The Cedna (Tales of Blood & Light Book 2) (23 page)

I
dressed
Sterling for dinner and walked with her down the hall.

“Are you really coming to dinner?” she asked.

“Why not?” I shrugged. I had avoided formal gatherings up until this point, fearing I would draw notice, but I had a higher purpose. “Only remember to call me Serafina, and all will be well.”

“I’m glad you’re coming.” She walked backwards, smiling at me. “No one talks to me at these dinners.”

“We’ll talk as much as you like, Sterling.” I planned to shepherd the conversation towards Onatos Amar using Sterling as a foil.

Malvyna barely looked at me when I was introduced as Sterling’s companion. She had no interest in a disfigured younger daughter and no use for that girl’s companion. My half-sister had aged well. No white streaks marred her black hair, no wrinkles collected at the corners of her eyes.

Conversation floated, dominated by Stesichore and Malvyna. I’d seen women like them in the Vorisipor harem. Some women were empty pits that no amount of care or food or admiration could ever fill. Such pits drew people in and never spit them out again.

I would retrieve my Onatos from Malvyna’s abyss.

“I heard that Mydon will accept no betrothal offers until the Marriage Brokering has formally begun,” Malvyna announced as abruptly as an opening salvo in a water war.

“I heard the same,” Lady Ricknagel said.

“It dampens any interest in match-making, knowing that the Prince is still not committed,” Malvyna said.

“Surely you might still consider a pre-arranged match for your son?” Xander said. “After all,
he
will not be marrying Costas Galatien.”

Malvyna’s lips flattened into a hard line. “My son will pick his own wife, and what he desires most in a wife is beauty. He wishes to wait until the Brokering.”

Sterling grew still at my side.

Xander frowned. “I hardly think this is the best place for such negotiations.” He looked pointedly at his daughters, and then at Malvyna’s two offspring talking privately to each other at the far end of the table.

Malvyna shrugged. “It seemed best that you understand my expectations.”

I turned to Sterling and murmured, “What is a Marriage Brokering?”

“A big party where the High Prince chooses his bride,” she whispered back.

“And do all the lords and ladies of the Ten Houses attend?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you ask?”

In the next pause in the conversation, Sterling interjected, “Do representatives from all the Ten Houses attend the Marriage Brokering?”

Malvyna and Stesichore both stared at the girl. Sterling so rarely drew any notice; she never spoke in front of a group.

“Only those the Galatiens invite, Starry,” Xander replied.

As the conversation resumed around us, I whispered in Sterling’s ear. “Ask if the Lord Onatos Amar will be invited.”

She gave me an odd look, but she trusted me enough to do it. Again, she waited for a lull and then asked with childlike innocence, “Will the Lord Onatos Amar be invited to the Marriage Brokering? Or his family?” she amended.

Malvyna glared at Sterling. “Lord Onatos Amar? Are you a ninny? Onatos disappeared long ago.”

Sterling blushed, but galvanized. “Did you know him?” she asked in a trembling voice. I could have kissed the girl.

“I knew him. He courted me.” Malvyna tossed her hair over her shoulder like a girl half her age.

“You must have been sorry when he vanished,” Xander said, watching Malvyna intently.

“A tragedy. Poor Daria, abandoned in the Alcazar.” Malvyna giggled. “Of course, Daria was rather lonely even
before
Onatos vanished.”

“What do you mean?” Xander demanded.

“Lord Onatos had a wandering eye,” Malvyna said. “Everyone knows he kept more than one mistress! It was why I wouldn’t marry him. All those women.”

“How odd,” said Lady Ricknagel. “One would not have guessed you had such scruples.”

Malvyna turned on Xander’s wife like a cornered cat. “What do you mean by that?”

Lord Ricknagel’s hand clamped over his wife’s on the table, squeezing as if to silence her.

“I mean,” Jenesis Ricknagel said with perfect calm, “you’ve never married, and yet
you
have two children. I wouldn’t have thought you so concerned about mistresses. Clearly you’ve had your fun, too.”

An icy silence fell over the table. Beside me, Sterling set down her fork, watching the two women. Ricknagel cleared his throat, loudly.

“Metolius,” Lady Malvyna said to the white-robed mage at her side. “Will you be so good as to let them know in the kitchen that dessert will be unnecessary?” The mage executed a formal bow. Everyone else continued to sit in utter stillness. The urge to laugh almost overset me.

Xander scraped his chair back and rose, tossing his napkin onto the table in a gesture I would have loved to have used myself; it perfectly expressed scorn and disdain.

But Xander Ricknagel’s gestures did not cow Malvyna. She, too, rose from her seat. “Lord Ricknagel, our negotiations are entirely at an end.” She laid down her own napkin on the table with elaborate care, as if to mock his gesture.

Malvyna stalked down the table to confront Lady Ricknagel. Fast as a cat, Malvyna whipped up a hand and slapped so hard that Lady Ricknagel’s head flew back and hit her chair.

A soft, unpleasant huff escaped Lady Ricknagel’s mouth. Xander leaped to her side, taking her into his arms. “Lady Entila!” he reprimanded brusquely even as Malvyna departed the dining hall.

Stesichore sprang to her feet and yanked Sterling out of her seat. “Come to your rooms and pack, Sterling. We’re leaving.” Rarely did Stesi display such sisterly concern, but Xander nodded at his older daughter over her head.

“I’ll have Kyro run down to the harbor,” he said to Stesi. “Likely we cannot depart until the morning, but we’ll collect ourselves as fast as possible.”

Sterling exited from the dining hall with her older sister. Xander took Jenesis out. Kyro, Ricknagel’s manservant, had already departed on his mission for his master. I followed, but paused in the corridor.

I inched back towards the dining hall, slipping behind the tapestry that lined the hallway. From there, I could see through the open door and all the way down the table to where Malvyna’s two children still sat. They seemed unnaturally relaxed after such a drama.

Ghilene, the daughter who looked so much like her mother, smiled as she turned to her brother. “I love it when Mother shows her claws.”

Culan scowled. “I don’t. She’s an embarrassment. You know what they were talking about. They weren’t just insulting Mother. They were insulting us. Because we’re bastards. That is what everyone will say about us in Galantia at the Brokering.”

“Are they gone?” Malvyna’s voice echoed into the dining hall.

“Yes,” called Ghilene. “You’ve managed to send the Ricknagels into flight, Mother.”

“Quiet, Ghilene,” Malvyna snapped as she entered the dining hall. “That bitch,” she said, “had the gall to insult you both.”

Culan waved. “She only spoke the truth. You don’t like to hear it.”

“She had no right,” Malvyna said, “I’m the Head of House Entila. You both have the blood of noble houses running through your veins on both sides. And Ghilene...” She trailed off, looking over the remains of the dinner.

“All this drama on account of Onatos Amar, my lady?” The white-robed mage Malvyna had sent to the kitchen entered from the back of the hall. “You ought to get rid of him. The disguise enchantment devolves by the day, and someday it will fail altogether. That Ricknagel girl’s questions seemed odd. Could she possibly have recognized Onatos Amar? I heard both girls went to the mews yesterday.”

“Onatos!” cried Malvyna. “None of this was about Onatos! It was about Lady Ricknagel and her precious morals. And Onatos brought that spellbinding upon himself, I’ll have you know. He was complicit! Don’t look at me like that!”

The mage studied her knowingly. “I know you, my lady. You feared the girl bringing up his name. Nor are you sorry to see the Ricknagels go.”

“They have entirely forgotten about Onatos Amar in all their righteous offense.” Malvyna took the man’s arm and pulled him into the hall.

“I am sure they have, my lady. But that was too close. Much too close. And have you seen him lately? He looks more and more like himself. His eyes have changed back to blue. I beg you, send for Imagus Khayan. He must rework his spells. Those Ricknagel daughters might not know Onatos Amar by his face, but Lord Ricknagel and his lady would. King Mydon will not be forgiving if our spellwork is discovered.” They were almost even with my hiding place behind the tapestry.

“What I am to do?” Malvyna complained. “I cannot let him go, not after nearly sixteen years. You’ve seen the spellwork. No one could unwind it. Who even knows if he would leave even if he were free?”

The mage stared up at his liege lady. “You mean on account of Ghilene?”

“He’s particular about Ghilene. She’s the only reason he defies me. It hurts him to do it, but he argues anyway. He loves that girl.”

My fingers dug into the flesh of my palms as I listened to their footsteps fade.
Ghilene. Particular about Ghilene
. Blood pounded in my ears. I’d seen the possibility already, but avoided thinking of it. He had a daughter then. A different daughter. Not Leila.

Only the wall behind me held me up. Why did I still expect any kind of justice in the world?

After I swallowed my rage about Ghilene Entila, I considered the other information I’d learned from Malvyna and her mage. They’d magicked Onatos—before or after I’d seen them together? Could southern magic force a man to act in that way without his own will? Had I condemned him on the Queenstown dock, blinded by my own hurt? Had he been tricked by Malvyna?

Hot emotions bubbled, but beneath them, a hard diamond flickered. If it was magic that held him here, perhaps
I
could give him what no one else could. Perhaps my power could win me the highest place in his heart. Perhaps I could set him free.

I
ran towards the mews
, a purloined knife from the dinner table in hand. I startled a bird off Onatos’s wrist as I came tearing in, my chest heaving.

“Onatos!”

“Shhh!” he scolded me. “Must I tell you again not to say that name?” He retrieved the bird and placed it back in its cage.

I pulled him outside to the grassy knoll behind the mews. My hands shook as I angled the knife at my wrist.

Onatos caught my cutting hand. “What are you doing, love?”

I yanked myself free and stabbed the blade into my arm with more force than I intended, sucking a gasp. “I’m going to see what that bitch did to you.”

Panic gripped me as I plunged down into Yaqi. I had not ritualled like this in so long, my bloodlight exploded from the wound in my arm. Its sudden darkness clouded my sight.

I had to swim through all my darkness, pushing at it like soiled water. Onatos’s bloodlight was as beautiful as ever, silvered like a pool of water gleaming in moonlight.

Then I actually looked at what had been done to it.

Though we Ganteans cut the bloodlight cords that connected one being to another, we did not knot and twist it as the southern mages did. I’d never seen the results of their magic in Yaqi before, and they horrified me.

I’d never seen bloodlight contorted into this kind of shape.

It had been pulled and stretched into a cage around him. A hot ball of angry white light sat trapped within the weeping opal strands. A different bloodlight, a green vine beaded with purple bursts, intertwined Onatos’s cage, threading it with a hundred—no, a thousand—intersections, each one a precious ung-aneraq, a bind between lovers.

I scanned the mess, looking for other such cords, one connecting Onatos to his wife, perhaps, or to other lovers, but like my bind with the Governor of Vorisipor, any other such connections had atrophied, finally withering away to nothing without use.

Ah, but there! A braid of black and white opal stretched from my chest to his, connecting a few pure strands of Onatos’s light with mine. I caressed the newborn ung-aneraq gently. I would never cut it again.

The purple and green vines wound through all of Onatos’s bloodlight, holding it fixed in a devilish configuration. That vine belonged to someone, and Onatos was inextricably strung to her, a thousand times over. Hatred boiled in my gut.

Not even an ulio could unbind Onatos from this magic without fatal damage. Bloodlight is delicate, and this spell ensnared far too much of Onatos’s. To cut any of it would risk injuring him beyond repair. A net-weaver of great skill might have been able to unlace the weaving with deft, careful hands, but I had no such skill, and even if I did, the working was so vast, so old, so complex, I feared nothing could undo it.

Black edges surged my vision; a throbbing pulse beat behind my eyes. I longed for an ulio, but even if I had one, to cut him free would kill him. I did not want to kill Onatos; I wanted to kill
her
. That vivid vine, green and purple, could belong to only one woman, and Malvyna Entila had not caught Onatos in this magic trap by accident. No, she’d done it purposely, perhaps even pettily. She craved the admiration of a man; she wanted him pinned and bound like an insect in her collection.

I gasped for air as I surfaced from Yaqi. Onatos sat before me, his head in his hands. My arm was coated in bright blood, dripping from my hand to the grassy earth.

“You looked at my Aethers?” he said, lifting his troubled gaze from the streaking blood to my eyes.

“Oh, Onatos,” I whispered.

“Don’t say it. Every time you say it, it is like a knife inside me. I am no longer that man. They used my name as the lynchkey that holds the spell together. Every time you say it, it pulls inside me.” He thumped his fist against his chest.

“Why would she do this?” To have wound himself so thoroughly into Malvyna’s lights, to have so many ung-aneraqs, he had to have been with Malvyna again and again. That time I’d witnessed in the hall was only the first of many encounters. He had told me, years ago, on the docks, that he had been magicked. I had not believed him, thinking him a philandering sayantaq, faithless. I had ignored the love we shared and believed the lies.

Guilt surged up my throat. I had left him and lost years with him from my own pride. I had suffered Vorisipor and he had suffered Malvyna’s trap, all because I had chosen mistrust instead of love. I shut my eyes. “Why, Onatos?”

“Gods. I courted Malvyna, long ago. She wouldn’t accept my suit; back then I was not Lord Amar, but only his bastard son, with a new bastard son of my own. She was insulted by my offer, to say the least. She’d thought to marry Mydon Galatien himself, and she felt my offering for her ruined her chance with him. He and I were friends, back then. He knew I wanted her; he was too honorable to take what his good friend desired. But she thought my interest sullied her, irrevocably. This has been her punishment.”

“There’s nothing I can do,” I said, repressing my strong emotions—jealousy, fury, hurt, guilt. “The spell is too fixed with your bloodlight. Too much of it is involved.” Not even Ikselian could have unwound such complicated knots, and she had been the best weaver I’d ever known.

His face fell. “I had hoped the Gantean magic might prove more useful. I even got a Gantean slave, to learn more about it, though she’s s a terribly quiet little thing and will not speak of Gantean magic. The Lethemian mages can do nothing.”

“Oh, O—Tiercel,” I stopped myself. I didn’t wish to cause him more pain, though the notion that he had willingly acquired a Gantean slave raised my ire. But he was suffering enough. I would not chastise him. I opened my arms, and he came to me. I ran my fingers through his dark hair as I once had with Laith, soothing him as a mother soothes a child, letting years of pent tension seep from him into me.

As I held him, I scowled. Malvyna had had so much more of him than I ever would. And not only that, a mage had been privy to all this, watching and magicking as Malvyna and Onatos had shared their bodies, binding Onatos in this inescapable cage.

I shuddered. I wanted to plunge an ulio into her throat. Like the Hinge after magic, nothing but blood would satisfy me.

“I am no longer the man you knew, Beautiful.” Onatos broke me out of my reverie. “He is gone and will never return. I am stuck here, well and truly. I cannot follow you. I am lost to the world, and you must leave me here. I have a daughter with Malvyna; you saw her. Ghilene. She is my only comfort. I cannot leave her.”

That brat was a paltry comfort. “I am not the girl you once knew, either. If there is a way to free you, I will find it. I will not rest until I do. And then we will be together, Onatos. I should never have left you. I didn’t understand. You will give me everything you once promised me. You will take me to Orioneport and show me your mews at the Alcazar—”

“Those days are gone,” he cut me off, a bitter tinge to his voice. “We lost them.”

“But Onatos—”

“Don’t say it! Don’t you see—”

“I see the man I loved!” I pressed a palm on my chest. “The one I felt here from the first moment I saw him. You can—”

“Please, love. Promise me you’ll never tell that you found me here. I have nothing left but pride. I do not want the world to know this happened to me. The shame—”

“But your children, Onatos!” I lured him with the thing I knew he loved best in the world. “Laith and Jaasir and Leila—”

“Are you saying we can find our daughter?”

My hands fell away from him. She would be nearly a woman grown now. Sudden, icy terror coursed through my veins. I had left her in Gante, and all the rumors said Malvyna had decimated Gante thoroughly. I had never considered the personal implications of Malvyna’s campaign against my people, for I had forsaken them. She might have killed my daughter.

“She is lost to us.” The pain in his voice twisted my hard-as-diamond heart.

If I told him I suspected our girl dead in Malvyna’s campaign against the Ganteans, he might give up entirely. He might throw himself over a dagger and be done with it. He required hope, and I had to entertain it for his sake.

“If we have to search to the ends of the earth,” I lied, “we’ll find her. And I will find a way to free you from this magic, I will. I must leave with the Ricknagels shortly, but I promise you, I’ll find answers. I promise. A Cedna has ancient powers. It may take time for me to find the answer, but there is no magic I cannot do.” More lies.

I removed my headscarf, letting my hair tumble over my shoulders. I tied the scarf into a knot and handed it to him. “I will free you from this curse. And when I do, you will leave this vile place and return to me. I will be with the Ricknagel household. Come to me. Find me as soon as you are free of it. You’ll know when I have freed you.” I spoke solemnly, as though in ritual.

He bent over my hand and kissed it. Then he kissed the knot I had made in the blue fabric and held it close to him.

“Even if you find that there is no help for me, you must return to me, Cedna. I want to hold you again, even if I will never be free. To see you again—it has given me so much. If I cannot leave here, then you must come back to me, do you understand? No matter what.”

“I will not fail,” I said. “You must come to me as soon as you can leave here.” If the whole world had to bow to me to fix this magic, well then, the world would bow, bend, or break.

Though even a broken world might not mend my past errors.