The Scourge of Muirwood (39 page)

She thought she would faint with joy and was grateful his arms had managed to loose themselves from the tangled weave of her hair and clutched her shoulders to keep her up.

Glancing up at him, she blinked as if in a dream. “Are you saying, Colvin Price, that we are married?”

“I am,” he whispered huskily, greedily.

“But do not I get a say in this?” she asked with a teasing voice. “Am I bound forever to you then with no choice of my own?”

His eyebrows raised in mock solemnity. “You must accept the binding for it to be sacred. I suppose I was presuming…?”

Lia ran her finger down his mouth. “Yes.”

“Yes?” he asked.

“Yes, I accept it,” she answered. “I give you all that I have and all that I am.”

“Then kiss me again,” he demanded.

She was only too willing to oblige.

* * *

Lia awoke first before the blush of dawn lit the windows of the kitchen. After rising from the pallet, she summoned fires from the oven Leerings to warm the tiles and quickly set about making something for them to eat. She was starving and knew Colvin would be too when he awoke. For a moment, she remembered the day she had made him porridge and he had tried to guess her age without asking and how they had argued. She warmed the kettle and added some spice to the dish before tossing in the seeds to the boiling water.

As she fretted by the trestle table, she heard him shift and come away and slowly pad over to her. His chin nuzzled her neck and she smiled and trembled, enjoying the bristled feel of his cheeks and chin, the tickling feeling it caused down to her feet.

“I thought you would sleep longer,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at him.

“I was cold after you left. I want you near me…always.”

“The ships will be cramped, I imagine you will get your wish,” she said playfully. “Now, you said the Holk will meet us on the coast?”

He nodded, kissing her earlobe and making her gasp. “Please, Colvin. I do not want to burn your food. You must let me concentrate. The Holk will take us to Pry-Ree and then…?”

“We cross the mountains to Tintern and bring the Aldermaston back with us. He is the last to be saved. We will be on the boats for some time. The land we sail to is very far. Across the great ocean.”

“You said that the orb was meant to direct us there,” she continued, stirring the porridge and nodding with satisfaction at how it thickened. “The Holk will be the lead ship.” She frowned. “What about Martin? We did not speak of his part to this story yet.”

Colvin nodded sternly. “He has chosen to remain and protect his granddaughter. Hillel will become Queen of Comoros and he will be her advisor and protector. There is still some time before the Blight consumes everyone. At least she knows now what she truly is and what she must never do.”

Lia sighed. “It must have been difficult for you. Ruining her sense of who she really was. You were the one who discovered her at Sempringfall. You were also the one to tell her the truth.”

Colvin looked askance and shrugged slightly. “I suppose I do not judge or consider her pains and loss equal to what you have suffered, Lia. She will be Queen. It is hardly confinement in a dungeon. Her marriage will not be a happy one. But she will have more comforts than she would have enjoyed as a wretched. And more power.”

“You learned her true name from my father’s tome?” she asked.

Colvin nodded.

Lia served up two bowls of porridge, flavoring both with treacle and raisins. They ate it ravenously, washing it down with pure water that Lia summoned from another Leering.

“You told me to wait until today to tell me how you escaped Dieyre’s dungeon,” Lia said when they were finished. “I had thought perhaps Martin rescued you. But now I think not.”

Colvin shook his head. “No, but he did mix the herbs that feigned my illness. He is an astute poisoner. I was truly sick for many days and he used juice from some berries to add little poxes on my face and arms. The important thing to create was the rumor of my illness. Rumors get exaggerated with each telling. I knew that I would be spending the winter below ground in a dungeon. Considering what you endured in the hetaera’s lair, I faced my task as bravely as I could. There were no serpents to torment me. Only rats. Dieyre visited me often, trying to get me to reveal where my sister was being held. He kept me alive for that purpose, using his influence to forestall the Queen’s plan to execute me. As long as I revealed nothing, they had no choice but to spare me.”

“Yes, but how did you escape?” Lia pressed.

He paced the kitchen like he had before, back when he was healing from his wound. She wondered if he would reach for a broom and start swinging it like a sword. The thought almost made her laugh.

“Dieyre let me go,” he said simply.

“What?”

“You must understand that we spent much time talking together. He did not come to that decision all at once, but he slowly turned his thinking. He saw people around him begin to die of the plague. He saw that your warning would eventually be fulfilled. He asked me about you. He said he believed you did not die in the furnace, that you were alive somewhere. He wondered where you were and if you could be convinced to remove the curse you had put on him. I think he kept me so long because he believed you would eventually come looking for me to save me. But how could I explain to him that you were an Aldermaston and were bound to Muirwood’s fate? You will be bound to Muirwood forever you know. We both will.”

“Yes, but as you explained last night, it means I am bound to rebuild her. Not myself, but one of my posterity must do it. I did not know I could freely leave, but now I do. Imagine it, Colvin. A child or grandchild of ours, returning to this land to rebuild the Abbeys. It will take centuries to rebuild them all.”

Colvin nodded. “Until we do, the dead will multiply and roam the land. They will be in chains like the Myriad Ones. We must free them, Lia. We must free them all.”

She nodded, remembering the Aldermaston. “So you convinced Dieyre to let you go?”

He shook his head. “No. None of my persuasions ever convinced him. In the end, he arrived one night after one of his servants had perished by the plague. He stripped the man’s clothes and gave them to me and replaced mine with his. He said he would announce to the world that I was dead and that I could leave that night.”

Lia wrinkled her forehead. “Surely he was letting you go to follow you to Marciana,” she said, suddenly concerned.

Colvin nodded. “Naturally. Which is why I went to Forshee first instead of here. I went there for two reasons. To find my tome and to get something for you. There is something I wanted you to have.”

“What is it?” she asked, leaning forward curiously.

He retrieved the pouch with the Cruciger orb and pulled it out. Then fishing at the bottom of the pouch, he withdrew a wedding band.

“This was my mother’s,” he said. “You remember I told you that she was buried in an ossuary at my manor house? That I had feared she was buried alive?”

Lia nodded, her eyes widening in wonder.

“I opened the ossuary and there was nothing left but graveclothes and this ring. As you pointed out to me in the past, if the dead do not wish to wear rings in Idumea, then we may as well use them here.” He walked up to her and took her hand. “Will you wear this, as a symbol of our binding?”

Trembling with happiness, Lia nodded and Colvin slipped the ring on her finger. It fit well. It was beautifully crafted by an expert goldsmith, with little designs made of maston symbols along the band.

“In return then,” she said, reaching into her bodice and removing the ring she had found as a child. “Would you wear this ring? When you gave it back to me in the cell below Dochte Abbey, I fashioned a little necklace from some threads and wore it beneath my chaen.” She snapped the threads and put the ring on his matching finger. It fit perfectly, as if it had always belonged on his hand.

“I have carried that ring since I was a child,” she murmured. “To think, all along it was meant for you.”

Colvin leaned down and kissed her warmly. She enjoyed it immensely.

“You still have not finished your tale. How did you escape your manor?” she reminded him, tugging at his shirt front. “Dieyre is not known for being generous or a fool. I am certain he had his men follow you.”

“Yes. But neither he nor I was expecting Nuric. That is his Pry-rian name. I knew him as Theobald, my father’s steward. He was an Evnissyen who served your father. His mission was to deliver you to Muirwood Abbey as a baby. Because of the binding sigil, he could not speak of it, but he hinted as best he could. As I child, I had heard his stories about the Prince of Pry-Ree’s missing daughter. I assumed he had family in Pry-Ree, not that he was of Pry-rian descent. Do you see, Lia? Your father sent Nuric to Forshee to serve my father. He was my advisor and a friend. He knew about you and where you were, but he could not say until the binding was broken. Remember, when I told you last night that Hillel and I went to the Holk, I was given the room of a shipmate, the one belonging to the crewman Malcolm. That was when Maderos told me who he really was and gave me your father’s tome. He was the one who kept it safely all these years.”

Lia smiled at the thought, grateful to her father and his Gift of Seering. “And the password?”

“The tome had passages for me, written in my language, by your father. He explained that to get the password, I needed to take the orb from Hillel and bring it to Maderos. He would be able to read it and make it work. The password was, as I told you last night, the name you were given in the maston ceremony.”

“And you read the tome during the journey home, at least the parts you could read. Then Twelfth Night came. That was when you betrayed Hillel and banished the Myriad One who was with her. You cannot banish it permanently, because of the mark on her shoulder, but you drove it away for a while and could explain to Hillel who she really was and what she had done.”

Colvin nodded, rubbing his chin. “Nuric helped me escape Forshee undetected. He is a skillful man and helped me cross to you undetected. He knew I should visit you alone and has gone ahead of us to the Holk and will leave with the ships for the new land. He is so anxious to meet you, Lia. He served your father faithfully so many years.”

Lia looked out the window again. It was dawn. “I suppose it is time to leave for Pry-Ree.” She smoothed her hand across the trestle table. “I will always remember this kitchen. My earliest memories are here. It will be sad to leave Muirwood, knowing we will never see it again.”

He took her hand and kissed it. “We will build it in the new land. It will look the same. Someday, our Family will return and claim it once more. We will rebuild it, Lia. We will rebuild them all.”

She squeezed his hand. “Make it thus so,” she whispered.

My dearest daughter. This tome is my only opportunity to speak to you with my own voice. If all has happened as I have foreseen, you are on a ship bound to a new land. I provided instructions that this portion should not be read to you, but that you must learn to read it yourself as you have always longed to be able to do. I have watched you from afar, from the very shores of Idumea. It is there that your mother and I await your return. You have been tasked to open the gates that bind the worlds together and you have set in motion the destruction of the hetaera. You have been faithful, obedient, and courageous. I am so proud of you.

In this tome, you will learn about your future and the future of our Family. Your work is not yet done. You and your husband and your children and their wives and husbands will be kings and queens in the new land. I have left you my tome to aid you that you may rule in wisdom and humility. When I sent you to Muirwood, I trusted you would learn the pains and feelings of common people. Their tears and pains and sorrows weigh more on the Medium than the whims and greed and beauty of the rich and the powerful.

I have seen deeply into the future, my darling girl. Our Family will play a great role in events to come. Your writings and wisdom will be added to this tome, helping save generations yet unborn. In the future I have seen your posterity will chain and shackle Ereshkigal for all time and bind her in prison under irrevocare sigil. She knows this is her destiny, which is why she has persecuted our Family. Teach your children to be strong for she will always seek to subvert them. Some will fall under her sway.

Cold aurichalcum and shavings is a poor medium in which to express a father’s love. Clasp this tome in your hands, my child, and think of me. Through the true Medium, you will feel my love for you, stronger than death and deeper than the depths of Sheol. We await you, beloved daughter. We offered up our lives that you might live and fulfill and begin the destiny of our Family.

Your servant,

Alluwyn Lleu-Iselin

Father

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