Warrior's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) (27 page)

“He bears the power of the Imnada,” Lucan’s voice was deep and gruff as if unused to speaking. A thousand plus years alone would make anyone tight-lipped. “Like the Flannery’s baby, he’s one of us no matter his lack of mark or signum.”

Gray leaned against a table, boots crossed at the ankle. Arms crossed at the chest. “He’s stronger in some respects, for he bears new blood carried through his mother. Young Declan is the same. This is what the Imnada lost when we retreated behind our walls. This is the legacy of generations in hiding.”

“We all used to look like
him
?” Meeryn asked skeptically with a sideways glance at the dark Goliath standing in the corner.

Lucan’s face softened. “Even in my time, I was considered a bit beyond the ordinary. But it is true what de Coursy claims, the Imnada clans lose much when they cut off the outside. Even one who considers himself the most pure of blood probably has an out-clan ancestor somewhere in his roots. The walls had yet to be built when I led the clans. Fey, Other, Imnada, human, all moved within each other’s lives.”

“Until the massacres of the Fealla Mhòr,” Meeryn said.

His eyes clouded. His softness vanished back into a granite indomitability. “Aye. Until the Fealla Mhòr. That’s when the peace unraveled and the world shattered. I would give all to restore what I tore apart.”

“Penance for your sins,” Meeryn muttered under her breath.

Gray turned toward her. Her legs nearly buckled under the weight of his spearpoint stare and her skin
prickled with icy goose bumps until she had to look away.

It was then she noticed Lady Delia watching them—or rather watching Gray—her arms wrapped tight around her body as if warding off a chill, though the house was stifling even in the cool of predawn. The self-satisfied expression was gone and her golden eyes dimmed with some unknowable emotion. “Then again, there are some sins no amount of atonement can wipe clean,” she said.

Lucan opened his bloodied fists, dropping his hands to his sides in surrender. “No, those we must simply endure.”

“Can you really read this?” Meeryn studied the soggy, ink-smeared parchment spread on the table between them. Turned it upside down. Cocked her head to the left . . . to the right. Squinted at it. “It’s just squiggles and lines.”

Gray pulled the parchment from her with a sideways cut of his eyes and a smirk. “So is English when you come right down to it.”

She sniffed. “Don’t be obtuse. Just answer the question.”

“Grandfather slipped up. He hired a weapons master to drill me in small arms who also happened to be a scholar of dead languages. This one was dead, buried, and forgotten. I learned how to shoot the spot off a target at twenty paces and to read and write ancient Carspethic.”

“Lucky you,” she said with a grimace.

The late-morning sun beat through the dusty windows, throwing golden squares across the table, sculpting the bones of Gray’s face into sharp relief.
The swoop of his dark brows drawn in concentration, the smudge of ink alongside his nose, the curve of his sensual lips as he felt her stare.

“Did you come to gawk or do you have a reason for being here?” he asked without looking up from the pages of scribbled notes.

“I came to inform you that Lady Estelle says Jamie’s awake and eating. He still resembles a walking bag of bones, but the corpsish overtones are definitely receding.”

The muscle tightening his jaw jumped, and he closed his eyes for a brief moment.

“He’s yet to speak of Kelan or . . . or what happened up on the moors,” she continued.

“What of his months in the catacombs? Or the questions put to him by Dromon’s enforcers?”

“I wouldn’t dare ask. Would you?”

She didn’t fail to notice the way he rubbed at his bandaged wrist nor the fading marks of his own imprisonment. “No.”

She continued to watch as he worked, head bent over the page, a hand plowed into his thick hair. A hand that last night had touched her in ways she’d never been touched. Conal had been a considerate lover. Like the sea beneath a calm sky and a thousand stars; the slide of easy currents over her skin and the deep’s sweet whispers in her ears. Gray was a lightning-shot, thunder-clouded tempest where one didn’t know down from up and swirling tides and screaming winds threatened to smash her against the rocks or drag her down into the deepest ocean chasms.

Conal had been easy to love.

Loving Gray scared her to death.

“Anything else?” he asked, placing his pencil down, the notes in both English and ancient line and squiggle so much gibberish to her uneducated eyes.

She’d begged Gray to pass on his training in swordfighting and gunplay. Dead languages and ancient scholarship had never been her cup of tea. Another reason her choice for N’thuil made no sense. If Jai Idrish was the sum of Imnada wisdom from the beginning of time, what on earth could she add? How to best grip a dirk in your off hand? How to load and fire a flintlock?

She wished Idrin might speak to her again; reassure her that the crystal had not made a horrible mistake. Then she immediately rescinded the wish. She couldn’t be sure she’d find Idrin at the other end of the sickening tumble into the blinding light at the crystal’s heart. She might end among the stalking oily shadows instead. No way to tell. No way to control it.

She brushed aside her thoughts with a shudder. Met Gray’s clear blue eyes with the fear firmly locked away. “He’s . . . ah . . . very tall.”

He pressed his lips together in an apparent attempt to keep from laughing. “I assume you’re referring to Lucan, not Jamie.”

She took up his pencil, rolling it between her fingers. “I’d heard rumors of his . . . return, of course, but really who expects to bump into the bogeyman in a Devonshire drawing room? It’s disconcerting.”

“How do you think he feels? The world he knew is gone. The world he’s living in reviles him as a traitor and a murderer. Not exactly a fond homecoming.”

“Yet you and he are . . . friends . . . comrades . . . it just seems so . . . that is, Sir Dromon accused you, but I never really believed it.”

“You believed a legend came to life but not that I might put aside a thousand years of prejudice to find out the truth behind the monster. Is that it?”

“His is the hand behind the Fealla Mhòr.”

Gray’s amusement vanished behind a veneer of weary defeat, as if he’d had this same argument more times than he could count. “His is the hand that saved young Jamie Wallace and David St. Leger before him.”

“Two lives against a slaughter of entire villages and holdings?”

“He doesn’t ask for your forgiveness, Meeryn. He doesn’t forgive himself. But he’s no more a monster than we are.”

He took back his pencil with a decisive this-discussion-is-over manner. Began scrubbing through earlier translations and rewriting them with much chewing of the pencil end and hard, painful stares at the page as if forcing the words to come.

“Why didn’t you steal the entire book? Wouldn’t it have been easier than trying to piece together these bits out of context?”

Gray shrugged. “Sir Dromon would have noticed the absence and questioned it. He might look like a clerk in a shop, but he’s still a shaman of the Ossine. He’s spent his entire life studying Imnada wisdom and practicing all our oldest ways. He knows Jai Idrish is in my possession. If he discovers I hold the Gylferion as well, it won’t take him long to put the pieces together and know exactly what I plan.”

“So, what does it say, Professor?”

His gaze flicked to hers and back down. “It’s part of a chart outlining the properties of each disk; bronze, copper, silver, and gold. This bit down here describes
the maker of these disks; a Fey by the name of Golethmenes. He forged the Gylferion to bind Lucan within the abyss of between for all eternity. A suitable punishment, it was thought, for the man who betrayed Arthur to his death.”

“But Fey-blood magic doesn’t work on Imnada. It never has.”

“Golethmenes made it work. I’m hoping that between this page and what I have in my own library, I’ll be able to shed some light on how and why it didn’t work when we tried it.”

The fear was back, and this time there was no preventing the shudder. It rolled down her spine into her belly, where it curled ominously. “But your library is in London . . . in a million pieces.”

“A minor complication.”

“And the Fey-bloods on the prowl? The Ossine enforcers searching for you? You’ll be heading straight into their waiting arms if you return to London. An easy target.”

“It can’t be avoided. Marnwood is a short-term refuge at best. I can’t hide away here forever.”

She opened her mouth to protest, swallowed her words at the unwavering glare from across the table.

“Even if I had all the answers in front of me, I’d still need to travel to Town. In another day or two, I’ll be out of the draught. Without it, no amount of struggle will prevent me from shifting at sundown and sunrise. And as the draught wanes in my system, I’ll grow weaker, sicker, less able to defeat Sir Dromon. Time is everything.”

She clamped her hands in her lap, over the hollow
frightened place in her gut. Clenched her jaw. Offered him a devil-may-care smile. “When do we leave?”

He laughed. “You’re not coming. You’re safe here at Marnwood and Estelle has said she would be glad of the company while Jack’s away.”

“Lady Delia less so.”

“It will only be for a few days. A week or two at most.”

“You rode away last time and stayed gone for ten years. How do I know you’ll keep your word?”

“I need Jai Idrish.”

She gritted her teeth on her look of complacency. “Of course.”

He reached for her hand with a quick devilish grin. “I need Jai Idrish, Meeryn; I want you.”

*  *  *

The book she found among Marnwood’s less than stellar collection was thin, smelled more of printer’s ink than old cheese, and . . . glory to the Mother . . . contained illustrations. Not hasty sketches but beautiful renderings done by a fine artist’s hand. Curled into a reading nook set within a window, the light spilled across the pages and what had been a frightening bogeyman’s tale when read in the quiet creepiness of the posting inn became a child’s faery story. Yet, the facts remained sadly and inevitably the same no matter the state of the volume or the state of her mind; Lucan Kingkiller betrayed Arthur, conspired in his murder, and died upon the field of battle at Camlann.

Gray had told her the reasons for his alliance with the Fey-bloods could be found in the books with
which he surrounded himself. All she found were tales of destruction, death, and demonization.

“You don’t look hard enough.”

She broke from her page-flipping to find the subject of her scholarship standing at a nearby window, staring out upon the park, hands behind his back—Lucan Kingkiller, the Traitor Lord, scourge of the five clans, himself.

She bit back an oath at being startled from her reading; few people could sneak up on her unawares. But the follow-up epithet over the man’s obvious spying on her thoughts slipped out, a muttered “bloody hellfire.”

It had been said that the ancients possessed the power to read as well as path. If this was an example of its use, she was very relieved it was a skill long lost to them.

He glanced over at her before returning to his study of the parkland beyond the glass. The room seemed suddenly smaller, the silence thicker, her mind afire with questions; the most all-consuming being . . .

“Why?” he said, his voice raspy but resonant, as if used to shouting over the ring of battle. “That’s what you really want to know. Why did I betray my friend, and my king?” His gaze remained on the park, posture relaxed though hardly at ease. He didn’t seem like a man who lounged about much. Perhaps a thousand and more years trapped in the hell of the Fey’s between taught you to stay alert. “The people who wrote those stories believe I did it for love, that I was infatuated with Morgana’s beauty, and perhaps I was for a time. She could be quite . . . persuasive.”

“Sounds familiar,” Meeryn grumbled under her breath.

His gaze slid toward her once more, but his expression
never wavered. “It wasn’t for Morgana, despite her obvious charms. I did it for the clans.”

She sat up, untucking her legs, the finger smashed in the book going blue with the force of her grip on the binding. Now
she
was on edge.

Lucan continued as if he didn’t notice her sharp interest or the way she caught her bottom lip between her teeth. But she knew he noticed. He saw everything; one could just tell. “There was peace between our peoples, but we were not
at
peace. Tensions ran high, and the constant mistrust kept true unity from flowering. We were so much alike, and yet we couldn’t see past our differences. Mordred was a half-breed child of Imnada and Fey-blood. A ruler who might join Other and Imnada at the highest level. Something Arthur with all his talk of harmony could never do. He was too much a creature of the true Fey, and there has never been love between shapechangers and faery folk.”

Hearing the most ancient fables treated like gossip around the village well was disconcerting to say the least. Arthur, Morgana, Mordred . . . Lucan . . . they were characters in a legend, not men and women who felt and acted like the people she knew and loved. The shamans spoke these names with respect, and, in some cases, loathing. Lucan spoke of them as if he were chatting about his neighbors.