Dockalfar (13 page)

The clouds were mostly dissipated and the sky was working towards what would most likely be an unearthly sunrise of surpassing beauty, when the assassin jerked up as if someone had flicked a switch. He clawed himself out of the mud and swung around in such befuddlement that Victoria almost felt sorry for him. He was in sorrier shape than she, who had gone to some effort while she sat watch over him to clean herself up with what water that puddled atop the mud. The front side of him was caked with dried mud, the back half with wet clinging clumps of it. It dripped from his hair and his cloak. He realized it even before he realized she was just a few feet away. He held out his arms and made a disgusted face as the mud-laden material dragged down. He looked perilously ungraceful and not at all beautiful. The two combined made Victoria rather happy.

“A bit of a mess, no?” she inquired.

He spun, flinging tiny clods of loose dirt and mud. She giggled. She could not help it. His eyes were gleaming agate, staring at her surrounded by dirty flesh. If it hadn’t been for the dirt, she thought she might have actually seen an honest expression of emotion on his face.

“I don’t suppose,” she suggested carefully, “that you would consider just letting me walk away, now that you’re up and about? It would only be fair considering I sat here all night keeping those rat things from eating you.”

He looked around, spotted the patiently waiting shapes in the morning shadows, then swung back around to her.

Mud or no, he really did look disgruntled.

He sat down suddenly, as if his legs had given out, staring pointedly at the ground between his feet. Victoria blinked at him in surprise.

“Well?” she prompted. “If you want to be blunt, I probably saved your life. You would think I’d deserve a little gratitude.”

His head snapped up and he glared at her. She got the distinct feeling he would rather she had not gone to the trouble.

“I do not need this.” She barely heard him murmur. He seemed very upset. She supposed a knock on the head might do that. She got up, carefully wiped flaked mud from her gown. It was ruined. She might as well be running about naked for all the protection it offered. She folded her arms across her breasts and stared down at him.

“Neither do I. And I asked for none of it, I remind you.”

She marched down the low point of the gully, not bothering with the indignity of trying to climb the steep slope. She heard running water and had every intention of finding it and immersing herself into it. She heard Dusk follow. She actually heard him. The rough sound of drying mud rubbing against dry mud. The brittle cracks as it flaked off of him. He caught up with her. She did not bother to glance at him. He did not dare to touch her.

She found the stream. Swollen to twice its normal size no doubt, but still not overly large or swift. She waded right into it, stopping in the middle where it reached her chest. She submerged, scrubbing at her hair, letting the clean water take away the filth. She came up gasping. Dusk was standing at the bank, eyeing the surroundings suspiciously. There was relatively little cover. Just a line of hills to the east and a gentle slope of grassy plain before them. There was no telling what lived under the hills. She did not care. She ignored the thought just as she ignored the assassin.

She came out dripping and clean and holding the night gown away from her flesh for modesty’s sake. She sat down on grass that was mostly dry and brought her knees up to her chest. Dusk stared at her.

She indicated the stream. “Don’t let me stop you. You’re filthier than I was.”

After a moment, he shook his head.

“Up. We need to move.” She sighed, finding him insufferable. “Are you sure you don’t want to wash the dirt off? You make a terrible amount of noise when you move because of it?”

He blinked at her, then looked down at himself.

“I’ll sit right here. I promise,” she told him. “We both know you can outrun me if I try to escape.”

He thought that over and apparently found merit in her statements. He walked a good pace away from her and squatted by the bank. Carefully he began extracting weapons from his person. Most of them were out of her vision. They were all of some dark, dull metal. Not iron, she thought. Weren’t the fey folk supposed to be deadly allergic to iron? He took off the cloak finally, and waded into the stream trailing it behind him. He was very particular in his treatment of it. She knew very well, that most of his attention was on her though. As if she would make a break for his stash of weapons. She pretended to gaze somewhere else. He ducked his head quickly, taking less effort with hair and skin than with cloak. He came out soaking and dark, slimmer than one might have thought with tunic and pants clinging to his body and no cloak to hide it. Slim-hipped and long-legged, with a pleasing broadening of muscle and bone at shoulders and chest. Wet hair spilled almost to his waist. He was too easy to look at, she thought sourly. Too entirely well-made for comfort. It was hard to despise something that made you catch your breath and stare. And him so unconscious of it.

He was washing his weapons in the stream, cloak spread out on the grass beside him. She gave up the illusion of looking elsewhere. Yes, she decided. One could hate something one found enjoyable to look at. It was a conjecture purely connected with the new side of her. She lay back on her elbows and behind the cover of her body, waved a finger in rhythm to some inner music. A tiny point of light glowed at her nail, then split to dance apart from it. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. She grinned down at it, remembering the tricks Aloe had dazzled her with. So easy. So very easy. It was a matter of the right frame of mind to find the power within. She let the light dance, keeping it close to her shielded hand.

When the assassin stood up, cloak folded over his arm, she snuffed it with a flick of a finger. She smiled up at him, truly aware of what filled her. It was vaguely wicked, the sensation. A power that made her not quite human.

She held out a hand for help up. Almost hesitantly he gave it to her. She prolonged the touch, still staring at him. He pulled away, not meeting her eyes.

“So where shall we go?” she asked. “Back to the forest?”

“North,” he said, uncertainty underlay his tone. Not for the direction. No, he knew where he wanted to go. Perhaps he was beginning to suspect that she was not quite what she had been.

Let him be uncertain. She for the first time in quite a while, was not. She had taken the first step to mastering a power she did not understand. He was an assassin, whose intent was not to kill her.

He was out of his element. Short of killing her, which he apparently would not do, how could he stop her? If he wanted to go back to the forest, that was fine. The fairies were in the forest. And it was the fairies that had caused her strange power to surface. They could help her learn to understand it. They could dance with her.

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There was a particular sense of migration the moment dusk fell and turned the day’s light into darker stranger shades.

Candles and torches seemed to light on their own in some halls, and there were places that glowed of their own accord with no benefit of artificial light. If the sidhe were predatory and watchful during the day, then they were avatars of enchantment and seduction once the sun took its warming rays back unto itself.

One and all they gathered for the Feast. They flocked to it with eagerness that left the servants wary and flustered.

Those servants that could stay safely hidden away in their cubby holes did so with relief. Those that had to serve the high lords at Feast did so with barely contained dread.

Alex followed Leanan through the shadowed halls into the depths of the keep to the mammoth chamber called the hall of Leath. It was second only to Azeral’s throne room, she informed him. It seemed to go on forever. Its ceiling rose to infinity, its walls curved and bent and were thickly cut with carvings. The carvings depicted a lurid array of situations and creatures. A great table sat the length of the room and seated the whole of the sidhe court. There were more than a hundred silken heads about it, adorned like birds of paradise, their voices like music. Bendithy and Gnomish servants scurried around the table, laden with trays and pitchers. The aroma of meat filled the room. Several hearths lined one wall and animals of some type turned on spits. The bendithy carved thick slices and piled them on silver trays to distribute about the table.

Alex gaped at the barbarous feast. At such elegant creatures grabbing for heaped food, spilling rich wine. Laughing with abandon, some touching or exchanging food and drink. Some embracing flagrantly against the table. Leanan pulled him past a female straddling a pale-haired male, her hands twined in his hair, her lips hungrily devouring his. She looked up at him, not stopping what she was doing, and her eyes offered open invitation. Alex could not tear his own gaze away. Leanan urged him on, humoring him with a smile.

Then there was Azeral, at the head of the table. Leanan sat him down in the seat to Azeral’s left, a place of honor. She took the seat next to him. Azeral nibbled on a spear of fruit, his eyes wandered leisurely about the room. Alex could not stop staring at him. He radiated charisma and power. A bendithy poured him wine and Leanan guided his hand to the goblet, encouraging him to take it up. The wine was like nothing he had ever tasted. Sweet beyond belief, but sharp enough to leave a tingling trace of fire down his throat. He downed it, and picked at various foods for lack of anything better to do. Azeral ignored him, while Leanan occupied herself with her goblet and her serene observation of the court. Alex wanted to blurt out a dozen questions, but he could not bring himself to intrude in the high lord’s contemplation. He could not bring attention to himself.

Azeral’s voice startled him. It was almost inside his head in its perfect clarity. “Does my keep please you?”

“It’s – unusual. Beautiful.” More wine from a observant servant. He swallowed it selfconsciously – there were more than two sets of eyes on him.

The conversation lulled. Everyone watched, as though he were enacting a play.

“So it is.” Azeral’s lips pulled back in a lazy smile. “Have you found comfort?”

Alex nodded dumbly, forgetting his lines. Everyone else seemed so versed in theirs.

“Has my daughter made a competent guide?”

He looked to Leanan, whose lips were turned up at the corners and whose eyes sparkled in amusement.

“Yes,” he said, in a small voice.

Azeral sat back, pleased. “Good. You may ask me a question.”

Alex blinked at him, looked around him at the avid faces that would never need paint or enhancement.

“Why am I here?” He formed each word slowly, deliberately, feeling the wine in his blood. It made his lips feel heavy and his tongue too sensitive. Azeral leaned forward, one elbow on the table, his silken curls fell over his shoulder, bound back by a circlet of gold above his brows. Alex leaned back as far as he could, invaded by those brilliant blue eyes.

“Have you ever heard of us? Of sidhe or any of the lesser ones. Ogres, trolls, goblins, elves?”

“Bedtime stories, fairy tales,” Alex answered truthfully.

“Legends?” Azeral suggested.

“Superstitions? Shall I tell you of other legends your kind pass? Troy. Olympus. Uthor Pendragon and his lot. Tir-Nan-Og?” he lifted a finely shaped brow.

“How easy it is for the folk of your world to relegate the unexplainable to legend and superstition. There is nothing of magic that exists in your world today, nothing that can survive the mass disbelief. There was a time when your folk were simpler and younger and magic thrived. Before your world became infested with iron and science. Science kills magic, you see. The need for information and explanation banishes the mystic. You’ve managed to wipe the irrational from the face of your world. Oh, there are still things there. Things that do not feed on magic, that thrive on the dark absence of it. Occult things, you might call them. But they cannot use the magic.

“And the magic, Alex… the magic needs to be used. There’s a balance, you see, between magic and science. Science in the realm of the norm. Magic is relegated to the gifted. It’s in your world. It’s always been in your world, waiting to be used. It’s not a dormant thing. It’s vibrant and alive. It needs to be used or it builds and builds and the pressure becomes unbearable. It affects things around it. It coils in men’s minds like tension. It’s like a storm brewing, but never releasing its power. It’s an irritation and a friction. It disrupts order. How many wars have your folk fought over little acts of frustration, of tension built to a breaking point? More than you think, I assure you. And quite honestly, your world has forsaken its belief in ours and so infested itself with iron that I really shouldn’t care what you do to yourselves in your neglect of magic, but for one thing….” He paused, taking a leisurely sip of wine. Alex drew a great gulp of air and stared wide eyed.

“One thing,” Azeral continued. “The magic is bleeding into our realm. It has festered and grown to such a degree that it is leaking into my world and disturbing the channels of power here. It contaminates the pure magic of this realm. It creates violence where there was none. It disturbs the balance and that I will not have.”

There was a murmur of assent around the table. The servants were quiet and huddled near the firepits. Alex felt too lightheaded and shaky to fully comprehend what he was being told. God, if someone had sat across from him back home and told his this, he would have smiled indulgently and considered the man a candidate for mental counseling. Here, there was no choice but to believe. It occurred to him that his initial question had not been answered. He opened his mouth to voice the opinion but Azeral cut him off with a wave of one slender hand.

“If I could use this power, if anything in this world could use the power of yours, it would gladly be done to relieve the pressure and alleviate the tension in both realms, but I cannot. Nothing not of your realm can use power born of your realm. Only a channel born of the same soil as the magic itself can be receptive to it. I need a human being to channel this intruding power. I need you.”