Warrior's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) (11 page)

“I see. Thank you, Pym. I suppose if he has the
strength to hurl dinnerware, he’s not as close to death as I feared.”

The butler made the appropriate noises and bowed his way out.

Gray watched him scuttle down the corridor, doubtless, headed straight to Sir Dromon with news of this conversation. It was safe to assume that every Deepings servant was in Pryor’s employ; either bound by loyalty or pressured by fear. It was also safe to assume that, despite Pryor’s toadying, the head of the Ossine wanted him dead as much as he always had. So why had he allowed Gray to return to holding lands unmolested, when up until a few months ago, he’d bent every effort to destroy him? What game did the Arch Ossine play?

To take his mind from his endless circle of questions, he surveyed the dark tapestried walls and the ponderous, uncomfortable furniture of his guest hall chambers. His lip curled in a humorless smile. Whatever brutal entertainments Pryor had planned, he’d made his first miscalculation. The guest hall had always been a drab, gloomy, unpleasant place. Almost certainly, a tactic of his grandfather’s to keep unwanted visitors to a minimum and the Gather elders from lingering too long. But they didn’t know its secret—Gray did.

He passed through a study, a salon, and a small private dining room to his bedchamber. Aside from a tester bed resembling something Henry VIII might have died in, the room held little more than a lumpy wingback chair, a folding officer’s desk with a wobbly leg, and an immense wardrobe carved with the de Coursy crest: a double-headed eagle bearing five
arrows in its claws. This last piece of ornate furniture took up most of the chamber’s northern wall. Beside it, the hearth yawned cold and black with soot from five centuries or more of oak-fed fires, while above it hung a heavy gold-rimmed mirror, the reflection within its speckled depths revealing a lean high-boned face bordering on gaunt, eyes that had seen too much, and a mouth set in a permanent expression of grim resignation. He raked a hand through his hair, straightened his tired shoulders, and ran a finger along the thin slash of red at his throat where Thorsh’s blade had left its mark. He looked like nothing more than a dour consumptive. Older than his thirty-one years, bent by pain and battered by injury.

The war had toughened him. The peace that followed had stretched him close to the breaking point. Only determination fired him now. Determination and a sense that all the events since Charleroi—hell since the fateful storm in the Channel had stripped his family from him in one earth-shattering cataclysm—had been leading him to this point and soon he might understand why and what he was supposed to do with this horrible destiny.

But only if he could gain hold of Jai Idrish.

Reaching up, he felt along the mirror’s left edge until he found a grooved indentation worked into the gilded frame. He pressed it once, then twice more. A brick at the back of the hearth scraped aside to reveal a narrow cavity—and a key.

He smiled his relief and thanked the Mother that he’d not been summoned here in winter, when the hearth would have been fed a steady diet of logs and the secret panel lost to the flames. He scooped the key
from its resting place and opened the wardrobe door. A servant had already unpacked his clothes, but Gray pushed all of them aside and stepped up into the high wooden cupboard. At the very back behind a mountain of coats and shirts and boots and stockings was the flat wooden panel that made up the back of the wardrobe. In the dusty camphor-scented dark, none would notice the tiny inconspicuous keyhole, but Gray knew it was there. He slid the key in and turned. The secret door opened with a puff of dry stale air to reveal a cavernous hole.

He allowed himself a smile of success—it paid to bury oneself in books.

He’d found the secret of the passage in a mildewed journal kept by the third earl of Halvossa, a scholar of history and a skilled warrior. A man who read and wrote extensively when he wasn’t hacking people’s heads off in battle. He gained a dukedom for his loyalty to one king. He ended on the block for his rebellion against another. But his greatest achievement had been Deepings. From rugged keep and earthen ditches grew a formidable defensive fortress. Only the earl knew what he’d truly been defending; the holding of his clan; the remnants of a race gone into hiding against a dangerous world. The journal had been a catalog of the building process, a daily report of bricks laid, ground broken, workers hired . . . and escape routes should the need arise.

It had not.

Not in the centuries since. Hopefully not in the centuries to come. The knowledge of these bolt-holes had been lost amid the Deepings library, only brought to light by a fifteen-year-old boy in search of a story to
lull him to sleep when the nights seemed endless and his thoughts spun like a Catherine wheel.

He stepped into the passage, pausing for a moment until his eyes adjusted to the dark. A faint breeze stirred the air against his face and fluttered the curtains of cobwebs. A dull roar vibrated the stones under his feet where no footprints marred the thick layer of dust and mouse droppings. Ten paces on, the passage became a set of winding stairs that descended hundreds of feet into the cliffs upon which Deepings stood, ending at a trapdoor and a swirling black whirlpool.

All just as he remembered.

The journal claimed that a short swim would empty you onto the beach below the castle. Gray had never had the courage to dive into the impenetrable black water to find out. Just standing at the edge and staring down at the churn of waves would bring on gut-seizing tremors. He’d imagine the punch of icy water closing over his head and the crush of burning lungs as he was spun head over feet by the tugging current. The tears would run, his hands would shake, and he would back away sickened and shamed by his cowardice.

It had been more than ten years since he’d last stood in this spot, but the unreasonable terror still gripped him. He steadied himself, palms sweaty, stomach rolling, and cursed himself for a craven. It would seem the years had hardened him, but old memories still clung like the cobwebs shrouding his clothes and tangling in his hair.

A hundred yards or a hundred miles made no difference. There was not a chance in hell he could leap into that hole and swim the distance to safety.

Escape route? Not bloody likely.

Perhaps Sir Dromon hadn’t been so stupid after all.

Perhaps entering Deepings had been the easy part, and it would be leaving that proved to be impossible.

*  *  *

“I hope you’ve recovered sufficiently, Lady N’thuil. I want to offer my humblest apologies on behalf of the Ossine. I can only hope de Coursy has apologized as well.” Sir Dromon fiddled with his pocket watch, running his fingers up and down the gold chain, his thin-lipped, chinless smile giving him a puckish, unnerving look.

“It’s of no matter,” she said, wishing only for the solace of her own apartments where she might scrub the grime of the road from her skin. The memories of slaughter would not be erased so easily.

“Isn’t it?” Sir Dromon challenged, rising from his desk. “He might have killed you had I not come when I did. Rage fills that man. There’s no telling what he might do. I only hope I didn’t err by inviting him back to Deepings.”

“Gray had no choice. The enforcer would have murdered the boy as he’d killed the coachman.”

“But to risk your life in such a callous way. If he could not honor your safety as N’thuil, you would think he would at least show respect for a woman in his care. To place you in peril was not the behavior of a gentleman, no matter how he was pushed to the brink.”

“What was Mr. Thorsh’s excuse? He made it very clear he’d have been more than pleased to see my brains mingling with that of the coachman’s on that
road. There was neither honor nor respect in his actions nor even a shadow of gentility. The man’s a monster.”

“In these times, we use the best tool for the job. Thorsh might not have the manners that come with social rank, but he’s very good at what he does.”

“Killing?”

“I was going to say, protecting the clans from those who would destroy us if given the chance.” His purse-lipped, professorial look over his spectacles was meant to set her in her proper place.

She wished she knew where that proper place might be anymore. She felt tugged in too many directions, like flotsam caught in a riptide. The more she struggled, the more she floundered. “I only want to put it behind me and focus on the reason for de Coursy’s coming in the first place, putting an end to this growing internal divide. The Imnada can’t afford to turn upon each other; not now. Not when—”

“—the Fey-bloods stand upon our very doorstep? But who put them there in the first place? Who went against every law and custom by revealing our existence to out-clans and Fey-bloods?”

“Major de Coursy did what he thought was right.” She felt herself retreating in the face of Dromon’s argument. Offering excuses for Gray when what she really wanted to do was throttle him for such a thoughtless stunt. When push came to shove, he’d not pulled the trigger, but that didn’t mean the thought hadn’t crossed his mind.

“That may be, but the laws were put in place for a reason—to keep us safe, to keep us strong,” Sir Dromon said. “Those who subvert them must pay a price for
their presumption. Otherwise, they pollute with their lies those who remain loyal to the old teachings.”

Logical, reasonable; the voice of rational thought among the clamoring squabbles of petty clan leaders.

Sir Dromon ambled about the room, hands behind his back, a self-satisfied master of his dominion. Now and then he would take up a figurine or a carved box, a bit of china statuary or a painted miniature, stare at it for a loving moment and put it back precisely in its place. A man who appreciated order and exactness above all else. He controlled the bloodline scrolls with the same care and meticulousness. No wonder the idea of half-breeds and out-clan marriages disgusted him. They disrupted his clean, neat, tidy view of the world where there was a place for everything and everything in its place.

“But they’re not all lies, are they?” she asked, reminded of the Flannery baby. A muddle of magics that ran counter to everything Sir Dromon stood for.

“What do you mean by that?” He dropped his fob, the flash of the pearl bright in the candle’s light. His brows creased, and he smoothed a hand over his shirtfront in flustered agitation.

She must tread carefully here. To accuse the Arch Ossine of an outright falsehood would be dangerous, but a bit of clever manipulation might reveal the answers and leave him thinking her as useless a female as he already did.

She cast her gaze to the floor, offered him a slightly awed look through downcast lashes. “It’s just that for centuries we’ve been told the bloodline scrolls are the only way to maintain the purity and power inherent in the race. That out-clan marriages must be shunned
and half-breeds refused clan recognition because they weaken us . . . dilute us. Yet, in London . . . amid Major de Coursy’s associates, the half-breeds I encountered possessed the same purity and strength as any true blood. Perhaps if that’s the case then they’re as worthy of the clans as any born of the scrolls.” She finished with an uncertain, doltish half smile.

His answering expression was one of pedagogical condescension. “It might seem so, my dear, but looks can be deceiving. Opening the way to half-breeds and out-clan marriages would be tantamount to surrendering all we are or ever hope to be. When Aneavala created the Palings to protect us, he set us apart and above. Who are we to turn our backs on what has served us well for so long?”

“But wasn’t that during the wars, when the clans fought for our very survival? It’s different now.” She worked to maintain the bland questioning expression that seemed to be working so effectively.

“Is it?” he answered sharply.

She thought about the Fey-blood who attacked Gray. He’d claimed this was the first time, but who could say if it would be the last? The Fey-bloods were known for their treachery and their hatred of the Imnada. The stories were full of such instances even before the Fealla Mhòr, when the clans were supposed to be at peace. If the
afailth luinan
was known to the Other, they would stop at nothing to possess such a prize, gift or not. Who was right? Dromon with his isolationist fears, or Gray with his desire for détente? She feared the answer would only be known after more violence.

“You defend de Coursy’s position even after he behaved
so badly,” Sir Dromon continued. “He must be quite persuasive to win you over to his cause.”

A parry and return thrust, bringing the conversation full circle. Nicely played. She would have to concede and withdraw. “I’m not won over, but I’m willing to see his side and judge the truth for myself.”

“That’s good and as it should be for a seeker of peace. I, too, look forward to hearing his arguments. Perhaps he can convince me of his rightness and that his actions have not doomed us all. That these Fey-bloods can be trusted.” Sir Dromon sighed deeply, his fingers again running up and down the gold chain hanging from his waistcoat pocket. “I only hope he can be trusted as well.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Why do you suppose he agreed to come back so easily? I know you believe your childhood friendship swayed him or perhaps your more recent feminine charms, but he is no fool. He must understand the risks. What could have driven him to come?”

“I told him the duke was dying. That for the good of the clans and his own peace of mind, he should attempt a reconciliation.”

Once more appeared the look of patient disdain that made Meeryn want to scratch his eyes from his head with one good rake of her nails. “That would be a wonderful thing, were it true.”

She curled her fingers into her palm and breathed deeply through her nose. “You don’t believe him?”

“I know the duke pines for his lost family and de Coursy’s exile was a bitter blow, but they were never close, were they? Perhaps it’s not love that brought de Coursy back but something darker
like”—he leaned close, his voice a hissed whisper—“vengeance.”

Meeryn went rigid. “You believe he’s here to kill His Grace?”