Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (8 page)

Finally, they slowed, and Caenith’s footsteps were heard scuffing on hard earth. She asked to be set down. He obliged; again, with exacting care, as if she was made of glass. Morigan stretched her arms, sore from clutching for so long. When she realized where they were, she leaned on Caenith and somberly asked, “How did you find this place?”

“It wanted to be found. It had a song unsung. A lonely melody, crying on the wind like a nestling in an empty nest. You have not been here in some time.”

“No, I have not.”

Once and only once had she visited the buttes of Kor’Keth, had she climbed the steep terrace of red clay, and that was to bury her mother. Thule had accompanied her, and it was branded in her memory as the most grueling trial of her years. For although Thule was a master sorcerer, one who could evoke incredible powers in moments of crisis, he was stubbornly averse to using magik for anything except the most menial of duties. So they had climbed, and shared the dead weight of Mifanwae’s corpse between their scrawny arms. She was a wee sprout of a girl at the time, though she ached as terribly as the old sorcerer did. All day it took them; sweating, scraping themselves, and weeping, until the cold light of the moon shone over a place high enough to suit Mifanwae’s rest.

I want to be able to see the moon, clear and bright over my grave
, Mifanwae had told her on many an occasion. Grim conversations to have with one’s daughter, but Mifanwae had a sickness of the heart that sorcery could stall yet never cure, and she had long ago accepted it.
We chose well, Mother
, thought Morigan. For the stone cairn that held Mifanwae’s remains had soundly withstood the ravages of time and the elements. It had not fallen down, as she had often worried might have happened. Nature had been kind and had filled the stones with a grout of dust. It had softened the appearance of the
monument into a seamless rise, as if that lump in the land, on that solitary outcropping of rock, had always been. Caenith and Morigan stood downhill from the cairn and then followed the watery white path of the Witch’s Moon up the slight incline to the monument. As Morigan approached, the worst of the memories assaulted her. She might have fallen if Caenith had not had so firm a hold on her, if he was not leading her as a shepherd leads a lamb while she wove in and out of the world—remembering.

She is in King’s Crown; the tall white spires of buildings are casting black shadows today. She remembers this moment as dark, as gloomy as if the sun had gone away, which, in Eod, is impossible. She is upon her knees. She feels so low, poor, and stripped. She has never felt so useless. What else could she feel, as her mother gasps and clutches her throat? As the tincture to ease her attack lies broken in the street—dropped before it could reach her mouth
.

Faces are around them, but they are as black as the shadows of King’s Crown. They watch but do not intercede. A city brimming with sorcerers and learned men and not a fleshbinder or physician among them who will speak out. Perhaps it is because of her shrieking, because of her fingers bloodied from her attempts to scrape her mother’s tincture off the cobbles. Surely, she looks like a rabid thing and screams just as frighteningly
.

She has managed to haul Mifanwae’s head into her lap. Mifanwae takes a breath and sees her clearly, looks straight into her face, and the moment silences her. There are no final words; there is nothing more to remember her mother by, just that look
.

Rather suddenly, and peacefully, Mifanwae dies
.

Her mother is there one sand, and then she is lighter. A sigh that leaves for the heavens. Mifanwae’s head rolls sideways, watching that breath float off, chasing it
.

At last the cairn was before them, and Morigan awoke from herself. She knelt and touched the sandy stones, caressed their graininess, and reached for Caenith’s hand, which had an identical feel.

“No one helped her. She died. In the greatest city in Geadhain…the City of Wonders.” Bitterly, she laughed. “My master arrived, but not in time, and I think he punishes himself for that, as unjustly as I do for my ineptitude.”

“You were a pup; there is nothing you could have done.”

“Perhaps that is true.”

They were easy together in the silence of the night. Caenith knelt behind Morigan, drawing his arm about her, pulling her to his hardness, tickling her with his beard and fur. As sensual as his every gesture was, Morigan did not feel any insistence of desire. He was the perfect companion to her grief—tender but hard, giving and requiring nothing.

“Thank you,” she said. She wasn’t sure how she had ended up at the rocky base of Kor’Keth, staring at her mother’s grave, on a cold desert night with a man who was not quite a man, but she was grateful for it.

“I know that the hunt tonight has saddened you, but often the quarry is not what we seek. I listened to the song of Geadhain, to what honeyed praise it sang for you, and this is where I was led. It is good that you have come here. We appreciate life if we treasure death. I think this was Geadhain’s gift to you tonight.” Caenith concentrated, hearing the whispers of the stones, the scratch of sand over rock, the shift of grit over the bones beneath. He listened for a name. “
Mifanwae
. She would be glad that you have come here, even if only her shadow remains.”

A tear rolled from Morigan’s eye. Before her sadness could deepen, a fierce cold breeze stole over the pair, and they huddled closer to weather it. On the wind, Caenith could smell the scent of dawn, like hay, along with spicier scents—moss, herbs, and loam—of the East. Was this a blessing? For as he looked, he saw what the wind had brought to Mifanwae’s cairn: a thin-stemmed white flower, borne from who knew what distant wood. The flower lay at the sandy base of the stones like an offering.

“Brighten yourself, dear Fawn, and look.” Caenith slipped an arm over her, pointing to the flower. “I wanted to see if the she-wolf would bless my pursuit of you, and it seems that she has. Life amid death. I shall take that as a sign.”

They watched the flower for a time as it fluttered on the sand but seemed content to stay. They remained in their embrace even though the elements no longer demanded it. Eventually, the flower was taken by the wind again, and Morigan’s head began to droop as shadows started to lighten in the sky. They prepared to leave, and Morigan was up in his arms in an instant. She bid her mother a sleepy farewell and then shut her eyes. The warm wind that was Caenith was moving once more. How long the trip to Eod took, she could not say, for weariness drained the last of her adrenaline, and this
time she dozed off in the arms of her carrier. Now and again, he would stop to adjust her position as her arms dropped from his neck. Nonetheless, she might as well have been riding upon a mattress, so well was her comfort assured. In the flowing darkness of her dreams, she visited forests and ran with wolves; she flew over a cairn in the desert and there was her mother, standing atop the stones, pale and smiling.

“Morigan.”

Caenith’s stone-grinding whisper stirred her gently. She was quite hot, and he was slick with perspiration, too; he must have been running for a while. They slid off each other as she was set upright. Along with her cloak, Caenith’s ribbon had been lost to the night, and his hair was a tumbled mess.

The sun was fingering the sky with red, and sleepy folks and lazy carriages were starting to appear in the neighborhood of less kempt houses with eggshell-colored facades, dulled roofs, and pockmarked sidewalks—Morigan’s district, was she paying attention. A coach master and his gray-horned steed trotted past them as they stood in the middle of the road; he shook his fist at the couple before taking a second look at Caenith and quieting himself. They ignored him, as they did all of what was going on around them. Morigan felt as if Caenith was waiting for a command from her. She could sense it in his wistful gaze and the distress on his brow.

“My question,” he said.

She tried to remember what Caenith was referring to, but there were so many memories already blurring in her head that she couldn’t think. She was relieved and elated when he simply asked.

“Will you be my Fawn?”

“Yes,” she said.

Caenith leaned in, his wicked smile cracking, his teeth sharper than ever. His hands came to Morigan’s tiny waist, fitting it like a corset. She wandered her fingers into his hair. An hourglass might have passed as they breathed into each other’s faces, as she pressed into his heat and he sniffed her and curled his lip. At last the tension broke. Caenith licked her lips before he kissed them and then swallowed her tongue. She tasted sugary and he tasted harsher: like wood-aged brandy and smoke. Their hands pawed the other; touching ivory skin, tanned skin, the tender meat of a breast, and the hard rod—nothing like the puny muscles Morigan knew—of a prick. When it was
over, however many specks or sands she could not say, Caenith traced a wet line to her ear, bit the softest part of it, and then slid a promise inside.
The Great Hunt begins…until tonight
, my
Fawn
, he whispered, and then his warmth vanished like a cruelly pulled blanket.

If Morigan’s eyes had opened fast enough, she might have seen the man bound into the nearest alley and leap tens of strides high over a startled cat and onto a roof. She heard the animal hiss, but when she looked about, Caenith was nowhere to be seen. On the street, there were only two witnesses to their impropriety: an old woman who was clutching her kirtle as if she had seen an assault, and a younger lad standing on the walkway, whose long face was even more afflicted from slack-jawedness. Morigan smoothed back her hair, checked that her breasts were in place, and made her way over to the young man.

“Good morning to you, sir,” she said, and checked the sky to make certain. “Yes, it is morning. I was wondering if you had the time.”

With shaky hands, the young man extracted a chronex: a small tempered hourglass tied to a pocket chain that was marked with larger and smaller lines. Regardless of how it was carried, it wouldn’t tip over or otherwise shift the pale sands inside beyond its prescribed loop, as these devices were synchronized by magik. Which meant from reading the glass that Morigan was well past tardy for her master.

Fuk! Fuk! Fuk! I’m late for work!
“Thank you!” she shouted, startling the man, and ran to hail the nearest coach.

A speck later, she was jostling against the interior of a carriage, without any coin to pay for it. Not that any of that was important. Grinning like a simpleton, she pressed her face to the window of the coach and watched the sun rise with the joy of witnessing it for the first time. She watched its red and gold fire light up the cloudless sky as if it were the most profound experience of her life. It wasn’t, however, and she laughed and sometimes giggled maniacally all the way to Master Thule’s district. For she knew what a
true
mystery was. A wolf…a man…a race on a living wind through the night. Grief, loss, passion. For the most incredible thing that had ever happened to anyone, had just happened to her.

III

AWAKE AND DREAMING

I

T
hule’s unadorned white tower was as much of an eyesore as you could find in King’s Crown, and the neighbors were always filing futile complaints with the Crown. The disrepair and neglect manifested clearly when compared to the flowered lattices or ever-flowing fountains of fire that could be spotted in adjoining properties. No grand metal gate did Thule have to fence his holdings, just a rock footstep that seemed pulled right out of Kor’Keth, and a plain but heavy iron door. This simplicity spoke to his lack of pretension.

Thule seemed fine when Morigan whisked into his study, out of breath and asking for her day’s wages in advance to pay the coachman waiting outside. He maintained a chilling silence as the young woman threw a hasty meal at him and saw little of her after that. Once done with her master, Morigan hurried about his tower from floor to floor, trying to make up for the hourglasses she had missed with an industriousness exceptional even for her hardworking self. Thule had a large tower with many unused rooms in need of a good airing out, which gave Morigan plenty to keep herself busy with as far as chores went. While she scrubbed, fluffed, and polished, her mind was a million spans away, running through the incredible adventure
she had been on last night. She could still taste the smokiness of Caenith on her teeth, and when she was finished with each room, she thrust herself out the window, wondering if somewhere he was catching her scent.

A wolf. A man. A man who is not a man. I don’t know who I met. I can’t say what you are or what you mean, but I like it. I want it. I count the sands until I see you again
.

Caenith consumed her thoughts. She saw his sharp smile flash in every wet sweep of the mop, his dark hair in every shadow; she heard his whisper in every breeze; she caressed his hard chest with every stone tile she washed. And yet, she felt alert, in great control of her faculties, brimming with mental energy, and as much as she accomplished, she never tired. The strange salutation that began last night circled often in Morigan’s head.