushes the ones that would pierce his brother, or snaps the spines of the snakes that wind through the muck, and Magnus is left unharmed in a world that should kill his delicate self. Perhaps he is not so helpless as he appears, though, and when the greater dangers come, the floods and storms that not even his brother can beat back with might, and they are forced to hide in pockets of muck, he can steer the torrential waters off their burrow or ask the lightning to strike somewhere else. One such storm has just passed, and there will not be another for some time. The sky will tell him when it is angry, when it is time to hide, as is the way
.

Lulled by this security, her host is not paying attention and he slips into a sinkhole clogged with thorns and sharp stones that rip his tender flesh as his brother hauls him from it. This is hardly the first occasion that his weaker self has been damaged, and his brother coos gently to stem the tears while he carries him to a patch of hardened mud. In a swarm, the mosquitoes follow them, and he wipes some of his brother’s red essence on his back and shoulders to keep them busy killing themselves while he sets his charge down. The killer’s stare in Brutus softens, and the fire inside her host goes wild as a forest of burning
trees: Magnus is sweating and shaking with the courage of his brother instead of the fear of his injury. Brutus treats him as he has always done, since the first scrape that festered, or the first bone that snapped and would not mend like his did. He chews into his palm with teeth that are suddenly sharp and clasps his brother’s shredded shin with that hand. His rich purplish blood is immediately soothing to Magnus, and the fingers of fire and frost between them intensify to a whirling dizziness, a closeness where they cannot say who is wounded, who is strong, who banishes the thunder, and who tears the throats from their meals. When it is over, Brutus licks off the blood and dirt on Magnus’s leg. He is satisfied that not even a scar remains. Brutus hoists his brother up on his shoulders and strides on through the bog
.

The Fuilimean, this ancient rite of sharing blood or being with another. So this is where it began. Without words, with the oldest of promises: to live and love the other
. While it was interesting, this was not what Morigan sought. She was reversing time, though, going earlier and earlier into the ages, chewing up every one of the king’s memory threads.
Almost there
, thought Morigan, and her bees tore ahead down the final fraying line of golden memory, arriving at a tangle, an axis where all such filaments met.

She finds herself in a snowy arctic hollow, cracked by a howling outside. Here in the Long Winter, the cold is vicious and unchallenged by sun. Her host shivers among the crystal teeth of the cavern; his brother’s heat is gone, and he is a springling himself, unable to stay warm even under the heaps of pelts in which he has buried himself. So he quivers and waits for the giant to return. This is how time has passed; this is their life. Brutus hunts, they eat, they sleep. They are patient until the Long Winter’s endless darkness breaks for a moment with sun and they race out into the tundra to find a new hole to house them before the snow comes down again
.