Warrior's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) (14 page)

Closer she drew toward the spiraling center, her body plucked tight, the storm outside mirroring the tumbling crescendo. She cried out, knees buckling, head spinning. The world became a dizzying collage of emotion and sensation, jumbled and spun till she had no way of knowing which way was up, where he ended and she began. He caught her as she fell into his arms and they knelt forehead to forehead upon the stone floor, each fighting to catch their breath.

The wind howled and rain drummed upon the narrow windows, a wall thickening between them with every passing minute neither spoke nor moved. Water plopped on the floor beside them in a steady beat that matched her slowing heart. She’d no desire to move or speak, no desire to break the dream she wrapped round herself as he held her.

Gray recovered first. He cupped the soft weight of one breast, his thumb sliding provocatively over her nipple, his lips barely tasting the sweat-salty skin before he pulled her blouse up to cover her, then straightened her sleeves, pushed her hair back over her shoulders. Small moves to tidy her, to erase the past minutes as if they’d never been. She allowed it,
but each distancing move brought a new lump to her throat.

“That shouldn’t have occurred,” he said.

“Why not? Because we’re unwed? Because I’m N’thuil? Because you’re . . .”

“I’m nothing, Meeryn. Society calls me the Ghost Earl. A horrid nickname, but that’s what I am. Dead to you. Dead to the clans. As much a wraith as . . .” He dropped his gaze to the stones they knelt upon.

“As your parents and Ollie. I understand.” She collected herself bit by bit, until she knew she could ask the question that needed to be asked and not fall apart at the answer. “What do you need, Gray?” she finally asked, her voice soft but strong. “What really brought you back to Deepings?”

He sucked in a sharp gasp that might have been pain or shock or both, even as the burning heat of his body seemed to cool and solidify to unyielding marble. The light winked out of a face wiped clean of expression, the inches separating them suddenly yawning wide as a chasm.

“To live . . . or to die . . . it depends on you.”

*  *  *

Half-two. It was time. Satisfied, Gray snapped his pocket watch closed. The house would be sleeping by now. Servants long since abed. Shadows thick and concealing. Gray slipped out a side door in the guest hall. Should anyone challenge him, he would produce the cheroot from his pocket and explain his prowl as sleeplessness mixed with nostalgia. No one did.

Emerging onto the long, sloping lawn, his eagle’s gaze swept west to east, before settling upon the Crystal
Tower, the sanctum of Jai Idrish. Four stories high and built all of milky-white stone, the tall, graceful tower stood out like a blaze of light amid the bleak fortresslike gray of the rest of Deepings’ curtain wall and the cloud-riven night sky above.

He checked for any signs of movement, any patrolling guard or skulking servant. He’d spent years in similar situations, noting French forces, surveying unfamiliar battle terrain, moving ahead of an army that relied on his information for victory. But he’d done it from the air; a distant clinical observer. Tonight, he wore the skin of the human and his war had shrunk to a one-on-one fight for personal survival.

Crouched and moving swiftly through the dark, he approached the door to the tower. The hairs at the back of his neck lifted as magic crawled over his skin and prickled against his brain like needles. A large crow settled on the grass a few paces away, watching him with eyes shiny as jet beads.

“I wondered when you might turn up again.” The bird hopped beside Gray as he made his way toward the arched doorway letting into the tower. “Any word on who might have spilled our secrets to the Other?”

A shimmer of rainbow color exploded up from the bird in a column of dancing light. From the midst, Badb emerged in a swirl of feathers, her eyes snapping with anger. “No, though it is clear someone is speaking out of turn. The Other are uncertain and still reel from their own internal strife. It would not be difficult to unite them against a common enemy. You must hope whoever sparks these latest rumors is not bent on causing more than mischief.”

“You have no idea who it might be?”

“No.”

“So I can’t stop it.”

“No.”

“Then it’s a problem for another day.”

“You would ignore an impending crisis to play at kiss-me-quick with a woman? Was the taste of her quim so pleasurable, you would forget who you are and what you seek to do, shapechanger?”

He swung around, anger almost, but not quite, causing him to forget with whom he spoke. Badb was an ally, not a friend. She could also be a terrible enemy if she chose. His fists fell useless to his side. He breathed a deep steady breath. “I know exactly what I seek to do and unless you’re here to help, you can fly back to Lucan and tell him all’s well and I’m not dead yet.”

“
Yet
is right. This is madness. Worse than madness since you walk into the mouth of the beast knowing exactly what you do.”

“Meeryn is N’thuil. She can help. If anyone understands the powers of Jai Idrish, it is she.”

“Or she can betray you to your doom.”

“My doom is set if I don’t make the attempt, though. Jai Idrish . . . Meeryn . . . they’re my only hope.”

“You still believe this unnatural instrument is the key to your freedom? It is not of this world nor a source of Fey magic. What makes you think it will be able to lift the curse upon you and your friends?”

“The old writings talk of its power. Ferontes alone states that—”

Badb waved off his words with a snort of disgust. “A blowhard who enjoyed hearing the sound of his own voice and barely said anything worth hearing. What would he know?”

Here was a reminder, if Gray needed one, that the young woman in front of him was as foreign to this world as Idrin’s crystal sphere. She was true Fey. Being immortal, she’d lived through the Lost Days, when the walls between the mortal realm and the summer kingdom of Ynys Avalenn had yet to rise, when magic shimmered in the very air and to be born with the gift of sorcery or the power to shift was a privilege. King Arthur had been the last great king of the Other, the linchpin holding together all three races. With his murder, that fragile peace had unraveled like a skein of string. The Fey retreated behind their walls, most of the Imnada were rounded up and killed, and the Other hid their magic from a new and suspicious world.

Badb had seen it all and, unfortunately, held opinions about it all as well.

“The man didn’t have the sense the gods gave a housefly, but he could blabber on for hours as if he knew the answers to life.”

“Do you have any better ideas?”

She cast him a squelching look.

“I didn’t think so,” he said, pushing open the heavy oaken door.

The room they entered was black as pitch, no windows to pierce the Stygian gloom on the ground floor and only narrow arrow slits in the next two stories. Only the glimmer of her pale skin lit their passage up the twisting stairwell.

“And if Sir Dromon has his guards waiting to ambush you?” she asked.

“Does he?”

“You’re so prepared to trust a woman you barely
remember—” She tossed her cap of curls with a sneer of contempt. “I’ll let you find out on your own.”

“Then stand aside so I might pass.”

She huffed, her feathers a ruffle of indignation. “Foolish shapechanger.”

They climbed the rest of the stairs in silence, the darkness fading to gray as they rounded the last landing and entered the topmost chamber. Four enormous stained glass windows, each depicting a different face of the Mother Goddess, were set within each wall of the sanctuary: the east and the maiden’s waxing moon of Piryeth; the south depicting the full moon of Silmith when the Mother’s light and the Imnada’s power were at their height; the aged crone’s moon of waning Berenth looked toward the bleak western moors. Only the fourth, north-facing window was empty of the Mother’s beauty. Instead a collage of blacks and grays symbolized the cloaked and faceless figure of Mordoroth and the night of no moon when the Mother fled the skies completely.

Cushioned benches were set beneath the windows. Once, streams of petitioners might have waited for an audience with the N’thuil. Now dust clung in the crannies of the dark carved wood, and the cushions bore a disused, forgotten appearance as if few trod the steep flights of stairs anymore to seek answers. The Voice and Vessel of the Mother had little to do these days but polish the sphere and attend the Gather as the goddess’s representative.

The beauty of the windows, the graceful vaulting of the arched ceiling, and the ornate engravings of beasts and birds that ran the perimeter of the room combined to catch the eye and snatch the breath, but
it was the crystal sphere resting upon a silver dais that pulled the gaze to the center of the chamber. It shimmered from within; each rough-hewn facet burning with a different milky shade from gossamer silver through deep creamy blue.

Gray paused for a moment at the threshold, drinking in the scene. An unsettling ache pressed beneath his rib cage, and his fingers curled under to dig into his palms until his breath moved easily in his lungs once more. He felt Jai Idrish’s immense power running beneath his feet, thickening the air, pushing the blood through his veins. The heart of the beast within him felt it too and woke from the deepest parts of his soul. The urge to stretch free of his human form and take to the skies tightened its grip on him until he must lean a shoulder against the wall and wait for the dizziness and desire to pass.

“This thing is not of any world I know. Nor of any world the Fey have knowledge of. I do not trust it.” Badb’s voice sounded in his ears as if from a great distance.

“Jai Idrish has kept the Imnada safe for millennia beyond counting. It’s the conduit to the goddess herself and the sentinel standing at the gateway to our ancestors.”

“Doors are only as good as they are strong or as long as the guard set to watch them remains vigilant. Can you guarantee this sphere of Idrin is both strong and protected?” Before he could answer her, Badb’s head tilted to one side, her bright eyes locked on some unseen vision. “Someone comes, shapechanger.”

A breeze swirled up from the stairwell as the door below was opened. “It’s Meeryn.”

He turned back to find the girl vanished and the crow winging toward the rafters, her voice drifting across the surface of his mind.
I do not like it. Not at all. What you seek to do has not been done, what you seek to undo cannot be undone except by death. The scholars are blind and the mages see but glimpses. And there are darker things hidden within this crystal than a goddess, no matter they shine like her moon.”

“I have to try to wake Jai Idrish. It’s the only way to break the curse,” he called out to the circling bird just before it winked out of sight in a blink of Fey magic, leaving its warning to scrape the insides of his skull

Yes, but what if it is something else entirely that you wake? What then?

*  *  *

“It happened on the eve of Waterloo.”

“A battle?”

“A slaughter.”

Meeryn noticed with an emotion close to chagrin that Gray held himself carefully apart from her, as if even the slightest brushing of her muslin against his leather might open them both to a return of their uncontrollable heat. He might be right. Just recalling his skillful touch and hot mouth was enough to send shivers of delight up her spine and make her wet with desire. A reaction she’d not expected; Conal had been gentle, Gray was overpowering. Conal had been considerate, Gray took what he wanted. Conal had offered her soft words and tender emotion, Gray offered nothing beyond the friction of their bodies and the dazzling inferno it spawned.

She had wanted the love she’d found with Conal.

She’d not wanted this thunderous raging conflagration she found in Gray’s arms, but she knew if he reached for her again she would respond. It was blasted humiliating.

It thrilled her to her toes.

She pulled her mind from the gutter and focused on the sphere resting on its carved stone plinth—no, not resting, mocking. Jai Idrish had teased her with a hint of its power, whispering to her, guiding her here with unseen hands as if nudging her forward to her chosen role. And when she had woken gasping and frightened, it had glowed with a light that blinded the circle of angry Ossine, bursting out from the tower with the brilliance of ten thousand lighthouse lamps.

That had been two months ago. Two long, silent, frustrating, months.

“. . . Adam’s pathing nearly ripped my brain apart. A mental scream of anguish like claws raking the inside of my skull. Somehow the sorcerer d’Espe knew what Adam was, he forced the shift upon him. Adam had no choice and it nearly drove him mad.”

The echoes of pain in Gray’s voice pulled Meeryn back to the conversation. She shuddered, imagining the horror of being compelled to assume her aspect. The twisting of her nature to something ugly and terrible. Then she pictured it happening day after day, night after night, in a never-ending agonizing cycle. That had been Gray’s fate . . . his curse, his life for the last two years.

The destruction of his clan mark and signum in one violent shredding of mind and charring of flesh had been a horror, but the bending of his powers to another’s will must have been the worst anguish of all.

“Adam lost control, lashed out against the Fey-blood magic as he’d been taught from the cradle. It was over by the time the three of us arrived, the bodies a slashed and mangled mess. He’d killed the entire household to protect our secret.”

“If only Adam had made certain d’Espe was dead, none of this would have happened. He never would have cursed you and the others. You’d never have been declared
emnil
and cast out of the clans. We would . . .” She dropped her eyes to her lap, noting the way her nails dug into her skirt, the racing of her pulse beneath the skin of he wrists. “Our lives would have turned out differently.”

“Would they? Or would you have rebelled against marriage to a man you’d not seen in years?” He touched her chin, forcing her gaze to his. Shadows pooled beneath his eyes, his lean, hard-angled face almost gaunt in the light of a single taper. “There’s only sorrow in wishing for a past that’s long gone or a turning in the path not taken. I have to look to the future now. My future. The clans’ future.”