Authors: Alexa Egan
“Gone?”
“He disappeared last night. None know how, but the castle has been searched with no sign of him, and Lord Duncallan refuses to answer any questions. A disappointment, as I would have liked to interrogate the shifter further, but it is not to be helped.”
Callista frowned, the bees settling to her stomach with a dull thud. “He can’t have left. We . . . he called me Edern.”
Aunt Deirdre sniffed, her gaze falling to the book. “The Fey-born princess married off to the monster to save the kingdom. A sentimental if affecting tale.”
Callista’s cheeks flushed hot even as the rest of her shivered with cold. “Rinaci Hammerclaw won Edern’s heart. He loved her.”
“As long as Mr. St. Leger’s alive, you’ll be wed to this ridiculous dream.”
“No, the dream is past. We fought it and we won. I just didn’t realize that winning the battle would be losing the war.”
“So you will stay here with us. I will inform Sister Hosta, our mistress of novices, of your decision and—”
“I won’t wall myself away, Aunt. I won’t exchange one prison for another.”
Aunt Deirdre’s expression hardened as she straightened her gown with a twitch of a sleeve. A brush of the collar. “You say the shifter is doomed to die? Perhaps I should have left him in death. Perhaps that would have been the mercy . . . for both of you.”
* * *
From her high window, Callista took a last look at the swiftly churning clouds, the flocks of feeding sea-birds, and far sails upon the sea beyond Dunsgathaic’s walls, but it was Rinaci Hammerclaw and Idrin the Traveler, Helene of the Rhaynor and Brune the Hairy, she saw out her bedchamber window. Lords and ladies, heroes and villains, daring battles and tragic romances. She knew all about those. She ran a hand over the book as if she might step within the pages before shoving it in her satchel beside her bells. The letters Aunt Deirdre had kept.
She turned her mind from thoughts of David. A week had passed with no sign of him beyond a hastily scribbled note, the handwriting sloppy, ink splattering the page. She tried not to imagine him fumbling with the pen, awkward with his mangled hand. Struggled to
forget the deep slash on his cheek, the broken bloody nose, and the smashed and splintered wrist. Instead, she focused on the words he’d whispered, the way he’d held her, the depth of his fog-shrouded gaze. It was all she had left of him.
“Ahhh,
The
Collected Tales of Moriaen Golden Tongue
, a classic.” Lord Duncallan joined her at the window, ready for travel in a long coat, a stylish hat covering his dark hair.
“I’d never heard of the book until I found it among Gray’s shelves. Now I’m hooked on stories about Swen of the Silver Ship and Morag the Rat Tail. How could the Other have discarded so much of a past rife with such majesty and magic? How could they have destroyed the Imnada in retribution for one man’s crime?”
“There are a thousand more stories that never made it into the books, an oral tradition passed down from generation to generation but never written. Stories of brutality and fear and starvation and death. The Fealla Mhòr is the most frightening of these. It’s spoken of as one might speak of the end of the world.”
“It was the end of the world for them, though, wasn’t it? Of all they’d known and everything they’d been.”
Duncallan’s gaze grew distant, almost forbidding. “It was. Villages razed, populations slaughtered. Any who bore a drop of shifter blood singled out for execution. ‘We shall not suffer a demon to live among us any longer. They are deceitful, wicked, evil creatures.’ Said as the Other were tearing babes from their mothers’ arms, hacking the heads off young men, and butchering whole families together.”
“After such savagery, how can you ever hope to bring about a peace between the races? Even after so long, the hate is still there on both sides.” She closed her eyes against a sharp, painful breath.
“We’ll never know unless we make the attempt,” Duncallan responded. “If you’re ready to go, the coach is waiting. It’s a long journey to London.”
“Are you certain this is a good idea? The Earl and Countess of Deane won’t even know we’re coming until we arrive on their doorstep, and I’ve learned to my cost, it’s not wise to turn up unannounced.”
He smiled. “Deane House has more rooms than I could count on hands and feet together and most of them depressingly empty since Seb’s wedding to Sarah.”
“I read about it in the papers. I saw Sarah Haye perform once in Bath as Lady Arabella. She was brilliant.”
“Unfortunately not all her acting skill can mask her lowborn background. Society does not like an upstart. Sarah has few friends. You’ll do each other a world of good. And it will only be until you’re back on your feet.”
“She’s friends with Bianca Parrino . . . I mean, Bianca Flannery, isn’t she?”
His gaze grew bleak. “Yes, the captain’s wife and the countess are close. Sarah will be able to offer Bianca comfort when . . . when it’s needed . . . but you’ll understand her pain better than any.”
Oh, she understood pain all right. It lived cold and hard in her chest. It woke her at night with wet cheeks and scratchy eyes and turned every dawn into a sentence to be served. She might have comforted herself with the knowledge that even if he was not with her, he was still out there somewhere. But even that solace
was denied her. David was doomed. The curse ate him alive. There would come a day that she would look up at the moon and know he was gone forever.
She swung her satchel onto her shoulder, took one last look at the cozy tower chamber, and closed the door of Dunsgathaic behind her.
* * *
“Sir? Can I bring you a bit of supper? I’ve some mutton left from this morning and a bit of ham.” A knock and a rustle of heavy skirts on the other side of the door. An eye pressed to a crack in the slats. He sensed Mrs. MacDonald watching him. She’d spent nearly every moment since he’d arrived at this sad excuse for a roadside inn attempting to wheedle information from him with simpering smiles and sweet words. Unfortunately, she only managed to give him the shivers.
“I’m not hungry, Mrs. MacDonald.”
“Have it your way, young man.”
He heard her muttering all the way down the creaking stairs. A few choice phrases about queerish rattle-pated gentlemen and moon madness.
She was half right.
He glanced out the window at the gathering dusk. The sun dropped beneath the horizon to the west while Piryeth’s maiden moon, a yellow waxing crescent, scraped the trees in fast pursuit. He watched and waited for the blue and silver flames to engulf him, for the curse to tear at his muscles and warp the blood in his veins. The faint lines crisscrossing his palms seemed to shine in the weak light while the scar on his wrist burned as it did every night. He rubbed a hand over the healing gash, knowing the pain would always
be with him, the connection he shared with Callista. A bond of love . . . and now blood.
He’d hated leaving her, but he couldn’t remain within the walls of Dunsgathaic. Not once the
bandraoi
learned of the power of the
afailth luinan
. He would not exchange Corey’s brutal captivity for the pampered ease of a softer confinement by the
bandraoi
as they picked him apart with needle precision until the secrets of the Imnada were laid bare upon their cutting board.
He told himself it was for the best. Callista had gained the family she’d always wanted and the life of a priestess, where her Fey-born powers could be honed for the good of her race, rather than the enhancement of her coin purse. She would forget him in time. He only hoped she could forgive him.
He glanced once more to the window to see that night had truly fallen, not even a glimmer of orange to brighten the purple, star-shot sky. Stared down at the table, flinching only slightly at the stump on his right hand. The maiming played havoc with his handwriting and his table manners would need some adjusting, but it wasn’t the loss of a finger or the aches in his wrist or even the piratical scar down his cheek that gripped him immobile in his chair. It was the untouched cup of rancid Fey-born brew infused with his blood. A potent blend of Imnada power and Other magic; two forces wholly opposed and always at war. No wonder the draught killed him and saved him at the same time.
He’d not taken it in two weeks. By now he should be retching his guts up, his entire body one exposed nerve as the curse tore through him like shrapnel. Sunset. Sunrise. The days marked off by the forced
shift as his body morphed from man to wolf against his will while he screamed.
Two weeks. Nothing. He remained healthy. He remained in control.
He remained completely and incurably confused.
He ran a hand through his hair. Rubbed at the back of his neck. “I don’t understand.”
“You died.”
He peered over his shoulder at Badb, who’d materialized in the cheerless garret, her shift of feathers rustling as she crossed the floor, her naked body lithe as a willow.
“The MacDonalds should get a cat,” he groused.
She laughed, her snapping black eyes alive with mischief. “You seek answers. I bring them. You died, St. Leger. You went into death. And death took you.”
“Then spat me out again, no thanks to Deirdre Armstrong.” He rose to pour himself a glass of wine. Only one. The rage had left him. And for some reason, loss left no room for drink.
Badb crossed to his side to lay a hand on his arm. “The necromancer pulled you free from the paths. You should be grateful. The door to death—”
“Only opens from the outside, I know. But what’s that to do with the draught and the curse and why I feel . . . good.”
She frowned, tossing her cap of curls. “So dense, you are. The answer stares you in the face. You died, and so, too, did the curse. It ended with your death as the spell was originally wrought. Though I doubt that the Other who cast it intended such a flouting of his purpose.”
“So, that’s it? The spell is broken just like that? No
more draught? No more shift? No more . . .” Wine forgotten, he dropped into a chair, staring unseeing in a haze of amazement.
“You are not dying, shapechanger. You are reborn. New. Cleansed of the curse. Free of its taint.”
He held up his mangled hand. “Yet still missing a finger.”
“I see your dubious idea of wit remains intact as well.”
“So, if Mac . . . if Gray . . .”
“No, shapechanger. This was your path. Theirs still remain for them to follow.”
The curse had been broken, his death sentence lifted. Too late for him to make amends? To create a future with the woman he loved? He dared not go himself to find out.
“Can you deliver a letter for me?”
* * *
Fog hung in ghostly streamers across the valley, the long narrow loch gleaming like polished steel beneath the gray sky. Even the distant hills took on a soft blue and purple patina in the damp air. From here, she could look south and east across the endless mountains or turn her face to the north for a last glimpse of the sea and the rocky shores of Skye far to the west. She stood upon the brink; both paths still within reach. No decision unchangeable . . . yet.
Below her, the coach waited, the Duncallans lounging upon a blanket with a basket luncheon. As Callista watched, Katherine leaned over to kiss her husband. His arm wrapped round her waist. A quiet breathless giggle carried on the breeze to where Callista walked alone.
She swallowed the hard ache in her throat and
scrambled farther up the slope, out of view of her companions. She didn’t need a reminder of what she had almost had. What might have been hers but for a Fey-blood’s black spell.
A fold in the hillside led her into a hidden meadow. Mist moved like water over the ground, but here and there, sheltered from the wind, star-shaped leaves grew in a burst of bright green from a craggy rockface and small purple flowers littered the long grass.
He stood at the far end of the meadow. A figure as gray and wraithlike as the mist-shrouded hillside. Only his gaze burned hot and startling in a face carved in harsh lines and grim angles. No longer the Adonis, he still paralyzed with a stomach-plunging intensity. A bolt of lightning. A sword cleaving the heart. “I don’t blame you for wanting to get away from them,” he said. “They make a sickening couple.”
“They love one another. There’s nothing appalling about that.”
Heat crawled up her throat and into her cheeks, and she shivered imagining David’s hands upon her body, his fingers combing out the heavy curling fall of her hair. Desire flooded her with a new and different ache, a throbbing between her legs, a tingling in her breasts. Their eyes met, and she knew he knew what she was thinking . . . and feeling. His mind was open to her touch, as her thoughts were clear for him to read. “Are you a ghost?”
He laughed. “What does your power tell you?”
“That you’re real . . . you’re alive.”
“And mostly in one piece.”
“What have you done, David?” she asked.
He approached, his body leaving a trail within the
dew-silvered grasses. “The blood I offered you connects us. I’m part of you . . . as you’re a part of me.”
As if he’d a map to her soul, she felt him inside her, a presence filling the hollow place in her heart. “You can’t . . . I mean, you said you couldn’t read my mind.”
I still can’t, Callista. Or not entirely. Thoughts sharp and loud, these I catch snatches of now and then.
He switched to speaking out loud. “But no, you’re safe from that trespass.”
“Then what do you mean, ‘we’re connected’?”
“Honestly?” He gave a brittle laugh. “I have no idea. But Gram’s stories always spoke of the bond between those who’d shared the
afailth luinan
. Souls connected. Destinies intertwined. It’s the most powerful magic the Imnada possess and is not given lightly.”
“Yet you left me.”
“I fled Dunsgathaic. Your aunt saw me offer you the life from my veins. She would not have been satisfied until she drained me of every last drop.”
“Aunt Deirdre is not Victor Corey.”
“She may not have sold me off a vial at a time, but her brand of sucking me dry would have amounted to the same thing. The Imnada are under siege. I would not be the fuse to bring the walls tumbling down around them.”