He huffed again. His eyes flicked back and forth restlessly, as they did when he was angry about something—about what?—but as always her steady, soft tone seemed to disarm him. She had been his wife for two decades now and had weathered more than one storm by the strength of her serenity.
But that was before Kostas came, she thought. The knot of fear grew at the thought of him but she kept her expression calm, steady, radiant.
The High King’s roving gaze took in the altar, the ironwood bed with its northern carvings, the hanging tapestries with their scenes of snow-covered mountains, winter hunts, and the Veil of the Gods. “This is more a foreign place than when I last was here.”
“You had less interest in the furnishings when you last were here,” she reminded him.
It should have brought a smile to his face, but it did not.
He came to where she stood, the fine linen of her gown now wet enough to cling to her body, revealing its contours. She bore herself as though she wore a fine gown with all its trappings. He fingered the edge of the robe, which she had scored with small cut marks in deference to her mourning. His fingers brushed the line of her neck, the damp curve of her breast. This close to her it seemed she could smell the stink of Kostas on him, and it took everything she had not to pull away in revulsion.
“ ’Tis a hard thing, losing a son.”
Her voice caught in her throat. “So it is, my husband.”
“Hard for the kingdom as well, losing an heir.”
She simply nodded. Andovan would rather have been eaten alive by jackals than take upon himself the stifling responsibilities of the High King’s throne, but she was not about to tell Danton that. She and her son had whispered of it in the garden, in her garden, where only the gods were listening, and she would not betray that confidence even after his death.
“You served me well. Four sons in four years. Though some say there must be magic to such a family line, to have been managed so perfectly.”
Though his tone had grown colder by merely a single degree, she did not miss its sudden edge. “Sire?”
His finger caught her under the chin; his dark eyes narrowed. “Few women have managed such perfect fertility. Even those whose lives depended upon their success.” He let the words hang in the air for a moment, allowing her time to remember his father and his habit of executing wives who failed to provide heirs in a timely manner. “I am grateful the gods have given me a wife so skilled in the womanly arts.”
She lowered her eyes humbly, hoping he could not hear her heart pounding, nor sense its rapid pace through his finger on her skin. “It is simply a gift of the gods, Sire, for which I am humbly grateful.”
“Is it that?” She could sense the barely tethered rage in him, held just beneath his surface. What had caused this? Was there some news about Andovan she did not know about, or had one of her other children committed some act that angered their father? Or was it simply that Kostas was interfering in her personal life, for gods alone knew what reason?
He hates me as much as I hate him, she thought.
“Only the gods?” he demanded.
“Sire?”
He grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her toward him. His grip was harsh and painful, his fingers digging bruises into her pale flesh. “What other man has had input into my line?” he demanded.
The question was so unexpected that for a moment she just stared at him. Then, in a trembling voice, she managed, “You think I was untrue to you?”
With a cry of rage he threw her across the room and onto the bed. In that moment she could smell the unwholesome reek of Kostas all about her, and for a moment—just a moment—it seemed she could hear his laughter.
Is he behind this? she thought desperately. Does he mean to have Danton kill me?
“What, to make me a cuckold? That I could deal with. That is a human thing.” He came over to where she lay and caught her slender neck in one brute hand. “That requires only the death of the offender—the public execution of the wife—preferably in some dramatically unpleasant manner, to warn others who might follow in her footsteps . . . business as usual for a king, my dear, yes?” His dark eyes blazed. “My father did it often enough.”
Before she could answer him he reached up with his other hand, grabbed the neck of her robe and pulled. The seams of the garment gave way with a sharp ripping sound, leaving her torso stripped bare, the sleeves still tangled damply about her arms.
“Your crime is not nearly so simple, is it?” His voice was a low growl, black with fury. “Only to foul my line with sorcery, as a woman might do with a weakling king that could not beget his own.”
Speechless, she stared at him. And it seemed for a moment she could see Kostas’ power surrounding Danton, not as an illusion of foreboding but a more palpable power that blazed about him like a black corona and streaked his skin like veins of jet. Whatever response she might have offered was choked off by the horror of the vision. What enchantment had the vile Magister worked upon her husband that was revealed to her senses in this way?
Danton took her silence for an admission of guilt and with a growl low in his throat pinned her back against the bed with one hand, reaching to his own clothes with the other. With a sudden understanding that was almost surreal she knew he was about to rape her, knew as well that the act was not wholly his, that some vile magic was lodged in his brain like a parasite, driving him to this bestial rage. She watched in horror as he bared himself for the act, revealing an organ that was not only swollen red with rage, but with corruption. For her vision was bolstered by the gift of the northern gods, and she could see a webwork of black, swollen veins wrapped around his flesh, the conduits of some unnamed sorcery. Whatever that power was, whether it came from Kostas or some other source, she could not let it into her body! She struggled against him in fear, trying to deny him entrance, but his rage lent him unnatural strength and she was but a small woman, lacking either the strength or the skill to dislodge him. His knee forced her legs apart with a force that made her cry out in pain and in terror, and then—and then he was inside her, thrusting his rage deep into her body, and with it that foreign sorcery. Where did it come from? What did it want? What was it using Danton for, riding the heat of his rage like a hunter might ride a mount, forcing the High King to do its bidding? She knew the answers mattered but she could not focus on them, she was lost in the pounding rhythm of her husband’s rage and the desperate need to deny that her husband would treat her thus.
It is not him. It is someone else, causing this. Danton would not do this to me.
And then it was over. She turned on her side, curling up around her pain and her shame, and wept. Her insides felt bruised and raw, and her soul throbbed with a pain that was almost beyond bearing. Would that I were really a witch, that I might heal such things! She was aware of Danton watching over her for a moment, aware also that he had never seen her weep like this before; she did not look up at him, but curled herself even more tightly into a ball on the bed, feeling a thin trickle of blood run down her thighs; her flesh stung in a dozen places where he had bruised her, angry purple blood already rising to the surface in witness to his violence.
Then, with a final snort of disgust, he left her alone. She listened to his footsteps moving across the room, heard the door open, heard it fall shut of its own weight behind him.
A short while later Merian returned, and the servant held her mistress in her arms for a while as the tears flowed, murmuring curses against the High King that would have gotten her executed on the spot, had they been witnessed. Gwynofar felt too weak to silence her. At last Merian helped her back into the tub, where she scrubbed her down with soap and gentle caresses, as one would an infant. But soap could not cleanse her spirit of the pollution that had taken root inside her, and several times Gwynofar almost vomited, remembering the sight of her husband’s body streaked black with that foreign sorcery. Was that inside her now, riding Danton’s seed like some ghastly stallion, into the s
ecret recesses of her body? If not, why had she seen it? What was its purpose?
And then, late in the night, when moonlit shadows shivered across the bed, creeping along the body of the battered queen, the gods of the Protectors whispered the truth in her ear. Just as they always did with the daughters of their most favored race, a gift they had granted to the women of the Protectors’ bloodlines many, many centuries ago.
There will be another child, the gods whispered to her, in that moment when sleep fell upon her. Already he makes ready to draw strength from your flesh in order to grow. Can you feel him inside you yet? Does he stir your maternal loyalty?
“Is it a true child?” she whispered into the darkness. “Or something else? Please tell me!”
But the gods, as always, choose what questions they wish to answer . . . and this time there was only silence.
Chapter 22
THE SKY was pitch black, with a pair of crescent moons facing in opposite directions. They were the color of freshly spilled blood, and the sky that backed them had no stars or other natural features, but was lightless and empty for as far as the eye could see. The dark pines beneath them glittered as if with dew, but it was not the time for dew, and teardrops of ice hung suspended from every needle, as if the trees themselves had frozen in the act of weeping.
It was an impossible landscape from start to finish and therefore, Ethanus reasoned, a dream.
There was only one person walking the earth these days that would send him a dream. He was pleased that she had taken his lessons to heart so well, and designed a setting that would alert him to its nature, but he was disturbed by the tenor of her creation. The moons in particular looked more like wounds in the sky than natural spheres. It was a small detail, but it worried him. Dreams were a strangely insightful medium, that reflected in shadows and hints the condition of the soul that created them. These signs, if they truly reflected the state of Kamala’s soul, were anything but reassuring.
After a moment the shadows parted and a figure approached him. It was draped in a long black cloak, the hood drawn forward so its face could not be seen. For a brief moment Ethanus wondered if his assumption about the dreamcaster’s identity had been incorrect but the figure reached up and pushed back the hood, and Kamala was revealed to him. She was pale and drawn and had deep circles under her eyes, such as might come of exhaustion or grief. Her clothing was streaked with black and in tatters, yet another reflection of the torment within. Bad signs all around.
“Kamala?”
Her voice was a whisper, hoarse as if from crying. Surely his fiery pupil could not have been crying! “Forgive me, my master.” She lowered her eyes in a rare gesture of submission; wrong, all wrong. “I know it is not the custom for students to seek council after they have left their mentor—”
“If I did not expect you to break that rule I would not have given you my ring.” He wished he could use his sorcerous senses to gain more insight, but in a dream all he would see was what she wished to show him . . . and that was probably already visible. “What has happened?”
Her gaze was a terrible, haunted thing. Her bloodshot eyes fixed on him for a moment as if she was deciding what she dared say, and finally, in a voice no louder than a breath, she whispered, “I have broken the Law.”
A cold chill ran up his spine. “How so?”
“I killed a Magister.”
He shut his eyes for a moment, and whispered a short prayer under his breath. When he was sure he could keep his voice steady he looked at her again and asked quietly, “How so?”
“It was an accident. He accosted me, and I defended myself, and he . . . fell.” She shook her head. “It was a long fall. He had time to save himself.” She bit her lip, hard enough to draw a drop of blood. “He did nothing. Just . . . fell.”
Ethanus drew in a sharp breath. “Transition?”
“I don’t know. He looked like . . . like a morati. Just helpless.”
“Do the others know?
She winced. “Magisters?”
He nodded.
“Probably. There were at least three others nearby.”
He had to ask it. “Do they know what you really are?”
“I don’t think so.”
Exhaling noisily, he turned away from her and tried to think. By all rights and Magister custom he should cast her out of his territory, now and forever. Then again, by all rights and Magister custom they should not even be talking. She should not have his ring. She should not have been made a Magister in the first place. There were so many other rules that he had broken for this one that had once been sacrosanct. . . .
He turned back to her, and saw with a start there were tears on her face. He had never imagined that anything could shake her badly enough to make her shed tears in front of him. He swallowed the knot that rose in his throat at the sight and made his voice as steady as it could possibly be. “You must retrieve your things,” he told her. “Everything that they could possibly use to track you down. Not only clothing and possessions—the obvious relics—but every hair, every fingernail clipping, every flake of skin you might have left behind. Your scent upon the sheets, the oil of your skin on a doorknob, your finger’s smudge on a bedpost—all of it.”
She nodded.
“They may catch you doing that—there is that danger— but if they do not know you are a Magister, I doubt they will be alert for sorcery.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose between two fingers, trying to think. “They know your name? What you look like?”
She whispered, “No. I don’t think so.”
“You can change your flesh now, if you are not certain of it.”
She nodded, “I know.”
Often before he had suggested she change her flesh, for one reason or another, and she had always responded with indignation, declaring that she would not be forced out of the body she was born into for any other man’s convenience. The fact that she did not protest the suggestion now told him just how much this affair had shaken her.
“Will they hunt me?” She asked it softly.
“Do the morati know that a Magister was killed?”
She shut her eyes, remembering. “Yes.” The ice-laden pine trees sighed in the wind. “They were gathering around the body as I fled.”
He exhaled sharply. “Then, yes. I am sorry. There might be more options if the death were a secret, but if the morati know the Magisters will need to hunt down the killer and execute judgment as quickly as possible, lest the common folk learn that they can kill one of us and get away with it.” He shook his head grimly. “It is bad enough when they learn that we can die.”
She nodded. Her shoulders trembled slightly. “Master Ethanus, you must believe me . . . I did not intend this to happen—”
He raised up a hand to silence her. “I know, Kamala. I am the one who taught you the Law, remember? You would never seek the life of a Magister. If only because you knew what the cost would be.”
What it must be now, he thought.
Ah, my beautiful but wild-hearted apprentice, could you not have waited a while before offending against our entire brotherhood? Maybe all of one peaceful year before you shook our world to its very roots?
“I will do what you say,” she whispered.
“Get far away from them, quickly, and stay away. Do not play at laying down false trails for them to follow, or any other fugitive trick. They have centuries’ experience more than you do at that kind of thing; you may wind up giving them more information than you intended.”
Her eyes flared defiantly for a moment, diamond-bright in the darkness. Even in the midst of her troubles, the suggestion that she could not best another Magister was unacceptable to her.
Ah, Kamala, that same spirit which is your strength is also your greatest weakness. May the gods watch over you for its sake.
“I do not ask you to help me,” she said. “Or protect me.”
“No.” He nodded. “You do not.”
“Nor will I come back here and bri
ng trouble to you. Do not fear on that account.”
There was a brief tightness in his heart. “No,” he said quietly. “You cannot return to me.”
You stand outside the Law now. That fate cannot be shared with another.
She bowed her head respectfully. The gesture reminded him of when she had first come to him, a fiery and determined child ready to take on the world. And now you have done so, he thought. Was it worth it? Do you, when the shadows of doubt draw too close, regret the course you have chosen?
It was more of a rhetorical question than a real one. If ever she truly regretted becoming a Magister her soul would lose the strength it needed to fight for continued life, her consort would break free of his bond, and she would die. The fact that she still walked the earth bore witness to her continued commitment.
“I am sorry to come to you now,” she whispered. “I know you must break the Law even to talk to me—”
“No, I have broken no Law.”
He met her bright eyes with his own, willing all the strength he could into his voice, that she might partake of it and refresh her own spirit. “I had a dream, nothing more. It is hard to tell dreams from reality, sometimes.” He paused. “This was an odd dream, for I imagined that an old student of mine returned to me and revealed that she had broken our Law, and then asked for my counsel. Of course she would not do that, for she knows our ways. And I would not give my counsel to one who had killed a Magister.”
She nodded. Her eyes glistened. There were no tears this time. That was good.
“Besides,” he said softly, “The moons were at odds with one another. So how could it have been real?”
“How indeed?” she whispered.
For a moment she just stood there. The trees groaned softly in the breeze; a single frozen teardrop fell to the ground and shattered there. He had the sudden desire to take her in his arms, to kiss her gently on the forehead, as one might with a child. To give her comfort. But it was not his way . . . nor was it hers.