Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) (17 page)

“What of Lowe and Leonitis, stuck playing in our skins?”

“If Magnus had wished their phantasms dispelled, he could easily have broken my magik. We should assume he knows about the illusion; we should assume we are seen as criminals by most who once favored us, those who know of my act...” Sadly, Lila drifted off, her hand stopping atop the beat in Erik’s chest.

“Our act. I helped you,” he declared. “We destroyed Menos together. And think of the state Eod would be in now if you had not struck the Iron City first.”

“Eod would lie in ruins.”

“Yes.”

They mulled over the sour truth.

“Promise me no more guilt, Lila,” said Erik, and shuffled closer. “I do not have endless years, as you do. I have only now discovered, so late in life,
what
and
how
to feel.”

Erik’s adoration and confession humbled her, and she blushed. A knock and some garbled announcement saved her from any further conversation on mortality and commitment. The knocking rose to a violent banging.

This was definitely not a dainty maid come calling, and the lovers knew they were on borrowed time. Alert, Erik wrestled himself from the sheets, which clung to him, making him furious. Meanwhile, Lila scrabbled
around for a scrap of clothing. Making sure he was decent was not a priority for Erik: he needed to get to the sword that he kept against the dresser. A thundering bound brought him to the bureau, and he crashed into it with his hip, hurling its mirror to a shattering death. Nonetheless, he managed to catch his weapon by its hilt before it fell, too. Suddenly, the door was kicked inwards, and Lila, frantically whipping her head about, saw men storm into the room. She could not say how many. Erik may have been drinking himself into oblivion for weeks, but at his core he remained a man of metal; steel sinews vibrated in every knotted brown cord in his body. As the queen glanced to her weapon and shouted his name, he protected her with a fearsome spectacle of strength. He drove his sword into the floorboards—releasing a humming twang—picked up the creaky piece of furniture he’d bumped, and then roared as he threw it toward the doorway.

The sight of a crazed, naked strongman hurling a dresser took everyone by surprise, particularly the men on the receiving end of the payload. A handful of thugs went down in a puff of dusty shrapnel and lay moaning on the floor. One dazed fool stayed on his feet, having sidestepped the dresser. Dazzlingly fast, Erik picked up his sword, moved through the chaotic room like a black monster of smoke, and bashed the man’s face with the pommel of his blade. The warrior dropped. Erik strode toward the remaining crippled men, who crawled and stumbled through shattered wood. With kicks to their backs that made sickening snaps, Erik rendered two men unconscious. Once downed, the men did not move again. Erik caught the fourth and last failed assailant as he attempted to escape, grabbing the flowing tail of his cloak. Like a scarf dancer, Erik twirled the fabric around his hand, wrenched it tight with a grunt, and then unfurled it, throwing the man back into the room. The man lost his balance, fell, and dropped his sword. In a speck, Erik had his blade under the man’s chin. “Who sent you?”

The gasping youth, red-haired and nearly beardless, could comprehend neither the storm of violence in which he’d landed nor the dark, powerful man threatening him—a man who smelled of both destruction and ripe, sexual sweat. Erik drove his sword’s point a sliver closer to the lad’s jugular, and the steel sparked a confession.

“Alderman Tretton! A b-bounty! He said there was a bounty on the hammer of the king! I’m s-sorry! I’ve never been sorrier! Please, I’m only following the orders of the Twelveswatch. I’m betrothed, I have a child—”

C
RACK
!

A pommel to the lad’s head ended their discussion; but at least Erik hadn’t killed or horrifically maimed him as he had the others. Shouts sounded in the tavern beneath them. Erik rushed around fetching boots, pants, his flask—but no, he felt no urge for drink, not now that he must defend his queen. Lila was dressed in a moment, fully hooded and prepared for flight. She helped him into his shirt.

“A bounty? I thought—” she began.

“That Magnus would leave us be? Forever? You forget that Magnus’s judgment is as bitter as the Long Winter in which he was born. We have been judged, it seems, and found wicked.”

Erik shrugged on his cloak and hood, then slid his sword into its sheath; they would draw less attention if his steel weren’t flashing. Lila was not quite panicking, although she was clearly vibrating with worry; her mouth trembled, trying to give shape to unformed questions. Feeling impetuous and enflamed by the red, fluttering petals of her lips, Erik, the eternal sword, ruler and repressor of emotions, succumbed wholly to desire and kissed his queen. They were hot, dripping, hungry kisses; he grew hard against her leg. When they pulled apart, Lila felt breathless. She had forgotten her questions.

“We are fugitives now,” he said. “If word of the bounty has spread, we are now the most wanted criminals in all Geadhain.”

Lila was weak with shock and giddiness, but she smiled as they dashed out of the ruined apartment.

V

In their wake, the fugitives left a trail of unconscious and slumped men, bleeding noses, and broken limbs. When it had become evident that the fugitives would not be easily or quickly caught, the Twelveswatch intensified their efforts. Soon, the clanging naval bells atop the ancient watchtowers woke every man, woman, and child from their beds. Carthacians were unfamiliar with such disruptions, and they stepped timidly and
sleepily out into the streets wearing their nightgowns and long johns. Rubbing their puffed eyes, they chattered about what in the king’s name had woken them at such an unkind hourglass. A fire? Where, then, was the smoke? A burglary? If so, then Carthac’s treasury must have been beset by privateers, given how many of the Twelveswatch had been called into action. They received no answers from the frequent patrols of cloaked, steel-baring men sweeping the roads and alleyways.

Foolishly, by rousing the rabble, the authorities had raised a clamor that allowed Erik and Lila to camouflage themselves during their brief scurries through populated areas. A phantasmal disguise from the queen would have allowed for a perfect escape, yet she still believed in caution when it came to using magik, unable as she was to foretell whether it would bring harm or aid. She needed time to test her Will, to see whether her connection with Erik—their
feelings
, she thought lightheadedly—would act as a counterweight to her instability. She felt as if she were a different woman from the one who had been haunted by a dark spirit for weeks. Occasionally, Erik glanced to her, or stopped to give her a rough, bearded kiss and some wanton caressing, and she knew that whatever reckless desire filled her filled his veins as well. Everything about their predicament was unsafe, undignified, and unseemly for a queen, yet still it seemed as if she was behaving like herself—not a woman-slave of the Arhad, not a gawking bride to an ancient king, but her real and buried self. And from what she could tell thus far, she liked this new Lila, even if her actions were unpredictable.

For hourglasses, they played cat and mouse with the Twelveswatch, while slowly creeping toward the Order’s basilica. There, Lila felt they would find sanctuary among the women who distanced themselves from politics and wars. If they were given no welcome, she and Erik could always take refuge in the catacombs under the building. Leaving the city without magik and a devious plan would not be possible, and they would need time for her to construct them. One mercy was that the Twelveswatch appeared unable to deal with this level of emergency; they never patrolled in groups larger than four, and Erik alone counted as an army. While not prone to fawning, Lila found herself nonetheless marveling at the strength and viciousness of her lover. Astonishing that a man, one without magik
or supernatural strength, could train and discipline his body until he had become a weapon.

She watched Erik dispatch one of the first patrols they encountered, a trio of the Twelveswatch, so fast that only sands later did she realize what he had done. After asking her to stay back, he had tiptoed through shadows, almost running, and then disabled two men with quick chops to the base of their skulls; they dropped like ragdolls onto the street. As the final member of this Twelveswatch patrol sauntered on, Erik kicked his knees out from behind, then smashed his face into a brick wall while he was still laughing at the joke he’d just told. Erik was a master of restrained brutality—he did not want to kill these men. If he were set on murder, or if he chose to use his sword…She shivered thinking about how red the streets would run.

Roughly twenty assaults later, her awareness had become smudged behind a grease of blood; she had grown desensitized to the cracking, meaty, pounding sounds and stifled whimpers. She knew whenever violence was imminent, for Erik would pause then skulk off. From somewhere up ahead would drift the notes of his violent music, and then he would return to her hiding place, usually wild looking and spattered in crimson. “Come!” he would hiss. Lila often kissed him. This new or
true
Lila was a warm and daring woman.

As they ran from their latest escapade, leaving behind a groaning heap of men and swords, she remembered a book. It was one of the millions in the Court of Ideas, an overwrought romance she’d once read in an afternoon. She had laughed at the contrivances and clichéd characterization: besotted women who fell over themselves, men who were uncompromisingly cold, but somehow harbored secret, hidden flames. She hadn’t believed that people could reach such emotional heights, where the fires of passion transformed the metal of the soul into wondrous alloys. She had thought she might never feel anything again—and certainly not so soon—but perhaps she had wanted Erik for longer than she knew. Indeed, most of her ignorance and misconceptions about love and romance had come from marrying Magnus, a man of ice, always cultured and cool. Her time with Magnus had been a dream, and it possessed the consistency of vapors and illusions when she dwelled upon it.

With Erik, however, life was raw and terrifyingly tangible. The moments they stole, the warmth of his mouth, the exhilaration of their fear, the threat of his mortality…This last thought pricked her heart with a thorn. They would worry about his longevity later—if this delicate dream didn’t shatter, if they managed to evade the Twelveswatch.
I think I might love you, Erik. Real love. The passion of a woman who knows herself, not the starry-eyed wonder of a girl beholden to a king
.

“A moment, my queen,” said Erik, interrupting her reverie. “There are men up ahead. I need you to be both silent and patient.”

As you have so dutifully been with me
. The sentiment choked her, and she nodded, though she said nothing. Erik darted into the shadows, leaving her alone near the back steps of a noisy alehouse that stank of piss. She hunkered down behind a stack of kegs, and was not so dainty as to shriek as rats ran over her feet. Angry at her uselessness, she made the rats squeal with her kicks. With her magik, she should have been able to protect Erik as much as he was protecting her. She debated testing out a spark of her power—something small, a bit of flame, perhaps, like the one she’d managed back at the Order—when the clang of swords and a grunting scream from Erik jolted her. Damn his rules, and damn the man if anything happened to him.

Bolting from her cover, she raced down the narrow alleyway, as mad as a horse in a thunderstorm. She quickly came upon her protector. He was alive, thank the Sisters Three. The same could not be said of what lay near him in a twisted pile of shadows. Death had finally come to the Twelveswatch, she saw, appraising the jutting, gnarled hands and grotesquely crooked legs. A red, sparkling spray decorated the walls of the alley, and a ghastly iron stink farted up from the bodies.

Erik, strangely calm, leaned against the wall, his sword hanging limply from his hand. When she whispered his name, he dropped the blade, clutched his side, and stumbled toward her. As he stepped out into a flash of moonlight, he winced, and she saw he’d left gory handprints on the bricks. Lila ran to him.

“What happened? What did they do to you?”

“Two groups.” Erik huffed. “Eight men. The second patrol spotted me creeping upon the first. One of them had a knife. I thought he was down, and then—”

Erik clenched his teeth in agony. Lila slung his heavy arm over her shoulders and helped him lean up against the wall, so that she might examine his wound. Eight men? She was amazed he still lived. Even more astonishing was Erik’s composure in light of the fact that the dagger remained embedded in the lower left side of his stomach. Crimson circles seeped into his tunic. The blood looked so dark that despite Lila’s limited medical knowledge, she was certain it came from an organ. The wound would be fatal.

“Erik!”

“If you pull it out, I’ll bleed faster.”

Lila hesitated, unsure, a thousand terrors suddenly in her heart.

“You have to pull it out,” he said. “And you have to heal it.”

“I’m not sure—”

Erik grabbed her hand and brought it to the rough bristle of his face, caressing himself with it. Her touch acted as a medicine on the knot of burning, numbing pain in his gut. “Then I die,” he whispered.

“No. No!”

“Do it now, Lila. Remember the promise we made; remember your strength, my queen.” After kissing the hand he held upon his face, he lowered it to the hilt of the weapon lodged inside him. “Remember that we still have to answer the question for each other. If we can love whom we choose—”

Unable to finish, he coughed, then spat out a wad of bloody mucus. Lila felt warm red syrup pulse against her fingers. In a speck, Erik’s impressive discipline would crack, and either delirium or shock would seize him.
Do it. Answer the question; be the woman he sees in you
, she demanded. Suddenly, as she stared into the black shadow of death on her lover’s face, the breath of their journey rolled out in a storm cloud of emotion that flickered with bright and dark memories. She saw a thousand dreams in one speck: the stables, their crossing of Geadhain, a hand steadying her on a sheer black cliff, the horrors of the Iron Mines, their beautiful sexual torments, and, finally, their salvation. That they had passed through the world’s gauntlet unscathed was thanks to their need of each other and a force that had to be love. Lila knew the answer to Erik’s question.