She let go of Sir Forsythe’s hair and turned to face me. She smiled and her expression was beautiful and terrifying. “Stop what, Frank?”
She strode toward me, and the girls parted between us.
“You think I might do some sort of damage to your loyal minion? Look at me. Excessive displays of violence are not my forte.” She strode toward me, and it was impossible for me to take my eyes from her. Every curve of her towering body carved itself into my consciousness, as if some tiny artist was sculpting my brain into a likeness of the statue that had spawned her. She stopped less than an arm’s length from me and placed a hand on a cocked hip. “I have other weapons.”
“I see.”
She laughed at me. “No, Frank, you don’t. You think somehow I’ve not already had my revenge on that babbling idiot? If you don’t realize that, you’re a bigger fool than he is.”
“What revenge?”
She laughed again, shaking her head. “You, now.” She reached out and placed a finger on my chest, and just her proximity set my body into overload and I had trouble keeping my knees from wobbling. “I should be furious at you, shouldn’t I?”
“Uh,” I said with an eloquence I usually found only while drunk.
“After all, someone so close to the Dark Lord walks into a temple that was desecrated in his name . . . But . . .” She trailed off as she removed her finger and sighed. She shook her head and turned away. “Get up,” she told Sir Forsythe.
“But what?” I said, once I had caught my breath again.
She paused, her back still toward me, just as mesmerizing as the rest of her. “But you had to give me an offering, didn’t you?”
“An offering?”
She sighed. “You do know that’s what the altar and those braziers of incense and perfumed wood are for.”
Oh. It was probably what summoned her too.
“Of course, if some man comes into one of my temples with six young women, I generally expect a slightly different sort of offering. My rival Dark Lord to the contrary, there is more than one way to offer a virgin sacrifice.”
She turned around to face me again. “But that gets so tedious. The same thing, over and over and over and over . . . booooring. And look—” She gestured down at herself and spread her arms. “This is what my worshipers want. As if sex was all there was to me. But I’m not just love, sex, and fertility. I’m also art, beauty, song, poetry . . . and storytelling.” She flashed a genuine smile at me that might have struck me unconscious if it wasn’t for the fact that the display of her body had already overloaded every male response this body had, leaving me numb and a little shaken.
“You know how long it has been since someone has offered me an epic like that? Extemporaneously? The only way it might have been better is if you could have improvised in meter.”
“I-I’m glad you liked it.”
“Like it? I loved it.” She walked back up to me and touched the side of my face, then—before my legs gave out from the sensation of her skin touching my own—she bent down and placed a chaste kiss on my forehead. “Thank you,” she whispered.
I think I blacked out for a moment.
• • •
When I blinked my eyes open, I was flat on my back in the temple, the girls bending over me, and there was no sign of the Goddess Lysea.
I blinked again and realized that the girls were no longer wearing filthy sewer-encrusted rags, or the associated sewage for that matter. They wore long tunics embroidered with gold thread, held together with copper-studded leather belts. Their hair was all styled with braids woven with flowers reminiscent of the garland the Goddess had been wearing.
“What? How long was I out?”
“A few minutes,” Mary said.
“How? Your clothes—”
“She said if we’re going to stay here,” Grace answered me, “we need to look the part.”
I sat up slowly, feeling the aftereffects of an erotic hangover. I wanted to be anywhere but lying prone, surrounded by a half-dozen teenage girls who’d been freshly cleaned, perfumed, and dressed like acolytes in a divine whorehouse.
“Are you all right?” Krys asked me.
I nodded. I wasn’t, but I wasn’t about to admit what was the matter, even if everyone could probably guess. I looked around and noticed who was missing. “Where’s Sir Forsythe?”
“He stepped outside once the Goddess disappeared,” Grace said.
Great, the unstable bastard probably ran off.
I got to my feet, happy for the excuse to step outside myself. I headed toward the brass doors and Grace said, “Wait a minute.”
“What?”
“You just got kissed by a Goddess, and you have nothing to say?”
I shrugged. “These things happen?”
“Who are you, Frank Blackthorne?”
“I’ll get back to you on that one.” I slipped out the door before any more awkward questions came my way.
Who was I? I didn’t have an answer for that anymore. As for physical displays of affection from the Goddess Lysea . . . What was there to say about it? It certainly wasn’t the weirdest thing that had happened to me by any measure.
Sir Forsythe sat on the broken steps to the temple, staring out at the first glimmers of dawn light touching the gray winter sky. “Are you unhurt, My Liege?” he asked without looking at me.
“I’m fine,” I said. “You’re the one who doesn’t look so great.”
“I was not expecting Her.”
“Neither was I,” I said. “But didn’t you say it was Her garden?”
“It was abandoned long ago, when I was a child. I never expected to see Her again.”
I looked at the broken tombs. “Well I guess just looking at how torn up—” I stopped short and turned to look at Sir Forsythe. “Again?”
He nodded.
“When did you see her before?”
He gestured at the old destruction before us. “Shortly after this happened. My father, the tenth Lord Forsythe, was one of the men who drove her acolytes from Grünwald. He led a small group of royals and nobles to the glory of the Dark Lord. He gave the first sacrament to the woman who would become our first Dark Queen.”
“What happened?”
“The Goddess came to all of us, every child of the first acolytes of Nâtlac.”
I was speechless for a moment as the pieces of what she had said began tumbling into a complete picture. I sat down next to him on the steps and said, “She said she already had her revenge.”
Sir Forsythe nodded.
“What did she do to you?”
He stared at the sky and shook his head. “She kissed us, showed us love and beauty and honor, and before we could pledge ourselves to Her for all time, She cursed us to serve the faith of our fathers.”
For the first time Sir Forsythe appeared broken, as if all the implications of what he had said weighed him down at once.
“We served the Dark Lord, fully and without reservation, because the curse allowed nothing else. And because of the Goddess’s kiss, we understood what we did.”
For a goddess of love and beauty, I was starting to think she was kind of a bitch.
“My generation didn’t last,” Sir Forsythe said. “Too easy for most to give up, lose themselves in battle, in drink, to the altar, even their own hand.” He turned to face me. “Do you remember, My Liege, when you asked me about the contradiction between being a hero and my service to Nâtlac?”
“‘I don’t let that define me,’ you said.”
He nodded. “And do you know who named me Sir Forsythe the Good?”
“No.”
“Prince—King—Dudley, as a mockery.”
“I’m sorry.”
“The irony is that buffoon Dudley owes his position to the Goddess. Both of his older brothers—older l
egitimate brothers—bore the same curse. Neither bore it well. He was born just too late to suffer from it.”
“Prince Bartholomew?”
“Saved by being a bastard. The king’s bloodline did not participate in the worship of Nâtlac, and didn’t raise a hand against Her temple.”
I found this new side of Sir Forsythe unnerving. Even if I now knew why he was so eager to pledge himself to me after Queen Fiona’s death, and why he’d been slow to criticize the new Dark Queen for her lax observation of the rituals of the Dark Lord.
“Well, I need my knight back, Sir Forsythe.”
“My Liege, I am a fraud. All I am is because of a curse laid upon me by the Goddess. Without that, I would just be another blind acolyte of Nâtlac, serving King Dudley, looking to roast your flesh and that of those children for the glory of the Dark Lord.”
I stood and said, “You are not a fraud.”
“You heard—”
“Quiet!” It still surprised me when I managed to get a tone of command into my voice, even if I recently was able to argue a dragon to tears.
Sir Forsythe, invested in the hierarchy of nobility as he was, shut up. I didn’t like abusing his misapprehensions of who I was, but I didn’t want him continuing down the path he had begun down.
“You are no fraud, Sir Forsythe. Of all the people touched by the Goddess and given this ‘curse,’ how many are left?”
“Only me.”
“Why do you think that is?”
He shook his head. To be fair, before this moment I would have answered the question for him; as I mentioned earlier, he was crazy as a rabid goblin. But, besides not being a helpful answer, it was also the lesser answer.
“I’ll tell you why,” I continued. “Because I have no doubt that your peers decided to suppress the Goddess’s gift. They buried it inside themselves to fit in, to earn favor, to be part of the new aristocracy of Grünwald. Am I wrong?”
“No.”
“That’s what killed them. That was their contradiction. They denied who they were and it destroyed them. You took what the Goddess gave you, and you embraced it. You decided to become Sir Forsythe the Good despite mockery, despite derision.”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t my decision.”
“It’s always your decision!”
He drew himself back from my outburst, and I suddenly felt a sense of déjà vu as I spoke the words before I understood fully what I was saying. I was facing Lucille again, and I was about to say something irrevocable.
But it wasn’t my relationship to Sir Forsythe that would change with my words.
“You had no choice in what the Goddess gave you,” I said, “just as you had no choice who gave you birth . . . but you decided how you’d react, you decided what person you’d make yourself into. You decided if what She gave you became a curse or a blessing. You did something no one else She touched was able to do, take what She gave you to make yourself a hero. And despite everything, you’ve become one.”
His eyes widened. Then he lowered himself to one knee before me, lowering his head. “Thank you, My Liege.”
As he repledged himself to my service, my own words echoed through my skull like a church bell ringing in a cathedral of my own stupidity.
You had no choice . . . just as you had no choice who gave you birth . . . but you decided how you’d react, you decided what person you’d make yourself into. You decided . . . curse or a blessing.
“Who are you, Frank Blackthorne?”
What person had I made myself into?
CHAPTER 18
I don’t know if I asked the next question to absolve some of the guilt I was feeling, or to punish myself. It had fully sunk in how much of a bastard I had been, disappearing in a fit of pique the way I did. One of the last things I had said to Lucille—other than a grunt or a monosyllable—was that she was an ungrateful bitch.
“How is Lucille? Is she all right?”
Sir Forsythe shook his head. “The Dragon Prince is angry.”
Of course she was. “I guess I can’t blame her.”
“The whole of the Lendowyn court, your husband especially, are convinced that your disappearance was at the hands of agents of Grünwald and King Dudley. That was why I was sent, My Liege. I was to gather proof of this, and retrieve you if I could.”
Given my past interactions with Grünwald and the Grünwald court, that had been a pretty logical conclusion. Wrong, but logical. “Mission accomplished, I guess.”
“You sound troubled.”
“Where’s Prince Bartholomew? He woke up in the princess’s skin and he just left?”
“You disappeared, My Liege.”
I nodded. Talking with him further, it seemed that Princess Snake had vanished the morning I’d made the bad decision to wear the Dark Lord’s wedding gift. He would have had to make a run for it almost immediately. I couldn’t quite reconcile that with what I had found out about this guy. I couldn’t see him not taking advantage of the position he found himself in.
But he had disappeared, and I thought about what Sir Forsythe had said. “The Dragon Prince is angry.”
The burned Grünwald village was even more disturbing now. Lucille hadn’t waited for Sir Forsythe to return with evidence before attacking. Perhaps she took his capture to be that confirmation. Had she destroyed that town in retaliation for something that never happened? My heart sank.
What had I done to her?
We had to get me back to the Lendowyn court before this escalated any further.
• • •
I led Sir Forsythe in out of the cold. Inside the temple, the girls had sat down in a circle and turned their heads to face us as if they were in the middle of some sort of debate. It was still disconcerting to see them dressed as acolytes of the goddess of beauty and love. Now that I was less distracted by the aftereffects of contact with the Goddess, I noticed Lysea had gone beyond clothes and hairstyling. Most of them had elaborate makeup applied, including painted lips and nails. All except Krys.
I also noticed that Krys’s clothing was different than everyone else’s; her tunic had longer sleeves and a looser cut with a round neck hole rather than a vee. Also, while the other girls had jeweled accessories, necklaces, and bracelets, Krys had a pair of solid bracers on her wrists covered in elaborate knotwork.
In other words, she looked like the boy counterpart to the acolyte dress of the other girls. She also appeared more at home in her ensemble than the others did in theirs.
The fact that most of them still had salvaged swords and other weapons made the scene all the more surreal.
“He’s still here,” Grace said, looking at Sir Forsythe.
“So am I,” I said. “What did we interrupt?”
Mary glared at me. “You lied to us.”
I glanced at Laya. “To be fair, you were holding a crossbow on me.”
“You dragged us miles away from—” Mary rose to her feet.
“Mary,” Grace said.
“—and nearly get us killed by these Grünwald—”
“Mary!” Grace snapped again, grabbing Mary’s arm.
Mary stopped and sat back down.
“She’s still right,” Laya whispered.
Grace stood up. “We’re not holding a crossbow on you now. Does that mean we part ways now?”
Sir Forsythe stepped forward and said, “We will never abandon a distressed maiden to her fate. You need not worry, I will—”
I held up an arm to hold him back. “Quiet,” I told him. “Let the maiden tell you if she needs rescuing.”
“My Liege?”
I asked Grace, “Do you want to part ways now?”
“There is no treasure in Lendowyn, is there?”
I shook my head. “There’s barely a treasury.” I patted Sir Forsythe’s chest and dropped my arm. “
The crown pays this guy with food, board, and the opportunity for extreme acts of self-sacrifice.”
“I do not serve for crass material gain,” Sir Forsythe said.
“Point made,” I said.
“Then why bring us at all?” Krys said. “After you slipped into that assassins’ camp, you didn’t have to stop for us. You could have ridden the carriage on your own through Grünwald. Why bring us?”
“I didn’t want to abandon you.”
“What?” Grace sounded insulted.
I hooked a thumb at Sir Forsythe. “This guy is a bad influence.”
“You thought we needed saving?”
“I didn’t know what I thought. I was improvising. Sometimes it works out—”
Grace glared at me. “Sometimes it doesn’t.”
“Sometimes it doesn’t,” I agreed.
“We didn’t need no saving until we got involved with you,” Mary snapped.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I messed up. Happens a lot lately.”
Six pairs of eyes stared at me and I felt more uncomfortable in my skin than I had since before I’d ever come to Lendowyn. I wanted to shout that this wasn’t me.
Maybe that was why I clung to Snake’s identity with them long after I had decided the guy was reprehensible, trying to disown my stupid decisions by being someone else.
“So in Lendowyn,” Grace asked, “do they round up people for sacrificial offerings?”
“Uh, no.”
“And there’s less of Grünwald between us and Lendowyn than there is between us and anywhere else?”
“Yes.”
Grace nodded. “Fine.”
“Fine, what?”
“If you want to make things up to us, lead us across the border to Lendowyn. We can ply our trade anywhere, but I’d prefer somewhere that doesn’t have a history of human sacrifice.”
“But I want to go home,” Thea said.
I saw Mary roll her eyes. “The farther from White Rock, the better.”
“But—” Thea started to blubber. Krys reached out and pulled Thea to her. She rocked back and forth with her, whispering, “Shush, your home’s with us.”