The Staff and the Blade: Irin Chronicles Book Four (27 page)

Something in him died, and in its place, an angry root took hold. “I always knew you thought I was a liar,” he said softly. “At least now you don’t feel the need to shield me.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Yes, it is. When I told you about Tala, you didn’t believe me. When I told you she insisted, you didn’t believe me.” He glanced up. “You still don’t.”

She flinched, and Damien knew he was right.

“The plan made the best strategic sense at the time,” he said quietly.

“Is that your excuse for letting her die?”

“You weren’t there!”

“No, I was fighting for my life. Watching my sisters and our children be slaughtered by Grigori,” she said. “Where were you?”

Where were you?

The weight of guilt would never ease. He had been in the city. Doing what he thought was right. Following orders. Despite Tala’s dream. Despite the attacks in Brussels. He’d been blind and proud, convinced the Grigori were thinking as he was. Convinced his council was right.

Where were you?

He had been flush with his mate’s power, leaving Sari weak against the enemy who had attacked her, attacked their unborn child. He’d left her to fight alone, so she had pushed him away.

I wasn’t there.

She didn’t need him anymore. She was as hardened a warrior as he had ever been. Hardened by anger and terror and survival. Hardened by the choices she’d made and the ghosts that haunted her.

“What can I do?” he asked. “There is no making this right. What would you have me do, Sari?”

She sat alone on the bed, her face blank. “I don’t know.”

Damien closed his eyes in defeat. There was no forgiveness. There might never be. For a moment he thought of Otto, his brother too haunted by the past to envision a future. He thought of his men who had taken their own lives and left this horror of a world for the peace of eternity with their mates.

But Sari was alive. Leaving this world would bring him no peace. His death, even if she hated him, would wound his mate, and everything in Damien revolted at the thought.

“I will never leave you,” he said. “Never. But I will not come to you again. I cannot.”

She was livid. “You do this to punish me. Because I won’t—”

“Do you want me to hunt you?” His voice rose. He tried to tamp it down, but the predatory instincts in him were on a very tight leash. “Because I will, Sari. To the ends of the earth, there would be no rest from my pursuit. Is that what you desire? I
would
hunt you, my love, and I would find you.”

Her eyes grew cold again. “You would try.”

Proud. Stubborn. Combative. Her will was honed steel.

May you be blessed to find a mate as warlike as yourself.

Should he laugh or cry at his fortune?

Damien hung his head. “I can’t do this. When you are ready,
milá
. When you can find forgiveness in your heart for me, come to me. Knock on my door, and I will always open it. Always. Come to me when you are ready to take me back. I love you, Sari. I chose you, and I always will.”

That night it was Damien who left the house. He left, and he did not return.

CHAPTER ONE

S
ARIHÖFN
, Norway

2013

“T
HE
risk is minimal for the reward,” Sari said. “I vote we allow her to continue on the continent for now.”

Mala, her first lieutenant, didn’t agree.
She’s becoming a liability,
Mala signed.
For her contacts and, more importantly, herself.

“I know you’re attached to her,” Sari said, “but you can’t argue with her success. She’s taken out five nests of the monsters in the past two years. And she’s done it under the watchers’ noses.”

Sari caught Astrid, the haven’s healer, biting her lip.

“You agree with Mala,” Sari said.

“I do,” Astrid said quietly. “I love her, but we all know what Renata is like. This past decade, we’ve seen her spiraling out of control. It’s one thing when she’s risking her own life, but when she’s careless with others…”

The fearsome singer had come to them, barely out of her training as an archivist, from a village outside Rome. Renata’s family and her intended mate had thought they’d escaped the ravages of the Rending, but the Grigori stalking them had only been lying in wait. Renata was the only survivor of that massacre. She’d made it a point to hunt down Mala—renowned for her ferocity—and demand training as a warrior. Mala had led her to Sari. Renata had been taking her revenge on Grigori ever since.

“Do we know where she is?” Sari asked.

Mala shrugged. Astrid said, “I know how to find out. I’ll get the message out. It could take a while.”

“Fine. Until she’s back—”

Karen burst into the library. “Sorry! Sorry, sorry, sorry. I was baking and lost track of time.”

Mala signed,
Sari just agreed to call Renata back.

“Good,” Karen said. “It’s about time. She’s going to kill herself and someone else at this rate. She needs to be home for a while.”

“That’s all you’ve missed so far,” Sari said. “We were just going to go over news from the other havens.”

As Astrid began to read some of the correspondence from singers’ havens around the world, Sari thought for the thousandth time how much had changed since the Rending. Would mobile phones and e-mail have prevented the slaughter of so many? It was easy to forget as communication became instantaneous how confusing those months had been. Everyone was traumatized. Added to that, reports of other attacks were so muddled and contradictory that no one knew what was going on.

In the centuries since, the Irina had become masters of communication. When the Internet was developed, they’d learned its secrets early. They wouldn’t survive in the modern world without it. While the scribe houses stagnated among their ancient scrolls, the remnants of singers had become adept at communication and obfuscation in the modern world. Havens like Sarihöfn existed all over the world, and they were all connected. Silent assassins were sent out to eliminate threats. Careful contacts were cultivated to maintain anonymity.

It was a new world.

A new world still carrying the corpse of the old,
Mala had told her once.

It was true. The world had moved on, and the Irina had moved with it. But in many ways, they were still the walking dead.

“I’ve had word from Patiala,” Astrid said quietly. “Anamitra has surrendered to the heavens.”

Sari felt the slow intake of breath. A pause before the exhale. “Have you told my grandmother yet?”

“I only got word this morning. Her niece said she had been in silence for over a year now.”

Anamitra, one of the eldest of the Irina. Older even than her grandmother Orsala, and a dear friend who had served on the Irina Council at the time of the Rending. For decades, rumors said she’d been killed with her daughter and her granddaughters. Then the word had come that the singer had been in seclusion since the death of her mate, who had died in his attempt to defend their village. She’d stopped her longevity spells and had been slowly fading for two hundred years.

Mala put her fingers to her lips and lifted them to heaven. Karen closed her eyes and smiled.

“May peace find her,” Sari said. “Is there anything else?”

“No.”

“I’ll go tell my grandmother.” Sari rose and walked to the door, leaving her three most trusted advisors in the library, quietly talking about the passing of a legend. When Sari reached the edge of their small commune, she toed off her shoes and dug her feet into the soil, letting her magic reach down and twine with the ground that fed it. It pulsed with life and heat despite the chill in the air.

She felt more than the changing of the seasons. Something in the rhythm of the earth had changed. The death of one of their elders marked something. Some shift was happening in the heavens perhaps. A change in the wind off the sea.

Sari turned her face to the sun and walked to Orsala’s cottage.

※

“You’re very affectionate tonight,” Damien whispered to her. “Talk to me.”

“I can’t.”

“You won’t.”

The sea tumbled behind them, and the sun warmed their bodies. They were on the coast of Brittany. A short holiday after they’d first moved to Paris. The golden time when their family surrounded them and dreams felt like promises.

Damien held her on the blanket, his shirt stripped off, as was hers. They lay skin to skin as the sun and the sea surrounded them.

It wasn’t the same as feeling his arms. Nothing was the same as that. Dream-walking with her mate was like smelling and tasting the finest food but never being able to swallow. It fed her soul enough that she could function, but she never felt full.

“The past feels very heavy tonight,” Sari said, resting her head on his chest. Two hundred years of dreams, and she most often spent them like this. Resting her head on his chest while he held her. Sometimes passion filled their thoughts, but they were not new lovers. Most often, it was his presence her soul needed. That night she ran her hands up and down his torso, feeling every dip and scar. Every raised line of his
talesm
. Every battle-hardened muscle. He was her personal homeland, and she mapped him inch by inch.

“Sari,” he said. “Something has happened.”

She blinked as the dream began to grow muddled. He lived in Istanbul and often woke before her.

“What?”

“Something has happened.” His voice was foggier.

“Damien.” She held on to him even as his body grew faint beneath her. “Please, go back to sleep. I need you tonight.”

“I need…” His voice came from a distance. “…come to you.”

She shook her head. He wouldn’t come to her. He’d walked away. Part of her couldn’t blame him. Part of her was incensed. Another part of her lived in the fury and didn’t know how to break from it even when she desperately wanted to. She’d made Damien her world, and then he’d failed her. She’d put her faith in him, and his feet were made of clay.

“Damien?”

She opened her eyes, and the beach where they’d been lying was cold and dark. But as she turned to look for him, she felt his warmth at her back and his voice came to her ear, as clear as if he were lying in the same bed.

“I am coming to you.”

※

She was still thinking about the dream a week later. For days, Sari had expected to hear word of her mate in Oslo or even Bergen.

He wouldn’t, the logical part of her argued. He’d promised, and Damien did not break his promises. A tiny part of her whispered in hope. After a week, that part fell quiet again.

Sari was weeding the gardens, clearing the raised beds for winter planting. They would put the hot frames over them the following week so modern technology and Irina magic could keep their commune in vegetables through the winter. But before then, every errant sprout must be eliminated. It was good work. It connected her to her magic and distracted her from the itching in the back of her mind.

Damien was not coming to her. He was busy in Istanbul. Busy obeying the gaggle of old men who still held his leash. Busy following rules that had led to the slaughter of half their race.

He could have been on the council if he’d wanted. With his family and connections, the appointment would have been an easy one. Or he could have worked from behind the scenes, like Gabriel.

He did neither.

“Sari?” Astrid called from behind one of the permanent greenhouses.

“Back here!”

Astrid walked over the even ground, her hands in her pockets. She was an even-tempered healer, with just enough humor to keep Sari from killing her. Her hair was normally a light brown, but it glowed golden in the sun that day.

“I heard from Renata,” Astrid said as she approached. “She wasn’t happy about it, but she agreed to come back.”

“Where was she?”

“She didn’t say.”

Sari grunted and went back to pulling weeds. “Here’s hoping she’s home before it snows.”

Astrid looked up at the sky. “Do you think a storm is coming?”

She shook her head. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Astrid said. “Something in the air. Karen mentioned it this morning too.”

That hopeful whisper started again. Sari shoved it back as Astrid walked back to her cottage.

She worked four more hours before she noticed a figure standing at the edge of the greenhouses, watching her. It was her grandmother, Orsala. Sari pushed the hair out of her dirt-smudged face and straightened. “Grandmother?”

The old singer said nothing, simply turned her face to the west. “Magic on the borders.”

Sari stood and reached for the staff that was always within reach. “Where?”

“Coming up the old road.”

The road that had existed before the modern highway had been built. A footpath still linked the old road and the haven, though few ever used it.

“Who?”