Warrior's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) (41 page)

Gray’s triumph lasted but a moment as the Ossine followed through on their leader’s final orders. The first bullet hit Gray in the shoulder, blood spattering Meeryn’s gown crimson. He fell against her as the second bullet exploded through his chest. His legs gave out as if his strings had been cut. He fell upon
the crystal, the sphere covered with his insides, blood pouring down the side of the dolmen.

It’s in the blood!

The voice seemed to burst inside his head with the same crushing agony centered in his chest. A rumbling shook dust from the cavern’s ceiling and mixed with the billowing mists. Jai Idrish’s humming increased until it matched and surpassed the roar of the river. The sickly yellow light exploded crimson and gold, blue and silver. It bounced off the walls, bathed the iridescent river a brilliant blue, and etched a burning white light on the backs of his eyelids.

Weight and momentum carried him onward to tumble headfirst into the river. The water closed over his head, but there was no freezing punch of cold, only a scalding heat centered in his torn and broken chest. He surfaced to hear the sounds of struggle, a woman’s sobbing, ragged screams, but the river dragged him under again, and weightless, boneless, and drained of strength, he let it.

He felt himself falling, a spinning twisting piece of flotsam caught in the cascade as the river carried him away. He tried to breathe but his lungs wouldn’t work. Pain burst against the back of his head. He gasped once and went under. And the world went black.

*  *  *

A seeming enternity passed as Meeryn knelt on the cavern floor, an arm pressed to her middle, the dolmen casting a shadow over her bowed body. The sphere’s light faded as slowly as the power surging through her body. Every now and then, her eyes would travel to the overhanging lip of rock where the river raged through
the gap to spill in a froth deep beneath the earth, as if expecting Gray to climb from the edge of the river sopping wet and fuming like a cat tossed into a well.

“Meeryn?” She winced at Mac’s touch upon her shoulder. The gentle worry in his voice. “Is all well?”

She lifted her eyes, red-rimmed with weeping. “He hated the water,” was all she could muster with another long look at the river as it rushed over the falls and down beneath the cavern’s wall.

Mac and David exchanged glances. She knew what they were thinking. That she’d lost her mind. That she was a hysterical female with straw for brains. That she was as useless a N’thuil as Muncy Tidwell with his grotesque belly and pinhead brain.

“Is it over?” she asked, looking around her, seeking to gather her wits and regain her composure. Her heart might be lying in pieces around her, but she was N’thuil. The crystal had chosen her. It had spoken to her as it had not spoken to anyone in centuries. She would not be found wanting after such a gift.

“Aye,” Mac said, straightening with a swipe of his brow. “Or just beginning, depending upon your viewpoint. With Sir Dromon dead and Gray . . .” He turned away, his hands fisting at his sides. “The clans could tear themselves apart in their fight for a new leader.”

For the first time, she noticed his blood-soaked shirt, his bruised knuckles, the cut upon his chin. St. Leger, too, held himself stiffly as he leaned awkwardly against the dolmen, his blond hair plastered to his head, mist and sweat mingling on his battered face.

The bodies of the Ossine had been laid out as if for burial. She noticed all had death offerings lying upon their chests, above their crossed arms. Sir Dromon,
on the other hand, had been hauled to a corner of the cavern and dumped unceremoniously to lie forgotten and unmourned.

“Where’s Lucan?” she asked, reassured by the strength in her voice.

He’s gone
. Badb’s words burst in Meeryn’s head as her body burst into being in fireworks of color, her crow feathers ruffling outward in a surge of feathery black. Her cloak billowed and swirled around her pale young woman’s body of pert breasts and narrow hips. Her eyes bore a flat emptiness unlike their usual snapping fire.

“What do you mean, gone?”

The girl tossed the gold disk to the ground at Meeryn’s feet. “I mean he has paid for his sins twice over. Freed from a thousand years trapped in the between of nothing, only to be taken once more by the Gylferion’s powers that you unleashed. He is gone.”

Meeryn took up the disk, fingering the clan mark of the Imnada on the face, the double parallel lines crossed by the diagonal on the back. Gazed at Badb, who stood hunched, hands wrapping her stomach as if she too fought to hold her grief back.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that would happen.”

“He did. And he chose to go through with it anyway. Your people call him Kingkiller and curse his memory. But love drove him to such a madness. As love drove him to this one. Is that a crime? A sin to be endured or atoned for?” Badb searched each face as if trying to understand, but none had an answer for her. She made a jerking motion with her hand as if cutting off any more discussion. “The tunnel will take you out as it brought you in. Be gone from the shop by dawn. Do not come back. It will not be here.”

And just like that, the magic of her race congealed around her, pulling her inward as her feathers disappeared in a strange tightening swirl, popping out with a final burst of weary color.

The three of them seemed to hold close as if offering one another the comfort of nearness. She was grateful, for just the act of keeping body and soul together seemed a Herculean task.

“Can you walk?” Mac finally asked, a hand propped beneath her elbow.

“I’m not hurt. Only heartsick,” she said, taking one last look around her. The crystal shone dim and cloudy once more, its voices silent. She took it in her hands, feeling the warmth beneath her fingers, the eddying vibrations like a dizzying pulse. Her eyes followed the green mist-shrouded river as it disappeared in a roaring spill over the edge of the cavern floor. “Do you suppose he suffered much?”

Mac followed the track of her gaze. “I would think he was dead upon hitting the water. Neither Ossine missed their mark.”

She spat upon Dromon as she passed his lumpish tangled body, bullet-shattered face hidden by the careful drape of an arm. “Nor did Gray. All that bloody training at last paid off.”

Sigurd Skaarsgard shuffled the papers on his desk, fiddled with his watch fob, then peered over his spectacles at her. It was a stare meant to intimidate, but she had never been easy to cow, and recent events had only firmed her resolve and her backbone.

“The man comes of good family. The Nornala prosper and the holdings are fat with wealth under his handling of the clan in my absence. The new Arch Ossine supports the cross in bloodlines. Why do you refuse?”

Meeryn sat calm and still, hands folded in her lap, eyes ahead. A pose of careful deliberation on the outside. Within she was howling her frustration and grief. “His focus is solely for the Nornala, as it should be, while you remain at Deepings, cousin. I need a man whose love for all five of the clans allows him to see beyond the acres in front of his nose. The next years will not be easy ones for us.”

The Skaarsgard cleared his throat and sat back, arms crossed over his chest. “What you need, Meeryn, is a man who’ll look past your growing belly and take you
as his mate anyway. Who’ll be strong enough to keep you safe from your enemies and your child’s enemies. Do you think they don’t know whose child you carry? Even the bastard son of de Coursy could be a powerful threat if he grows to manhood. There are men out there who would seek to do you and the babe harm. Some who blame you and de Coursy for the state of the clans and seek vengeance for the death of Sir Dromon. And some who see your interference as carrying us toward a new Fealla Mhòr with the Fey-bloods. We live in dangerous times and you need a powerful protector.”

“I know, but Findlaech Orlspath is not the answer.”

He’s the third candidate in two months. You’re not growing any smaller. And the clan’s troubles are not growing any easier.”

She ran a hand over her stomach. Already the gowns she’d ordered in the autumn were straining against her bulk. Gray’s child prospered. She had done what she could. She had accepted Gray’s seed. In a few short months, she would have a living memory of their love. A face to look upon where she might see traces of Gray perhaps in the sweep of the child’s brows or the hard steel blue of its eyes. That both comforted her and saddened her in equal measure.

“The Gather does what it can, but with the throne empty, the clan leaders squabbling amongst themselves as they seek to solidify their positions, and Idrin’s line ended, there is too much uncertainty. You’re the only glue we have that can keep us from fracturing further.”

The Skaarsgard’s criticisms drew her back to the conversation at hand and the concerns of today. Gray had died in the caverns. It was up to those who survived to keep the destiny he envisioned alive . . . if they could.
Mac Flannery and David St. Leger tried to hold the alliance between Fey-blood and Imnada together, but even they found the way difficult and the tensions increasing.

“I will think on it, my lord. And give you my answer tomorrow. Is that time enough?”

He smiled, obviously satisfied he’d convinced her. “You always were a headstrong lass, even as a youngling barely free of your mother’s womb, but growing up within the duke’s household has taught you cleverness and to keep your own council. Jai Idrish chose wisely when it chose you.”

“Did it?” Sometimes she wondered. In the dead of night, when the soft hissing voices tricked her brain and she dreamt of the black unending shadow rising above her like a rogue wave, she feared what she might have unleashed when she freed Gray and the others from the curse.

*  *  *

He stood at the window, staring out on the snow drifting small and white from a wintry gray sky. His chest ached in the cold, every breath was laced with dull pain, but his shoulder seemed much improved. It didn’t throb as it had in the weeks and months past, when every bump of his injured arm elicited an unconscious scream of pain that brought tears to his eyes and left him gasping and retching.

He’d not remembered how he’d gained such horrific injuries nor how he’d survived them. The wizened, stooped old woman who tended him spoke little beyond explaining he’d been fished from the river barely alive. How he’d ended in the river in the first place, she could not say . . . or wouldn’t. She brought
him three meals a day, cleaned his rooms, pressed his clothing, and tended his hurts. Questions, she did not answer. Frankly, she barely spoke at all.

It had been six months since he’d arrived here and he knew only that he was not wholly within the world he spied through his window, though what world he inhabited he could not quite say either. It seemed as real as the cityscape beyond the glass; the bed was soft, the food tasty, and the books smelled of old leather and dusty pages. But there was no way to get from this place to that, not one door that he had found in all his meanderings once he’d gained the use of his legs again and walking didn’t involve a crutch and a steadying arm.

Corridors emptied into more corridors and rooms followed rooms, but of doors, he found not a single one. And the windows, when smashed—as he’d tried three weeks ago in a fit of rage—seemed to tear through the veil of both worlds, leaving only a howling darkness.

He had not broken one since. Better to stare out upon a world he recognized and pretend he was living among the men and women he spied going about their lives in the streets below than face the reality of his imprisonment.

But why? What had he done? He rubbed his forehead as if that might bring some recall, but naught but dim shadows met his study; a woman’s eyes dark as treacle, a woman’s body lithe as a willow reed. Whenever he probed this vision deeper, he came up against an unspeakable madness where terrors lurked and voices called. He did not court these memories often. And recently, not at all. He kept to the pleasant thoughts of the mysterious woman and hoped that whoever she was, she did not grieve overmuch for his loss.

Turning away from the window, he spied the mysterious old maidservant enter his room, a cane in her hand. “This is for you.”

At this point, he didn’t even question her. Curiosity had succumbed to ennui and he already knew she’d offer him nothing more than the same story of his being dragged from the river and brought here for her to mend as best she could. He knew the tale by heart.

She left as quickly and quietly as she came, leaving him alone with the dubious gift. What on earth did he need with a cane? He’d long since thrown away the crutch. His wounds had been to his upper body, the scars proved that. Still, it was a diversion in a life of few amusements beyond his books and his window.

He took up the cane, ran a thumb over the handle shaped in the form of an eagle’s head. Now, why should that evoke a tightening in his chest and a tremble in the hand that held the ebony walking stick? He’d no idea but he gripped the cane like a weapon, the window a target for his sudden and overwhelming rage.