Gorinthians (29 page)

"I told her that I wanted to
give you your first kiss.” Li's dark eyes stared up at him
expectantly. "Am I too late?"

Instead of answering, Celdic
leaned forward and pulled her into a rough embrace, kissing her
tenderly. The kiss lasted for quite some time before Celdic finally
pulled his head back. "Now you're too late,” he replied, slightly
breathless. He had often stared at her lips when she was not
watching, wondering if they could be as soft as they looked. Now he
knew that they were much softer.

Li smiled at him radiantly,
squeezing him tightly. "Are you sure? I wouldn't want to make any
mistakes with something this important.” Her face was upturned with
her lips slightly parted.

Celdic grinned and lowered
his head to meet those soft lips again.

---

Terrance stood next to a
small pond with Lochnar and Thistledown on either side of him. The
three of them had remained silent the entire way, Lochnar seething
with a rage that seemed excessive even for him. The fact that
Thistledown kept casting worried looks at Lochnar was enough to
alert Terrance that something was very wrong. Lochnar was always
difficult to deal with, volunteering almost nothing in a
conversation while demanding everything. This was different though.
Lochnar stood silently, as if unsure where to start.

"What happened back at that
camp with the children?” Terrance asked at last. "Thistledown said
that someone that may have been an enemy showed up."

With a glare at Thistledown,
Lochnar finally nodded. "It was Riah."

Terrance felt as if the
ground had fallen out from beneath him. She had been a member of
the Derinian Order for two centuries before Terrance had learned
her father was Lochnar. He knew Lochnar had been searching for her
when Jerard had trapped him and had only survived because Terrance
and Thistledown had arrived in time to drive Jerard off and heal
Lochnar, however incompletely. Terrance had always been like a
second father to Riah, showing her what compassion and mercy were
while Lochnar taught her to kill and use her rage as a
weapon.

"She's alive?” Terrance
gasped. "Where? Why didn't you bring her back?” Terrance finished
in a half-shout.

Lochnar's glare moved from
Thistledown to Terrance. "Because that was exactly what Jerard
wanted to happen. He has done something to her spirit that I do not
understand, aside from his usual amusements, but I think that if
you try to help her, you will be killed or trapped."

Terrance breathed deeply,
trying to calm himself down. He knew what Jerard did for amusement
now, torturing a person's body of course, but their soul much
worse. The things that he did to their soul became embedded within
the matter that made them up, making it impossible to give the
person the mercy of erasing their memory. "We have to get her
back,” Terrance said firmly. "I will need to study her to find out
how to heal her."

Lochnar shook his head.
"That is what Jerard wants, Terrance. I should have killed her when
I saw her, but I am glad that I refrained. Jerard has woven a trap
for you, but if you use that block that you call a head, you should
be able to figure out a way to turn the tables."

Terrance frowned at Lochnar,
his brows lowered over his razor gaze. "You think that we should
use Riah as bait for Jerard?” Terrance growled
menacingly.

"Yes,” Lochnar said
simply.

"It could work, Terrance,”
Thistledown added suddenly. "The only thing that has kept Jerard
from showing himself has been your presence on the continents. If
he thought that you were snared, he might make his move
now."

Terrance tried to think
about it, but Riah's beautiful face, eager to learn and full of
hope, kept appearing before his eyes. "I will need to think about
it."

---

Selindria was sitting in a
tall-backed chair in the sitting room when Terrance walked in,
looking more troubled than she had ever seen him. She was wearing
one of the dresses that she had found in the wardrobe in her
bedroom. The wardrobe was filled with clothes that fit her as if
they had been custom-tailored. Her dress was dark violet, almost
black. It was cut low at the neckline to reveal a generous amount
of cleavage and a dark moonstone, which reflected the light from
the windows. Her midnight-hair cascaded over her shoulders almost
down to her waist where she had belted a pair of daggers. Her
cat-like eyes caught the light and gleamed as she studied
Terrance’s face. He sat down in a chair that appeared across from
her, the look of recognition flashing through his eyes once more as
he studied her. She felt her pulse quicken slightly as she felt his
gaze travel over her body.

"I need to talk to you about
your sister,” Terrance said finally, sighing as if a great weight
were on him.

Selindria straightened in
her chair, suddenly alert. She knew that her sister had been a
member of the Derinian Order before she died, which was one of the
reasons that she had such a hard time trusting any of them. She had
always held them responsible for her sister’s premature
death.

"Riah is alive,” Terrance
said, watching her closely. "She stumbled into Lochnar's camp the
night the others arrived here."

"Where is she?” Selindria
demanded, her gaze sharpening in its intensity.

"Lochnar discovered that her
spirit has been tampered with.” Terrance’s face flashed with pain
before he continued. "Jerard captured her and has done something to
her to try and trap me. I don't know if we can do anything to help
her, but we will need your help if we are to have any chance of
success."

"What do you need me to do?”
Selindria asked without hesitation.

"I will need to use you as
directions,” Terrance replied hesitantly. "I will need to study you
completely in order to try to restore Riah to normal. She will
never be the same as she was. In fact, she will probably have even
more in common with you than she did before. Jerard did not know
that Riah had a twin sister, so he did not anticipate this
possibility."

Selindria's eyes narrowed.
From her years as a teacher, she had a knack for knowing when
someone was trying to hide something from her. "And the
trap?"

Terrance took a deep breath.
"We will try to use the information that we get from studying you
to make it appear that I have indeed been trapped. In truth, I will
have to be trapped just as Jerard expects in order for him to
believe it. But the trap that I make will dissipate in a couple of
weeks."

Selindria watched Terrance
silently, realizing the danger that he was voluntarily putting
himself in to help save her sister. Impulsively, she bent forward
and kissed him on the cheek. "Whatever you need me to do to help, I
will,” she whispered.

Terrance’s cheeks colored
slightly when she kissed his cheek and he averted his eyes as she
studied his face. "We will need to go to a special room to do
this,” Terrance said, looking at the ground. "There will be some
odd sensations during the process, parts of your spirit examined
that you were not aware of."

Selindria just continued to
watch him silently, until Thistledown entered the room, stopping
abruptly when he sensed the mood. With a sigh, Selindria leaned
back in her chair.

"Are we ready?” Thistledown
asked, with one eyebrow arched slightly.

Nodding, Selindria stood up,
followed by Terrance as Thistledown led them through a door that
had not existed earlier, near the kitchen corner. As they passed
through it, Selindria felt a sudden sensation of weightlessness as
her feet stepped out onto nothing and she drifted away from the
opening. Thistledown was gliding in front of her without any
apparent difficulty and Terrance was just entering behind
her.

"Use your
yar
to propel yourself,”
Terrance instructed behind her. "Just think in the direction that
you want to go and you will go there."

"And where are we going?”
Selindria asked curiously. "For that matter, where are
we?"

"We are in a passive realm,"
Terrance replied from behind her. "Matter is more responsive here
than it is in realms that have agents everywhere. The three of us
are the only agents in this realm right now. All the other matter
is passive."

Selindria did not respond,
but studied the area around her with her
yar
. Everything that her
yar
touched seemed to be
more supple than anything she had ever felt before. There were more
elements surrounding her in this place than she would have believed
existed. There were compounds as well, but the vast majority of the
matter surrounding her were elements.

"This is what's known as a
drain,” Terrance explained, as if reading her thoughts. "We have
filtered all of the agents out so that there are only passive
elements left. This is what we call our workshop. We will be using
the passive elements to create a new shell for Riah."

"Let's get started,”
Selindria said shortly. She did not want them to notice her
nervousness, so she assumed the brisk manner her students were used
to.

"Very well," Terrance said
spinning in the emptiness to face her. "What we need you to do is
blank your mind of all thought. We will do the rest."

Selindria nodded curtly and
began emptying her mind of all thought. The last image that flashed
through her mind was that of Riah laughing as she spun around on
the wooden floor in a tavern, teaching Selindria how to
dance.

As Selindria lay motionless
in the emptiness around her, she began to feel warmth flood into a
part of her body that she could not identify. It was like having an
itch under her skin that, no matter where she scratched, she could
not locate it. The warmth flittered around within her, and a moment
later she felt her cheeks burning red with embarrassment as the
warmth flooded into a part of her being that she had not known
existed, but instinctively knew that it was a personal space
reserved for intimacy on a spiritual level. The sensation only
lasted a moment. Suddenly, she was laughing uncontrollably as a
feeling mixed between mirth and euphoria rushed through her in
waves. The new sensation departed as quickly as it came, only to be
replaced by an ageless sorrow that had her sobbing until she
thought her soul would shrivel inside of her. The sensations
continued for what seemed an eternity, always changing. Sometimes
she thought that her body would not be able to handle the raw
strength of the emotions that were raging through her and sometimes
all she felt was a light probing that seemed to analyze parts of
her being that had no reaction to the strange contact that was
examining her. She began to think that this night would never end;
that she would spend the rest of eternity floating in oblivion as
her spirit was bobbed around like a puppet hanging from
strings.

Finally, it stopped and she
opened her eyes. Standing in front of her was her sister Riah,
almost exactly the same as Selindria remembered her, even down to
her resonance. She was wearing nothing but her skin and her eyes
were dull. "Riah?” Selindria whispered questioningly.

Her sister just floated
there, without response or apparent awareness of her surroundings.
"She is just a shell,” Terrance said from behind her. "When we find
the real Riah, this is the shell that we will be transferring her
into."

Something about Terrance had
changed since they had come into this place. Selindria studied him,
looking for a clue as to what had happened. When he looked at her,
she did not feel like he was looking at a companion any longer, but
as a man seeing a woman. He also did not seem to know how to react
to this newfound awareness.

"There is something else
that you should be made aware of," Thistledown piped in. "When
Terrance begins transferring Riah into this shell, he will need an
anchoring point. He will need you to be that anchoring point that
keeps his spirit in this realm."

Selindria looked back and
forth at the two of them. "What does that mean?” she asked with a
frown. The way they were acting indicated that there was more to it
than that.

"There will be a link
between you and your sister after that,” Thistledown said. "You
will be able to communicate with each other with thoughts, feel
what the other is feeling as well as a few other odd side
effects."

Selindria could tell that
they were hiding something, but she was too focused on getting her
sister back to worry about it now. "That's fine, as long as it
works. It must be morning by now, shouldn't we be
leaving?"

Thistledown laughed. "It's
the same time as it was when we left. We are in a passive
realm."

She felt him reach out with
his
yar
and open
the doorway back into the cabin. She followed him, arriving in the
room just as she had left it only moments before.

"Let's get some sleep,"
Terrance said as he closed the door behind him. "We are going to
need it.” He walked over to the far bedroom and went in, closing
the door softly behind him.

"Well, I am still hungry,”
Thistledown said as his stomach growled loudly, "so let's see what
we have for dinner."