New Blood (40 page)

“You can't. I've bound her mouth shut.”

“She's inside me. I think I can.”

“Jax—” Amanusa caught his other hand, held tight to both of them, pleading with him.

“Amanusa,” he said sternly. “I don't want to quarrel with you, but about this, I must insist. If I were only your servant still, perhaps I would not. But you married me. And as your husband, it is my duty to look after you. To protect you, even from yourself. We must know.”

“Who will protect you from yourself?” she cried, unable to stop herself. Why did she feel so frantic? It wasn't Jax's worry influencing her. His worry was about her. This sense of panic was all about Jax.

“You will, of course.” His smile was gentle. He brushed her tumbled hair back from her face. “But think, Amanusa. Eventually, I'll need to rid myself of the rest of the magic Yvaine stuffed into my head. And the unconsciousness hasn't lasted nearly so long, these last few times. This is as good an opportunity as any. Better than most, because we do very much need to know what Yvaine can tell us about this.”

Amanusa bit her lip, clinging to his hands, needing that skin-to-skin reassurance as she thought. She puffed out a disgruntled breath. “All right. We'll ask her. But if you're unconscious all night, I will . . . I will beat you. With a stick.”

“I will lay it in your hands myself.” He did his old servant bow, pressing his forehead to her hands. But he was smiling when he did it.

She squeezed her hands tight around his with an exasperated growl. “You know I could never actually beat you. But I'd want to. Badly.”

He looked up at her from his bow, not bothering even to attempt to suppress his grin, and winked. “I know. Now ask.”

Amanusa took a deep breath and blew it out again, sorting her disordered emotions and calming them. Jax would be all right. And they did need to get rid of the rest of Yvaine's blood. She just wished it didn't have to be now.

“Yvaine of Braedun.” She reached for her magic inside Jax, taking hold after a brief hesitation. “Tell me about tasting the blood of my servant. What happens when the sorceress tastes the servant's blood?”

The blue faded from Jax's eyes, brown blooming in them. Amanusa shuddered. She would never get used to that. She wanted the woman out.

“The sorceress rides through the veins of others,” Yvaine said with Jax's voice. “The sorceress does not take into herself the blood of others. Especially do not, under any circumstances taste the blood of your servant. It will make you weak and unable to use your servant as needful. Keep your blood pure and untainted.”

“What about—?” Amanusa didn't get her question out before Jax's eyes rolled back in his head and he toppled backward on the settee.

“Is that it?” she demanded. “Yvaine! Is that all you have to say?”

She shook Jax's hands, patted his cheek. His eyelids fluttered, but he didn't rouse.

“Yvaine, tell me what it does. Tell why it's important?” If Amanusa could reach inside Jax and snatch hold of Yvaine, she would shake her until her eyes rattled in their sockets, until she coughed up the information
Amanusa wanted so badly. But Yvaine was dead, and Jax did not deserve the abuse.

A knock sounded at the door. Supper already? But this was an excellent hotel and things happened quickly. Amanusa ran for the coins in her purse, trying to remember how much she'd seen Jax give the servant the last time. She opened the door and waited for the footman to roll the cart in. No one who meant harm could pass the door's layered warding.

The footman set the cart near the table by the window and began to lay the dishes out, casting curious glances at Amanusa's unconscious husband. Oh Lord, Jax's nose was bleeding. Another drop of Yvaine's blood. Amanusa thrust the whole handful of coins at the servant and hurried him out the door.

She found a slip of the rice paper, blotted up the old, dark blood, and held it to the gaslight, until the flame burnt her fingers and the magic whispered off to join Yvaine in her distant grave. Jax looked horribly uncomfortable on the settee, so she adjusted the angle of his neck, stuffing a pillow under his head, and rearranged his limbs so that he at least looked better. She couldn't help stroking a hand down his dear, kind face. He was a handsome man, but it was his kindness that made him so attractive to her.

She couldn't stand and stare at Jax until he woke. Well, actually, she could, but she wouldn't. Why should she? He was her husband, but that didn't mean she was in love with him, or anything of the sort. They were rather literally attached to each other. But she could give him the room he requested.

The delicious aromas rising from the table drew her. Amanusa peeped under the covers. Jax had
ordered a hearty dinner. Salmon patties, sliced beef, and crusty bread to soak up the juices—enough food to fill two shelves on the cart. Who did he think would be eating all of this? Her stomach rumbled ominously.

“Have you eaten?” The words rode out of Jax on a groan and Amanusa rushed to help him sit up.

“No, I haven't. The footman just brought it not two minutes ago.”

“Don't wait on me.” He brought a hand to his forehead, rubbing it. “You need to eat. Magic drains your energy. Food and rest put it back.”

“Food and rest put it back.” Amanusa repeated the words in unison with him. “Yes, I know. But I'd rather eat with you. Come sit at the table. Let me serve you this time.”

Jax let her help him stand and leaned on her as they walked the short distance to the table. “How long—?”

“Not long at all. Maybe five minutes.” Amanusa scowled. “Probably because Yvaine didn't tell me anything.”

“Nothing at all?” Jax stopped and stared at her in shock.

“Nothing useful. Nothing I needed to know.” She shrugged. “She just said, ‘The sorceress rides the blood of others, she does not allow others' blood into her.' ” Amanusa made her voice sound pompous and eerie both at once, quoting the old harridan. “But she didn't say why, and she didn't say what would happen if the sorceress did taste someone else's blood.”

Amanusa decided in that moment to keep the part about her servant's blood making her “weak and unable
to use her servant,” to herself. She didn't feel weak in the least, and she had no intention of using Jax. Not the way Yvaine had used him.

“Perhaps she feared me locating the information and using it against you,” Jax mused.

“You never would.” Amanusa pulled out her chair and Jax seated her before going around to his own chair. He never neglected the little courtesies, no matter how many times she told him they weren't necessary. They made her feel . . . cared for.

“Against you? No, never.” His smile warmed her. “But against someone like Yvaine? Probably.”

“What was she like, Yvaine? You've never really told me.”

“I shouldn't tell you now. Do you honestly want her present on our wedding night?” Jax served the soup, despite Amanusa's intention to serve him. He was sneaky like that.

“She's already here. At your insistence. I think we should drag her into the open so we can exorcise her. Yvaine the woman, not the magic she left in your head.”

Jax sighed. “She's been in her grave two hundred years. We should leave her there.”

Amanusa reached across the table to clasp his hand briefly before letting him eat his soup. “But she's not in her grave, Jax. She still haunts you. How did you meet her? Can you remember?”

M
ORE THAN I'D
like. I met Yvaine in York. Leaford—the earldom—is in the North of England, and Henry—Henry VIII—was king then. Henry had just beheaded Anne and George Boleyn, and married poor Jane Seymour that summer. A year or two before that, he'd shut down all the little monasteries, which upset no end of folk, and there was a big uprising in York that fall. Pilgrimage of Grace, they called it. Being the arrogant earl I was then, I went along with the Duke of Norfolk when he led the king's armies out to deal with the rebel riffraff.

“In the end, there wasn't a battle—not that year. Norfolk negotiated a truce and everyone went home. But I wasn't ready to leave. I'd come for some fun, and by God, I was going to have it. So a gang of us—some who'd already succeeded to our titles and some who hadn't any title to succeed to, unless several uncles, brothers, and cousins died—rode from Don-caster, where the negotiations took place, to York. To see the sights. Or to drink and carouse and . . . whatnot.”

Amanusa set the soup plates on the cart and served the fish course. “And did you see the sights?”

A sardonic chuckle escaped him. “Mostly, we saw ‘whatnot.' Alehouses and brothels. But I also visited all the magicians in York. I was thirty-four then. I'd married, produced an heir and a spare—poor Margaret, having to put up with me for a husband—” His
voice trailed off as he vanished into his memories. Not pleasant ones, from the look on his face.

“I think you are a very fine husband,” Amanusa announced.

Jax gave her a skeptical look. “Your opinion of a marriage lasting an entire, endless day. Wait a few years and I'll ask again.” He looked at his salmon patty and drizzled hollandaise sauce over it. “I'm not the same man I was then. Margaret suffered with the original version of me, full of self-importance and ignorant cruelty.”

He paused to stare blackly into the past again. “I would almost rather not have some of those memories returned to me. They shame me.”

Amanusa touched his hand again in silent support.

He looked up at her and smiled. “But they serve to remind me that I do not care to become that man again.”

She smiled back and took a bite of her salmon patty. It was good and she was hungry, but she was more interested in Jax's tale. “Why were you visiting magicians in York? How many did you visit? Was Yvaine based in York then?”

“No, she'd been called in to serve in the courts after the rebellion. Her master—the sorceress who'd taught her—was still living then, but Morwen was getting old, the magic close to burning her up, and she'd sent Yvaine to handle the session.” Jax began to eat, but didn't seem to taste it.

“And I was visiting magicians to learn magic,” he said. “I suppose I must have visited a half dozen or better. York was the second city in England then, and had more magicians than most. I'd always been
fascinated with the power to be attained through magic, and I had studied it with my tutors, of course. Then, as now, actually working the magic was seen as coarse. Something peasants did, or the merchant class. Not the nobility. A nobleman hires magicians. He does not practice magic himself.

“But even though I was essentially tone deaf—magic blind—I was fascinated with magic. Probably because, try as I might, I couldn't perform the least little spell.”

“And then you met Yvaine.” Amanusa watched him closely, trying to read his moods, but he'd closed in on himself.

He smiled at her, sad, wistful. “Then I met Yvaine. It was at a dinner, hosted I think by the local goldsmith's guild. The dinner was over. I'd drunk far, far too much wine, and I wasn't in the mood for dancing. I was practicing a simple alchemy spell, determined to get it right at least once, to make the candlewick smoke if not burst into flame.

“And Yvaine walked up to me. She was a beautiful woman. Tiny, with lush curves and rosy satin skin and long brown curls that tumbled down her back, the color of the caramel over the crème brûlée you like so much.”

Amanusa concentrated on eating. She looked nothing like that, with her tall, angular frame and straight, white-blond hair. But maybe that was a good thing.

Jax went on, lost in his memories. “She asked if I wanted to learn magic, and I laughed. Drunk as I was, she still frightened me a bit. Powerful magicians can do that. You carry that power around with you
like a cloak, like armor and weapons bristling from you.”

“Do I frighten you?” Amanusa had to ask.

He swam back up from the past and looked at her,
saw
her. And he smiled. “I'm part of your armor.”

The smile faded a bit and he reached out to her this time, clasped her hand. “There's an element of—not fear, but—respect. Maybe a bit of awe. Respect for what you can do and the power you can wield. It's there. But because I am a part of that power and because you are who you are, no, you don't frighten me.”

“Good.” Amanusa smiled at him, content to hold his hand until he freed her.

“Eat.” He took away her empty plate and replaced it with a plate of beef and delicate dumplings. “Your strength still isn't where it should be.”

And how did he know that? From experience? Or something else? Amanusa cut into the tender beef, but before she ate it, she asked, “So what did you say to Yvaine?”

“I told her that I would love to learn magic, but I was head-blind. If she could teach me, despite my handicap, it would make her the greatest magician in all England. And she said she could do it. So I went with her, eager to learn everything she could teach me.”

Jax paused, his fork in midair. “I don't remember much of that next week. I've never been able to, even before she filled my head up with this posthumous presence of hers.”

He took the bite, chewed pensively a moment, then swallowed. “I remember—I think—pain. Bleeding.
And sex. A lot of sex. And magic. For the first time in my life, I could sense magic. I could work magic. I remember being giddy with delight. Absolutely thrilled that the magic would obey me.”

He took another bite. “Of course, it was Yvaine's talent working the magic, not mine. And when the week was done and I came back to myself again, I was bound. Yvaine's servant.”

“I thought you said you were willing.” Amanusa burned with righteous indignation on his behalf.

“I was. I remember that much clearly. Every step of the way, every time one portion of the binding was completed and another lay ahead, she asked me ‘Do you want this?' And every time, I answered ‘Yes.' Because I did want it. I wanted every bit of the magic she offered.