The Dark Throne (21 page)

“It is no secret that there is something between you and Finnead,” Luca said, almost gently. “Most, I think, can see that I favor you as well. And I do not begrudge you your choice. I am patient.” His fingers dipped below the collar of my shirt at the nape of my neck, but his touch was brisk, almost business-like. He wasn’t trying to seduce me, that much was certain, and I felt a strange rush of gratitude, because I wasn’t sure if I would have been able to resist, with the high excitement of the dragon hunt running through the air like electricity. And somehow, in a thoroughly strange way, the fact that Luca acknowledged my attraction to Finnead, almost
welcomed
it, made him all the more appealing. It reminded me again that though I was the Bearer, I hadn’t been born in this world, and some things in it were still foreign to me. I took a shaky breath just as Luca said, “Finished. Let me see your face.”

I obediently turned up my face as he moved to the front of me; for a moment, I was gazing up at him from a very compromising position until he crouched down, inspecting my application of direflame. He dipped his thumb into the pot. “Close your eyes.”

“I forgot my eyelids,” I groaned. “Rookie mistake.”

Luca chuckled as his thumb brushed direflame across each of my eyelids. “There.”

“Thanks,” I said, clearing my throat as I stood. I picked up my emerald scarf, folding the rectangular piece of slick cloth into a long triangle; I laid the flat edge of the fold over my head, then took the bitter ends of the triangle and crossed the two sides over my nose, tying the ends behind my head at the nape of my neck. I noticed Luca watching me curiously, but I ignored him until I pulled back the hood from my head and pushed down the cloth covering my mouth, arranging the scarf around my neck.

“You wear your scarf like your brother,” Luca said suddenly.

I blinked. “I…yeah. He taught me how to tie a
shemagh
after his first deployment. I must have bugged him about it for a week before he gave me one and showed me how to wear it.” I smiled fondly at the memory. “It looks strange when you’re first putting it on, but this way you can pull the back of the scarf up to protect your head and the back of your neck, and the front can be pulled up over your mouth if you’re in a dust-storm. Or…dragon-smoke,” I added as I demonstrated.

“A
shemagh
?” Luca repeated, tasting the foreign word on his tongue as he folded his own blue scarf into a triangle.

“Yes. It’s a scarf worn by the native people in a particular part of the mortal world.” I swallowed against the tightness in my throat at the thought of Liam deployed in hostile mountains overseas.

Luca arranged the scarf over his head, commenting as he folded the scarf over his mouth, “I look like an old woman in a headscarf.”

I chuckled. “Only for a moment. And I said the same thing…but it works, so that’s enough for me.”

Luca tied his scarf and pushed the material down around his neck. “If your brother taught you, I am sure it works well.” He nodded. “Your brother is a trustworthy warrior.”

“Glad you think so, because I agree.” I smiled. I shoved the wax seal back into the top of my pot of direflame. Then I paused. “What about the
faehal
?”

“Already done before we left,” said Luca.

I raised my eyebrows. I hadn’t realized the intensity of the preparations for this hunt, and I felt vaguely guilty. I’d probably been asleep for most of the time that the other riders had been preparing the packs and the steeds, not to mention the great weapons, the bespelled wings and the direflame itself. I tucked the clay pot into my pack and picked up my breastplate, leaning the Sword against my leg as Luca wordlessly tightened the straps of my armor. I looped the strap of the Sword’s sheath over my head, settled the blade against my back, and pulled on my gauntlets. Luca offered his hands again, but I shook my head, pulling myself up onto Nehalim’s back. My hands protested with a bright quick starburst of pain, but it soon faded, and I sat with satisfaction in the saddle. I looked over at Luca, astride his
faehal
. Kianryk bounded away through the grass, his tawny hide gleaming in the golden morning light.

“What do we do now?” I asked, raising one eyebrow.

Luca turned his mount’s head with a twitch of his reins, replying with a grin, “Now we go to hunt a dragon!”

Chapter 12

T
he choosing of the
vyldgard
began without ceremony in the dusty light of the early morning, a long train of silent riders following their High Queen into the east, the new-risen sun revealing the desolation of the lands before us. The long verdant grasses disappeared, replaced by bare ground as we rode onward, the hooves of our
faehal
kicking up a cloud of fine dirt, which hung about us and turned the gleaming wetness of the direflame into a dun speckled mud. I hoped the substance still retained its effectiveness, and the Sword sent me a reassuring hum. It had been mostly silent since we’d left the Hall, but now I felt its power stirring, pacing within the cage of my ribs, bumping against my sternum like a great dog pressing its head into my chest. As I pulled my scarf up over my nose and mouth against the cloying dust, I wondered idly if the Sword would jump into the fray against the dragon as its primal wolf-form….or if it could take the form of another dragon, bellowing forge-hot
taebramh
into the air.

If I were to appear as a dragon,
said the Caedbranr in my mind
, it would not be as a pale imitation of the Great Ones.

And it sent me an image of a creature even more terrifying than the dragon I’d glimpsed in the great cloud of smoke, a creature whose bulk wrapped around mountains and whose wings blotted out the sun, throwing whole kingdoms into shadow. I shuddered a little and reminded myself that I was essentially bound to an object with the power of a deity. I began to wonder if the Sword was indeed an actual deity—if Arcana was a fragment of the Morrigan, and my power, through the Sword, was equal to hers….then it was within the realm of possibility. But rather than answer my thoughts, the Caedbranr merely chuckled and settled down behind my beating heart, tucking itself into a pulsing cylinder of flame somewhere among my arteries, drowsily surfacing every now and again to glance at the column’s progress.

“You answer only what suits you, don’t you,” I muttered, bringing my full attention back to the desolate landscape about us. Luca still rode beside me, our fleet mount’s strides eating up the bare ground. Now and again a lone tree struggled upward from the soil. A coppery sweet scent hung faintly in the still air; we rode past the hulk of a
cadengriff
corpse, red bone gleaming through its decaying flesh; and I wondered in horrified fascination if it was the same dead beast that had sheltered Vell, Beryk and me when the dragon had almost ended our journey to Brightvale. The three wolves showed their teeth to the corpse, growling and snapping as they bounded past, their lithe shadows racing along the ground beside them.

We rode deeper and deeper into the dead grasslands, and as dark sweat laced the flanks of the
faehal
, we began to see more obvious signs of the perils ahead. There were no more rotting corpses; instead we passed the charred skeleton of some huge creature with wicked tusks, and another which was no more than a pile of blackened bones. The few trees that had survived in this wasteland were fire-blackened, their crooked limbs bearing a coat of burned and cracked bark. The coppery sweet scent in the air became layered with the smell of sulfur and smoke. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled and I felt the Sword’s power awaken, prowling close to the surface of my skin. The sky pressed down on us, the sun fading behind thick gray clouds.

At some unseen signal, no doubt from Vell, the thundering mass of riders slowed and halted. I decided I’d rather be closer to Vell—she’d charged me with being a healer, but I would protect her as she’d so doggedly protected me during our long journey. And she’d asked me to be Arcana’s second—I was still trying to figure out exactly what that
meant
, but I tucked away the thought as Nehalim cantered gracefully up the long length of the halted column. He tossed his head as we slowed, as if to show me that he still had plenty of spirit left even after the long gallop over the barren hills. I patted his neck and picked out Vell. The High Queen gave an order to Gray, and the golden-haired knight wheeled her mount and cantered over to two dozen waiting warriors. They all dismounted and carefully untied their wrapped wing-frames from their mounts. As I watched, one of the warriors smoothed out the leather straps of a gleaming harness, fitting it to the muscled chest of his
faehal
. I turned my attention back to Vell.

I trotted up on Nehalim as Vell finished speaking to Finnead. As I slid down from my white mount’s back, Finnead turned, and his drowning-blue gaze, vibrant from the depths of the dark scarlet band painted across his face, caught my eyes. A thrill leapt through me, a spark swirling through my limbs as Finnead, transformed into some wild creature of the North, held my gaze with his own. He walked toward me, closing the short distance between us with that same lithe cat-like grace. He was entirely different and completely the same, both at once, an electrifying transformation made all the more exciting by its contradiction. Even his raven-wing hair was artfully tousled, an echo of the fierce ridge of braids worn by Vell, yet somehow it didn’t make him seem vain. He wore the Northern war paint and hair like he carried the sigil of the High Queen on his breastplate and on his shield: with a fierce silent pride and a wildness that hadn’t been at the forefront of his demeanor as part of the Unseelie Court. I smiled a little despite myself, and an answering smile quirked one side of his eminently kissable mouth. His high cheekbones shone with the direflame, his pale skin somehow unmuddied by the dust of the barren plains.

“Ready for the hunt, lady healer?” he asked, raising one eyebrow and looking pointedly at my new plain blade at my waist and the glint of dagger-hilts at the other side of my hip and in my boot-tops.

I tilted my head. “Even a healer should have blades at the ready. I’m still adept at taking creatures apart, even if my official job right now is to put people back together.”

“Just make sure the two aren’t one and the same,” he replied with a flash in his eye, and I started, hearing Ramel in his voice; but then I wondered whether Ramel had picked up the saying from Finnead, back when he’d been a squire to the fastest-rising young Knight in Queen Mab’s service. I saw that Finnead wore his midnight-dark scarf folded and tied like a
shemagh
, like I’d tied my own, and the part of my mind that wasn’t blissfully admiring his beauty wondered what experiences he’d had in the mortal world, doing Mab’s bidding as a young Named Knight.

“That’s the plan,” I said after too long a pause for my reply to make much sense, but we both pretended not to notice.

“Speaking of plans,” he said, this time truly picking up the thread of conversation, “Vell just outlined the battle plan. Has she told you?”

I shook my head mutely, content to let him carry the burden of enunciating real words.

“I’ll have the ground force. Gray has the Valkyries. Arcana will be positioned by Vell, and that’s where you’ll be as well, a good distance away from the actual battle.” He looked satisfied at that and I raised an eyebrow, remembering myself enough to feel a slight sting of irritation. “Vell will be working the spells on the wings and whatever other elemental sorcery she deems necessary, so she won’t be very attuned to her immediate surroundings.”

Suddenly my belt-pouch felt heavier. Still listening to Finnead, I slid a few fingers into the pouch surreptitiously. My fingers encountered smooth stone, and from the tingle in my war-markings I knew I now carried the nine smooth dark stones that had been forged from the shards of iron in the Royal Wood. Or perhaps there was only five, because I’d used four to mark the points of the compass on the banks of the Darinwel, and I couldn’t clearly recall gathering them back up after using them to extract the blood-oath of safety from the siren. But I’d find out later. Plenty of time to count stones that I was suddenly carrying again, or perhaps had still been carrying all along, when I wasn’t standing before a handsome dark-haired Knight of the Wild Court.

“Since you’re Arcana’s second,” Finnead continued, “you’ll become the captain of the High Queen’s guard if something happens to the Evermage.”

I nodded. “If the Evermage becomes a crispy critter, I get to be the boss. Got it.” I wrinkled my nose. “Vell agreed to this guard?”

“She understands its necessity,” said Finnead, just as Vell threw in from somewhere behind him in a growl:

“That doesn’t mean I like it!”

“That doesn’t mean she likes it,” said Finnead without skipping a beat, and I smiled again. He blinked. “What’s so amusing?”

“I like this Wild Court Knight,” I said before I could think too much about the words and trip over them. “You’re much more…free.”

Finnead considered the statement for a moment. “I’d point out, Lady Bearer, that you’re not basing this conclusion on very substantial evidence.”

I spread my hands. “It’s not really a conclusion, more of an observation. You seem more…spontaneous. Lighter.”

Finnead raised his eyebrows. “Spontaneous?”

“Well,” I amended, “as far as spontaneity goes, that’s never really been the Unseelie strong suit—”

And I found my words quite suddenly silenced by that eminently kissable mouth, as Finnead, seemingly intent on proving said spontaneity, drew me against his body, one hand about my waist and the other behind my head, fingers wrapped in my braids. Fire rushed through my veins and roared in my ears as Finnead kissed me thoroughly—a passionate kiss, his urgency born of the looming battle and his newfound freedom. His lips tasted like new snow and pine—the direflame, I realized distantly. I surrendered to the whirlwind, pressing myself against him and sliding my arms about his sides, wishing that I wasn’t wearing gauntlets and armor and all manner of ridiculous impediments to feeling his skin upon mine.