Warrior's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) (23 page)

Blood welled around the quivering handle as he fell, the second enforcer up and attacking before his associate hit the ground. The man dashed for Gray, hatchet raised, hair and eyes wild, a blood-curdling yell tearing from his foaming lips.

Her breath caught in her throat. Her feet remained rooted to the ground. Her mind reeled off at a million miles an hour; every reckless thought, every shuttered glance, every beloved face, every wish she’d ever wished . . .

Gray!
she pathed in a mental scream of warning.

He turned and threw his arm up just as the man made his final lunging thrust, and they met with a
force to rattle the breath from her lungs, going down in a spinning tangle of arms and legs. The enforcer’s hatchet ended lost in the wild overgrown hedge beside the wall. Gray rose from the mud, face streaked black and clothes caked with sticky goo, but his eyes remained glacier cold and sharp as jagged glass as blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

Loosed from her paralyzing fear, Meeryn ran for the hedge, kneeling to feel her way past the thorns and needling branches for the hatchet. She was useless without it. No match for the maddened masculine brawn of the Ossine’s deadliest. Fingers stretched, she searched . . . nothing.

“Murdererous whoreson bastard!” the enforcer shrieked, staggering to his feet. He might have been temporarily unarmed, but he bore a thick wrestler’s body and his stance revealed obvious fighting skill. “I’ll cut your damned heart out.”

He closed in a bull rush that sent Gray lurching backward into the wall with bone-crushing force. He grunted as the breath was driven out of his lungs, his face a ghastly white beneath the mud, but his eyes gleaming almost iridescent blue.

Cut out his heart . . . of course, the second Ossine. He remained where he’d fallen, ominously still but for the blood pumping from the wound in his chest. The dagger lay in his limp hand, his strength used up in the fight to yank it loose.

Meeryn snatched it up with a hasty glance at the downed enforcer, just long enough to notice the fuzz browning his upper lip, the dark curls brushing his homespun collar. And his boots, they were . . . old. Cracked. A farmer’s boots, not the soft-footed welloiled
soldier’s garb. No knife at his waist, no red-tasseled scabbard, just a rusty musket and a billhook tucked in his belt.

“
Avaklos
will prove our loyalty once and for all. Do what Dromon’s men could not.”

The shout dragged her from the horrible truth. She spun in time to see Gray drop the man to the turf in a brutal attack that would have snapped a normal human’s spine. His face was a mask of unrelenting concentration, but she could see he tired. His moves came slower, his reactions dulled by fatigue . . . and something else . . .

Shadows lengthened as the sun dropped beneath the horizon, bathing the glen in a blue and silver twilight. A hot wind stung her face. Gray screamed and staggered, his face stark and stretched tight as bone, his eyes burning with an icy fire. Flames seemed to ripple over his body, bathing him in an eerie phantasmal glow.

He dropped to his knees, doubled over, hands to his face as the wind and the flames wrapped him within their shrinking cocoon. Mother of All, he was shifting from man to aspect against his will. She watched as he fought the agony of it, muscles in his neck standing out as he refused the scream ripping its way up his throat.

His attacker shrank from the power, eyes wide with horror. “The black curse takes him over.”

It was true. The Fey-blood’s black spell was changing Gray, twisting him, stripping his soul bare for the world to see. Fey-blood magic curdled her insides and needled her brain. She wanted to be sick, her stomach rolling at the convergence of so much corrupted power.

Recovered from his initial shock, the man attacked with redoubled intent, striking with boots and fists, his fear and anger making him oblivious to anything but dealing death, his muttered curses emphasizing every blow. He never noticed Meeryn until the dagger slid through coat, waistcoat, and shirt to the vulnerable flesh just above his kidneys.

The knife made him pause, but whatever he saw in her face must have terrified him. “Don’t make me drive it home,” she said, her tone cold, her body colder. She forced her hand and her voice to steady. “It’s a messy, painful end.”

“You’d not dare,” he muttered harshly through lips drawn back from his yellowed teeth in a grimace of rage.

“I was told once it grew easier every time.”

He bent away from her blade, his hands opening and closing, his shoulders hunched. Then, just as she drew a shaky breath, he lashed out. His fist came up in a swift lunge meant to take her hard in the face. And just like that, she slid the blade deep, blood gushing hot over her hands as he fell in a ragged retching heap.

“You killed me,” he called, tears blubbering down his fat cheeks.

“No, I saved
him
—again.” She turned to Gray, but he was gone. All that was left was a bundle of clothes, a crush of matted grass and broken branches, and an eagle beating the air with great golden wings, heading east. When she looked back at the man, he lay quiet, eyes staring in his blue-lipped face, hands reaching for her as if he sought her help in his final moments. Not an enforcer. Not an Ossine whose death she could justify as a battle-scarred killer of innocents. This man
had been a farmer, a clansman whose only crime had been believing the Arch Ossine’s lies.

“What have I done?” She dropped the knife, seized by a horrible despair, sweat washing cold over her back, up her legs, making her knees buckle until she fell to the earth, tossing the knife away as if it burned her.

“You saved the last son of Idrin and the last hope for your people.”

She came from out of nowhere, a girl of no more than eighteen or nineteen years, yet her gaze held timeless wisdom. She seemed to float across the grass, her cloak of crow feathers barely covering the milky shine of her skin, her lustrous dark curls framing a narrow elfin face. The sizzling sting of Fey magic pulsed the very air and made breathing difficult.

“You were at Deepings—the crow on Gray’s ledge, the one watching me atop the battlements,” Meeryn said.

“I am called Badb; a Fey of the Summer Kingdom once upon a time, though now I walk with duller company in a world infected by ordinary. Are you ordinary, Lady N’thuil?”

“I’m not a murderess, if that’s what you mean. I don’t kill people.”

“What of the Fey-born at the inn? Or does he not count among your casualties?”

“He was . . . that is . . .”

“He was the enemy.” The girl bent her gaze to the dead man at her feet, gave it a shove with one delicate slender foot. “As was this one.”

“No,” Meeryn answered sharply. “He was of the clans. An
avaklos
, yes, but he acted out of loyalty to the Imnada.”

“He threatened de Coursy. That made him an enemy.” The girl tossed her head, her cap of curls catching the dim moonlight, eyes fathomless. “Sir Dromon has been clever. He spread the word that our young heir murdered the Duke of Morieux. In this way the Arch Ossine wishes to salt the battlefield with fresh soldiers to his cause.”

Meeryn shook her head, unable to erase the memory of her hand pushing the blade deep, the tear of tendon and muscle as it passed through him, the scrape of the blade against a vertebra or rib. His fading sobs as he bled out into the grass. This was not the thrill of her duel with Gray. There was no wild excitement as her blood sang in her veins, no leap of her heart as she scored a hit or parried a thrust. This was gruesome and ugly in its brutish savagery. She wiped her sleeve over her face, swallowed the bile and the disgust.

The Fey girl stepped closer, her cloak a ruffle of black on black shadows, her small white teeth bared. “You begged for this skill, Lady N’thuil. Did you think there would be no price to pay? That the ability to take a life was an idle pastime like sewing a seam or painting a watercolor? Your people stand at the brink of a war that will desecrate them, beyond anything your enemies might do to you. Gray is the link that will marry past to future—if he survives.”

“If Sir Dromon’s lies have spread throughout the clans, nowhere will be safe.”

“There remain a few refuges. He flies to one now, a friend who will shelter him.”

“Where has he gone?”

Badb smiled enigmatically. “The eagle will fly to see his swan.”

Lips, warm, soft, and teasingly skillful, roused him from a nightmare of howling storms and billowing black seas. A gaze, golden as the sunrise, lit with pleasure as he opened his eyes, blinking up at his visitor in shock. And a stench like maggoty rancid meat mixed with Limburger cheese nearly had him retching in a corner.

“Wake up, sleepyhead.” Her smile held bold amusement and more than a little mischief as she wafted the draught beneath his nose. “You’ve nearly slept the day away.”

His heart lurched in his chest while his stomach turned ominously. Not the woman he’d been expecting. Not even close. He pushed himself up on the pillows, muscles groaning with stiffness, and his head foggy with more than exhaustion. “Where’s Meeryn?”

He glanced around at the sparse whitewashed chamber as if she might be hiding behind a piece of
furniture, except that there was no furniture, other than a bed, a chair, a battered washstand. A servant’s garret rather than the royal suite. Rain drummed against the window, throwing blurry patterns across the walls. No surprise. It had been raining almost nonstop since they left the coast.

A hand on her hip, Lady Delia faced him down. “I should be insulted that the first sentence out of your mouth is a question about another woman.” She huffed dramatically. “But if you must know, your exalted N’thuil is perfectly safe. Arrived in company this morning with everyone’s favorite overbearing faery . . . and two dead bodies. Ugh!” She shuddered.

“Two dead . . .? Do you mean . . .”

“Don’t ask. If it were me, I’d have left them to rot, but Miss Munro seems to think they deserve better.” She placed the cup on the washstand. Drew a silver-bladed knife from a pocket in her apron and laid it beside the cup. “You’re fortunate we had the needed supplies in stores. All but for . . . you know.” She wrinkled her nose.

“All too well.” Gritting his teeth, he drew back the quilt, sat up, and put his feet on the floor. The room wobbled, and blue and silver flames licked at the edges of his vision. His skin crawled as if stretched too tight over his bones and the beast sank its razor beak into his brain, talons raking his lungs until it hurt to breathe. It was later in the afternoon than he thought.

“There was barely enough for a day’s dose . . . perhaps two if you’re cautious,” Lady Delia explained.

“That will see me through until I return to London.”

“Is that your plan? I thought resurrection lay in Cornwall.”

“I brought it with me.”

He stood, pausing as the room settled, then padded across the floor to the washstand. Delia followed his every move with arched brows and an appraising stare as if comparing the lover he’d been with the wreck of a man he’d become. Not that he cared overmuch what she saw or what she surmised. Their time together had been brief, both of them fully aware it was an arrangement built on expediency and loneliness. A way to forget for a few hours. A way to remember without weeping.

He took up the knife with a quick hiss of indrawn breath. Spread his left palm, drawing the blade across in a quick parting slice. Blood welled behind the cut. A tip of his hand and the drops slid into the cup of gelatinous phlegm. He tried not to think too hard as he swirled the elixir, put the cup to his lips, and downed it in one swallow. The draught, along with his stomach lining, sought to claw its way back up his throat. He shoved it down with a few swallows. Rested head bowed until the worst passed and the agony of the curse subsided.

“Better?” Delia asked.

“Than what?”

She laughed. “Fair point. But you’re breathing, standing, and more or less coherent, so I’ll term the whole a success.”

He took up a towel, closed his hand to a fist around it until the bleeding stopped. Returned to his bed where fresh clothes had been laid for him. A little large and not the first stare of fashion, but clean.

As he dressed, she continued to regard him with a sly curve to her mouth that never boded well. “A little bird tells me you’ve inherited a dukedom.”

“By English law, I’m a duke. By Imnada law, I’m as outcast as ever.”

“Yes, the tale going round is that you’re guilty of patricide. Or in your case grand patricide.” She waved away the accusation as if it were a pesky fly not worthy of her attention. “Sir Dromon’s a boob. Anyone who knows you knows such a story is laughable.”

“That’s just it. They don’t know me. I left at twenty-one for the army and returned to a sentencing and exile. I’m a stranger to most of them. Sir Dromon could tell them I ate babies for breakfast and puppies for lunch and they’d believe him. The men who attacked us certainly did.”

He pulled a shirt over his head, recalling Meeryn’s accusations at the cottage. Her words had struck a little too close to home. Had he compensated for past weaknesses by armoring himself in callous indifference and calling it strength? Had he lost the use of his heart when he’d lost his clan mark? And was that what this recent horrible pain was in the left side of his chest? Had it come to life again upon the auspicious arrival of a little brown mouse?