Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (9 page)

“A toast,” said Caenith
.

“To?”

“To awakenings.”

Awakenings. She would ask him tonight what he meant. She would ask him many questions, she decided, and tried to reel some sense back to into her body. Later in the afternoon, when it was time for Thule’s tea and she had enough self-possession to face her master, she went into the study. Master Thule was not reading today, but staring off at menacing shadows drawn by the red hand of dusk on the wall.

It will be night soon
, she thought, and her heart began its pitter-patter. What instincts she had about Caenith told her that night was his hourglass.

She removed Thule’s mostly untouched brunch, and he did not look at her directly, though after Caenith’s attentions, she was quite familiar with the sense of eyes crawling over her flesh and knew that he was furtively watching. She slipped away and down several winding flights of stairs, noticing the little blue spheres of sorcerous gas that lit the walls as she went and thinking of the sapphire kingdom she had visited last night. Shortly, she arrived at a dreary kitchen that was lit by a lonely slat of light like a prison window. She deposited the old food and made up some soothing white-thistle tea and one of Thule’s favorite fish sandwiches, hoping that would appease him. When she returned to the study, Thule was sitting up and alert in his chair.

“Put the tray down and have a seat,” he said.

How lucky I’ve been to avoid a scolding so far. Looks like my luck has run out
, thought Morigan, sighing.

The study was messier than usual, and there were piles of books in many places, as if she had not cleaned yesterday or for many days before. She chose the least teetering, lowest pile and placed the platter there, and then found another stack for herself to sit on.

“This is about my lateness. I do apologize,” she said.

“I am worried about you,” confessed Thule.

“Worried? About me? Why?”

“You are not yourself today.”

Morigan contested this with a frown and silence.

“You are acting strangely. What is going on with you?” asked Thule.

Inside Morigan that effervescence persisted, like bees buzzing in her head, though not in a distracting way, for their song was a harmony she felt she could listen to, music that enlivened her. While her body was exhausted, her mind felt as if it would not sleep for weeks. She wasn’t certain if this was just a symptom of her fixation upon Caenith. She could not shake impressions of him from her mind any more than she could slow her brain’s endless whirring. She felt as if her thoughts were cast into a thousand seas at once. To the streetlamps that winked on as she went to see Caenith last eve, or how many books were on the floor about her toes—four, she noted, as well as their names. To crystal caverns and chores. To the sound of a child crying outside. Into the hot vision of a red kissable mouth, then another of Mifanwae’s grave glowing in the moonlight. Into memories of the past or fantasies of the future. Now that she had stopped working for the moment, this velocity of thought had not eased, but continued relentlessly. Still, she had no difficulty in sorting through each and every bit of it. Within her skull was a new presence: a churning machine, a pervasive awareness, and it showed no sign of slowing. As she sat, in that moment of quiet assessment, she was struck by the revelation that there was something going on in her head that she didn’t understand.

From an outsider’s perspective, Thule had observed this change as well, progressively worsening through the hourglasses. Already, he had been worried about her associations with this smith, this Caenith. His night’s research
did nothing to allay his fears and only uncovered vague myths of brutal, bloodlusting barbarians who shared the same rare name—though hopefully not the same heritage or inclinations as Morigan’s gentleman. But when she had arrived today in the state she had—disheveled, demanding money, wild, and speeding about the tower—he was suspicious that she might be involved with dangerous recreations, be that sex, narcotics, or some mixture of the two. She was definitely not herself. Nor had she even answered him. Instead, she continued to quiver in her seat as if she were receiving a current and stare through him as though he were made of air.

By the kings, there is something wrong with her. Something is very, very wrong
, he thought. He had lost a wife, a daughter, and Mifanwae. He’d be damned if he would allow Morigan’s health to slip away as well. Thule shuffled out of his chair and clapped his hands to get her attention.

“Morigan! What’s the matter with you?”

He rushed over and took her hands, which were vibrating and humming like struck metal. Suddenly, she seemed to focus on him, her pupils as sharp as two silver spears. Her gaze skewered him to silence—peering, peeling, piercing his head. Thule had the sense of the room fading away, fringed in gray mist, and that was the last he knew before blinking into elsewhere.

Now, when Thule appeared before her, Morigan came out of her fugue a bit. On his face, written in wrinkles deeper than his skin, she saw his desperation. She felt his fear rolling off him in a stagnant black cloud. A terror of losing her.
Why so much sorrow?
she thought, and wanted to understand. In her head, the bees buzzed louder, and the cogs of her brain slowed on one flash, a single window in her mind. Only this was not a window that she had ever looked through, not a memory that she knew, not one of her own.

She fell into it anyway.

She is in the tumbledown stone cottage. A place comfortable with its disrepair; its small bird-pecked holes in the roof that let in strands of sunlight and the songs of their makers, its grass-patched walls stuffed with an errant flower or two. All day the hearth crackles here, and it warms the stones and fills the air with the aroma of meat and peppery herbs of a meal that boils in a pot over the coals. Every sign of tender maintenance tells that the folks who live here care not for material things, that love is their wealth. Through a corner of the window, she can spy the tangled thicket, the spidery trees, and
beyond that, the shadows of a forest like a black mountain range. Beyond the safety of these walls lies the Untamed, Alabion, where all wicked and evil things dwell
.

She recognizes that this is her home. But she has never seen Alabion. She knows it only from the tales her mother used to read to her. And yet, she knows it is Alabion that she sees outside the window
.

A door behind her opens. She looks, and there is a woman as beautiful and earthy as a spirit of the woods, with chestnut hair, the eyes of a doe, and a trim figure. She is carrying a basket filled with roots, berries, flowers, and seasonings, all cleverly harvested from the safest, thinnest reaches of Alabion. At the sight of this woman, a flush takes her chest and loins, and she feels the faintest tug of meat between her legs
.

(“Who am I?” thinks Morigan.)

“Come help, Thackery,” says the woman
.

(“Now I see.”)

Thackery moves to join the woman at the hearth. She is unpacking her basket in a stone sink beside the hearth, and Thackery slips behind her, whispering, “Theadora is asleep, Bethany. Dinner can wait.”

(A memory within a memory then, and Morigan sees Thackery’s young hands and lean arms tucking a dark-haired, blue-eyed darling of a child under woolen sheets. She is no older than a handful of years, this child, and with the gentle beauty—and nature, she feels—of Bethany.)

Thackery kisses his wife (the sword between her legs rises). She returns the kiss with passion and then unexpectedly pulls away
.

“My handsome Whitehawk,” she says
.

(Bethany’s name for the man who has helped many of Menos’s caged birds fly to safety—including his wife. Morigan understands this without reason.)

“Did you ever think you could be so happy with me? I was blessed once to find freedom. Blessed twice with your love. And blessed thrice with our child. I worry that the world will take away this dream that I have no right in living.”

(Bethany has feared this before, remembers Morigan, and always with the same sad coyness. Beneath every word is a betrayal of deeper sentiments. Of what it means to live close to Menos, City of Wisdom. City of power and hate. Where masters rule and all others obey.)

“We all have a right to life. From the lowly spider to the master who would step on him. I shall never allow our dream to end,” he replies, placing one hand around her waist and joining their other hands together. “A dance, my lady. It has been so long.”

Bethany smiles (she is so close that Morigan can smell the leafy perfume of whatever she washes her hair with). “But we have no music,” she says
.

“Music is all around us. Listen, my love.”

(What happens next is extraordinary. The swell of heat that rises in her host like a breath of pure summer air. Magik. Thackery has called a spell. He has distilled his love for those in this cottage into its purest form and thrust it into the world. Effortless for him, but a gift that few possess, to paint their desire so forcefully across Geadhain as if it is a canvas for their Wills. He could do more, so much more than the illusion he summons, Morigan feels, as the door to his Will creaks open. He is a storm in a rickety cage, a sorcerer far beyond what she suspected him to be.)

A peek of his power, his condensed love shines from him and the cottage lights up as if it were a glass wind chime held to the sun. The magik tinkles as if it were glass, too, making music. Together they sway, dance, and quietly laugh. They are careful not to become rambunctious and wake Theadora. They are surprised, then, to see her standing in the doorway to her bedroom, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and clutching the tattered patchwork wolf that Bethany crafted for her. She is not as delighted by the glimmering, tinkling room as she should be; in fact, she looks afraid
.

“Father…I think I saw a man. A man outside my window,” bleats Theadora, and runs to bury herself in Bethany’s skirt. Her mother clutches her
.

“Thackery?” questions Bethany
.

Thackery looks to the bedroom
.

The darkness is thick there. Too thick for the day
.

“Sorren,” he hisses
.

(Abruptly the memory is slowing, moving as if events are underwater. It does not want to be seen, it does not want to be remembered. Morigan senses herself being pushed away from this space, senses a body that she had forgotten, hands that are actually her own, being separated. The memory is breaking apart, and only shards of it come to her.)

A figure of blackness—bent, thin, and shrouded—he reeks of death
.

A flash of shadow, like an ebony flame, and a wave of white light
.

Herself (as Thackery) doubled over, sobbing—

A blue eyeball floating in a shimmer of rain and blood—

Sorrow. Black, all-consuming—

“No! No, no, no, no, no!”

Morigan gasped. She was back in Thule’s study. Her head was still buzzing, but the bees were less restless, and she could concentrate on her surroundings, at least. She noticed that her master was sprawled and weeping on the floor. Instinctively she reached for him, the vision still clear in her head.
By the kings, his family, they’re all dead
. She knew this, she had seen it, and she had little idea how.

Thule slithered away from her, knocking over books, carving a trail across the floor carpeted with papers.

“Don’t touch me!” he shouted, and the hand he warded her off with fumed with golden light.

Morigan stopped her advance. The dream state had mostly abated, while the images and sensations she had returned with had not. If she wanted to, she felt as if she could reach right into Thackery’s head and pull out more. That is what she had done, as unbelievable as it was. She’d sniffed out his sorrow, his deepest, purest grief, and sucked it into her consciousness. Questions of identity and
what am I?
halted her steps as much as Thule’s fear did, for she was terrified and in awe of herself. Remorse soon followed. She was steeped in emotion as she said, “I am sorry, Whitehawk—”

“Thule!” roared the sorcerer.

He had wormed his way back to his chair, lowered his threatening hand, and clutched at one of the lion-pawed legs. “Y-you will call me Master Thule! That name is not yours to use! And you will never,
never
enter my head again, witch!”

Morigan sloughed off the insult. She had assumed that Thule was a contented bachelor, mayhap even a happy whore-lover, for in all their years together he had never once mentioned kin. Certainly no wife or child.

“Not once have you spoken their names,” she whispered. “Why? What happened to them? What happened to your family?”

Thule could not answer her. Not from the heaviness of his head, which felt as if he’d drunk a cask of wine, but from the weight of his soul. What
Morigan had seen, so had he. Through whatever diablerie, she had towed up the darkest memory in his abyss and replayed it for them both in flawless clarity. In such granular detail that even he did not recall.
What is she? How? How did she break into my head, my soul? Is this the smith’s fault? Has she always been this way? Her silver stare…deep as a pin to my heart. Who was the father that gave you those eyes, Morigan? What have I invited into my home?

The bees were growing excited again, filling the honeycomb inside Morigan’s head with more information than anyone needed. She had a flash of a woman kissing her child while they sat watching a leaping water fountain that Morigan recognized from her daily walk home; she felt the love of that gesture as well, sweet as a warm river of sugar. With a spin, she was at a firecaller who sprayed the air with pinwheels of flame before a cheering crowd. She could feel the onlookers’ delight shivering her bones. Then came the memory of Caenith biting her ear, and a waft of his musk, and she swatted her head as if his lips were there. All of these pictures played within her, and she was distracted but not undone by the chaos of it. Though how long that equilibrium could sustain itself was questionable. Yet it wasn’t only slices of sensation that she hungered for, but voices now, too, if she heeded them. Secret voices of lust:
I’d stick her like a hog on a spit and paint her tits with my seed
. Chattering insecurity:
I can’t wear this, it looks as dumpy as a dress over a sow
. Or vile bigotry:
Bump into me, you lowbred filth! If we were in Menos, I’d buy you just to flog you in the streets!
The sort of statements that would never be uttered aloud in polite society. The hidden voices of Eod were storming, and she was their lightning rod. While the conversation was a burble now, she felt that it would rise to a cacophony, and she dreaded the moment when the sights, sounds, and smells that weren’t her own drowned her.