The Twelve Kingdoms: The Mark of the Tala (21 page)

I looked back to see all the people outside in the winter, like the starving pauper children that crowded around Ordnung’s walls until the guards drove them off again. Rayfe alone smiled at me, hope and belief shining from him.

He stepped through, a bold stride, and signaled to the other Tala. Terin rode up to the barrier, a rime of fear under his anger. He must be one who couldn’t shift, I realized. With a grimace, he urged his horse through at a speed that would surely knock him from the saddle, should the barrier be solid to him. But he passed, with a hoarse shout of joy.

After that, others followed.

Rayfe stood by my side, watching his army reenter their homeland. He could have come through in his animal form at any time, but he’d waited, walking through in human form, as all these warriors must.

They came through, all along the wall, like ghosts emerging from another world, shouting their excitement and saluting me with yells and fists pumping in the balmy air.

But others did not.

They remained outside, defeat and despair on their faces. Staring in, they silently implored me to help them. After a time, fully two-thirds of them lingered, still trapped outside.

“What do I do now?” I asked aloud, not really expecting an answer.

But Rayfe did answer. “Salena could . . . communicate with the barrier. I hoped it would be enough to have you inside—and look, it is for some. There must be something more. Can you ask it to let the others in somehow?”

A derisive snort came from behind me. I didn’t have to look to know it was my faithful ex-uncle, anxiously awaiting my failure.

And fail I did. Whatever in me allowed the people to pass through didn’t respond to all of my beseeching. While the sun slid lower in the sky, I did everything I could think of to “talk” to the barrier. Though my blood hummed to its presence, and even though I could move back and forth, from summer to winter and to summer again, nothing I tried let me bring the rest of the warriors through.

Finally, Rayfe put a stop to it. I protested, but he pointed to the falling darkness, stepped through on his own, and sent them away.

“Where will they go?” I asked him, rubbing my arms, though I’d long since doffed my furred cape and could hardly be cold.

He slanted me an opaque look. “They’ll find places. The Tala are survivors. Many of the people you saw here have been outside Annfwn since Salena left. A few more days—or months or even years—won’t matter that much. They can wait for you to learn the way.”

“But they came now because—”

“There’s always hope. More so now than ever. But you’re tired. Let’s go to the campsite.”

In truth, Rayfe seemed to be the weary one. Though he’d glossed it over for my sake, it showed in the lines of his face how much it bothered him to send those people away. They had been hoping, and though they still seemed strange and alien to me, their disappointment cut me.

But maybe I could still help them.

I walked with Rayfe down a forest path, the others having gone ahead while I worked at the barrier. We rounded a bend, and before us lay a crystal-blue lake, practically at our feet, almost entirely fenced by a wall of tall, dark trees, straight as spears.

A shout from farther down the lake rang across the water. Rayfe squinted, then a look of profound relief and . . . joy? . . . crossed his face, like the sun breaking through clouds. He grasped my upper arms, squeezing them, and grinned at me.

“Perfect timing. I have a surprise for you.”

A group of Tala men picked their way along the shadowed shore, now screened by trees, now breaking out of the shadow. A flash of white in their midst threw me off. Then the breeze shifted, and
she
whinnied at my scent.

If grief clamps down and stops breath, then joy is like the beast breaking free, shattering ribs and exploding the heart. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t gasp out Fiona’s name. All I seemed able to do was clutch my hands over my mouth, to hold what in I don’t know. But suddenly I was laughing and sobbing and Rayfe was leading my horse to me and watching me with such hopeful yearning, my already laboring heart nearly broke.

With a glad cry, I wrapped my arms around Fiona’s neck, while she nuzzled at my hair. The silky white coat, her familiar scent, all of it centered me again, and I had something of who I’d always been.

“She is a beautiful creature,” Rayfe observed. “It would have been beyond a shame for her to have been so carelessly destroyed.”

I dashed my tears away—Moranu, Rayfe must think me a silly maid to weep so often—and tried to smile, but my wobbly lips wouldn’t hold the shape. “How . . . why? But
how
—?”

“The night you told me about her. I sent some men for her. I couldn’t let you suffer such a loss when we’re asking so much of you.”

The wary hope in his eyes moved me. He didn’t have to want me happy. We both knew this. I unwound my fingers from Fiona’s white mane and laid my hands on Rayfe’s chest.

“Thank you,” I whispered, mindful of the men who ringed us. “This is the greatest gift anyone has ever given me.”

I stood on tiptoe, slid a hand behind his neck, and kissed him with all the emotion that surged through me. I couldn’t separate all the joy, relief, and love swirling around in my blood from the desire that fired at his response, the way his big hands tightened on my waist, and how he deepened the kiss, urgent, fierce with unnamable longing.

I drew back and held his face in my hands, the way he touched me.

“Thank you,” I said again, firmly, like an oath.

He wrapped long fingers around my wrists, holding me there, then turning his face to press a kiss into each of my palms. “I wish you happy, Andromeda. Remember it. Despite all the rest, I want that for you.”

I would remember that.

Reading my father’s letter only drove the point home. I bathed in the cold lake and took the time to run my hands over every inch of Fiona’s crystal-clear hide, to reassure myself that she was unharmed. Then I sat a private distance away while Fiona searched out the tender water plants at the lake’s edge.

He demanded my return, accused me of treachery, yet again. More, he named Annfwn as his by right and threatened to take it by force. His hatred of Rayfe and the Tala oozed from every line. The man who wrote this wasn’t the wise king he pretended to be. But then, nothing seemed to be what I had always believed. I wondered if Derodotur had watched him write this missive, his serene face impassive, if he’d seen the cracks running beneath the surface.

No wonder Rayfe hadn’t wanted to show it to me until he knew Fiona’s fate. I wondered how he would have broken the news to me if they’d been unable to retrieve her.

Not one word after my well-being.

“He’s insane,” I remarked, hearing the footstep behind me.

“Like father, like daughter?” Terin quipped.

He stood just inside the tree line, head cocked saucily, eyes glittering.

“Has everyone read my personal business?”

“You have no personal business, Princess.” Terin circled around behind me. I refused to crane my neck to watch him, so I gazed at Fiona instead and twisted the silver ring on my finger, with the bloodred stone. “Everything that involves you is a matter of national security, which means it concerns me.”

“I didn’t ask for any of this. You can hardly consider me a spy.”

“I didn’t ask for it either,” he snapped back, “and yet here you are. Everything you touch becomes distorted beyond recognition.”

He finally stalked around into my peripheral vision.

“You mean Rayfe.”

“He wants what cannot be had. He gives you what he should not. All to chase after a pipe dream.”

“What is the dream?”

Terin grinned, foxy and canny. “Oh, no, it’s his to tell you.”

“Is that why you hate me so?”

“Do I hate you? Hmm.” He pretended to ponder the question, squinting at the sun and tapping his chin with dirt-stained fingers. I wondered what he’d been digging at. “How would you feel about the child of the woman who drove your brother to suicide?”

I stiffened. “I’ve never heard such a story.”

“Ah, so sweet Salena dishonored his memory as well. Alas for that. History is written by the victors, by the callous survivors and the murderers. And by their vicious progeny.”

“I was a child when she died. She could hardly have told such a horrible tale to someone so young.”

“She wouldn’t have cared about that. You were a means to an end for her. If she’d truly seen you as her daughter, she would have taught you something.”

“My mother loved me.” I remembered the sound of her voice, singing to me. The way she let me brush her hair. Her face when she gave me the doll.

“Salena loved no one.”

“Why would you say such a thing?”

“You didn’t know her,” Terin snarled. “You were a sniveling brat when she died, and she was nothing more than a weeping teat to you. She was incapable of love or she never would have—”

“Terin.” Rayfe, voice pitched low, even, and with unmistakable command, cut through the man’s rant. “Enough. Begone.”

Terin snapped his mouth shut with an audible click. Then he clicked his heels and saluted me in a mockery of some of the Avonlidgh customs. The man disappeared and a large red fox blinked cinnamon eyes at me, then dashed into the forest.

Rayfe sighed and lowered himself to sit next to me.

“If Terin can shape-shift, why did he wait for me to open the barrier and cross as a man?” I asked.

“Shifting outside of Annfwn is tenfold more difficult. Not all Tala can manage it.”

“Do you all become one particular animal?”

Rayfe chuckled, shaking his head and drawing up his knees to dangle his hands between them, casual and relaxed.

“I heard pretty much everything Terin said to you. You hold the letter from your father filled with poison—and you want to ask about the shape-shifting?”

“Well, I have ten thousand questions, but that seems like a fair place to start. And I don’t care to talk about my father or my mother just now.”

He studied the glimmering lake. “Are you not tired?”

“I think I’m so exhausted I’ve passed into this state where I can’t even feel the need for sleep.”

“And your mind is busy.” He reached over and took my hand, holding it between his to study the ring he’d given me. “Supposedly, our ability to shift is limited only by our imaginations, or so I was taught. Unfortunately, some of our imaginations seem to be quite limited. Most of us have a favored form—an instinctive one, if you will. The more time we spend as that animal, the more it . . . leaks over into our human forms, the more it becomes instinctive to become that one thing and the more difficult to become something else. Most Tala have one form only. A few can do more. The magic lives within all of us to greater or lesser degrees.”

“So you become animals other than a wolf?”

He glanced sideways at me, with that half smile, and rubbed my fingers. “A rather large black falcon.”

“Not fond of stained glass, are you?”

“Not when you are on the other side, no.”

“I never saw my mother shape-shift.”

“No. You wouldn’t have. Uorsin would have insisted upon that, I’m sure.”

“Why would she agree to such rules?”

He sighed, turning my hand over and lacing his fingers with mine. “I don’t know all of it. I never met Salena. She was born to another family—one of our oldest, the purest blood. Really, her family—your family—is the stuff of legends among our people.”

“But you said I look like her.”

“I saw her once,” he admitted, voice soft. “When she was queen of the Tala and I was but a boy. Her hair dragged on the ground, it was so long then, like a cape. She radiated Tala magic like a lily redolent with sweet perfume.”

“Why did she do it?”

“Abandon Annfwn and wed Uorsin? Some say ambition. Some say the simple powers of Annfwn were not enough for her and she longed for more. Others say she did it for love.”

I studied his profile, in bright relief in the glittering light from the lake. “That’s not what you think.”

He looked at me, raised an eyebrow. “I have reason to believe otherwise.”

“The reasons you’ve engaged in this entire enterprise. Bringing me here.”

Rayfe held my gaze, solemn. “You do have the look of her.”

“But I am not her.”

“No—you’re more. I think you are what Salena left Annfwn to get.”

“A child who benefited her not at all? Who she didn’t live to see more than a few scant years?”

“Salena didn’t want you for herself. Make no mistake—Terin is a bitter fool. I’m sure she loved you all, the daughters of her heart that she sacrificed so much to have.”

“To gain what?”

“Everything. Not for herself, but for her people, for all the people of Annfwn. To carry on her family’s legacy.”

My heart quaked. I could barely voice the words. “Rayfe—I’m not that.”

His eyes blazed, fiercely dark blue.

“Oh, Andromeda. You will be.”

Mute, I shook my head.

“You want proof?” He tapped the scroll in my other hand. “Uorsin knows it, too.”

“Your men who brought Fiona—they’re the prisoners you asked to have released from Ordnung.”