Dockalfar (60 page)

Other than a means to privacy, Alex took little note of the once beautiful surroundings. He used the gardens as a means to escape the company of the sidhe.

He had no wish to join in their celebrations, or endure the sly looks or the slier comments. He had no wish to deal with Leanan, who would most certainly notice his upset and guess the reason why.

He wanted nothing more than to brood in peace and wallow in a misery that was not of his making.

There was a hurt inside him that cried for appeasement, but he pushed that aside in favor of hate and accusation. Those were the emotions that made the hurt less.

Betrayal! That ate at him the most.

Betrayed by the one thing he held holy and pristine. And thought she might not have been the instigator, he knew, deep down in his soul that she had never once protested.

She who had promised everything to him, who had been closer to him than ever a sister or a brother could have and yet still been his lover had forsaken him for what?

A surreal being from a nightmare/fantasy.

A thing of death. The hurt seeped through past the anger. How could she have been so fickle? To forsake what they had had in favor of another.

And that other – the resentment built to a seething volcano of emotions. The betrayal he felt there was a shock in itself for the assassin certainly held no loyalty to him. But he would have expected a certain honor. A certain rigid stricture of behavior that would have prevented such a thing as stealing another man’s woman.

And then there was that first favor he had wrung out of Dusk. The one that he so conveniently tied in with the second, being to find Victoria. Stay away from her. It had been perfectly clear and perfectly, he had thought, understood.

The favor had been broken. It seemed only fair that the life he had saved to gain it be forfeit. His thoughts fixated on that notion. Get rid of the problem. The temptation. And somehow, Victoria could be won back.

It was morning almost when he decided to act on his black musings. The shadows were long and gray with the first shrouding hints of light leaking in to accentuate them. The fires in the camps around the keep had burnt low or completely out. One could almost hear the riotous snores of ogre’s over the distance.

The sidhe made no such noise in their sleep. The great colonnaded hall he searched first. Many of the court sprawled there, saturated with Seelie wine, sated from the pleasures they had brought with them, since the Seelies were not kind enough to leave servants of their own. He thought the assassin might have been there, given to the court by Azeral to torment.

The night before, Alex had heard, the court had had their way with him. He had heard snatches of their breathless excited hopes that the gift of the Ciagenii might be permanent. The sidhe so prided themselves on stretching a punishment for many years.

Alex could not be so patient in his vengeance. He moved from the hall quietly. Nothing there. He wondered, since Azeral had stolen the Ciagenii’s resistance to magic, if he could track his whereabouts that way. He realized that he had no inkling of Dusk’s personal aura.

No notion what to bait his magical senses with. He had the picture of a face and a form and even those were none too clear.

He stood in the hall outside the great forum and thought.

Misery. Who in all this keep was not a conqueror? Who did not gloat with the smugness of victory? This keep was full of sidhe and their minions and their chosen slaves. If there was misery and pain, and the stirrings of fear, it would only be in the vanquished. He sent out the hounds of his magical senses and searched for that. He searched for hopelessness and hurt. Found the closest in the great hall with the sleeping sidhe. A bendithy slave girl, used badly by her master and his closest cronies. She whimpered in her sleep, curled in the arms of her abusive master. Alex passed her by and searched further. Another slave, beaten for dropping a pitcher of wine on a sidhe. It was surface discomfort only.

And deeper into the keep, a quiet despondency. A dazed, low cresting current of desolation. Images of pain and magic induced torments that went beyond any mere punishment of a clumsy servant.

Alex latched onto the scent and followed its trail. There was a room, flanked by stone arches and low-ceilinged. It boasted a thick wooden door. One of the few doors in this keep with a lock. The lock was nothing for him. He magicked it without conscious thought. There were two sidhe by the door, sprawled on floor, empty wine jugs at their sides. Their weapons were propped against a bench within easy reach, as if any amount of ruckus could rouse them from their wine induced sleep. Still, Alex was not minded to take chances. He went into their unguarded minds with as much ease as Leanan might have once gone into his, and made the sleep a more concrete condition.

Then he turned and peered into the room.

And saw nothing. The shadow and darkness revealed no more than empty walls and the stark lines of the columns built into the walls. He knew better. He was used to the illusion of camouflage.

The magic led him where he wanted to go.

He summoned a sphere of fey light and it hovered over his shoulder patiently as he crouched before a mound of dark cloth.

Bits of dusky flesh showed through the rips and tears of the cloak, which someone had thrown across their victim, almost an afterthought. A great deal of tangled hair obscured all vestiges of a face. The pungent scent of blood was strong, but the cloth and the flesh under it were too dark to show any signs. The chameleon even now. Was it habit or nature? The effort of concealment agitated Alex. It was a rebellion, whether reflexive or not, that he was not inclined to tolerate.

“Stop it,” he whispered. “Who are you hiding from?”

Nothing from the assassin. Alex knew he was aware, at least partially. His mind was too easy to access. Confusion and chaos reigned there. And yes, a desperate need to hide. Alex ground his teeth and repeated his order, backing it with a stab of magical force. The assassin was easier than the dullest of ogres to manipulate.

The reflex died and the colors slowly faded to shades that might have been the night sidhe’s natural tones. Pale skin and hair that held every color of fall, from lightest gold to darkest brown.

“Look at me,” Alex hissed. No response. He grabbed a handful of cloth and hair and jerked the unresisting body upright, slamming it back against the wall.

Chains clinked dully. There was a loose fitting bronze collar about the assassin’s neck, with a chain attached the wall. Bronze fetters imprisoned his wrists behind him. He almost cried out hitting the wall, stifled the impulse and merely pressed his head back and shut his eyes.

For a moment, Alex was stunned into inaction. The lashing had been thorough and time consuming. The skin beneath the cloak, and that cloak must have been a torture in itself over the wounds, was hardly more than raw, striped flesh. Oh, they had been cruel in their devices. The burning had been artful and carefully placed. It had neatly sealed the deeper wounds made by sidhe blades. There were runes carved and burned into flesh.

Runes that Alex could not read, but doubted held more meaning than some bored sidhe’s notion to encrypt his own symbol into living, screaming meat.

Screaming? No. Dusk had not given them the pleasure. Alex tore that memory from a mind incapable of defending itself.

He had not cried out at the torture, or at the other things they had done before they had rendered his flesh unpleasant to look at. Not once and that had enraged them.

A half laugh escaped Alex. “You stupid idiot. If you’d have screamed and begged for their mercy, this might not have been half so bad.”

Nothing. He wondered if Dusk were capable of speech. He thought, in frustration that there was very little he could do to top what had already been done. Death was all he could do, for his mind was not able to contemplate the physical torture that the sidhe gloried in.

He pulled out the ornamental dagger that he wore at his waist. Held it before Dusk’s bloody, abused face.

“You’re going to die without honor,” he whispered. “You broke your word to me. You promised not to touch her.”

The eyes flickered. One was too swollen to open. The other slitted, partially revealing a golden iris. Alex doubted he even knew who it was that addressed him. Who it was that was going to take his life.

“You bastard. You promised me a favor, remember? When I saved your life. I told you to keep away from Victoria.”

“No.” A bare whisper between bruised lips. Alex hardly heard it. The denial enraged him. He lashed out. The assassin crumpled in a heap on the floor.

The back of Alex’s hand was smeared with blood. Alex ignored it. Wrapped his fingers in the tangle of hair and yanked Dusk back up.

“You betrayed your oath to me. She was mine!”

Dusk gasped for air. There was no fear. No fear. “You asked for another. I fulfilled it. I brought her to you – and you did not want her.”

The blackness took over. It filled him with a rage that blinded him to that horrible, unforgivable truth that he had betrayed her first. He slapped Dusk down again and brought the blade to bear with every intention of slicing the assassin’s throat.

He got the breath kicked out of him first. The hard heel of the assassin’s foot shot up and slammed into his jaw. Then again, when he was falling backwards, into his groin. Pain exploded upwards. A hot, stabbing ache that momentarily stole his senses. He came back to himself with the self-incriminating knowledge that he had been a fool to think this creature defenseless. The sidhe could never have done what they had to him without magic sapping his will to resist.

With a vengeful stab he drove into Dusk’s mind and shut off the defensive mechanism. The assassin slumped out of his tense crouch with a small, despairing sob. He stared at Alex balefully. Alex touched the blade to the skin at his throat.

“I’ll make her forget you ever were.”

Dusk shivered. Alex felt it under the blade.

“You can,” the assassin whispered. “She still loves you, but she despises what you have become.”

Alex blinked at him. At that twisted revelation. It was not what he had expected. “And what have I become?” he sneered, letting the blade bite into skin.

New blood welled.

Dusk shut his eyes. “Like them.”

He was tempted, in indignant denial, to slash the blade across skin and be done with it. Some bit of weakness held him back.

“Do it,” Dusk said. “It will matter naught. Azeral can bring the body back, for he holds the soul.”

And that was the root of the misery.

That, Alex realized, was what held the assassin immobile when he might have fled this torment. Regardless of treatment, he was his master’s creature. There was no fight when someone else held the strings on your soul. And yet he had defied Azeral… the very ethics that made him Ciagenii, for Victoria. Why? It made no sense, when he knew very well that there was no escape from Azeral. There was absolutely no escape. It was tantamount to a death wish… or with this bunch, a wish for eternal torment. Eternal debasement and pain.

Rather suddenly, it occurred to Alex that Dusk might not have been the instigator in the treacherous union between him and Victoria. It occurred to him that one did not blithely go about the mechanisms of one’s own destruction without a passing doubt or two. It was incomprehensible, knowing what the consequences would be, that Dusk would actively pursue any woman, much less Victoria.

He sat back on his heels, frowning darkly at the assassin. It was disconcerting, and strange to think of it, but he was beginning to get the notion that his Victoria, his sweet, innocent Victoria, had gone after Dusk.

His sweet Victoria, if he remembered correctly, had almost fried him and Leanan
and
Azeral. She had developed claws that he never knew existed. He was intrigued by the thought of her with power.

Power to equal Azeral. Power that had the Unseelie court waging war to possess or destroy. Victoria with that power was going to be absolutely hell to win over.

Unless one had a lever to use against her.

He sheathed his blade suddenly and released his magical tether on Dusk. The assassin did not move. Just stared at him expectantly. Alex pushed to his feet, forgetting him as him thoughts whirled to other plans. There were things that needed to be done. A mind set that he needed to convince himself of before he dared approach Azeral.

~~~

Azeral stood alone in Ashara’s council chamber. The rising sun was a faceted explosion of lights on the many-paned glass wall. The room felt of her.

Her essence was strong in it. Not so many days ago, he thought, she had stood on the very same spot he did. Her fingers had touched the glass and her breath fogged its surface. He sighed and leaned his forehead against the cool pane. The dream and its after effects still fatigued him. His body ached from the pain. He was unclear if was self -inflicted or came from some other source. He was, as always, unclear afterwards. Like a dream the clarity of it faded with wakeful contemplation. He hated the weakness. The lack of control over his own mental workings.

He would wonder later, if the human chose this time to petition him, somehow knowing of his weariness, or whether it was mere chance that led him to Azeral when his defenses were down.

Nonetheless, Alex encroached upon his solitude, somber and intense. He stood a few paces away, quietly, respectfully, waiting to be recognized.

After a moment, Azeral sighed and turned to him. “What is it you wish?”

“Nothing of any value to you in exchange for something of great value.”

Azeral lifted one brow, too tired for riddles. He carelessly probed the boy’s thoughts. Found them filled with images of Victoria. Yearning for Victoria. Hurt over Victoria. Victoria. Victoria. Azeral pulled out, a bit taken aback by the intensity of the desire. She was overwhelming, even in memory. He looked sternly at Alex and bade him continue.

“You would have had her, you know,” Alex accused. “She came to you willingly, but you turned her against you by what you and Leanan did to me. She came to find ‘me’ and what she found was your daughter’s puppet and she couldn’t handle it. It’s your own fault.”