Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) (16 page)

S
MASH
!

A sparkling fantasia appears before her. Fractured looking-glasses, drifts of diamonds, and mist float around her. Tinkles, shattering groans, and percussive bursts of frozen stone exploding from pressure make an obstreperous song. Is she in some great crystal machine? What is this ether reek? A stink of minerals, salts, and purity—a mineral spring without the heat
.

’Tis the smell of the beast, Sangloris’s buzzing voice tells her. The beast? Then she spots a fragmented line of mirrors moving in the bedlam. A crackling slit shows a beautiful sphere of quartz with an accrual of sapphire-blue crystals at its center. The mirror line moves again, casting glitter and frost, and closes over the immense sphere. Suddenly, hysterical with panic, Lila grasps what it is she beholds: an eye. An impossible riddle: What has an eye as large as a moon? What more of this coiled thing lurks in the vaporous streams of ice and floating crystal? She knows it moves through the inconceivable reaches of this underground cavern like a water snake, but this serpent is immeasurably large. By Sangloris’s oracular magik, she knows, too, the serpent’s name, and speaks it: “Nifhalheim.”

Speaking the elemental’s name ends her journey. In a blink, she is bobbing once more, rigid and dead, in a black and watery grave
.

“You must share what you have seen,” says Sangloris’s spirit. “Since you continue to choose the illusion of weakness, tell my wife, Elissandra Donanach, who has traded the Iron Wall for Eod’s ivory one, what to do. No matter the inner circle, she provides her wisdom to this war. She is strong; she will guide the king. I cannot reach her, my fair daughter of the moon. My spirit cannot pierce the strange new shield of Eod so that I might say goodbye. Tell her that I love her. Give my children the kiss I cannot. You are to be our goodbye. Go forth, glass woman, and stir the world with change. You do not see how fierce your storm of fire can be, how cleansing. I warn you against straying from this path. An errant step and you will ruin more than Menos. You will ruin life, all life—here, and throughout the tree of stars…” Sangloris’s warning echoes, and then begins to fade. “Fire against frost…Element to element…Mother to seer…Brother to brother…This is how it must be…”

Silence swallows Lila, silence that throbs with emptiness
.

Lila took the longest breath of her life, an inverse scream; it was as if magik had suddenly revived a heart and lungs stilled by death. Sister Abagail was shaking her, shouting at her to release the body of the dead Master of Mysteries and pleading for Lila to explain why she was soaking wet and burning cold.

Lila couldn’t answer, for nothing in life made sense at the moment. The memory seemed as staggering to consider as the monster of ice that slept in the North. An elemental
; the
elemental force of ice. She remembered the vision of its twisting, glittering lunacy. She remembered that Sangloris had charged her to find Elissandra—possibly tempting death at Magnus’s hands. That didn’t matter. For she needed to return to Eod, find Elissandra, and tell her how to stop the world from ending.

IV

Rather drunk, and further blurred by anger, Erik struggled to find Lila in the dim, unlit room. He had only the thin veins of a red dawn by which to see. However, after a moment, Lila’s tawny, naked flesh gave off an artful shimmer. She sat upon their bed, her back turned to him. She seemed to be shuddering and rocking herself. Alarmingly, the room looked as if it had been torn apart: chairs had been tipped, their meager set of dishes shattered. Erik relaxed after he’d scanned the room and confirmed that no men had taken cover in its shadows. It was only Lila who had done this, then. After bolting the door, Erik rushed toward her.

“We have a problem,” he said, and wondered if her distress meant that she already knew.

Circling the bed, he came and knelt before his partner in sin. She looked unhealthy; her olive-and-gold complexion had taken on a greenish hue, as if she were oxidizing copper. She shivered, refusing to look at him. A cold, damp towel lay discarded at her feet. Whimpers and watery eyes expressed her barely contained turmoil. “Lila?” he asked quietly.

They were not lovers; they were prisoners sharing the same sentence. Still, the broken hammer rose, sat on the bed, and put his warm, strong arm around the fallen queen. She must have bathed recently, and her honey-apple smell—and the whiskey in his veins—inclined Erik to a kindness out
of keeping with the rough-and-tumble persona he’d adopted. Somewhere in the thick mists of his feelings, he heard musical notes, the melody of his early love for her. Songs of her incredible strength, but also of her frailty. A woman like a glass nightingale in a cage of the hardest steel; a woman who challenged the world with her beliefs, and at the same time became trapped by her hubris. Perhaps Lila had also found that woman again, if only for an instant, for she fell apart in his arms. She broke down, shuddering and weeping.

“You are not a weak woman,” declared Erik, after she’d wet enough of his tunic with her tears. She stiffened up and pulled away a little, though she remained within the circle of his embrace. “Have you heard, then?”

“Heard?” She sniffled.

“I’ve been recognized. One of the aldermen. At the gambling house where I sometimes work, he saw me and called me by name. I denied it, of course. I would have thought a man his age would have brains like porridge, and yet…We should leave Carthac. I do not believe we shall be safe here anymore. Word will get back to Magnus, somehow. I haven’t thought of where…” Erik paused, and images of a cool white tundra, swept with snow and bitter winds, charmed a smile out of him; it was a memory of their voyage near the Northlands. He spoke again, stirred by wistfulness. “Perhaps we could go to a place where men are too focused on warring with the elements to worry over war itself. We could go north. To a place where we would never be found, where you would no longer be a queen—and where I would no longer be a man who has lost his honor. We could be whomever we wanted. New people…not prisoners chained by our cultures and our pride, or sycophants bespelled by the charisma of an Immortal. I love my Kingfather, I always shall…But you and I both know that loving Magnus is not a choice. Why must we tie ourselves to his heart—a heart that beats strongest and truest for his brother? Why must we forgive him, forgive them? Why can we not love whom we choose? Possibly even—” He froze and stared at the woman of gold sitting beside him.

The question would not be answered; it hung there between them, its scope as deep as the wounded devotion they shared. Nothing could be clearer in that moment: he had followed her into doom, and she had
wallowed with him in depravity. Their carnal suffering and sadism were another shade of love: a blacker one, forged in pain and blood.

Was it as the spirit of Sangloris had said?
wondered Lila. Could guilt created by monstrous acts outside one’s control—earthquakes, war, the damage done while she’d lost herself—be a distraction from following one’s purpose in life? The purpose of life…What could that be? A mystery too grand to apprehend, and yet…

A revelation pulled at their souls, their flesh. She and Erik drew nearer. She saw Erik’s scars—not merely the ones on his cheeks and on the sculpted, frowning lips that infrequently kissed her, but ones caused by wounds that bled deeper: his imperfections, his longings, the honor with which he fought. She wanted to apologize or confess an enormous secret. Then a weight of emotion that felt like a tangle of nettles, broken swords, and clotted darkness—the
poison
that they’d drunk together—forced itself from her body in a heave. “Erik, I…”

“Lila…” he said, and his hands were upon her. He touched her face, as he had that first forbidden time in the stables in Eod. “We can go tonight. We can catch a ship and sail north. We can forget Kings, our twisted vassalage, and wars. In time, the cold will make us numb to our memories of the Iron Valley and what we did. War and despair harm what is good in us. You told me that. You warned me and I followed you. I cannot blame you for where I have chosen to go, for where I shall always choose to go.”

Torn between weeping and laughing, Lila trembled. Erik’s entreaty, backed by the force of his black gaze, inspired a fierce yearning in her—to give in wholly to his suggestion, roam white nothingness, forget who they were, and choose who they would be. His appeal was as powerful as one of Magnus’s spells—more powerful, even, as Erik’s was a magik she had chosen to be bewitched by. However, fate demanded that she be strong, that she be the fire of change once more. At first, Sangloris’s speech had ruined her with its pressure and expectation of what must be done. She’d fled the basilica, tried to scald the vision from her body in the hottest bath she could fill. Then she had agonized—catatonically, rocking like a madwoman on her bed—over the spirit’s dire words. And here, now, as always, was Erik: when she most needed the strength and surety of a weapon, he shone as her sword. At last he had stripped off the wicked armor each had
donned, baring himself, his feelings, and the desire to serve and protect her. He was a flame that would never die.

“Your patience is my greatest strength,” she said, touching the hands that cupped her head. “We shall go north. To start again.”

The huge, dark, often terrifying man wore a desperate, starved expression. In a sense, he had been deprived. Lila’s golden touch, her amber stare that beheld him with awe, was a feast for his soul. “Do you mean it?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Creeping closer, with the utmost hesitation, the two glass creatures grazed noses then brushed their cheeks together. Finally, each found the warm sanctuary of the other’s mouth, kissing with a sigh. It was a kiss exchanged between the most intimate strangers: people who had known the darkness and ugliness of each other before tasting any of the other’s light. Hands groped, bodies rubbed, and they tumbled onto the bed, blind with passion. A careful lust, a cautious lust, now that they knew it might mean something other than escape from the world. Erik kissed tender trails down her golden neck, but Lila stopped him, raising his panting face to hers.

“I must tell you something.”

“Do you want me to stop?” The calloused wave of his hand paused its roll over her flesh.

“No,” she replied.

“Do you doubt…”

Your passion, your truth, your commitment? Never
. She’d broken this man so often that he could not tell whether fist or kiss would come from her next. No more punches, she decided, and kissed his cheek, then placed her arms around his broad back. Confused, though submitting to the pleasure, Erik rolled on the squeaking mattress and held her, too. After sands of that peace, Lila whispered, “I shall travel north with you. But we cannot go right away. There is someone in Eod who is waiting for a message—a message only I can deliver.”

Erik grunted and pulled back, glowering. “Eod? Is it Magnus? What would you say to him?”

“Not Magnus.” With her serpent’s charm, sweet perfume, and red lips, she drew him into her spell once more. “The message is not for him,”
she half kissed and half said, “I could not reach him anyway. I do not know how the magik of the heart works, the magik that binds Magnus and I, but there is no longer a wall or chasm separating us. There is nothing. I have cast him out, or he has done so to me. I do not think he and I shall be together again without an invitation.”

“Who then? Who is the message for?” asked Erik.

“While I’ve never met her, I know of her—it would be impossible not to, as she’s been one of our enemies for years…” Lila gazed off, distracted by the strangeness of it.

Gently, Erik turned her head to meet his gaze. “Who?” he asked.

“Elissandra, one of the Iron Sages of Menos.”

Erik gasped. “I would’ve thought them all dead. Who gave you this message?”

“The ghost of her husband.”

A ghost? This mystery would have to wait, for Lila, his one and eternal queen, pressed her lips to his. In her kiss, he felt the purity he’d known was hidden behind her sorrow all these days. Behind her kiss, dazzling the darkness of his closed eyes, he felt the sacred light that had nearly made him bring steel upon his Kingfather. He had followed Lila’s star on the darkest journey of his life; he would protect its beauty with his soul. At last, his queen was free to shine. And she had made her choice, which was to be with her knight. Ghosts, guilt, and secret messages evaporated in the fire that rose between their bodies. In moments, his clothes were off, their sweat and kisses lathered each other’s skin, and slowly, sweetly, and for the very first time, they made love.

V

“Sangloris Donanach, a creature called Nifhalheim…” Erik muttered, struggling to pay attention to Lila’s account of her ominous vision. The feel of their legs entwined, thighs caressing, was more interesting to the warrior than tales of ghosts and doomed promises. Thrice they’d made love, with such patience, that day had come and gone. He could taste her sweat and the salt taffy of her lower valley on his lips. How could a woman taste so sweet? Something in which she bathed? Even while they had been in exile, he recalled, his queen had stepped into water that steamed with
exotic oils. The wonder of her elegance bounced around like a ball in his head. Never mind that: now he must listen and unsheathe the steel of his soul. It was time to be a weapon again—the queen’s weapon. Lila watched the change happen—a military stiffness now commanded his body even as a certain part stayed rigid below—and knew she had most of his attention. “What would you have me do?” he asked.

“
We
must deliver the message to Elissandra.” She walked two fingers up his chest while speaking. “We must tiptoe into Eod, as there is a protection of sorts around it. I have heard from local gossip of this Witchwall; it is a shield against magik. It must have been raised by an unknown ally, because Magnus was not present to defend his city from the sky monsters of Menos—Furies, as they are called. No matter; we shall find Elissandra and I shall tell her what I have seen. Then we shall head north.”