The Immortal Prince (35 page)

“You want me to find Medwen's child?”

“I want her back,” Medwen declared.

“Oh…you want me to
kidnap
Medwen's child.”

“It'd be handy if you found out whether or not they've managed to perfect that warrior caste of feline Crasii they were working on, too,” Lukys suggested. “The Emperor of the Five Realms armed with an army of warriors with the killing capabilities of a cat and the ability to think like a human is a rather disturbing prospect.”

“A caste of warrior
cat
people?” I asked, shaking my head. It seemed such an absurd concept in those days. “What does one do with an army like that, anyway?”

“We think he has plans for them beyond Tenacia,” Kinta replied.

Brynden nodded in agreement. “We think Syrolee has her eye on the title of Empress of Amyrantha.”

“Why stop at a continent?” Medwen added sourly. “When you can rule the whole world?”

“But why bother?” I asked. “It's High Tide. If they want to rule the world, there's really nothing stopping them. Both Tryan and Elyssa can wield the Tide as well as Lukys or Bryn or I can. What do they need an army for?”

“To control the human population afterwards, perhaps?” Lukys suggested.

“It's easy enough to scare any human population into doing what you want when the Tide's up.” I shrugged, unconvinced. Then I glanced at the others and added, “We've all done it.”

“Not
all
of us,” Brynden corrected stiffly. “But I believe Lukys has the right of it. Respect inspired by fear is only effective when the reason for that fear is reasonably close by. Immortal they may be, but there aren't enough of Engarhod's clan who can actually use Tide magic effectively and they can't be everywhere at once.”

“Build yourself a loyal army, however,” Lukys agreed, “one that is magically compelled to obey you, and you're halfway there. A hierarchical power pyramid based on fear with the Tide Lords at the top and a willing army of killers at the bottom. Very efficient method of controlling a world, based on the well-documented mathematical principle that shit flows downhill.”

I couldn't help but smile. “You always did have a way of putting things in perspective, Lukys.”

“Perspective being one thing sorely missing among our kind,” he agreed.

I rolled my eyes. “This from the man who thinks he can find a way to travel between the stars.”

Lukys stared at me, his blue eyes bright against his dusky skin. “You waste your immortality on trivial things, my lad. I've no interest in ruling a world when there might be a chance I can rule a whole galaxy.” He tickled the rat fondly. “Isn't that right, old son?”

I looked at Brynden. “And what do you think, Bryn? Is there room, somewhere in your noble warrior ethic, for the notion of ruling a galaxy?”

“One cannot presume to rule others until one has total command of oneself,” the Fyronnese Tide Lord replied.

“One can redress an injustice, however,” Kinta added impatiently. “Even without achieving such a state of purity.”

Her comment gave me the first hint of the split that would eventually drive Kinta and Brynden apart, but I didn't realise it then. Instead, I turned my attention to Medwen. “How long ago did you and Rance have your…unfortunate encounter?”

“Almost eleven years ago, now.”

“And nobody's done anything about it yet?”

“We were waiting for the right time,” Medwen explained.

“And the right person,” Lukys amended. He raised his cup to me with a mocking smile. “The time has come I suspect, Cayal, our Immortal Prince, for you to do something useful.”

 

Much later that evening Medwen came to my room, sliding silently into the hard narrow bed beside me. We made love—out of habit, as much as desire—not saying a word until after we were spent. Medwen lay beside me afterwards, her head resting on my chest, and spoke idly of the years we'd spent apart, of things she'd done, places she had seen, people she had met. She said nothing of Tenacia, or the loss of her child. She didn't have to. The fact that she was here in my bed was proof enough of her pain.

“Why?” I asked eventually, when she'd run out of things to say.

“Why what?”

“Why did you go anywhere near Tenacia?”

“I was bored.” She shrugged. “And regardless of what you think of them, you have to admit Syrolee and her clan know how to live in style.”

“You're immortal. You could set yourself up as a goddess anywhere you wanted if you feel the need to be worshipped so badly.”

Medwen sighed in the chilly darkness. “But it's so much work. And I'm not like you and Lukys. I can barely light a candle, even at High Tide. It's much easier, don't you think, to ride in the wake of someone who enjoys doing that sort of thing?”

I smiled faintly, glad for the warmth of an extra body. The thin blanket Brynden provided for his guests did little to ward off the cold. Although our bodies regulate themselves so we don't really feel the cold much anymore—and I suspect that without immortal protection, we might well have died of hypothermia in Brynden's icy castle—I still felt the cold grip of something. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I was glad of Medwen's warmth, nonetheless.

“Why a child?”

I felt her shrug beside me. “I was lonely. I knew the child would die of old age eventually, but I wanted someone to love me, Cayal, even if it was only for a little while.”

“I love you, Medwen. You know that.”

“Only because I'm here in your bed. You'll have forgotten about me by morning.”

Sadly, that was probably a fair comment. “But a child? Surely you didn't think a baby would bring you anything but pain?”

“You had to be there, Cayal. It's not that easy to explain.”

“What did the others say when they learned Rance had taken it?”

“Nothing much,” she told him. “At least not in my hearing. Engarhod was singularly unsympathetic. And Elyssa suggested it was my own fault.”

“So who gave birth to this cat creature Rance wanted?”

“Elyssa. I found out later that she'd birthed most of the first generation. I think she was tired of being pregnant, which is why Rance asked me.”

“Did someone finally
order
a mortal slave to sleep with her?”

I felt, rather than saw, Medwen smiling against my chest. “That's a cruel thing to suggest.”

“But probably true.”

She turned in my arms, and looked up at me, her dark eyes glittering in the gloom. “Will you go, Cayal? Will you do as Brynden asks?”

“I want to talk to Lukys again first.”

“Why?”

“As I said at dinner, he has a way of putting things into perspective. You know…that skill we immortals sadly lack?”

“Do you trust him?”

I looked at her in surprise. “Don't
you
?”

She laid her head down again so I could no longer read her expression. “I sometimes think he's the most dangerous one of us all.”

I laughed softly.
“Lukys?”

“He wants to rule the whole galaxy.”

“Every immortal needs a hobby, Medwen.”

She slapped my bare chest impatiently. “I'm not kidding, Cayal. This is serious. We point at Syrolee and Engarhod and roll our eyes at the way their family scrabbles for power every time the Tide turns. We even think Brynden and Kinta are a little odd for setting themselves up as gods in this dismal abbey, making a virtue out of grim austerity. But think about it for a moment. What does Lukys do with his immortality? He's as powerful as any of you who can wield the Tide and yet he disappears for centuries at a time. He never stops trying to test the limit of his power. He doesn't care about lording it over the mortal population, and he makes a point of helping every other immortal find their way, so we all end up thinking of him as our best friend. Why? Because he's nice? Because he has a pet rat? Or because he wants immortal minions the same way Syrolee and Engarhod want their army of feline Crasii?”

“Lukys only cares about his astrology,” I disagreed. “He doesn't want to rule us.”

“He's trying to find a way to
reach
the stars,” she reminded me. “Not just study them. We have forever, Cayal. Eventually he may discover it, and then we'll no longer be equals because while Tryan and Jaxyn and the rest of you with more power than sense are causing cataclysms on Amyrantha to amuse yourselves, he'll be realigning the planets to suit his whim and there won't be one of us with the knowledge or the ability to stop him.”

I tightened my arm around her gently, bending my head forward to kiss the top of her head. “What are you saying, Medwen? That I should forget Rance and your child and try to take down Lukys and his wretched rat instead?”

She shook her head, sighing. “No. I'm not sure what I'm saying. I just think we all put far too much store in Lukys's opinion.”

“I'll bear your warning in mind when next I speak to him, my lady.”

“Now you're patronising me.”

“Sorry.”

“No, you're not.” After a moment, she turned to look at me again, her expression fierce. “Bring me back my baby, Cayal.”

“If I can.”

“If you can't, will you make Rance suffer?”

“It'll be my pleasure.”

“How?”

“I haven't the faintest idea.”

“He took my baby, Cayal.”

“I know.”

“He has to suffer.”

“I'll make him suffer,” I promised, trying not to seem impatient with her demands. I knew Medwen was hurting, but she was wallowing a little too comfortably in her pain.
Tides, it happened eleven years ago,
an unsympathetic voice in my head was complaining.
Get over it.

I said nothing aloud, however, and soon Medwen laid her head against my chest again, her dark hair tickling my nose. She was silent for a time—so long, I thought she must have drifted off to sleep. When she finally spoke, her question stunned me.

“Cayal,” she asked softly in the darkness, “do you ever wish you could die?”

I hesitated before answering. “I've never really given it much thought.”

“I never thought about it much, either. Not until Rance took my baby.”

There was no answer to that, so I said nothing. But it set me thinking as I lay there in the icy darkness, Medwen's body curled into mine, her deep even breathing lulling me to sleep.

It was the first time I was forced to confront the notion that if I ever actually wanted to die, I had a serious problem.

It was the early hours of the morning before Cayal finished speaking. Their fire had burned down to embers and both Arkady and the Crasii had listened to his tale entranced, heedless of the bitter wind that howled through the mountains.

It was Chikita who broke the silence, her tone awestruck. “You have spoken to the Mother, my lord?”

Cayal nodded. “Who, Elyssa? Of course.”

Arkady stared at Chikita in surprise, forcing herself to focus on what the Crasii was saying. She'd heard the Crasii refer to “the Mother” plenty of times, but the identity of the goddess the Crasii considered their maternal figure was one of those closely guarded secrets they refused to share, even with an outsider as trusted as Arkady. Confronted with such a startling revelation, she was disturbed to discover how much effort it took to concentrate on the disclosure. It was proving rather difficult to banish the image of Medwen lying beside Cayal while she slept with her head resting on his naked chest.

“Did you do it?” Arkady couldn't help but ask.

“Do what?”

“Find Medwen's child?”

Cayal hesitated and then shrugged. “Not exactly.”

Cayal leaned forward, poking at the embers of the dying fire. It was impossible to read his expression in the darkness, but she could sense his reluctance to go on. “If I've learned one thing since becoming immortal, Arkady, it's that it is far easier to destroy a friend than an enemy.”

“And much easier to be cryptic than give a straight answer, too, I've noticed.”

“I just meant I hung around with Rance and Krydence for a time,” he told her, throwing another branch on the coals. “Probably longer than I should have, truth be told. Fact is, it wouldn't have made a difference to Medwen. By the time I got there, her child was already dead.”

“So how did you get revenge?”

“I helped put a stop to Crasii farming, for one thing. Eventually.”

“But not the Crasii,” Arkady remarked, glancing around at the felines surrounding them. Although the rain had stopped and the fire had dried her off, Arkady was still freezing and she envied them their fur coats. Their eyes shone in the darkness, watchfully, warily, as if they were waiting for her to try something. She wondered what they thought of Cayal's story. If he was telling the truth—and the felines obviously believed he was—he must be shattering a few of their illusions about his kind. In Crasii legend, the Tide Lords were gods. There was no mention of a Tide Lord who refused to be a party to their creation. Or of other Tide Lords who might have actively opposed their creators.

The fire flared, sparks vanishing into the night, as Cayal coaxed it back to life. If he was worried about the effect his tale was having on the Crasii, he gave no sign of it.

“By the time we were done, there were enough Crasii around to continue the species without magical help,” he continued. “Actually, they'd reached that point long before I got there. When I arrived in Tenacia, Krydence, Taryx and Rance were well on their way to building their army. It was Syrolee and Elyssa who kept on experimenting.”

“With blending the races?”

He nodded. “They got really creative there for a while. I even had a talking horse called Bevali, once.”

“A
talking
horse?” Arkady smiled, certain he was teasing her now. “What happened to these remarkable talking horses? I mean, we still have the felines you claim the Tide Lords created, and canines and amphibious Crasii, even reptilian Crasii, although they're rare. Can't say I've ever been spoken to by a horse, though.”

“They were never really viable.” He glanced across the flames at her with a shrug. “Too hard to make and too difficult to manage when we did. The horses were Rance's idea, but the others experimented with a lot of crazy mixtures, and not all of them logical. Some blendings worked and some didn't. I don't think the equines were infertile, but once you give an animal a chance to voice its feelings, you've overridden a large part of their natural instincts and in some species that's just asking for trouble. I heard they wouldn't breed because they were so attached to their human masters, they started to think
they
were human, too. The equines weren't interested in their own kind. Not even for sex. Did you know we're the only species that has sex for fun?”

“Do you include all the Crasii in that sweeping generalisation?”

“Yes.”

“But if they're part human as you claim…”

“Chikita!” Cayal barked in reply. “Why does a female feline copulate?”

“Because she can't help it,” the feline replied without hesitation. “The need comes on her with the heat and she must fulfil it. We must go on. We must breed. It is the way of things.”

“And feline males? Why do they mate?”

The young woman spat on the ground in contempt. “It is their function and they desire nothing more because they are animals.”

“There,” Cayal said, turning back to Arkady. “You heard her. It is the way of things. They must breed.”

Arkady was silent for a time, wondering why she had never thought to question Crasii sexual practices before. And why she was buying into this nonsense in the first place. She smiled. “You nearly had me there.”

He looked at her in surprise. “Pardon?”

“You nearly had me believing in magic.”

Cayal shook his head with a sigh. “I marvel at your ability to ignore the evidence of your own eyes, Arkady. You're so set on what you
think
is real, you can't accept the truth, even when it has its fingers chopped off, right before your very eyes.”

Cayal was wrong. Arkady wasn't ignoring anything. She knew she was clinging to a myth, but she wasn't ready to let it go just yet. Admitting the truth about Cayal would mean stepping through a door Arkady Desean wasn't sure she had the courage to open. No matter how absurd, in light of all she had witnessed this day, it just seemed easier to hold on to her old reality rather than deal with the new one.

“If you're telling the truth, Cayal, then I have to confront the notion that my world is based on a lie,” she admitted eventually.

“That's not actually my fault,” Cayal replied with a shrug, and then without offering her any other opinion, he lay down, turned his back to the fire and promptly went to sleep.

 

The following morning, in a steady downpour, Cayal turned their party south, taking them even deeper into the mountains. The track they traversed was so faint, Arkady wondered if Cayal was imagining it. They were frequently required to dismount in order to get past the narrower, more dangerous sections of the slippery game trail he followed, but he kept onwards and upwards relentlessly, with the confidence of a man who knows exactly where he is going and what to expect when he arrives.

Protected by their pelts, the felines seemed unbothered by the icy rain that soaked Arkady's skirts, finding every vulnerable seam with wet, icy fingers. She wasn't dressed for trekking in the mountains. Her coat was a summer-weight, decorative garment, not meant to protect a body from the relentless rain or the harsh winds that whipped around the peaks of the Shevron Mountains, and her high-heeled boots were ill-suited to riding, even less appropriate for walking over rough ground, or climbing across narrow ravines.

Exhausted, her feet blistered, her thighs rubbed raw, her lips blue, her fingers numb, Arkady took a moment or two to register they had stopped, when Cayal finally called a halt to their progress just on dusk.

It was three days since they'd left Clyden's Inn. Arkady had stopped trying to reason her way through her predicament. Survival demanded more of her attention now than idle philosophical arguments. She was too tired and too overwhelmed to worry about it any longer. Immortals existed, she decided as she sank to her knees on the rocky plateau Cayal had chosen for their campsite, and Arkady couldn't have cared less.

“Tides!” Cayal exclaimed, as Arkady collapsed. “Look at you! You're frozen through! Why didn't you say something?”

She looked up at him through eyes blurred with wind-driven tears. “Would you have stopped?”

Cayal didn't answer her. Instead, he cursed impatiently and ordered the Crasii to care for the horses and make camp while he helped Arkady up and led her into the lee of the cliff behind them. There was a shallow depression in the rock face, not deep enough to be called a cave, but enough to offer some small relief from the rain. He drew her close and began rubbing her upper arms briskly, to stimulate the circulation.

“Your hands are so warm,” she remarked in surprise through chattering teeth, glad of the little bit of heat he was able to provide.

“Another advantage of immortality,” he shrugged.

“More of your body regulating itself?” she asked. “Like not getting too fat or too thin?”

Cayal stopped rubbing her arms for a moment and shook his head. He seemed amused. “You're on the verge of passing out from exposure, Arkady. Don't you ever stop trying to analyse things?”

She shrugged. “Sorry. I can't seem to help myself.”

In reply, he pulled her close, wrapping her in his warm embrace. She closed her eyes and tried not to think about the cold. It was disconcerting to be held so intimately but she was too grateful for the unnatural warmth of his body to question its source. Over the top of her head, she could hear Cayal issuing orders to the Crasii to get a fire going.

When he was done with the Crasii and her teeth had stopped chattering, she looked up at him. “Where are you taking me?”

Cayal glanced down at her, still holding her close. “Why?”

“I have a right to know, don't you think?”

He thought on that for a moment and then shook his head. “Not really.”

A part of Arkady wanted to push him away angrily, but the part of her that was just starting to thaw out resisted the temptation.

“They'll find you, you know. My husband will already have his scouts out, scouring these mountains. We've left a trail a mile wide. The Crasii are not attempting to conceal our progress. A blind man could follow us.”

Cayal shrugged, unconcerned. “I'm not actually trying to hide, Arkady. Just find a place of strength from which to negotiate.”

She stared up at him, a little surprised at how much she wanted to believe him. “They won't let you go, Cayal,” she warned softly.

He smiled down at her, supremely confident. “We'll see.”

Arkady shivered as the numbness began to fade a little. Unconsciously, she tried to bury herself even deeper into Cayal's embrace. She felt his arms tighten about her. Soaking up his unnatural warmth, Arkady closed her eyes again, letting his solid strength envelop her, and tried not to think about anything other than surviving this nightmare so she could return to her husband and her perfectly constructed life full of lies, as if, after what she'd done, there was even a slim chance such a circumstance was possible.