The Immortal Prince (48 page)

Maralyce didn't go back to the mine as Arkady was half-fearing, half-hoping she would. Instead the old lady pottered around the cabin for the rest of the day, fiddling with her equipment, muttering to herself and generally ignoring her houseguests as if they didn't exist. Cayal stacked the wood he'd chopped outside the cabin door and brought enough inside to see them through a blizzard.

Arkady prepared a meal, which wasn't much more than sausage and cheese, and midafternoon Chikita appeared in the yard unbidden, to report there was still no sign of pursuit, and then vanished again as soon as she was able.

Given the way Maralyce was glaring at her, Arkady didn't blame the poor feline one little bit.

The tension in the cabin was palpable, although Arkady wondered if she was the only one who could feel it. Maralyce acted as if there was nothing amiss, and to her, there probably wasn't. She patently didn't care what was going on between Arkady and Cayal and had no intention of letting either of them get in her way.

“Is the gemang gone?” Maralyce asked when Cayal came back inside after speaking with Chikita.

“She's gone.”

“You just make sure she is,” Maralyce grumbled. “Don't want those abominations hangin' around my place.”

Cayal rolled his eyes but said nothing. Clearly this was a longstanding issue between them, which made Arkady curious. “Are you not one of the Tide Lords who helped create the Crasii, Maralyce?”

“I had nothing to do with that sordid little episode and I want nothing to do with the results. Ask your boy there what it took to make a Crasii. Abominations, they are, every last one of them, born of pain, perversion, rape and murder.”

“I went to Tenacia to find out what happened to Medwen's child, remember?” Cayal pointed out, sounding a little wounded. “If I had to do a few things that weren't entirely…noble…while I was there, I had good reason.”

“Bah!” she scoffed. “Listen to you and your excuses. You stayed with those shameless bastards for the better part of twenty years, Cayal, before you finally developed a conscience. And then, just when I thought you're on the brink of doing something decent, you pulled that stunt with the weather and ruined it for all of us. Don't expect me to pat you on the head and tell you what a brave lad you are, to suffer all those years of terrible torment, seeding the Crasii farms of Tenacia.”

“You weren't there, Maralyce.”

“No,” she agreed. “I wasn't. That says something about both of us, don't you think?”

Arkady was beginning to wish she'd never broached the subject, but her curiosity drove her to probe further. “But surely, Maralyce,” she said, “if the Crasii are now self-sustaining races, aren't they entitled to be treated like…real people?”

“Real
people
aren't slaves,” the old lady argued. “And I don't mean that literally. The Crasii are slaves to their instincts; worse, they're slaves to our whim. I could walk down that path, find your Crasii and order every one of them to slit their own throats and they'd do it, because they have no choice. That's not a survival trait, lady.”

“Yet they have survived.”

“Only because the Tide goes out for hundreds of years at a time and their numbers breed up when the immortals aren't around to get them killed.”

Arkady looked at Cayal, wondering if he was going to defend what he'd done to help create the Crasii, but he was leaning against the mantel, watching her, his expression thoughtful.

“Is that what
you
think?”

He shrugged. “Getting a lecture about the wickedness of my evil ways is the cost of Maralyce's hospitality. One of the reasons I tend not to visit her often.”

“That,” the old lady agreed, “and your aversion to honest hard work.”

“I chopped your damned wood for you, you ungrateful old cow,” he reminded her without rancour.

“Only because you didn't have a Crasii around to do it for you.” She looked up from another piece of equipment she had dismantled and spread across the wooden table—Arkady had no idea what it was or its function—and frowned at her. “People who aren't averse to honest hard work usually don't feel the need to breed slave races to do it for 'em, ever noticed that?”

“Where I come from, we don't believe the Tide Lords created the Crasii at all. We believe the Crasii evolved the same way humans did.”

“Then more fool them,” the old lady sighed. “'Cause the Tide is on the turn and it won't be long before your fancy academics in their sheltered, ignorant universities find out the hard way just how completely wrong they are about everything.”

 

Later that afternoon, Maralyce stood up, let out a satisfied sigh, gathered up the thing she had been working on all day—Arkady was still in the dark about what it was exactly—and left the cabin without a word. Alone suddenly with both Cayal and her fears, she swallowed an unexpected lump in her throat, knowing the unresolved business between them could no longer be avoided.

Bracing herself, she turned to face him, forcing the distracting images of his sweat-sheened body wielding an axe in the dappled sunlight from her mind. This wasn't about silly, idle fantasies, she reminded herself. This was real.

Taking a deep breath, she discovered him—somewhat to her annoyance given how much she'd been agonising over him all day—staring thoughtfully out of the small dusty window, oblivious to her.

More than a little peeved by his lack of consideration, she snapped at him far more sharply than she'd intended. “Cayal?”

“Why did Chikita take the trouble to come up here and tell us there was no pursuit, do you think?”

If he noticed—or cared—that she was irritable, he gave no sign. Still, his distraction was something of a relief, in a way. Asking after a Crasii was the last thing she expected. Perhaps this wasn't going to be as fraught as she feared.

“Because,” she ventured, “perhaps…there
is
no pursuit?”

Cayal wasn't amused. “Maralyce is right, you know. The Crasii are slaves to our whim.”

“Which has what, exactly, to do with Chikita bringing us word that we're not being pursued?”

“I never asked her to report if there was no pursuit, only if there was.”

She raised a brow at him. “You mean you didn't breed initiative into your slaves? How remiss of you, your highness.”

He turned to her, frowning. “Don't take that tone with me.”

“What tone?”

“That holier-than-thou tone you use when you think you own the moral high ground. You know nothing about me, Arkady, only what I choose to reveal.”

She squared her shoulders defensively. “You can hardly blame me for thinking I own the moral high ground. By your own admission you're responsible for the deaths of millions of people and the total destruction of their civilisation.”

“Then aren't you the lucky one,” he replied sourly, “to be so without fault that you can judge me?”

“To judge you, I'd have to believe your lies first,” she snapped.

He stared at her. “Tides, we're not going to start that whole
you can't possibly be immortal
routine, are we? I thought we were long past that.”

“Maybe in the cold light of day, I've had a chance to come to my senses.” Arkady said the words, but couldn't understand why. She believed him. He knew she believed him. It was absurd.

Cayal sat on the edge of the sill and folded his arms. “This is how you protect yourself, isn't it?”

“What?”

“This!” he said, waving his arm to encompass her. “Fight or flight. It's the first rule of mortal survival. Only you're too damned stubborn to run.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“I think you do, Arkady. Come here.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because this cabin is about ten feet wide, Cayal, and there is nothing you have to say to me that you can't say perfectly well with us that far apart.”

“I can't kiss you from there.”

“I have no intention of letting you kiss me again, so what difference does it make?”

He smiled. “Do you think you could stop me?”

“Given that you're a confessed rapist as well as a mass murderer, probably not.”

That seemed to amuse him. “You're very beautiful when you're being irrational.”

“You've had eight thousand years to work on your seduction technique and that's the best you can come up with? Tides, I thought you immortals were supposed to be something special.” She turned away with nowhere really in the tiny cabin to escape to, except Maralyce's small bedroom.

Before she could reach the door, however, it slammed shut in front of her.

Arkady jumped back in fright and spun around.

Cayal shrugged. “I warned you, my lady. The Tide's on its way back. Can't destroy civilisation as we know it, just yet, but I'll be a whiz at slamming doors for the next few days.”

“Let me go, Cayal,” she begged. She couldn't believe it of herself. Not since Fillion Rybank had Arkady begged a man for anything.

Fear tangled with apprehension, desire mixed with doubt, they all coloured her vision, blinding Arkady to anything but those tormented eyes. She closed her own eyes to shut out his anguish, but that just made her own torment worse.

How dare he make her feel like this? She hadn't felt so helpless since the first time she knocked on the door of Rybank's room at the university. As she realized that, anger replaced her fear. She had sworn she would never allow herself to be any man's victim, ever again.

Arkady's eyes flew open. It was as if her anger had set her free.

From the moment she acknowledged her newfound freedom, she discovered she had the power to decide her own destiny. It was her choice, now, to seize the moment or turn her back on it.

Arkady looked at Cayal through different eyes, no longer blinded by fear or guilt. She crossed the room in three strides and threw her arms around him, aghast at how badly she wanted this.

From somewhere deep inside Arkady, a dam seemed to burst, built of the bricks she'd placed around her emotions as a vulnerable child, the wall getting higher and higher after every visit to Fillion Rybank. The heat of her desire, the touch of Cayal's sure hands on her body as he undressed her, pushed her onto the rough wooden table, the chill bite of the air as the sun set, all served to sear away the last of her uncertainty.

She didn't remember moving to the bedroom, but with every thrust, Cayal drove the memories farther into the past. With every kiss, with every touch, with every cry of ecstasy as he drew her to the brink and back again, time and again, only the present, only the heat of their ardour remained, until finally, when she was sated and complete, Cayal collapsed against her, the weight of him almost as reassuring as her shattered wall had been.

It was dark by the time Arkady woke to the unfamiliar feeling of another body beside her in the bed. For a long moment she lay there, her head resting on Cayal's chest, listening to his heartbeat, which beat like a distant battle drum heralding advancing danger.

Without warning, several fat candles on the shelf above the bed inexplicably flared into light, filling the bedroom with a soft yellow glow.

“Did you do that?” she asked, yawning.

“The Tide is coming in,” Cayal explained, pulling her a little closer and tucking the furs under her chin. The air in the small cabin was icy. They must have let the fire go out.

“So you have your powers back?”

“Some,” he agreed. “Can't do much more than light candles and slam doors just yet, but it's definitely on the way.”

“And then what happens?”

“We pick up where we left off, I suppose,” he replied. “Syrolee and Engarhod and their dreadful offspring will crawl out from whatever rock they're hiding under and try to find some hapless population they can bend to their will, which isn't much of a stretch for them, given both Elyssa and Tryan are Tide Lords and Pellys is never far away because he's too stupid to realise that Syrolee is never going to take him back.”

“But I thought you said he'd lost all his memories? How would he even know he and Syrolee were once a couple?”

“Lukys told him. He thinks it's important we remember who we are.”

Arkady frowned, wondering at the motives of this most enigmatic Tide Lord. Medwen's concern about what drove Lukys did not seem misplaced.

“Anyway,” Cayal continued, unaware of the direction of Arkady's thoughts, “I suppose Brynden will give up contemplating his navel and wondering what he did to upset Kinta and start striding around the world trying to convince the rest of us we should be doing great deeds of derring-do for the betterment of mankind. Lukys will continue to ignore the rest of us because he's too busy trying to find a way to make the stars bang together. Jaxyn will already have his eye on the land he intends to rule once there's nobody around who can oppose him, and the rest of them…well, they'll flock to whoever looks like they're going to make the best go of it this time in the hopes they're on the winning side when we come to blows, as we invariably do.”

Arkady pushed herself up on her elbow so she could see his face. “While I, on the other hand, who now knows that immortals actually exist, that the Tide Lords are real, that the Crasii were created magically and that everything we hold to be truth is a myth and that all our myths are true, will be helpless to do anything about it, because, of course, I can't prove a word of it.”

“Such is the burden of all seekers of truth,” Cayal agreed solemnly as she took a deep breath to recover from her outburst.

She punched his arm half-heartedly. “It's not funny, Cayal. I'm going to have to sit there grinding my teeth while that pompous misogynist, Harlie Palmerston, gets a peerage for his
Theory of Human Advancement.
”

“Look on the bright side. The Tide's coming in. You'll all be enslaved by us evil Tide Lords before the year is out, anyway, so what does it matter?”

“Oh, well…what am I worrying about, then?”

“Shall I strike him down for you?” Cayal asked with a smile. “This pompous misogynist, Harlie Palmerston, and his wretched
Theory of Human Advancement
?”

She shook her head. “No. I think watching his world crumble around him when the Tide Lords reappear should be satisfaction enough. You will ask your evil and tyrannical immortal brethren to make a point of showing him how wrong he is, won't you?”

“It'll be my pleasure,” he promised. “Besides, it's not the first time mortals have tried to will us out of existence.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your
Theory of Human Advancement.
It's one of the oldest tricks in the book. Educate everyone to the point where the existence of immortals appears completely irrational so that the next time the Emperor and Empress of the Five Realms try imposing their religion on an unsuspecting and credulous world, they're laughed at, rather than worshipped. It happened before the last Cataclysm, too. And it was surprisingly effective. It's been a long time since Syrolee got to be a goddess. A thousand years ago, they even had a secret society dedicated to ridding the world of us.”

“If it was a secret society,” Arkady asked, “how come you know about it?”

“Because humans can't keep secrets. The Cabal of the Tarot, they used to call themselves. That's where your wretched cards come from, you know, and the reason it irks me so much to hear you quote from them. The Tide Lord Tarot is just the last garbled remnant of a pitiful attempt by the mortals of Amyrantha to defy us.”

“Maybe you should have paid more attention to them,” she suggested. “If you want to die and they want to kill you, that kind of puts you on the same side, doesn't it?”

He stared at her in bewilderment. “That's the most idiotic suggestion I've ever heard.”

“Right up there with ‘let's kill seven people so they'll cut my head off and I won't have to deal with the pain any longer,' I guess?” Her smile faded as she studied him in the candlelight. “And what are you going to do now, Cayal?”

“Do? I don't understand what you mean?”

“What are you planning? Will the Immortal Prince look for some hapless population he can bend to his will, too?”

He shrugged. “I tried ruling the world once. It's a lot more work than you'd imagine.”

“You haven't told me that story.”

“I haven't told you a great many things, Arkady.”

She fell silent, not certain how she should respond to that. “Maralyce was talking about you earlier, you know.”

“Did she have anything nice to say about me?”

“Actually, she did.”

“You see, I was right. The whole world order is on the brink of collapse.”

Arkady smiled. “She says rumour has it you're…how did she put it? Quite good in the sack?”

“Like I said, Arkady. If you're alive long enough, you get to be good at everything, sooner or later.”

“Even lovemaking?”

“Especially that,” he told her. “Tides, you really
have
reached the bitter end when that bores you senseless.”

“Does it bore you?”

He looked at her curiously. “Any particular reason you want to know?”

“You tried to have yourself beheaded, Cayal. How desperate does a man have to be to attempt that?”

“More desperate than you will ever comprehend, Arkady.”

“Yet you have no choice but to go on.” She fell silent, wishing there was something she could say that would help. There wasn't, of course, but that didn't stop her wanting to try. She kissed him again, revelling in the taste of him.

“Why don't you sleep with your husband?” Cayal asked, pulling away from her.

“Who says I don't?”

“You do,” he told her. “You make love like a starveling. Does he not find you alluring?”

She laid her head against his chest again, snuggling into the solid warmth of him. “It's complicated, Cayal, and I really don't want to talk about my husband while lying naked in the arms of another man.”

Cayal was undeterred. “Will he come after me, do you think? To avenge your honour?”

“Last time I checked he was after you anyway,” she reminded him, “because you're an escaped convict. Having your way with his wife will just prove an added incentive to see an end to you, I imagine.”

“Will you be in a lot of trouble when you go back?”

“None at all,” she assured him, although the question pained her. There were no illusions in this bed. As world-shattering as it had seemed earlier, in the heat of their desire, this could not,
would
not last. This was the distant war-drum she could hear in her mind. Whatever Arkady felt for his man, her future lay with Stellan in Torlenia, not with a fugitive immortal.

She understood that and Cayal—to his credit—wasn't trying to fool her into believing otherwise. “You kidnapped me. I'm the victim here.”

She could hear the smile in his voice. “You're many things, Arkady, but believe me, a victim isn't one of them. Won't he know you're lying?”

“I'd rather we stopped talking about him.”

“Tell me something else then.”

“Like what?”

He shrugged. “I don't know. Something about yourself. Something from your childhood that doesn't involve dirty old men. A happy memory.” He looked down at her with a frown. “You do
have
happy memories, don't you?”

“Of course I do. Don't you?”

“None that aren't rotting from old age.”

She frowned, a little hurt by what he was implying. “Not even tonight?”

Cayal leaned forward and kissed her apologetically. “Tonight is still happening. It's not actually a memory yet.”

Somewhat mollified, she smiled. “What do you want to know?”

“Anything. Just tell me something you've never told anyone else.”

“Why?”

“Because that's the only gift you can give me that I can't take for myself.”

That made a twisted sort of logic, actually, so Arkady settled down against him again and thought on it for a moment.

“When I was about eight,” she began, recalling an incident all but forgotten over the years, “my father was called to the palace because the duke was ill and his physician was away. This was the old duke, Stellan's father, and my mother was still alive then, too, although heavily pregnant. The old duke had severe gout, poor man, and suffered with it terribly. There were plenty of other doctors in the city the duke could have called on, but my father and his personal physician were friends so as a favour to us he always arranged for Papa to cover for him when he was away. I think he knew my father would never accept charity—or payment from half his patients, which was half the reason we were so poor—and he knew how much we needed the money.

“Normally, I would have stayed at home for such a house call, but Mother was having a particularly bad day and she didn't want me underfoot, so my father took me to the palace with him. All the way there he admonished me about my manners and not saying anything and staying out of the way, which of course I promised to do, and which of course, I didn't.

“Anyway, as soon as we arrived, Papa was whisked away to attend the duke and I was left standing in this massive hall into which our whole house would have fitted. Naturally, I started poking into doorways until I found one unlocked. It led to a music room. I'd only ever seen musical instruments played by street performers before then, and we lived in the poorer part of the city, so they were pretty battered and worn. I'd never seen anything as beautiful as the dulcimer resting on a stand by the window. You should have seen it. It was shaped like a huge hourglass, enamelled in black and polished till it shone like a mirror. Its fretted fingerboard was inlaid with mother of pearl with a matching inlay scrolling down either side of the strings. I'd never seen anything so gorgeous. I reached out, and was just about to touch it, when this boy of about fourteen threw open the door and demanded to know who I was. Tides, he gave me such a fright, I nearly knocked the damn thing over.

“After I got over my shock, I explained why I was in the palace and then the boy walked across, picked up the dulcimer and asked me if I played. When I told him I didn't, he offered to show me what it sounded like. We must have spent the better part of the morning in that music room. Stellan played every song he knew, I think, and some of them more than once. He tells me he's not a particularly accomplished musician, but I was only eight, so what did I know? I just thought the instrument made the most beautiful sound I'd ever heard, and that the boy playing it was the nicest person I'd ever met.

“It wasn't until my father came looking for me in a panic a couple of hours or so later that I found out the boy was the duke's son, and even then I was too young to be impressed. He assured my father I'd been well behaved, bowed to me like I was a real lady and left the music room, after inviting me to come back and visit him again.”

“
That's
the happiest moment of your life?” Cayal asked.

She shrugged. “It may not seem like much of a memory, but my mother miscarried and died a little more than a week later, and after that, things were never the same. It probably wasn't the happiest moment but that morning was the last time I can remember being truly and completely happy.”

Arkady fell silent, letting the joy of that simple reminiscence envelop her. When Cayal offered no other comment, she looked up at him and discovered he wasn't even listening to her.

“Cayal?

His attention was elsewhere, his eyes unfocussed, as if he was listening to something Arkady couldn't hear. He lay like that, still as a rock, for a few more moments and then he sat bolt upright, pushing Arkady out of his way without apology. Throwing the furs back, he cursed under his breath as he sprang out of bed and began fishing around for his trousers.

Arkady stared at him in alarm. “Cayal? What's the matter?”

“Jaxyn's here,” he said, as he dressed hurriedly in his discarded prison uniform.

“How could you possibly know…?”

“I can feel him on the Tide.”

“But Jaxyn is…” Arkady's voice trailed off in horror as something awful, something almost too terrible to contemplate, suddenly occurred to her.

A sleazy little opportunist,
Cayal had called him.
Jaxyn will already have his eye on the land he intends to rule once there's nobody around who can oppose him
…

“Cayal, wait!” she called after him, as he slammed the bedroom door open with a thought, so hard the whole cabin shook, and hurried into the main room to find his boots.