Shadow's Curse (36 page)

But at least in the emptiness of the abyss, none could hear his painful screams and he might weep without being seen.

Warmth woke her. Blankets tucked to her chin, a hot brick wrapped in flannel against her feet, and a cheerful fire dancing in the hearth combined to ease the throb of thawing tired limbs. Then memory flooded her sluggish brain and she sat up with a cry. A hand, spotted and knobbed with age, but deceptively strong, pressed her back against the pillows. A face swam into view above her, but it was not the one she yearned for. Instead wrinkles lined a pleasant countenance and crouched in the corners of two pale blue eyes. “Easy, lass. ’Tis all right. You’re out of the wicked snow and warm as toast within the walls of Dunsgathaic. None will harm you.”

She’d arrived on Skye? But how? Callista remembered nothing after falling beneath the horse’s flailing hooves. Her memories were all of snow and ice and blood and death. And a red-hot slash of pain in her head before the black swallowed her.

“Where’s David? Is he here? Did he . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to ask the question.

“The shapechanger lives,” the woman answered, though her gaze grew serious, and the smile fled from her face. “Rest now. I’ll return when you’re summoned before the head of our order, the Ard-siur.”

She wanted to argue. Wanted to wrestle the sister aside and search for David, but her body refused to cooperate. Her brain was as muddled as her memories, and her legs and arms seemed weighted to the soft mattress.

She slept and woke again. The shadows had moved, and the sky beyond the window was a crisp blue. She gazed around at the room for the first time noticing the scattered rugs upon the floor and the comfortable chairs drawn up to a tiled hearth. A cabinet contained a pitcher and washstand. Another table was scattered with curios and curiosities. A bird’s nest. A bowl of sea-washed pebbles. A vase of celadon holding skeletal winter branches.

And, set upon a far cabinet by the door, a familiar mahogany box, the carved lid worn smooth with generations of hands running over it, the round brass lock and hinges as shiny as if new forged.

She rose from bed to take up the box. Set it back on the coverlet beside her, positioning the tumblers and springing the lock. Key, Summoner, and Blade; all as she’d left them. Her mother’s letters still nestled in the corner. Callista pulled them from their resting place. Felt the crinkle of the thin paper under her fingers, the faded ink, the frayed ribbon.

“I’m finally here, Mother,” she whispered to no one. “I’m in Dunsgathaic.”

Wind rattled the casement and moaned round the door, a lonely sound that sent worry curdling
unbidden up through her. She swallowed back a hard knot of fear. The sisters wouldn’t harm David. But what of the Amhas-draoi? They lived within these walls as well. The battle-queen Scathach’s army of warriors and mages were sworn to protect and defend. Would they see David as a threat? Would they recall the story of Lucan Kingkiller and take their revenge?

Bypassing the robe hanging over a chair, she scrambled into her own discarded gown drying upon a rack before the fire and wound her hair up into a knot. The mirror over the mantel showed her a peaked face of drawn skin and dark hollows. It also revealed the tremble in her fingers as she buttoned the last button and the nervous pulling at her lip with her bottom teeth.

In a moment of childish longing, she slid the packet of old letters into her pocket as a reassuring talisman against nervous uncertainty. These were all she had left of her mother, a last link to the heartbroken woman, forever torn between love for the family into which she’d been born and the family she’d built together with the man of her dreams. A last link to the last true home Callista had ever known. These, even more than the bells, were the true treasure kept safe in that box.

The door opened, a draft chilling the back of her neck and guttering the sconces. The priestess didn’t even lift an eyebrow when she saw her charge up and dressed. She merely motioned for Callista to follow. “Ard-siur is ready for you now.”

“What of Mr. St. Leger? I refuse to budge a step until you tell me where he is.”

“All your questions will be answered when you see the Ard-siur.”

“I want them answered now.” Callista folded her arms over her chest.

The priestess’s pose of serenity cracked and an irritated frown passed over her face. “The shifter is safe and in one piece, which is more than you’ll be if you keep the head of our order waiting.”

Without another word, she led the way through a long stone passage and down a steep winding flight of steps. Callista had no choice but to follow. She stared with wide eyes as they crossed a broad, muddy courtyard. A group of sisters stood in conversation. A heavy-set priestess in a dirty apron carried a basket on her shoulder. Another trailed a tail of four young girls like ducklings. Two
bandraoi
mounted on mules waited among a knot of laborers with shouldered picks and shovels and a man leading a bullock.

This would be her home from now on. These women would replace the family she had lost.

Why did the idea not fill her with the joy and anticipation she had thought it would? Why did the walls seem higher, the sky seem grayer, and her heart feel weighted with lead?

A set of tall double doors opened onto an enormous chamber of streaming blue and gold and ruby light from rows of high stained-glass windows. The priestess gestured Callista in with an impatient wave of her hand. “Miss Hawthorne, Ard-siur.”

“Thank you, Sister Brida.” A woman stood at a table, her gray robe edged in royal blue, her expression hard and unyielding as flint, but it hadn’t always been that way. Callista had seen it young and unlined and bright
with laughter as a girl gripped a kite string and raced across a green lawn toward a house of golden stone.

“Aunt Deirdre?”

*  *  *

David felt the priestess’s hard gaze like a blade, her disapproval evident in her stiff posture and her clenched arms. She did everything but curl her lip in a superior sneer. He flashed her a winning smile that usually had London’s mothers queuing up with daughters in tow.

She scowled harder.

“You’re fortunate in your allies, Mr. St. Leger. The sisters do not bestir themselves for every traveler plagued by difficulties. Without Lord Duncallan’s persuasive urging, you would have found yourself without our aid. You owe His Lordship your life.”

“With that and a penny, he’d have enough for a beggar’s bowl,” David quipped.

She eyed him down her long hawkish nose. “Just so.”

“Always good for the convent coffers to help a peer of the realm, but that wasn’t what really brought you scurrying to our rescue, was it?”

She pursed her thin lips tight, her hands in her long sleeves tighter.

Callista stepped forward, face flushed, dark hair spilling free from a hasty chignon to curl against her cheeks. Just seeing her clenched his stomach and heated his skin.

“Please, Aunt Deirdre. I’ve told you everything. Can you help him? Can you lift the curse?”

If the woman sneered at him, she fairly glowered at Callista. Not exactly the hearts-and-flowers reunion
with her aunt that she had been hoping for. The head priestess had been as sour as a lemon, unbending as an oak.

“A curse is the darkest of magics,” the Ard-siur said sagely. “A foul twisting of the mage energy. It would take much to unravel such a confusion of evil intent.”

“Is that your way of saying no?” David asked, hoping to turn her wrath from Callista back onto him. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been brought before a superior to answer for his transgressions. And after the Ossine’s savage punishments, it took more than a brittle, stick-up-her-back old snob to frighten him.

Even so, if she could shoot flames from her eyes, he’d be dead a thousand times over. “It’s my way of telling you and Miss Hawthorne that we do not take orders for magic like a village dressmaker with a new gown. There is much to consider.”

“Like whether you want to save the life of an Imnada rather than kill me now.”

“The sisters of High Danu do not commit murder, Mr. St. Leger.”

“What about the Amhas-draoi? They’re known for stopping at nothing in defense of you Fey-bloods.”

“The brotherhood has heard the rumors of the Imnada’s astounding survival, but there was no proof. No evidence the shifters were more than a drunkard’s tale.”

David spread his arms. “Here I am. In the flesh . . . or the fur, as you like.”

“Yes,” she said, her eyes raking his attire, a borrowed pair of breeches and a scrounged shirt that barely fit across his shoulders. “That’s more than clear. We’ll have to consider all this carefully.”

“My current existence or my future health?”

“Both,” she snapped.

Callista stepped in front of him like a martyr before the pyre. Her chin tilted defiantly, her shoulders squared. “He’ll die without your help, Aunt Deirdre. I’ve heard the voices on the wind and seen his future through the eyes of those whose spirits wander the paths of the dead.”

The Ard-siur grimaced, her hands lying knobbed and crooked on her desk. “Your mother should never have taught you such things. She gave up that privilege when she chose that man over her birthright.”

“That
man
was my father.”

“That man,” Ard-siur snipped, “was a cunning social climber who thought he could seduce himself a fortune. He was mistaken. The Armstrongs of Killedge Hall do not pay blood money, as he found to his cost.”

“No, they don’t. They hurt and insult and ignore.” Callista pulled a packet of letters from her pocket. Tossed them on the desk in front of her aunt. “She wrote to you over and over. Begging for forgiveness. Wanting only to know you cared, that you loved her. You gave her nothing.”

“Not really the way to persuade her to help,” David whispered in Callista’s ear.

Ard-siur stared at the battered cache of letters tied with a faded blue ribbon. Her face was as white as bone, the skin drawn and smooth as old leather.

“What did your mother give us? Shame, disgrace, and lowly connections. Roberta Armstrong had everything a girl could want. A good home, parents who doted upon her every wish, and a glorious match with a man of wealth and prestige. What did she do?
She threw it away on a charming smile and a pleasing word.” She shot David a contemptuous look. “Like mother, like daughter, it would appear. St. Leger’s handsome enough and, no doubt, he knows the words that will flatter you, but what is he beneath it all? A beast wearing the skin of a man. A treacherous creature who would rip your heart out as soon as look at you.”

“So, that would be a no on the cure?” David quipped, choking on his dagger-sharp fury. It would do him no good and only worsen Callista’s situation.

“You’re right, Aunt. David St. Leger has ripped my heart out and claimed it for his own. I love him. An emotion unknown to you.”

Color splotched ugly across Aunt Deirdre’s sunken cheeks while David simply boggled. Fury forgotten, he put a hand against the small of Callista’s back, and let her warmth ease his jangled nerves and relax muscles tight as wires.

“I was wrong to come here,” she said, her voice calm and carrying. Only David, feeling the tremors underpinning her words, knew how much she was really hurting. “Wrong to think I could ever find a family among you. Family isn’t about blood. It’s about love and compassion and the unselfish giving of yourself. I had more of that with Nancy, Captain Flannery and his wife, the Duncallans. Even Lucan Kingkiller and Badb. They cared about me and worried over me, and when I was lost or sad or upset, they stood by me. Can you say you would ever do the same?”

Ard-siur’s face was expressionless, her eyes flat, but her hand clenched the letters in a white-knuckled fist. “You’re welcome to stay as a guest of the convent until
your strength returns, but I do not think a life among the
bandraoi
is suitable for someone so volatile and capricious. As for you . . .” She turned her attention to David. “You will remain with us for the nonce. There are many questions and much to discuss.”

“Is that your subtle way of telling me I’m your prisoner?”

“It wasn’t meant to be subtle.”

*  *  *

“It’s not exactly how we would have planned such a meeting, but it’s past time the sisters of High Danu knew the truth about the Imnada,” Katherine said as she curled in an armchair, a blanket drawn across her legs.

Just as old the innkeeper’s wife had predicted, the sun had returned and with it, warmth enough to melt the snow to slick black mud, the icicles dripping long and thin from every eave.

“James is with David, and despite your aunt’s unfortunate opinion, there are plenty who feel differently upon hearing the clans survive. We’ll win our way out of this mess, wait and see.”

“I think it’s brilliant,” Sister Clara piped up.

The young priestess had arrived with dinner and stayed for conversation. Her cheerful chatter as much as her tray of food had done much to restore Callista’s equilibrium, though nothing could erase her last look at David as they led her from her aunt’s office while he remained behind. His grin was cocky as ever, but she saw the careful way he held himself and the caution in his gaze.