The Chaos Crystal (13 page)

'Doctor Morel is resting comfortably in one of the guest rooms under guard as you requested,' Lyna assured him. 'Although he's not very happy about his new living arrangements.'

'Is something wrong with his accommodation?' Arkady asked.

'Considering where he's come from recently, not a damned thing,' Lyna said. 'I gather his objections are on moral grounds. I do believe your father thinks you're a shameless whore, Arkady.'

'And you did nothing to disabuse him of the notion, I gather?'

The immortal shrugged. 'It's not up to me to remedy your father's misconceptions. Assuming they

are
misconceptions. Apparently you have quite a history of opening your legs to get what you want.'

Arkady caught sight of Jaxyn's amused expression and wondered if he hadn't deliberately staged this scene to test her mettle. She had been through enough lately, however, for mere insults to bounce off her skin like raindrops off an oiled cloak. She smiled at Lyna. 'A skill I'm sure you're also expert at, my lady,' she replied with acidic sweetness. 'Perhaps we can compare notes sometime.'

Lyna wasn't amused. 'Death is very final, Arkady. Don't make me show you that the hard way.'

'We were just discussing Arkady's mortality,' Jaxyn said, leaning back in his seat with a smile. The bickering between the women apparently entertained him a great deal, it seems she's rather anxious to provoke one of us into doing her in.'

'Tides,' Lyna said. 'What a waste. Still, I suppose that explains your father's message.'

'What message?'

'He said to tell you not to worry about the future. And something about him being the parent for once and it being time he did his job.' She shrugged.
To
her, the message was of little consequence. 'You're very lucky, you know. My father sold me to a brothel when I was twelve. He wasn't interested in saving me at all. Will we be three for dinner, Jaxyn? Or doesn't Arkady's house arrest extend to her eating with the family?'

'Don't be so catty, Lyna,' Jaxyn said, still smiling, it's not nice to taunt our guest with what she's lost. You're not too tormented being back here in Lebec Palace, are you, Arkady? Surrounded by all these pretty things you no longer own?'

Arkady didn't answer because she wasn't really listening. Something about her father's message bothered her, although she couldn't put her finger on it. 'Did my father say anything else, my lady?'

Lyna shook her head. 'Nothing of consequence. You'd think he'd be a little more grateful, though. I mean
...
the stupid bastard was rotting in Lebec Prison until a few hours ago. Now he gets to see out the war on a feather bed. Some people are just never happy.'

'I think I'll go and see to him,' Arkady said, rising to her feet.

'I think I'll go and see to him, please, your grace, is what you really meant to say, isn't it?' Jaxyn asked. Arkady glared at him.

'You're under house arrest, Arkady,' he reminded her. 'You'll not be taking a piss without my permission. Now, if you want to see to your father, ask. Nicely.'

Tides, Declan,
Arkady prayed silently, quite certain there was nobody listening to her prayer.
If
you ever
do manage to find a way to kill an immortal down there in Jelidia, can you please put Jaxyn high on the list
of
Tide Lords you intend to do away with?
She said nothing aloud, however, knowing Jaxyn was just looking for any excuse he could find to punish and humiliate her.

'May I go and see to my father, please, your grace?' she asked through gritted teeth. Arkady wasn't as bothered by the request as she appeared. In truth, this was just a word game, and there were far more dangerous games she could be playing with Jaxyn Aranville. If he thought having to ask his permission irked her, however; if he thought it was tearing her up inside to kowtow to him, then he would — for a while at least — confine his torments to such relatively simple and harmless games. Her father's safety might well hinge on Jaxyn's belief that he was torturing her with words and didn't need to move on to something more substantial to achieve his goal.

'You may,' Jaxyn said, after deliberating on the request for a moment or two for dramatic effect.

'Thank you, your grace,' Arkady said, bowing to him with obvious reluctance. She crossed the rug and stopped in front of Lyna. 'May I borrow your candelabra, my lady, to light my way?'

Lyna handed her the silver candleholder and stepped back from the door. 'He's upstairs. Third door on the left.'

'I know the way, my lady.'

'I'm sure you do,' Lyna said with a smile. Before the immortal could add anything else, Arkady stepped into the hall and shut the door on her.

Taking a deep breath and putting Jaxyn Aranville and his wretched fiancee out of her mind, Arkady hurried down the hall toward the main staircase, still worried about her father's cryptic message. What had he meant by telling her not to worry about the future? The message about him being the parent for once and it being time he did his job was equally puzzling.

What does
he
think he's going to do? Call Jaxyn
out? Challenge him to a duel?

Although she'd spent a lot of time during their incarceration trying to explain the Tide Lords to him, she knew her father didn't really believe her. She didn't even blame him for that. Magic and immortality were not easy concepts for a man of science to grasp.

Tides, Cayal had to chop a few fingers
off
to get me
to believe him.

The guards on her father's door offered no resistance when she demanded entry, so she assumed Lyna hadn't instructed the felines to forbid her from seeing him. The tabby on the right produced a key from her belt pouch and opened the door, standing back to let Arkady pass. The room was dark and cold, lit only by a smudge of glowing coals in the fireplace to Arkady's right. The large four-poster bed against the far wall had its heavy brocaded curtains drawn against the chill.

'Papa? Are you asleep?'

There was no answer. Arkady smiled at her own foolishness, thinking there was never a more ridiculous question than asking a sleeping person if they were asleep.

'Papa?'

She walked to the bed and put the candelabra on the side table, deciding that if her father really was asleep, she wouldn't disturb him now. It had been a fraught few days since Jaxyn had first come to visit them, and he was very uncomfortable with the deal she'd brokered to secure their release from prison and into house arrest in Lebec Palace.

Part of the problem, she knew, was that her father couldn't understand why Jaxyn would be interested in the location of the imaginary Tide Lords — despite Arkady assuring him that Jaxyn was one of them — so her deal with him didn't make sense. Bary Morel assumed the deal must involve something far more tangible. He believed she'd offered herself to Jaxyn to save them, as she had with Fillion Rybank and Stellan Desean, and it didn't seem to matter what Arkady told him, nothing was likely to disabuse him of that notion any time soon.

'Papa?' she again asked in a whisper. It wasn't surprising that he was already unconscious. This was the first time in years her father had slept in a proper bed with proper linen sheets and with blankets that weren't flea-bitten. Carefully, she leaned forward and pulled the curtain near the head of the bed back a fraction, to check if he really was sleeping. It was impossible to make out anything in the dark cave created by the closed curtains, so she let it fall back into place, deciding he must be asleep and there was nothing so important that it couldn't wait until morning. She picked up the candelabra and turned toward the door, bumping against her father's foot hanging down by the edge of the bed as she moved.

Thinking he may have turned in his sleep, she put the candelabra back down on the side table. This time she opened the curtains in the middle, expecting to find a somnambulant man twisted up in sheets and blankets in which he wasn't used to sleeping.

Instead, she found herself face to face with her father's midsection.

It took a moment for Arkady to realise what she was seeing, and why. Then it hit her and she cried out for the guards. She grabbed her father around the legs with both arms, trying to lift his dead weight, sobbing angrily as she tried to pull him down and lift him at the same time.

The felines on guard outside were quick, responding in a matter of seconds. Her father let out an agonised gasp as they released him from the crisp sheets he was supposed to be sleeping on; sheets he'd torn and twisted into the noose around his neck.

Tears streaming down her face, Arkady let him go and stepped back to allow the felines a chance to cut him down. His face was bloated, his neck bruised, his extremities already purpling with blood. One of the felines ran for the door, calling out for help.

Arkady stared at her father, speechless with shock as they laid him on the floor. She was a little surprised to find she wasn't distressed so much as angry — angry beyond belief at her father's selfish arrogance.

Bary Morel's brilliant solution to how to save his daughter was to remove himself from the equation.

It would have made a twisted sort of sense to her father, she supposed, even though it was a gesture of such utter futility that Arkady wanted to kill her father herself for even contemplating the notion, let alone attempting to carry it out.

'What's all the commotion about?' Jaxyn demanded from the doorway, arriving on the heels of another couple of felines who had come to investigate the guards' cries for help. The Tide Lord walked across

to where Bary Morel was lying on the floor and studied him for a moment. 'Tides. The old fool tried to kill himself.'

'Ever the sharp observer,' Arkady said caustically. Her father was barely breathing. 'Why would he do that?' 'To save me from you.'

Jaxyn looked at her oddly. 'Where's the sense in that? If he wanted to save you from me, he'd have been better served killing
you.'

'If you're planning to share that pearl of wisdom with him,' Arkady said, looking down at her father's lifeless body, 'perhaps you might take the time to heal him first?'

Jaxyn hesitated for a moment, staring down at her father's unconscious form, and then he smiled. 'Beg me to do it.'

'All right, I'm begging you,' she said emotionlessly. Inside she wanted to scream at him. Her father didn't have time for Jaxyn to play these stupid games.

'No, I mean I want you to
actually
beg me. On your knees.'

Arkady stared at him for a moment and then did as he asked. She fell to her knees and lowered her eyes. 'Please, my lord. Will you save my father?'

He smiled. 'Tides, you actually hesitated then, didn't you?'

Fortunately, she didn't have to answer him. Jaxyn must have realised how little time there was before her father was beyond the intervention of even a Tide Lord. Before she could respond or be asked to beg him again, he knelt beside her father and placed a hand over his bruised neck. Bary Morel convulsed with pain, even though he was out cold, but Arkady was relieved to see his skin tone visibly improving a moment later. Then he took a deep shuddering breath and his posture relaxed a little as he began to breathe normally.

Arkady tried not to look too anxious or relieved, aware of what a narrow escape this had been.

'Thank you,' she said, still on her knees, as Jaxyn rose to his feet.

'You may not think it was such a good deed once you've thought this through, Arkady,' he said. 'I mean, the old fool wants to kill himself and you just stopped him from doing it.'

'I know you didn't have to save him.'

The Tide Lord smiled. 'Yes, I did. You see, now you're going to have to explain it to him. You're going to have to explain how it is that he's alive. How it is that now I can
truly
use him to torment you. You can tell him all the ways I can cause
you
pain by making
him
suffer. And how he's
going
to be suffering, Arkady, because when he was on the cusp of death,
you
begged me to save his life.'

Jaxyn spared her father another glance as he began to moan softly at the Tide Lord's feet, then he turned and strode from the room. Still on her knees, Arkady crawled across the rug to her father, pulling his head onto her lap, wondering if Jaxyn and her father were right. Maybe she should have let him die.

But Arkady had lost her father once already. She wasn't ready to lose him again so soon. Tears streaming silently down her face, she held her father close, filled with a sense of such helplessness that it almost overwhelmed her.

CHAPTER 13

'What happened here?'

The scene that confronted the Tide Lords when they reached Blackbourn just on dark was one of almost utter devastation. Flattened trees littered the landscape and the ground was drenched, small puddles filling every low-lying surface. It was hard to tell how far the damage extended, but everywhere they looked, the jetsam and flotsam of a devastating tidal wave lay about them, reaching far inland — certainly as far as they could see in the darkness.

They'd landed on the beach just south of where the town should have been. By Declan's estimation, they had travelled almost 2000 nautical miles in just over three days. His head was pounding, his skin felt as if it was covered in fire ants. Kentravyon had taken over guiding them several hours earlier. He brought them in to land with consummate skill, the rug settling gently on the wave-ravaged beach with barely a flutter as he let the Tide go.