The Unfinished Song - Book 6: Blood (19 page)

Time circled around on itself in the faery ring. For Dindi, midnight was reaching for dawn, though where on time’s rainbow the moment fell, she couldn’t guess, when she felt a heavy weight slow her down. A new terror, worse than Vessia’s annoyance or Mrigana’s menace, shivered down her back and almost dragged her to the ground with its power. Nothing touched her, physically. It clawed her aura.

The omen could not be ignored. She staggered back, away from the circle, gasping for clean air. By accident, she looked up and saw, upon a turf and stone stairway she had not noticed before, a man watching her greedily.

Xerpen’s lips curled into a smile when her eyes met his.

Xerpen, Xerpen, Xerpen.
His name rang like a curse in her mind. How could she not have seen him standing there, watching? How could she have risked showing her Chromas, her magic, to him, when her only advantage was that he thought she had none? His presence now felt inescapable to her. There was nowhere to hide except the faery circle itself. She darted back into the dance, her steps grown furious.

What had he seen? What did he suspect? What did he know?

Sitting in a lightless corner of the world for years, Xerpen had spun and schemed to weave this moment, this conjoined dance of the High Fae and the Aelfae. Now that it was tangible, unfolding before him, though he still wanted and needed it, he could not but despise and hate it. Not for what it was, but for everything it still wasn’t.

He stood at the top of a stairway of dirt and shale, looking down on the dance he’d planned so long. Typical of fae magic, the structure of the dance was a simple circle, stomped out with bare feet to the unruly beat of drums. The circle of dancers veered this way and that in their gyrations at the edge of the cliff, which dropped off into malodorous black mist. The dance created a halo of light, dimmed by the press of that menace.

The dance bruised his tongue, wrong in taste, too bitter, too sour. The Black Well spoiled the taste of everything, as the tiniest white fuzz spoils a golden globe of cornbread, as a single bud spoils a potato. And yet he must put his nose to the turned milk, guzzle the feast of maggot meat, until the Day when the world would taste clean again.

The High Fae jumbled together, vying for place, petty and jealous. Where others saw grace, he saw greed. Despite their professed horror at what had happened to their Aelfae kin, the High Fae cared only for their own rivalries. To gain their cooperation, he’d been forced to make separate, not always mutually compatible, bargains with each of them.

The Aelfae were cleaner and brighter but not yet as full as they should be. Their light was still too dim. Unsteady. This worried him. An instability quivered at the core of his resurrection spell, a tiny flaw, born of that larger flaw in the world fabric, the cursed wound in the world. The rot. His enemy.

Death, curse her.

He would outpace her. He would cast his thread across the emptiness before the flaw could expand to an unbridgeable chasm, and he would reach that far shore.

Vessia smiled at him and held out her hands, inviting him to join her. Conniving cheat. Not that she remembered how she had betrayed him. But she still did not love him as he loved her. She never had. He had given her everything of himself, but she had always, always, always held back a part of herself to keep to herself, locked away like a flower flash-frozen under a layer of ice. He could behold the perfection of the hue and form, but there was no fragrance.

Curse her, too. He played with the supposition that she
was
his enemy. Was Vessia the Traitor? It would have made things simpler in so many ways. He could transmute his love to hate, and it would lose none of its intensity or purity. But things were seldom so simple. Vessia would never take only love or only hate from him. She had always, greedily, drawn everything from him, his loathing
and
his loving.

One day she would see him with new eyes, in a clear light. She would recognize him as her hero.

Today was not that day.

He did not join the dance of the High Fae and the Aelfae. Indeed, he was not sure he could bear to watch it any longer. Must he stand here, frustrated witness to its imperfection? No….

A new taste touched his tongue.

He coiled the thread of light around his pinkie and licked his finger. The magic was… fresh. Whose?

He did not move; only his eyes followed the thread backward from whence it had darted from the maze of dancers. The familiar bodies, the expected strands of light, in monochrome and polychrome, nothing out of place, nothing in excess of his plan…until his gaze came to rest on a human girl. She had
not
been invited to this dance. She should not, by all rights, even be able to
survive
this dance. All the stranger, then, that she held her own.

The human girl had magic.

How had he not seen it before? How had he looked her in the face and not seen her before?

She was young, almost a child, and far too pretty to be clever. Prettiness and stupidity marched together in humans. For them, experience always resulted in ugliness, as their reality, mortality, stomped over and over on their features, squashing spotless faces into a mash of scars and wrinkles and rotted teeth. As with all young fools, though, she was already meddling in affairs that would ruin her. Her guileless face was betrayed by a sly smile, lips slightly parted. A bit of clown paint from earlier in the day had been inadequately smeared away, leaving a smudge on her cheek and about her eyes. Raw, yet full of sexual need, as human females always were, she flexed her body like a she-cat in first heat. Her hair tumbled freely down her back. Dark hair, she had, burnt umber, except where the dyed tips of those tendrils ended in the color of fire like live coals. She panted as she danced. She had allowed one sleeve of her garment to slide down, to expose the roundness of her shoulder and draw notice to the dip between her breasts. Sweat sparkled in the cleavage. Kicking, she exposed her legs all the way to her thighs. When she whirled, her gown spun upward, goading him to search for the enchantments underneath. Every provocation was artless and artful: perfectly planned spontaneity.

He forced his stare onto her like a weight, as a wrestler pinned down an adversary beneath the whole of his body, willing her to acknowledge his mastery.

She looked up, directly into his eyes. For a moment, their gazes crossed the chasm across a slender cord of mutual defiance. Nothing tainted that bridge of attention. It was pure. She was obsessed with him; he could
taste
it. Unlike Vessia, this maiden feared him. She feared him more than she feared any person or pack or power in Faearth. His body tingled with satisfaction.

She didn’t know it, but she feared him because she desired him. She
believed
she wanted to kill him. He had swallowed the laughably obvious threads of her plan instantly, but it didn’t bother him. The thirst for death, in humans who were drowning in it, was only a plea for resurrection.

Poor little human. Her clay body would not long survive, but by loving him, a part of her would live forever captured in his memory. It was more than she could hope for if she lived out her brutish and stunted mortal life without ever touching him.

In that moment, without greed or conceit, he loved her.

I can save you
, he promised her.
I am your only hope for eternity. And some part of you knows it
.

A hot blush burned her face. She was no ice flower. Coyly, she dropped her lashes to her cheek and hurried her steps in the circle, hiding in the dance, darting behind the other dancers, pretending to herself she could hide from him. She’d offered her body and colors to him, but this knowledge was too frightening for her to admit to herself, so she would pretend she hadn’t. She wanted him to take her, to force her to admit to her own need. He felt enormous tenderness toward her.

He would save her.

The remaining prisoners stirred when a visitor arrived. It was a powerful warrior dressed in green and brown, who ignored everyone except Umbral.

Finnadro. Come to finish what he’d started.

He sauntered into an easy hunter’s crouch in front of Umbral.

“At last, justice catches up with you, Deathsworn.” A tiny smirk fluttered across Finnadro’s otherwise solemn expression. He thought quite well of himself for besting Umbral in a fight, no doubt. Quite confidant Umbral wouldn’t punch him in the face and stomp the nuts off his tree.

Bastard.

“You want to collect your deathdebt from me—I can understand that,” Umbral said calmly, as if this were an abstract matter. “But you don’t have to do it this way: blood for blood. You could earn a handsome ransom from the Deathsworn…”

Finnadro spit in his face. The slime oozed down Umbral’s cheek. It itched.

“When I think of what you did to those men—maybe you don’t remember them—you tortured them to death, but I suppose there have been too many for you to recall the particulars—it makes me inclined to choke you with your own entrails,” Finnadro growled, “which, as I recall, is what you did with the first man we found, the one whose face was so badly burnt we couldn’t even identify him.”

“Since you survived our encounter, some would say you owe me a lifedebt.”

“I was bound with black magic, tied to a tree, flayed alive, and drained of my magic almost to the point of death, but because I managed to survive, you suppose I owe you a lifedebt?”

“When you put it like that, naturally it sounds bad,” Umbral said drily. 

Finnadro put his hand on Umbral’s shoulder. It would have been a friendly, even brotherly gesture, except it was his injured shoulder and hurt like muck all when Finnadro prodded. “You
do
have one chance to attempt to ransom yourself.  I think you know what I want.”

Umbral clenched his teeth into a smile.

“One of the Aelfae is a traitor,” said Finnadro. “I want to know who it is.”

“Look, Finnadro, I think you’re a good man. Or trying to be one. You can put a stop to this before you make a terrible mistake. Why don’t you come with me to Obsidian Mountain. The Elders will make you see what is really at stake.”

Finnadro laughed. “You have gall, Deathsworn. That, I’ll grant.”

“Why are you helping the Aelfae? Why are you helping
Xerpen
?”

“Because
she
wants it.”

“I serve a Lady as well. You should be able to relate.”

“You serve Death.” Finnadro leaned forward, squeezing his shoulder again. “I hate to tell you this, but she screws every one of us. I wouldn’t call that lady-like.”

Umbral gestured with his chin to the other captives. “You hate me. I understand. What about these people? What have
they
done? They’re his
own people
.”

“That’s what proves they deserve it. No War Chief would agree to punish his own if the strong hand of justice did not demand it.”

“You are so blind…”

The blow caught Umbral square in the jaw. Umbral tensed uselessly in his bonds, knowing it wouldn’t end with one punch. He was right. Finnadro socked him hard in the stomach. Since it was impossible to fight back, lashed hand to foot, Umbral concentrated on smothering any sign of weakness. Even that was not entirely successful. When Finnadro cuffed Umbral right on his wounded shoulder, he bellowed his rage.

Finn stopped hitting him. Finnadro had remained calm the entire beating; Umbral had not. A point for Finn.

Bastard.

“Blind?” shrugged Finnadro. “Yes, I was blinded, by the Aelfae traitor who was helping you. I was blind, but now I see. A name, Umbral. Give me the traitor’s name!”

“I shall never aid you.”

Finnadro smiled. He stepped close enough to pat Umbral on a bruised jaw. Another brotherly gesture that turned Umbral’s stomach. A sharp pain followed, an incision of magic, which, like a snake’s bite, was as vast in sting as it was focused in flesh, vicious and venomous. Dizziness rocked him. Umbral fought back. He marshaled his Penumbra to lash out at the fang of Finnadro’s magic. Instead, the fangs doubled, trebled, closed around his throat like jaws, and choked. Agony chewed through him.

“You will obey me,”
Finnadro said, in the voice of Command.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no….

Finnadro had him in a leash. Powerful, pinioning every strand of his Penumbra, every un-color of magic he possessed. It was a knot he could never unravel, never cut, not from the inside. Umbral had been leashed before. He knew. He stirred the venom around his tongue. He hissed and thrashed, but he was helpless, and Finnadro knew it. He stood up, towering over Umbral, who was tied to the ground, to the post, hands to his ankles, a pig for slaughter.

“Don’t worry,” Finnadro said. “I’ll persuade you to do what’s right. In the Blood House.”

The name shivered in the dingy cell. A groan heaved across the other captives, belonging to no one and to all of them.

Finnadro left, but the guards remained, and the moonshadow, sick and cruel, resumed its roach-crawl over the floor. Stone by stone, gleam by unholy gleam, the moon marked the departure of captives through the night. The same drama repeated every time: a flurry of vows, bargaining and begging, anything to try to stay the journey; footsteps, ever fainter; a period of silence filled only by the hooting of owls and crickets.