Vengeance of Dragons (Secret Texts) (37 page)

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Authors: Holly Lisle

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BOOK: Vengeance of Dragons (Secret Texts)
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He took another step toward her.
And she walked into his arms and whispered, “Yes.”
Their bodies pressed against each other, her skin against the silk of his shirt, the leather of his pants. Their cheeks touched, and their hands twined together. They moved slowly, spinning around to the faint, sensual beat of the tala drums that rose through the wood-plank floor.
The dance was the dance of her dreams, though this time her feet touched the ground. They moved together surely, confidently, knowing when to step, how to turn, as if this were the hundredth time they had danced this way instead of the first. Perhaps her dreams and his dreams had been real, and it truly was.
They stepped and turned, stepped and turned, gliding left, spinning right. His warmth surrounded her. She pressed her face against his chest, liking the broad expanse of hard, flat muscle. She inhaled his scent—musk and spices, heat and hunger. They danced that way for a while, and then he kissed her once, lightly, at the point where neck and shoulder met.
She shivered, but not from the cold. She slipped one hand free from his and with it undid the laces of his shirt while the two of them kept dancing. Leaned close and kissed the hollow of his throat, and he made a sound halfway between a purr and a growl. Freed her other hand and slid both arms around his waist, and pulled the tail of his shirt loose from his pants, and let both hands wander beneath the shirt, stroking the lean, hard muscles of his back, discovering the heat and texture of his skin, the soft triangle of silky fur between his shoulders at the base of his neck.
His hands in the meantime settled on her bare shoulders and slowly, slowly stroked down either side of her spine to the small of her back.
She lifted Ry’s shirt over his head and let it drop to the floor. They danced skin to skin as they had in the dreams, the fullness of her breasts pressed hard against the furred breadth of his chest.
In the tavern below, the beat of the talas quickened.
She fumbled with the buckle of his belt, and he moved one hand from her back to release it with a short, impatient tug. He loosed the laces of his pants, too, but then returned his hand to her back. She got his message—he would go so far on his own, but no farther. She would have to show him she wanted him.
Her heart pounded and her blood burned. In the dreams, they had only danced, but she wanted more than dancing. She wanted him, wanted to take him as her lover—wanted to meld with him, to complete herself.
She stopped dancing and tugged his pants down. He kicked off his boots, stepped out of pants and underclothes. Waited. The beat of the drums, resonating through the floor, mimicked the racing of her heart.
He kicked his clothes out of the way, then enfolded her hands in his and began to dance with her again. They moved slowly, sensuously, skin against silken skin, heat to heat, kissing lightly, nipping and biting, dragging fingernails down backs, always spinning close and then stepping apart, then pulling together again, tighter than before.
At last they danced their way into a corner, and Ry stopped. “Now,” he said.
And she said, “Now.”
He stepped in closer and caught her around the waist and lifted her up, and pressed her back to the wall. She locked her legs around his hips. And as the tala drums died away to silence, they danced another, older dance.

 

Chapter
38
H
asmal began to sense the wrongness of the night even before Kait leaped from the tower. He’d carried that gut-wrenching premonition of pending disaster with him while he watched her fall and when he and Dùghall lashed out at Ry for insisting she lived. While he and Dùghall knelt on the floor of the common room, saying the offices for a dead Falcon—for though Kait had not taken the oaths of the Falcons, and though she had not yet learned all the secrets, both of them agreed that she had been a Falcon in truth—that sense of doom had grown worse.
The sense of wrongness had become an inescapable horror as the night progressed, until Hasmal asked Dùghall if he felt it, too.
“Of course I feel it,” Dùghall had snapped. “She’s dead, and lost to us forever. How could I not feel it?”
But Hasmal wasn’t convinced that his grief over Kait’s death was the demon that rode him.
Ian joined them for the final prayers, and Hasmal wished he would go away. In normal circumstances he would have been pleased to share the burden of praying a soul safely through the Veil—in normal circumstances, it was a burden best shouldered by as many as would willingly assume the task. But the presence of even such allies as Ian grated on him like a rasp on bare bone. The night felt like it would never become dawn.
When Yanth burst into the room in the midst of their prayers, grinning like an idiot, and Ry stepped in behind him holding Kait’s hand, Hasmal had looked at his clearly unharmed friend and had been unable to find any joy inside himself at the indubitable proof of her survival. He cared about her; she was a dear confidante and a trusted colleague; and
still
the fact that she lived couldn’t even begin to penetrate the haze of dread that gripped him.
Ry stood staring at him and Dùghall and Ian, his face bewildered. “She’s alive, you asses,” he said. “You can put aside your mourning clothes and leave your prayers for someone who needs them. She’s
alive
.”
Dùghall rose, looking old and stiff and bent, and walked over to Kait, a false smile on his face, and embraced her the way a polite man embraces the confused stranger who insists he is a dear friend of years past. “You’re a sight for hurting hearts,” he said. But Hasmal heard in the old man’s voice the same pain he felt in his own soul. The entire universe vibrated like strings tuned off key.
Kait frowned and turned to Ry and said, “You said they didn’t believe you when you told them I was alive, but I’d think they didn’t believe
me
.”
Ry put one arm around her shoulders in a protective gesture and said, “I don’t know what’s the matter with them. But you have me.”
“I do,” she said, and turned into his arms and kissed him.
Ian looked like she had slapped him, and Hasmal felt the man reverberate with an echo of the night’s wrongness. Ian stared at Kait with eyes gone flat and hard and cold, and said, “You’ve chosen, then.”
She swallowed and nodded. “It isn’t as if . . . I don’t want you to be . . . happy or . . .” Her voice trailed off and she shook her head. “Yes. I have. I’ve chosen. I’m sorry, Ian—I truly am.”
His hand moved to his sword, seemingly on its own, and Hasmal braced himself for sudden violence. But Ian only fingered the sword’s pommel and said, “You need not apologize to me. You were always free to take the path you desired. I had hoped I would be on that path, but I wouldn’t want to spend my life with someone who didn’t love me, no matter how much I loved her.” His whole face tightened, and he looked at Ry. “I wish you every happiness. Brother.” That was said in a voice Hasmal would have reserved for cursing enemies into Iberan hell.
Then Ian stalked from the room, his movements angry and his back stiff.
And Hasmal thought perhaps
that
was the heart of the despair that clutched at his heart, but no—the wrongness of Ian’s fury was a single grain of sand on an infinite beach compared to the hollow, foul fear that gripped Hasmal. He said, “Kait, your return brings me great joy, but I’m exhausted. Dùghall and I have been praying and performing the Falcons’ last offices since we thought you died.” He hugged her and kissed both her cheeks. “I’ll be more able to show my happiness after I’ve had some sleep, and more eager then to hear how you survived what I thought was a terrible fall.”
Dùghall nodded. “As will I. Dear girl, you’ve twice returned to me from the dead, and I am overjoyed. And after sleep and the morrow’s late breakfast, we’ll celebrate.”
When everyone had left but Dùghall, though, Hasmal said, “Something weighs on my soul tonight. Some part of the universe has gone astray. I’m sick at heart, and I don’t know why.”
Dùghall said, “As am I. I fear, and don’t know what frightens me. We must find peace. Sit with me, and we’ll go to the Reborn.”
Hasmal dropped cross-legged to the floor and released his shields. The darkness inside didn’t leave him. When Dùghall got into position, both men closed their eyes and began spinning out the delicate tendril of soul-stuff that would connect them to the Reborn. But this time, the magic didn’t work.
Hasmal struggled to put his whole concentration into his meditation; he cleared his mind and breathed slowly and focused on the still center and on the clear bell-pure ringing that was the sound at the heart of the universe, and even when he held those things inside of him and his mind was still as motionless water, he could not reach the Reborn.
Dùghall’s voice broke his meditation. The old man’s voice shook as he whispered, “We must offer our blood.”
They brought out blood-bowl and thorns and tourniquet, and spilled their blood into the silvered surface, and said the
He’ie abojan,
the prayer of those who waited in the long darkness. They summoned the magic that would connect them to Solander. And they waited. The blood in the bowl lay untouched. No radiant fire burned through it, building the bridge between the Reborn and his Falcons. No warmth flowed from it, no energy filled Hasmal, no love touched him. Where he had once felt the reborn hope of the world, the fount of joy, now he felt . . . emptiness.
He prayed harder. He pushed harder. His body stiffened and his breathing grew rough. He felt tears beginning to leak from the corners of his eyes; he tasted their salt burning at the back of his throat. Finally he opened his eyes and stared down at the blood-bowl, at the dark puddle congealing in its center. He touched Dùghall, who opened his eyes. Dùghall, too, had been crying.
“He’s gone.”
“I know.” The old man nodded, and his suddenly haggard face looked ancient.
“Where has he gone? Why can’t we find him?”
Dùghall wiped roughly at his eyes with a sleeve, then looked down at his hands. “We’ve lost, Has. We’ve lost everything, and the Dragons have won. Solander is dead.”
“No,” Hasmal said, but he knew it was true. Some part of him had known from the moment it happened that the Reborn had been taken from them. Stolen. Murdered. He couldn’t understand how such a nightmare could come to pass, but he knew that it had. “None of the prophecies ever hinted that this could happen,” he said. “Nowhere did Vincalis give an indication that the Reborn would be in danger when he returned. Solander was promised to us. Promised. How could this . . . ?”
But Dùghall waved him off, wearily. “How doesn’t matter, son. Why doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that the Reborn is dead, and the Falcons are dead with him. The Dragons have won.”
The Falcons were dead. The hope of the world was dead. The promise of a great civilization that spanned the world, that rose above war and evil, that based itself on love and peace and joy—all of that, too, had been murdered with a distant babe, while a thousand years of faithful, patient prayer and offered blood became as nothing.
Solander was dead. Hasmal rose, wondering how the world could even continue to exist. He plodded to the room he shared with Ian, stripped off his clothes and let them drop to the floor, crawled into his narrow bed, closed his eyes, and wished himself into oblivion. If he did not wake to greet the new day, he would consider himself no worse off than he was already.

 

Chapter
39
W
hen morning came, it announced itself only as a slight lessening of the night’s darkness. Kait shifted in Ry’s arms, listened to the drumming of a downpour against the inn’s shutters, and considered going back to sleep. But she felt surprisingly good. She’d Shifted the night before, she’d had nothing to eat afterward, and because she had spent the night in Ry’s arms she had only had a little sleep, yet she suffered neither the exhaustion nor the depression that always plagued her post-Shift.
She rolled over and kissed Ry’s neck, and bit him lightly. “Wake up. Let’s do something.”
“We were doing something,” he murmured, his muffled voice sounding eminently reasonable. “We were sleeping.”
“I know. But I want to do something more interesting. Let’s go out and get something to eat.”
“It’s pouring rain. The streets are knee-deep in water—listen. You can hear the roar of it running down to the bay. Let’s sleep.”
“Don’t be dull. I feel too good to stay in bed.”
Ry raised his head and grinned at her. “My beautiful love—if you insist on being awake, at least I can think of things we could do without getting out of bed.”
“We can do those things, too.” She leaned over and nibbled on the lobe of his ear. “And
then
we can go get something to eat. I’m ravenous.”
He flopped back on the pillow and sighed. “How ravenous are you?”
“I Shifted last night and I’ve had nothing to eat since.”
“
That
ravenous. Oh.” Ry jumped out of the bed and began pulling on pants, shirt, and boots without another word. He made his haste intentionally comical, and Kait laughed appreciatively, but the fact that he responded immediately underscored something about their relationship that Kait had never experienced before. She was with someone who understood. Who knew what it was to be Karnee; who had felt the madness of Shift racing through his own flesh; who knew the hunger that followed as intimately as she did.

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