Warrior's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) (40 page)

“Have you tried talking David St. Leger out of doing what he wants to do lately? It’s not exactly an easy task.” Mac rubbed his chin and Gray, for the first time, noticed the bruising across his face.

Gray turned to leave, a hand on the latch. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

Meeryn stopped him with a hand on his arm. “You can’t. We only barely made it here without discovery”—her gaze shifted to his hand pressed hard against his ribs—“and you’re hurt.”

“I can’t leave David.”

Badb’s gaze passed over the group, her eyes glittering. “Without him, there is no foursome. The curse can’t be lifted with only three. Lucan will be safe.”

“And they will die,” Meeryn snapped.

The door opened and David stepped into the room, out of breath, a bloody score down his cheek, his shoulder wet with blood. “The Ossine are coming. And Dromon’s among them.”

“How the devil did they know to find us here? Did they track one of us?” Mac snarled.

“Or did someone give us away?” David complained.
“I told you sending Lady Delia Swann to pass your messages was a mistake. The woman’s got more coils than a snake.”

“We can accuse each other later.” Gray scanned the back room. Stepped into the passage as he struggled to come up with a plan—any plan. Shoved aside the curtain to gaze into the darkened storefront and the myriad shelves of clutter. He turned back to the knot of anxious bodies crowding behind him. “If there is a later.”

Ringrose swept past him, motioning him after with a wave of his hand. “Follow me. Quick . . . quick . . . don’t tarry. Don’t linger.”

“We can’t just wander out the front door. There’s nowhere to hide, not even amid all that mess.”

“You think you’re so clever, shapechanger, but your knowledge is a thimbleful compared to the wisdom found within the Summer Kingdom.” He shoved the curtain back on its rings.

Where moments before he’d been standing amid the confusion of a dark and shabby apothecary’s shop, now white walls rose above him coming together in an enormous vaulted ceiling. Beneath his feet, rose and gold marble gleamed with polish, and tall arched windows draped in scarlet velvet looked out, not on a dingy Southwark street, but on a moonlit scene of aching beauty, a lake shimmering between snowcapped mountains, trees moving in a soft breeze. Fey magic pressed on his skull, beat behind his eyes like a hammer strike until he wanted to be sick. His stomach congealed to a hard curdled knot. He turned, but instead of one narrow passage, four wide corridors branched away into infinity.

“What is this place?”

“Our prison and our sanctuary. A place where worlds come together. A doorway. A thin place.”

“Are we safe from Dromon here?”

“No, the Imnada can tear through even the thickest of our magics like knives through canvas, but the conjuring will hold for a time and it will slow him in his tracking. Take the far left tunnel. It will bring you down below the earth where a secret river runs. Follow it, and you will be where the power of our world folds over upon the power of this one. That is where you must call upon your magic and ours, shapechanger, if you wish to lift the curse.”

“Let’s go,” Mac said, pushing through to start down the corridor. Torches burst into flame as he walked farther into the dark. Flickered out as he passed beyond their orbit. He paused. “Anyone?”

David and Lucan followed with Meeryn right behind. Gray hesitated. “If the magic is at risk, so are you.”

Ringrose shrugged. “There is risk in all we do, son of the Imnada, son of Idrin, but last I checked, the true Fey were still a match for a few blundering beasts wearing human skins.”

“So you’ll hide.”

“Quiet as the tomb, shapechanger. He’ll never know we’re here.”

Gray smiled and clapped the man’s arm in a firm handshake. “Thank you.”

“Do not thank us yet. We have led you false once. Who’s to say we won’t lead you false again?” And with that, Ringrose shimmered into oblivion, pinks darkening to reds, purples into blues, his form fading into a sparkle of dying light.

“What I wouldn’t give to do the same,” David muttered.

Badb stood close to Lucan, though she did not touch him and her eyes held as much anger as affection. “You’ll do this whether I will it or no.”

He bowed his head, his face close to hers, his expression holding sorrow and the weight of his imprisonment and hers. “I have endured what I could not atone for, but this is my chance to finally restore what I tore apart. To make right what I destroyed.”

“Penance for your sins,” Badb muttered and, as if she realized he stood as witness to their last words, she looked toward Gray, her gaze bearing the chest-tearing pain of a sword stroke.

Gray turned away, unable to bear her accusation and her grief. “Let’s go. Ringrose and Badb will buy us time. It’s up to us to use it well.”

“And if they’re leading us false?” David asked.

Gray offered a gallow’s smile. “Then we end in a hole in the ground either way, don’t we?”

*  *  *

“Dank, spidery, filthy catacombs and now dank, spidery, filthy tunnels. It’s a rabbit warren down here,” Meeryn muttered as they followed the river’s winding course.

It had been a slippery, uncomfortable journey. Twice she’d stumbled and scraped her palms, once she’d banged her bruised hip against an outcropping of rock, and worst of all, she’d smacked her head into a particularly low passage of rock, leaving her with starry-eyed vision and a duck-egg-size lump on her skull.

“Let’s hope Sir Dromon finds it equally as
confounding.” Gray pushed aside a drifting strand of spider’s silk from the ceiling of the slimy cavern walls.

“At least we have light.” The torches had continued on, one after the other, blinking into being up ahead, then winking out as they passed.

“A double-edged sword,” Gray said, glancing back over his shoulder.

“I wish we had a few of those, too.”

Meeryn glanced behind her then down at the strange tumbling surface of the water flowing past. Much like the conjured palace above them, this river was more than it appeared. The surface shone an incandescent green, from which mist rose like smoke. If that wasn’t enough to make her want to avoid it, the smashing anvil inside her skull and nauseous clutching of her innards warned her of the convergence of Fey magic centered within the curling, twisting currents and eddies.

David bent to wash away the blood from his face, but Lucan stopped him. “It’s not wise to take of this place. Neither stone from the earth or water from the river. If this is truly a fold between the realms, there is no telling what effect it might have upon us or what we might ignite with our trespass.”

“Wouldn’t our being down here count as trespass?” David asked in an aggrieved tone of voice.

Lucan shrugged and the two pressed on, David’s gash untended, his fears more than stoked, if the doubtful looks he continued to cast at the murky river were any indication.

“Is he right?” she asked Gray. “Are we tempting something worse by using the thin place to break the curse?”

“Can you think of worse? I can’t.”

She could think of lots worse; the shadows waiting for her when she stepped into the heart of Jai Idrish; the sickening jolt of muscle, tendon, and fat parting as her blade sank into Thorsh’s gut, the hot spill of blood on her hands and spattering her face; Gray palsied with sickness, his face green with fever, his body curled in on itself as the poison of the draught devoured him; and finally, the emptiness of her life should this fail, should she fail.

Gray trusted her to break him free of his curse. He counted on her.

She could not let him down.

“Do you still hear them behind us?”

Gray paused as he listened, then gave a frustrated shrug of his shoulders. “I can’t hear anything above the roar of the river.”

“I almost wish I heard shouts and the clomp of boot heels and a few clanging swords for good measure. Better that, than wondering if they’re out there just beyond the light of the last flickering torch.”

Gray offered her a half smile but she could tell his heart wasn’t in it. “Knowing Badb, she’s got them chasing their tails, literally and figuratively.”

“But even she can’t delay them forever.”

“No. She can’t. They’ll come soon or late. It’s up to us to be ready for them when they arrive.”

They rounded a corner and found themselves in a slick-walled cavern, the roof lost in a strange gathering of mist, as if the river’s surface had risen to coalesce like a cloud above them. The river itself poured through the center of the room, in a tumbling rocky rush, before spilling down beneath an overhang in a gushing fall to be lost from view. Amid the torrent, on a
small island accessible by a narrow bridge of rock where the cavern’s floor had been worn away, stood a tall fingerlike stone. Birds fluttered and animals crawled over the carved granite surface; the interlacing knots and spirals of the Fey wove in and out of every remaining cranny. Upon each of the four sides was inscribed a line of runes, the markings matching the odd gibberish in Gray’s ancient text.

“Carspethic.”

“Similar, though much older,” Gray said softly. “I’ve never seen such markings.”

“So you can’t be certain it doesn’t say ‘Beware, traveler. Touch this and you shrivel up and die’?” David quipped.

“One way to find out.” Gray stepped out on the bridge, slick with moisture and a thin sheen of green algae.

“Be careful,” Meeryn cautioned. A silly warning. What did careful matter when they were being chased down here like rats into a cellar, curse hanging like a cloud, poisoning a dose away, and Fey magic scraping the insides of her skull like caged animals howling for release? Slipping on a wet rock rated low on the scale of dangers to be overcome.

He held out a hand to her. “We’ll place Jai Idrish upon the dolmen.”

“Are you certain, Professor Gray?”

“More than a theory, less than a certainty, Lady N’thuil.”

She drew in a steadying breath and stepped, balancing her way on the narrow band of rock. A footstep, then another. She stumbled and nearly toppled headfirst into the drink. An arm wrapped protectively
around her middle just as her hem dragged along the murky water.

“I think my heart skipped a beat,” she said, catching her breath.

“Mine stopped.” Gray tightened his arms around her for a moment. He withdrew Jai Idrish from the pocket of his coat, the sphere burning a strange milky yellow, its light flattening out along the roughened walls of the cavern and casting upward into the mists to illuminate each silver droplet. “It wakes, Meeryn. I feel a humming beneath my hands.”

He placed it on the dolmen. As sphere touched stone, the light burst outward, bathing them in the same eerie milky glow. Faces hollowed by loss, by battle, by sickness, and by guilt. Without even touching the crystal, she heard the voices whispering in her head, a blur of endless N’thuils sharing their wisdom and their strength. But she also heard the first distant shouts. The scrape of bodies passing quickly through the approaching tunnels.

“Gray!” she said, unable to keep the fear from her voice. But he’d heard them, too. His head was lifted to the sound, the men shuffling restlessly as they touched knives, patted pistol butts, reminded themselves they were not defenseless. They would not go down without a fight.

“Quick! Jai Idrish at the center, the Gylferion at each compass point,” she said, repeating what the voices told her.

“And how are we to tell compass points with a mile of earth above us?” David asked, shooting sidelong glances over his shoulder.

“With this.” Gray pulled a small round box from
his pocket and flipped back the hinged lid to reveal a hidden compass. “East.
Nivatha Chu. Anada Asantos
.”

David, holding the bronze disk, crossed to stand where Gray pointed at the river’s edge. Jaw tight, eyes fixed upon Jai Idrish, he bore an expression of steadfast resignation. He had made his last farewells. He would live or die with no regrets.

“South.
Anakalo Filios. Anada Asantos
.”

Copper disk in hand, Lucan stood as if he faced an oncoming army without hope of survival. But it was a look of peace. Of finality. Of ghosts laid to rest.

The sounds grew louder. The stamp and scrape of boots. Muttered instructions. No way to tell how many came. No way to tell if Sir Dromon led them or if they faced a rabble of cannon fodder sent to flush them out.

“West.
Pinota Asneeri. Anada Asantos.
”

Mac clenched his gold disk in a tight fist, green-gold eyes fierce, mouth twisted in a grimace of final hope. No surrender. He would not succumb. He would battle to the last breath for the chance to live free of the Fey-blood’s taint.

“And north.
Krylesos Pryth
!
Anada Asantos.
” Gray pulled the leather drawstring bag from its place at his belt, spilling the silver disk into his palm with a hiss of pain. The poison would be seeping through his fingers and into his bloodstream. With every moment that the silver was in contact with his skin, it would be chewing its way through his body and draining his strength. But he did not wince after that initial gasp. Instead he left Meeryn’s side to cross back over the bridge and stand at the river’s edge to her right, eyes
flickering blue and silver in the crystal’s shimmering glow.

“Do it, Meeryn!” he shouted. “Now!”

*  *  *

Gray clutched the silver disk until the edges burned into his skin, his heart near to slamming free of his ribs as Meeryn placed her hands upon the crystal. This was the moment he’d been waiting for since that long-ago summer afternoon at Charleroi when the Fey-blood’s dying breath had stolen his own life away.

The shouts grew louder. Two Ossine. Then two more. A pistol cracked the cavern wall above him. David dropped one with a dead-eye shot from his own weapon, his other hand grasping the disk. Mac felled a second.

Sir Dromon stepped into the unearthly light, a hand shielding his eyes. “Stop her! Shoot the girl! She’s the one!”

The remaining Ossine trained their weapons on Meeryn, the cocking of their pistols freezing Gray’s blood. He flung himself across the slippery, narrow bridge even as he was pulling his own pistol free of its holster, cocking it, and firing in one swift fluid motion. Sir Dromon was blown backward, his body limp as a wrung rag.