Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) (48 page)

The lordvessel had driven itself right up onto a beach of crumbled granite. Gulls, busy cracking open clamshells, squawked angrily as Lila and Erik left the lordvessel through the newly ejected tongue of black metal. They walked down a rubble bridge. Lila spotted swarms of sinfully red crabs fighting the draw of heavy dashing tides. When they had descended lower, standing now amid seaweed-strewn pools, Lila, still touching the Mind, asked it to seal the hull. The lordvessel could not be entered again without the Mind’s command. The bloodmates splashed a path to less water-pitted shores and left a trail of footprints on a beach that glistened in defiance of the sun’s might.

That light and its heat, Lila feared, were simply a prelude to all that Kor’Khul would bring.
Do not think about tomorrow. Do not think about yesterday. Only the here and now matters
. In response to that thought, Erik’s hand found her back. Onward they strode, silent and united, each supported by the other’s strength.

Soon the beach was behind them, and they climbed a gradually rising green hump that met with other mounds and stretched into a rolling horizon. Once they had descended the first hill, Meadowvale’s charm blew over them in honeysuckle breezes. They walked through grass and wildflowers, and tried not to bother the hidden finches, the wild horses that grazed atop exposed granite skulls in the land, the many rabbits Erik saw poking white-furred heads up and down in the grass like moles. These creatures noticed the dark warrior, too, or smelled his obsidian grit and sweat, and they gave him and the queen a wide berth.

Welcome to the new natural order
, said the queen after noticing the animals’ behavior.
You’ve become a lord in this realm
.

The afternoon passed in a gentle lulling flow. Before long, the sun readied for its sleep in the west. Night’s red hand reached for the travelers, and they bunked down for the evening in a valley between two great hills, one partially stripped of green like some of the others in Meadowvale. Erik made a mercifully swift kill, bringing back a pair of hares that were then strung up over a fire lit by Lila’s Will. Firebugs came out to play for the
audience of two, and the bloodmates watched their dances, Lila wrapped in Erik’s arms.

Lila felt as if her heart should be grieving: she had once watched a similar performance from these dancers with Magnus back in Willowholme. However, that moment was now centuries past. When she hunted for emotion in those remembrances, she returned only with anger for Magnus, anger stoked by his rape of her, his pretense of being a man, his deceptions about his brother and their connection.
Finally, I know how it feels to be with one man, one soul. I do not feel myself splintered and lost anymore
. Indeed, Erik’s hale arms and the smell of his stone-powered sweat upon his tunic crushed these other reflections, and they were the last impressions Lila knew, or desired, before dreaming.

Her knight heard her thoughts, yet commented not. He’d loved her since the day she’d touched him in Eod. She still fought with terrors from her past, but to him, their tale was unfolding as it should.

Erik waited until he felt her presence far away and dreaming, then kissed his sleeping queen upon her forehead, her cheek, and her hand, which he lifted to his lips. “Goodnight, my queen,” he whispered. He himself, though, did not sleep. Now a lord of strength and stone, he no longer felt the need for it. Instead, the unnatural knight watched the firebugs whirl in helixes, correctly intuiting their next patterns. He listened to the heartbeats of the animals around him—they could echo like thunder, but he was quickly growing accustomed to absorbing a thousand scents and sounds every speck. Occasionally, he shifted to comfort his queen or to adjust the burden of the crystal eye she refused to release. Catching sight of her gold cameo in the moonlight, he fantasized about a world in which there were no Immortal kings to damage everyone and everything with their puerile thirst for identity.
Damn Brutus and Magnus
, he thought.

V

The next day they continued their travel through land that was sunny, peaceful, and full of nature’s songs and creatures. Around noon, however, they came to a point in the hills that was split by a road. Warily, they took the path; it would make for a faster journey, though they would have to remain alert for other travelers. Lila offered to mask them in sorcery, but
Erik rejected the idea. Erik felt he would be able to sense any approaching beings. Something about her knight appeared harder today, Lila found, and his insides were a quiet, brewing storm. He didn’t seem partial to conversation. While padding down the dirt-trodden trail, Lila’s hand wandered to the sphere trundled up and bouncing against her chest. The Mind spoke to her the instant she touched it.

Good afternoon, Navigator
.

Good afternoon
, she replied.
I am surprised you are still attuned to the passage of time. I thought you were blind unless awakened
.

I am always awake. Always seeing. However, I have no one with whom to share my sights when there is no connection between your skin and mine—I need the kinetic spark of your telemetry interacting with mine. Otherwise, we cannot speak
.

Intriguing, alarming, and slightly sad, thought the queen: this entity inundated by experiences it could discuss with no one.
How much can you see? How far?

Far. Ten thousand and ninety-six paces ahead, for example, I detect friable soil and a growing stratification of silt. A desert. If the barometric pressures do not change, I predict a storm will form in the desert, bringing winds of one hundred spans per hour. At your current pace, though, you and your mate should safely miss it
.

My mate? You use the most curious terms
.

The one with whom you swap blood and other excretions. The patterns when the two of you copulate are elaborate. I would say they resemble snowflakes, though I am only referencing data related to winter precipitation; I have never seen snow. There are astra that form in clusters—singing clusters—within the chambers of your forms. I do not understand the concept of beauty, but I find the complexity of your union a subject worthy of further scrutiny. The Erik is not like the Magnus. I have seen the Magnus’s pattern, too, in your memories. It is very complex; it contains so many astra and molecules I cannot analyze its makeup. A universe to your galaxy. I believe it is beyond my analysis
.

Yes, Magnus is a mystery
. A sneer darkened the queen’s face.

Palpitations and increased circulation indicate a state of hypertension or rage. You are angry when you think of your other mate. Is that because of what he did to you?

Lila gasped and took her hand off the Mind. Through her exposure to it, it had mined her soul and extracted her darkest pains. Erik turned, showing concern and tepid rage. Lila sensed a sympathetic fury behind his glower, a fury directed at Magnus and the event that had fractured all of Central Geadhain. One incident of incredible violence from her husband—possessed or not—was all it had taken to send every old reign crumbling into the sea. She’d neither confronted this pain nor dealt with it. Instead, she’d hidden, gone mad, and ruined a kingdom. She had become the horror that she’d suffered.
I have raped and reaped the world: of its children, its culture, its history
.

Lila stopped in the road, frozen by remorse. Her feet no longer obeyed her. Her heart would not heed her and stop its hammering. Surely, she would have wept, screamed, or fallen into the dirt if the man of obsidian had not forced her to speak.

My queen, you mustn’t condemn yourself
.

I have been fighting the wrong enemy
.

Menos had to be stopped. We had no choice
.

I do not mean Menos, my knight. Am I no better than the man who soiled me?

Magnus?

Yes
.

Together, they rumbled. She’d become a cloud in his storm. Lila leaned into him. At last, she whispered the thorny secrets she’d borne since Magnus had left her for Zioch.
I want to know why he chose me a thousand years ago. I want him to apologize for what he did. I want the world to know of the crime that drove me mad. I know that he blames himself for succumbing to the primal temptations and influences of his brother. But how sincere is his guilt when he declares you and I criminals, and the world remains ignorant of his sin?

Erik allowed the beast of his jealousy, the black side of his thoughts, to bleed out into his queen.
As a matter of pride
, he said,
as a matter of justice, as part of the code I have always upheld, he should not be allowed to keep this sinful secret. I loved him, I worshipped him, and he betrayed every virtue that he extolled. Would a better king have been able to resist his brother? Was Magnus ever as strong as I believed? Or merely weak, a puppet
to Brutus’s—or his own—sick desires? I want to fight him. I want to beat the answers from him with my fists of stone until he is as bloodied as you were when he left you. I would have killed him that night or died trying. I want to humiliate him as he did you. I don’t want him dead—

Not dead
, she agreed.

But he should suffer, and be more humbled than he has ever been
. With their minds and souls working in tandem, they weren’t sure who spoke, who fanned whose fires of wrath. A dark plan was being spun in their heads. A vision of revenge against the King.
We must call him out of his ivory palace. We must bring him into the streets where all of Eod will see him bow, will see him stripped of the virtue he uses as a shield. You want to be a man, Magnus? Then be judged as one. Be treated as one. Be scorned and praised as one. An age of truth. Let the people decide who is guilty of what. Let the people be our court—
they smiled, then kissed, flooding each other with a delirious, shivering malice—
and his
.

Their purpose was now twofold: they would deliver the message to Elissandra from her dead husband, Sangloris, and they would cleanse themselves of their past with Magnus. Why sneak into Eod like cowards when they should come to the gates screaming for justice for the people of Menos, for her rape, for Magnus’s lies?

Drunk on their black kiss, Erik didn’t sense the two men coming down the road in their cart; Erik was again distracted by the rigidity of his lover’s mouth and throat, as if she were becoming a woman of rock, as well. The strangers walked to within tens of paces of the pair, then stopped to stare at them. It was an arousing sight for two men: a comely lass tipped backwards, hood fallen—hair radiant as a falling cascade of sunshine—and held by a broad-backed, swarthy warrior. Young and aimless fellows, the wandering peddlers were in no hurry to make it to Meadowvale’s shores to scavenge for crab shells and pearls. They cared not if their mothers complained about their laziness, and this sight was worth a pause. At first, the louts guffawed and elbowed each other. Then they quieted down so they might watch without disturbing the show.

Unwittingly, Lila had held on to the Mind while Erik dipped her; one finger grazed the sphere’s cold crystal skin.
Navigator, two bipedal humanoids are displaying signs of increased temperatures, agitation, and sexual
arousal. I believe they wish to see you and the Erik mate. I did not mean to disturb you, but I thought you should know
.

The bloodmates rose. The queen moved past Erik and strode toward the aroused voyeurs. One of the men gasped, then nearly choked on his tongue when he realized who this extraordinary golden woman with the amber eyes was—and by extension, who the dark and terrible man looming behind her must be. Lila gazed upon the unwelcome guests with pure detestation. She whirled through visions of all the men in her life who had spat upon, chastised, or otherwise scorned her. She remembered the sour-butter stink and sticky heat of spinrex milk on her fingers, and the warrior who had slapped her black and blue for not squeezing teats quickly enough. She remembered her former chieftain and how he’d laughed at her, then beaten her, when she’d asked to become a warrior. An Arhad woman was never meant to hold a weapon, only a prick. She recalled the many gray and ancient fools who’d silently mocked her, with their stares and carefully worded reprimands, when she had first begun to chair at the Chamber of Echoes. Wise men, they were supposed to be—but none of them were. All of those withered bastards were dead now. She remembered the state in which she’d found Rowena in the desert: dry and cracked, blisters from head to toe. Men had done that to her because of her sex. Finally, Lila dwelled in a waking nightmare where a man—towering, fat with muscle, and reeking of beast—and a pale, pretty prince of ice took turns raping her. It hadn’t happened like that, though close enough. The fantasy was not so far from the truth.

As she neared the men in the road, her scent—her poison of spice, rage, and sweetness—became a field of blooming oleander. Erik could almost see the pollen of her power, a glittering particulate in the air, and he cringed from the reek of sulfur and the crackle of great magik. Was she set to destroy these men? He wanted no such wrath or blood upon her. Either his wish or her temperance helped them avoid this end. She did, though, walk toward the quaking men, who bowed and buried their foreheads into the dirt with such force that rocks and filth made their faces bleed. Her voice sweet and lethal as a tea of sugar and nightshade, she said, “No man shall look upon me but one: my beloved. My rock. My black mountain and gray sea. He has earned my love, as I have earned his. You
have earned nothing, not even a glance at our greatness. Cower, and know that the queen of Eod has spared your wicked, weak lives. Cower, cry, and wriggle on the earth like the worms that you are.”

The men mewled, their hips exploded with spastic jiggling, their hands came to their sides, and they snaked on the earth in senseless circles, as commanded. The queen motioned to her knight, and by the time he reached her, the strange scent and toxic cloud seemed to have disappeared. Lila didn’t address what she had done, what kind of magik she had used on these men—for it was magik of a kind unfamiliar to Erik that had broken their wills and turned them into puppets. When he glanced back over his shoulder, he could see them still worming and weeping in the dirt.