Queen of Song and Souls (39 page)

"Colum..."

"I'm not a fool, Talisa. You wed me on the day of your twenty-fifth birthday because the one you really wanted never came. And I accepted that, because I knew if you gave me a chance, I could make you happy." His voice cracked on the last word. He caught himself quickly, lips pressing together in a thin, bloodless line.

"Oh, Colum." She stepped towards him, hands outstretched in instinctive sympathy. He'd been her friend long before he'd been her husband, always a tad too prideful and arrogant, thanks to his father's predilection for the trappings of power and nobility, but dear to her nonetheless. He was the boy who'd spent his summers running with her brothers across the rolling hills outside of Kreppes on their families' neighboring country estates. The lad who'd blushingly offered her a bouquet of wilted Evermore by the banks of the Heras River. The man who'd proposed on her seventeenth birthday, then waited patiently another eight years for her acceptance.

Now, he was the husband who flinched from her sympathy and stepped back to avoid her touch. "I love you." The declaration was spat from his lips, more accusation than vow. "Do you know how many women have begged me to say that to them?"

She withdrew her hands. “Then perhaps you should have. Colum, I was never less than honest with you."

He laughed bitterly. "Of course you weren't. You're far too noble to mislead a man with sweet lies. But not too noble to marry a man you don't love to spare your family shame."

It was her turn to flinch. The barb stung because it was so despicably true, but that didn't stop her from exclaiming in outrage, "How dare you throw that in my face, Colum? You not only knew my reasons for accepting your suit, you
counted
on
them to convince me to say yes. Don't bemoan the bitterness of the bargain when you set the terms!"

As soon as the sharp words flew off her tongue, she wished she could have called them back. Colum's temper had an ugly edge, and though he was usually careful to hide the worst of it from her, she knew better than to prod him into a rage.

He crossed the room in two strides, grabbing her by the upper arms and shaking her so hard the pins in her hair fell out and her curls tumbled around her shoulders and down her back. "I bargained for a wife, not some Fey's whore who'll take my name and title, then lock her legs against me. You want to talk about bargains?" He shook her again. "You made a bargain, too, Lady diSebourne. Before your family, a priest, and half the nobles of the northern lands, you swore an oath to be my wife, and by the gods you are going to honor your word."

With a snarl of rage, he threw her on the bed. The bed frame knocked the night table and sent the bucket of ice chips and the bottle of pinalle crashing to the floor. Talisa rolled across the bed to the side opposite Colum. He lunged for her, but she evaded him, snatching up the candle lamp and raising it like a weapon as she backed towards the open window.

Her teeth bared in a smaller, more feminine version of her father's wolfish snarl. "Do this and I’ll loathe you forever, Colum diSebourne," she hissed. "You'll never have anything of me that you don't take by force. Never!"

For one dreadful moment, she thought he might take what he wanted anyway; but then, with a bitter oath, he spun away and stalked to the opposite side of the room, his chest heaving, his fists clenched.

"Gods, Talisa, you drive me mad." For a moment, the boy who'd been her friend was there in his voice, hurt and lonely, too proud to ask for the kindness his heart ached for. "This isn't what I want between us. I want what we had before
he
came.”

When they'd first wed, before Adrial had come into their lives, she'd shared Colum's bed, if not with joy, at least with loving friendship. Now even the thought of that was more than she could bear. "Colum... I'm sorry...."

"As am I." He drew a deep breath and his shoulders squared. "But you're my wife, and you're going to honor your vows."

Before he could expand on that, a knock sounded at the door, and the muffled voice of Talisa's brother Luce called, "Is everything all right in there! We heard a crash."

Without taking his eyes from her, Colum called, "We're fine, Luce. Your sister just knocked something over."

"Ah. You all right, Tallie?"

Talisa clutched her robe tight. "I'm fine. Luce," she called, but she didn't lower the candle lamp still clutched like a weapon in her hand. "Colum and I were just... roughhousing."

"Ah. Well, keep it down, would you? Parsi, Sev, and I have the room next door, and we're turning in for the night. You know how cranky Sev gets when he doesn't get his beauty sleep."

Clomping boots marched down the hallway, and a door opened and closed. Then the sound of cheerful whistling filtered through the thin walls, accompanied by the voices of each of her brothers calling, "Good night, Colum. Good night, Tallie."

"It seems your brothers are determined to afford you the time you say you need," Colum observed with a bitter sneer. "Very well, then. You shall have it. We reach Kreppes in a week. I suggest you use that time to forget about your Fey lover." Colum's gray eyes, which at times could seem soft as doves, glittered like hot steel coins still glowing from the red-orange flames of the forge. "Because, one way or another, Lady diSebourne, our estrangement ends your first night on Sebourne land."

He stalked from the room. He didn't slam the door behind him. He closed it with very deliberate calm. Somehow, that seemed worse. Talisa sat there in silence, dragging air into her lungs as shock set her body trembling and tears burned her eyes.

She covered her face with shaking hands. A gasping sob burst from her throat and the tears fell from her eyes like hot rain.
Oh, gods, what am I going to do?

In the woods a mile away from the Celierian inn, Adrial vel Arquinas fought his brother Rowan's hold. "Let me go, scorch you!"

"And let you slit the
rultshart's
throat?” Rowan snarled back. "Flamed if I will!" He shook his brother hard, hoping to shake some sense into the
shei'tanitsa-crazed
madness of his mind. "Don't you remember what Rain said? You can't touch diSebourne. You sure as hell can't kill him. You do, and you start a damned war."

"He's frightening her!" Adrial howled.

And for that Rowan wanted to slit the miserable maggot's throat himself. No warrior worth his steel could watch another Fey's mate suffer abuse without feeling the surge of killing Rage all Fey called the tairen rising in their souls. Though only the rarest and most powerful Fey, masters of all five magics, would ever see his tairen sprout wings and spout flame, that didn't lessen the fierce, predatory killing instincts of the rest of them.

Rowan's jaw clenched tight and only his desperate hold on his brother kept him from reaching for steel himself. Fire, Rowan's own strongest magic, kindled in his eyes. Blessed gods, he ached to teach that spoiled, spineless
rultshart
diSebourne a scorching lesson about respecting women.

Talisa!" Adrial cried out. Wild, whirling cones of Air spun around him, shredding leaves and branches from the nearby trees, while overhead a strong wind howled across the forest canopy. "She's crying, Rowan." His lips drew back in a snarl, brown eyes flaring bright with deadly magic. "He laid hands on her. If he does it again, I'll kill him. War or no flaming war."

"He's her husband, Adrial," Rowan reminded him. To his mind, he has the right to lay hands on her." Up until now, they'd been lucky. Talisa had managed to keep her husband at bay, but it was clear that brief blessing had ended. Rowan closed his eyes, offering up a quick plea for strength. Ah, gods, what a tangle.

Adrial's body suddenly went limp and sagged in Rowan's arms. Alarmed, Rowan loosened his tight grip on his brother. "Adrial?"

The blast of Air caught him off balance. He flung his arms out instinctively as his body flew backwards into the trees. As he tumbled, he saw his brother racing towards the Celierian inn.

•
Adrial
!" he cried. "
Krekk
!" He grunted as his body slammed into the trees and slid to the ground. By the time he cleared his head enough to follow, Adrial was gone.

"You shouldn't be here." Talisa turned to face Adrial as he slid his leather-clad legs over the sill of her open bedchamber window.

"Here is the only place in the world I should be." The creaky slats of the inn's wooden floor didn't make a sound as Adrial crossed the room to sit beside her. When he drew her into his arms, she didn't protest, but instead pressed her face into his throat and began weeping softly. For those tears alone, he could kill diSebourne without a qualm. If diSebourne hadn't gone downstairs to cool his temper in a pint of ale...

"Oh, Adrial... what are we going to do? I don't know how I can bear to let him touch me when the only man I want is you."

He stroked her dark, tumbled hair. "He isn't going to touch you. Not ever again." His lips found the soft skin of her temple, her damp eyelids, the tender fullness of her mouth.

She pulled back. "Adrial... no, this is wrong."

"Nei,
shei’tani
, finally, this is right." Holding her gaze, he lowered his lips again and kissed her. Softly at first, delicate brushes of his lips against hers, tiny nibbling kisses, tasting her lips with the tip of his tongue. Soft kisses deepened with increasing ardor as she began to kiss him back. She tasted like light and joy, like hope and peace and happiness and all the sweet, secret dreams of his heart.

And as her arms lifted to wrap around his neck, he knew he would kill any man who tried to keep her from him.

Colum diSebourne clutched the stair rail tight and concentrated on planting his heavy, uncooperative feet squarely in the center of the stair treads. He took pride in being a man who could hold his liquor, but that last round of whiskeyed ales had nearly dropped him.

With the company in the inn's small pub so much warmer than the reception awaiting him upstairs, Colum had not objected when the first celebratory round had turned into another. Somewhere after five, he'd lost the ability to count.

He reached the landing and clutched the wall to keep from falling back down the stairs he'd just climbed. Five more staggering steps brought him to the door of his room.

He wasn't sure what to expect when he opened the door, but the sight of Talisa sleeping in the flickering candlelight made him squeeze his eyes shut against the sudden burn of tears. She was so beautiful. He'd loved her since he'd first laid eyes upon her as a boy, and his father had always promised she would be his. He'd never wanted anything more than he wanted Talisa, never known a longing so deep. Yet now she was his wife, and his dreams of the life they would have together had turned to bitter gall.

He took a ragged breath and began shrugging out of his clothes. Drink made his hands and legs unsteady and he nearly fell several times, but finally he managed to strip and climb naked into the bed beside his wife.

The sweet, warm scent of her dizzied his inebriated senses, and when he pressed his body against her back and cupped her small, round breast through the thin silk of her nightgown, she awoke with a soft sigh. He held his breath as she turned in his arms, and her lovely eyes, large and dark as a doe's, blinked up at him.

"Colum," she whispered. Her arms slid around his neck, and her petal-soft lips parted for his kiss.

Outside, on the rooftop just above the bedchamber window, a lavender glow of magic swirled as the Fey Spirit master spun his weave, while behind him in the darkness of the forest, Adrial vel Arquinas and his
shei'tani
slipped silently away.

chapter seventeen

Elvia ~ Navahele

Three belts after sunset, the last of the dinner dishes were finally cleared away and the hauntingly beautiful strains of Elvish night music filled the meadows of Navahele.

Fanor pushed away from the table and rose to his feet. "Come, my friends. It is time. Lord Galad will see you now."

He led the Fey off the terrace and across delicate bridges that spanned the silvery pools ringing the island at the city's heart. There, rising in splendor from a wide, mossy knoll, stood the centermost tree of Navahele, a giant king among Sentinels, with a trunk easily twice the width of any other.

"This is Grandfather," Fanor said. "The ancient I told you about, who was a sapling in the Time Before Memory."

"He is magnificent," Ellysetta breathed. She tilted her head back. Grandfather was so tall she could not see his upper branches. Beside it—him—she felt dwarfed. An ant standing at the foot of a giant. Grandfather's bark was smooth and ageless, shining a silvery gold that shifted color in the glow of the butterflies hanging from the Sentinel's vines and branches.

"Aiyah,
he is that," a low, musical voice agreed.

Rain put a hand on Ellysetta's shoulder, and together they turned to face the stranger who seemed to materialize from the forest itself. One moment, the stretch of mossy ground to their left was empty; the next, the Elf king stood there.

Galad Hawksheart, a man who'd been a legend before Gaelen was born, needed no introduction. Tall, broad shouldered, and lean hipped, the Elf king was even more breathtakingly beautiful than most of his kind, with strong, masculine features framed by a fall of burnished gold hair threaded with shining beads, aromatic leaves, and fluttering hawk feathers. Except for the golden cast to his skin and his tapered ears, he was almost Fey in appearance.