The Fate of the Tala

by Jeffe Kennedy

  “I hate what’s happened to us,” I said, a tremble in my voice. “The distance… You hurt me.” That cursed distance that created an opening for the high priestess’s opportunism. Maybe if our marriage hadn’t been already broken and bleeding, she wouldn’t have been able to scavenge the bones to make her puppet.

  Rayfe nodded. “It’s my fault. I know that. I’ve been…” He took a breath and set his jaw. “I’m so sorry, Andromeda,” he breathed, “that I said you were acting unhinged. You’re not, but I have been.”

  “No…” I protested, but without vigor.

  “I have no excuse. All I can say is that I love you so much.” He swallowed hard, eyes shimmering with unshed tears. “I know I haven’t been reasonable, but if I lost you, the world would turn to ash.”

  “And our child…” He slid his hands down to my wrists, holding them out and dropping his gaze to my pregnant belly. Making himself look, but then his steely expression softened. “How can I love him so much already? All these feelings—I wasn’t prepared for this. I didn’t know I’d be so torn.”

  I almost couldn’t speak through the tears rising to clog my own throat. “I understand,” I managed to say. “Zynda explained. I know it’s hard.”

  He met my eyes again, a rueful half smile on his beautifully carved lips. “She explained that I’m an idiot?”

  Now I did laugh a little. How I loved him. How I’d missed this. “Basically, yes.”

  He sobered. “That excuses nothing, though. I let you down. I let you believe that I don’t want you, that I don’t want this.”

  “No, I always knew that you want this,” I said, but the tears had spilled over and my heart ached like it might break in half. “It’s all right,” I managed to add.

  Rayfe lifted his hands to my cheek, wiping the tears away. “It’s not all right. Not even close. But I want to make it up to you. Never, ever doubt how much I want you, my queen.”

  He slowly closed the distance between us, brushing my lips with his. So sweet. So full of love, rich and full. I gasped a little at the sheer humming pleasure of his touch, of the returned flow of love I thought I might never feel from him again. He gathered me close, deepening the kiss, running his hands over me in exactly the way he knew I loved. And I arched against him, purring like a well-fed cat. He trailed kisses along my cheekbone, taking my earlobe in a light, teasing bite that sent a bolt of arousal straight down my spine, fountaining in my sex. My body knew his so well that I opened like a flower to him.

  “Kelleah talked to me,” he murmured in my ear.

  I made some inquiring humming noise, my mind whirling with desire that crowded out thought.

  “She wasn’t afraid to tell me I’m an idiot. She said what you did—that it’s good for us to be together, that it won’t hurt the child.”

  “What?” I opened my eyes, heavy lidded as his wickedly clever mouth worked its magic on my throat.

  “It was wrong of me to move out of our bed, to abandon you like that,” he said huskily. “I was a coward. I can’t even explain what I was thinking. Tell me it’s not too late, that you can forgive me. That I can mend what I carelessly broke. Come to bed with me. Let me love you.”

  “Oh, my wolf.” The sob caught in my throat, fortunately sounding like a groan of desire, not despair. A day ago, even this morning, I would’ve given most anything to hear those words from him. And now…

  Now I had to say no. Wildly I sorted options. I could go to bed with him and sneak out later. I could move the barrier tomorrow night, or even in the morning. But no—too many messages had gone out, too many people awaiting the moment. Nakoa had been brewing his storm for hours. People could die if I didn’t come through on schedule. I could tell Rayfe the truth and hope that the high priestess… no. Too dangerous.

  Especially for solely personal reasons. My duty to my people, to everyone, was far more important than my love life. I had to do this, but what could I tell him? I needed to make some excuse. Go and come back.

  But he’d know the moment I moved the barrier—and that I’d deliberately withheld my plan from him—and I’d lose him forever. Any softening of his heart now would only make my apparent betrayal wound more deeply.

  Rayfe slid the narrow shoulder of my shift down my arm, following with his mouth until he reached the upper curve of my breast. I shivered at the hot caress of his lips and tongue, my nipple peaked with anticipation. I threaded my fingers through his long, silky hair, holding on, savoring the scent and feel of him. I could… I could lose myself to this. Sate our mutual desire and reforge the connection between us. It wouldn’t necessarily take long. And then I could use mind magic to put him to sleep while I—

  While I violated his trust yet again. He wouldn’t know it yet, but I’d have to confess someday. And he’d still know that I’d moved the barrier and kept the plan from him.

  “Andromeda?” He lifted his head, looking at my face. I’d hesitated too long. “What’s wrong? Come to bed.”

  “I can’t.” The words wrenched out of me, staggering in their regret. Silently I begged him to understand. To give me one more chance. Moranu, please, don’t make this be my last chance.

  His winged brows drew together. “Surely whatever you need to do can wait until morning. We’ve been slaves to this war. Let’s take an hour for ourselves. To enjoy each other, to remind ourselves what we’re even fighting for.”

  “I wish I could,” I said fervently, meaning those words more than I’d ever meant them in my life. I took his hands in mine, extracting myself from his embrace. “Rayfe—I want nothing more than to be with you right now. And forever. I love you with everything in me. But, I swear to Moranu, there is something I must do.”

  He didn’t pull his hands away, but suspicion flickered in his gaze. “You’re being very careful not to say what it is, my queen.”

  I caught my breath, trying to quell the panic. Cool and calm. “I don’t want you to be angry is all,” I temporized, willing the wheeling birds of my scattered thoughts to align into some plan.

  “Try me,” he said tightly.

  “I… promised to consult with Ursula. She won’t sleep until I do.”

  He relaxed. Smiled. Ran a hand over my tumbling hair. “Is that all? I’ll come with you. I should probably apologize to her, too, for my behavior earlier today.” A faint, puzzled frown bent his brows again. “Though I can’t quite recall why I have that feeling.”

  Moranu save me from this. I felt so ill that bile rose in my throat. And guilt clearly writ itself across my face, because Rayfe took a sharp breath, dropped my hands, and stepped back.

  “You’re lying to me.” He sounded incredulous. “Why would you lie to me?”

  “Rayfe,” I said helplessly, reaching my hands for him. Dropping them when he looked at me with clear disgust.

  “Never mind,” he bit out. “It doesn’t matter. Here I’d been thinking all last night, all day today, of how I could mend things with you—and you don’t even care.”

  “I do care!” I nearly shouted at him. “I care so much that this estrangement has nearly broken me, and I—” I cut myself off, belatedly remembering the power I handed to my enemy with those words. “I can’t do this right now. I have to go.”

  His expression had gone cold, the fine bones sharp as glass, his blue eyes arctic. “Is there someone else?”

  “What? No!” I ran my hands over my pregnant belly without thinking. “When would I even—”

  “I imagine that’s my fault, too,” he interrupted bitterly. “You made your demands clear and I refused to bend. Because I cared about you and our child! Can’t you get that through your head, Andromeda?”

  “No. I mean, yes. I understand, but I never—”

  “Who is he? Or she? Some old mossback lover come to slide into your cold bed, eager to take advantage of what I treasured too much to risk injuring?”

  “No! Rayfe, I don’t understand how you could—”

  Oh. I mentally sighed for my stupidity, fo
r how easily I’d been baited into a fight yet again. “If this is how you’re going to be,” I said, chilling myself and pulling poise around me like a tattered cloak, bit by bit, and still not enough to cut the bitter wind, “then… I…” I stuttered to a halt, physically unable to deliver the appropriate ultimatum.

  “Don’t fret yourself, Andromeda,” Rayfe replied icily. “I won’t importune you again.” He took a breath, considering, then pierced me with his gaze. “There could be other women, you know. They offer. I’m a proven breeder after all.” He gestured at my belly, laughing harshly. “I’d said no to all of them, because I didn’t want them. I only wanted you. What a fool I’ve been.”

  With a clap of dark wings, he became his favored raptor form, arcing out the open window and dissolving into the night.

  A lone black feather lazily spun to the stone floor in the wake of his passage. Stunned, shattered, I picked it up, remembering that first time when he flew through Glorianna’s rose window at Ordnung, coming after me, and left a feather in his wake. Even then, knowing nothing, I’d taken it for a message, a promise. I’d pocketed it, fingering its glass-edged, obsidian lines, wondering at this man who so compelled me.

  Until Ursula had made me burn it to prove a loyalty that had already begun to shift away from her and our father, and to the land I’d been promised to before birth. I took one more precious moment to carry the feather back into my bedroom. I couldn’t look at the bed, where—but for excruciatingly bad timing—I might even now have been entwined in the arms of the only man I’d ever loved. Going to my jewelry box, I laid the feather inside, then carefully shut the lid.

  After a moment, I also put the high priestess’s topaz in there. I didn’t like to leave it where it could be reclaimed by one of her creatures, but I worried more about taking it inside the Heart where she could potentially track it. I’d underestimated her too many times.

  Taking a few deep and calming breaths, I cleared my mind. Concentrate. Focus.

  Becoming an owl, in deference to the night, I flew out the window also, and out over the dark sea. Though the waxing moon picked out glimmers on the waves, all the water was black, no hint of blue anywhere.

  ~ 14 ~

  The first time I’d gone to the Heart, I’d been brand new to shapeshifting, had no idea where I was going, and executed all of it quite clumsily. After all this time, I’d gotten more efficient—and cannier—about the journey.

  I never went directly there, as I had—more or less—that first time. I circled, flew or ran to various locations, before I changed to fish form and dove into the sea. On this dark night, it seemed unnecessarily exhausting to go too far out of my way, except that I was leery of being tracked by any of the sleeper spies. Not that they could enter the Heart even if they found it, but if the high priestess knew its location…

  Well, since it seemed increasingly clear that our magic shared many qualities, it could be that Salena’s line and the high priestess’s line sprang from the same source. If I could get into the Heart, she might be able to also.

  So, I expended energy appearing to hunt—though I released the bat I caught, unwilling to risk eating in animal form—gradually working my way lower, closer to the waves. I changed to heron form, keeping to the shadows, then slipped into the water in that form, diving deep before becoming a fish. After that, it was a matter of changing from one aquatic form to another as the water deepened, requiring a form best suited to each environment.

  The Heart sits in an abyssal crevice some distance from the Annfwn shoreline. While much of the Onyx Ocean is relatively shallow until well past the Nahanaun Archipelago, there are these chasms, deep valleys in the ocean floor, that plunge to dizzying depths. Some Tala shapeshifters—those who loved to test the limits and extremes—had attempted forms that withstood those crushingly intense deep waters.

  I was not one of those.

  But I had found on that first journey, through sheer good luck or the guiding hand of Moranu, that I could reasonably easily take the form of a denizen of each level. I never took those forms at any other time. Most of them I had no name for. They were creatures of the cold and lightless depths, where sight became worthless. Everything became about sound, smell, and feel.

  Until the Heart of Annfwn itself.

  The emerald glow of it lightened the waters long before the dome came into view. Few creatures lived nearby. Those that loved the crushing depths did not love light, so they avoided the area. Only the blue crabs, their gleaming shells like polished lapis lazuli, greeted me as I swam up to the golden walled dome.

  The Heart of Annfwn is essentially contained within another version of the magic barrier. Smaller by several orders of magnitude, the shield itself is correspondingly thicker, nearly opaque from the outside. The crabs crawling over its surface aren’t living creatures at all, but constructs of a sort. Not unlike, it suddenly occurred to me, the creatures of Deyrr.

  The crabs, whatever their origin, maintain and defend the dome. Knowing me well, they formed a shifting pattern like a salute, parting to allow me to flatten against the dome and ooze through. I didn’t shift back into human form until the sudden lack of pressure and gasping of my gills made it painfully necessary. Far better that way, however, than to shift back too soon. My deep-water creature form could withstand a bit of low pressure and dry air for a few moments far better than my human form could bear the freezing, crushing depths of the abyss.

  I’d learned that the hard way. And barely survived. I also hadn’t mentioned that near fatal mistake to Rayfe.

  The first time I’d entered the dome, I’d been naked in human form. In the beginning, it hadn’t mattered, as no one could see me this deep in the ocean, in a place no one else could ever go. But then I’d learned to project my consciousness to other places. When I appeared to people, even in illusory form, they seemed to see me as I was in the place. Not naked was preferable, so I wore my usual loose silken shift.

  On the smooth, curving chair formed of a giant abalone shell, probably created back when the first Tala expanded a second version of the Heart’s shielding to create the barrier, sat the Star of Annfwn. I breathed a sigh of relief to see it there, where I’d left it. I’d considered hiding it, but other than the elaborate chair, the small dome was a barren space. Finally I’d decided the Heart itself would have to serve as hiding place enough.

  Taking up the smooth topaz globe, I rolled it in my palm, heavy, radiating heat and light. Our mother had given it to Ursula, her eldest daughter, to keep and guard all those years. For a long time it had sat inset in the pommel of her sword, only the upper curve showing, appearing to be a cabochon jewel. Larger than the high priestess’s stone, possessing perfect clarity, the Star focused magic. When it had finally come to me—a process I hadn’t rushed, as I’d had a great deal to practice before I could begin to wield it—my abilities had grown by leaps.

  I sat in the chair, soaking in the revitalizing energy streaming from below. The Heart of Annfwn, the great condensed sun of all the magic in the world—well, most of it—lay beneath this chair, sunk into the bedrock itself. It sat at the center of the golden barrier that surrounded me and kept the ocean at bay, only the upper side apparent as a dome. Much like a cabochon jewel set in the ocean floor.

  Though I could follow all the surface of the Heart’s globe, just as I could with the larger barrier, it had never occurred to me to trace it into the earth. Sitting in this place, boosted to supernatural levels by the furnace of magic beneath me, I became both globes, in all parts of each at once. I didn’t really have time to dally, but I took a bare moment to sample the barrier where it traveled deep in the rock below, through fiery lakes of molten ore, frozen soil, and dense stone.

  My first time in this place, I’d been so new to sorcery, to any sort of magic, that my human senses had been unable to fully process the sensations. I’d heard colors and smelled sounds. Over time, I’d come to understand the vicissitudes of magic and no longer experienced it as strange sensory
contradictions. Now the magic spoke to me directly, with no need for sloppy translation.

  Flowing into and through the barrier, I followed its curve north. There, where barrier met the ground and dove beneath it, the soil had been frozen solid for centuries, perhaps forever. Huge, immensely thick sheets of ice lay on top of that, sometimes with deep covers of snow, new piled on top of old. In places along the coastline, the ice-covered land merged seamlessly into the frozen sea. But, fortuitously, where the barrier crossed the coastline, a high line of rearing cliffs broke that surface.

  I settled myself there, feeling as if I stood on those towering rocks. Though it was the middle of the night, it was also midsummer, and this far north the sun never set. Instead it hovered on the horizon, its light muted, but also clear and white.

  To my right, the barrier shimmered with purity, clean and unchallenged. With a rush of gratitude, I savored its pristine power, beyond relieved that Dafne had steered me away from my initial impulse to deal with the barrier at the point that Deyrr had fouled it.

  Below me, the sea foamed, hurling itself against the cliffs with a roar, determined to chew its way through the stubborn rocks. To my left, about a league south, I spotted the landmark I’d identified with Dafne: a rounded notch in the cliff face, where the water boiled into a glassy, deceptive calm. I only had to pull the barrier to just past that circle.

  That location confirmed and set in my mind, I turned to my next task: speaking mind-to-mind with Jepp. I contacted the staymach Zynda had left with Jepp and Kral. In nightjar form, it responded to my mental touch with eager affection, then flapped its wings to alert Jepp. She jumped, a dagger leaping to her hand before she relaxed—thankfully without skewering my bird.

  “Andi?” She asked tentatively. I had the bird duck its head in an approximation of a nod.