by Renee Peters
Medley of Souls
Renee Peters
Rae Stilwell
Medley of Souls by Renee Peters and Rae Stilwell
www.theaegeans.com
Copyright © 2020 Renee Peters and Rae Stilwell
Cover Design © Rae Stilwell | raestilwell.com
ISBN: 978-1-7346441-3-5
Ebook ASIN: B0852RB51X
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Contents
Join the World of the Aegeans
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Epilogue
Appendix I
Appendix II
Appendix III
Glossary
Thank you!
Join the World of the Aegeans
More from the Aegean Immortals Series
Free Excerpt: Rhythm of Hearts
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
This book is dedicated to:
Our coworkers:
Jax, Jerry, and Starbuck
and
Rico and Charlie
Without whom these books might have been written much faster, but we appreciate their support nonetheless.
-Renee and Rae
Join the World of the Aegeans
For a current list of all books available from the World of the Aegeans, please visit our website. You can also join our email list to receive promotions, updates on upcoming books, free content, and more.
www.theaegeans.com/sign-up/
Subscribers will receive a free copy of Saving Eden: The Urchin’s Song as a thank you for joining our world. Check out a preview at the link below.
Saving Eden: The Urchin’s Song
I love you
as the Moon
must love
the Night Sky
The Aegean Immortals Series
Prologue
Anowen Castle, East Yorkshire, England, January 1810
Late morning sunlight filtered dangerously into the halls of Anowen Castle. Despite the sensitivity of the castle’s occupants to the sun, its windows were large,
filling the exterior walls from floor to ceiling — almost as wide as a man was tall. Only four feet of wall space divided one window from the next; its stonework and wood paneling heavily decorated with gilded molding, alcoves, paintings and fine sculptures.
Heavy drapery did much to protect the halls from the sun; but the light stubbornly found its way through the gaps in the fabric. Triumphant, it flung itself across the decorations and scattered dappled sunshine like a thousand gold coins through the polished halls.
Sunshine that carried with it the power to burn the skin.
It was the reason the youngest member of Anowen’s family currently crept through the shadows.
At one hundred and sixty-two years old, Joanna LeClair Holt was no child by mortal standards. She was pleasing enough to look at and possessed of average height and a slender figure. Golden curls sprung free of a simple, woven braid to frame a heart-shaped face. With large, green eyes and thick lashes, she was passing fair among the mortals.
But she did not live among mortals.
When matched against the perfected beauty of the Immortal family who had stolen her, Joanna’s appearance fell short by leagues. The coven — when they had cause to remember her presence — sometimes noted that she was almost humanlike in her appearance.
Even so, Joanna was no human, and of all the castle’s inhabitants, she alone was too young to sneak between the daylight shadows without risk.
Such was the price of the curse forced upon her.
She took her respite, where she could, in the quiet hours of the early morning when most of the family slept. There was no escaping them, otherwise. With every heartbeat, the muted symphony of the entire coven sang through her veins; the empathetic weave bound her to the family that had once stolen, then rejected her.
When her song had ceased to give them life, they had settled into the quiet monotony of a dull forever, and she had done her best to remain forgotten.
A sudden, sharp pain caught her wrist, startling her from her thoughts.
With a gasp, the woman dropped the box she had been carrying, scattering writing supplies and tools across the floorboards.
The queen stepped back from the mess and turned her wrist over for inspection. The white sheen of a burn greeted her, and with a soft curse in French, Joanna lifted her gaze.
A statue of a golden nymph captured mid-dance glittered in the sunlight. The queen followed the path of the light from the figure to where she had been walking and frowned.
She had been inattentive.
Her fingers brushed across the blistering burn. It would heal — slower than she had grown accustomed to — but it was not her first injury from the sun. When the pain began to fade, the queen crouched to gather her supplies.
She had hardly shuffled the parchment together when the sound of a flute grew louder in her blood. It was a flute she recognized. With a wince, Joanna began scooping the mess into the box with far less care.
The taps of footfall were upon her quicker than Joanna could move.
“What a mess, little Froggie,” her Immortal sister’s voice, honey sweet, sighed. “I thought I heard something crash. Would you like some help?”
In silence, Joanna continued to drag her belongings into her collection, her head down.
As she grabbed for a fallen hammer, Joanna heard a curtain shift and then sensed the spill of light behind her. With a gasp, the queen scrambled forward into the safety of the shadows. A scattering of the nails that littered the floor dug into her knees.
Joanna pulled her dress out from beneath her. Before she could stand, a flutter of red fabric around her marked her sister’s progress toward a second window.
Angelica threw it open.
Sunlight blazed into the corridor, trapping Joanna between two long rectangles of light. Dancing reflections from nearby decorations swam across her sanctuary of shadow, forcing her ag
ainst the wall.
“Oh, dear,” her sister giggled. “But it does improve the hallway, doesn’t it, pet? Look how the gold glistens from the light. You can certainly see better to clean, now, can’t you?”
Her tormentor had barely been of age at the time of her rebirth, while Joanna had been in her mid-twenties. Even so, Angelica was a senior in their curse by nearly a century.
The other queen stood in the sunlight without damage, its beams glittering from the ruby pins that adorned her black curls. The sweetness of her smile made for a poor match to the coldness in her eyes or the flatness of her song.
“Good luck with your mess, pet.” Angelica lifted a hand to wave. “I believe I’m off to bed. Try not to stay up too late in the day. You really ought not to be out of your room when the sun is up. You might get burnt.”
Pivoting on her heel, the queen in red departed down the hall, leaving Joanna alone to her prison bars.
The blonde exhaled, her shoulders slumping as if she had deflated with her release of breath. Curling her legs beneath her, the queen moved her box closer, and began to remove its contents. Flipped upside down, it served the purpose of a writing desk; though she did not manage so much as a word as the hours passed.
A servant eventually found her and pulled the drapes closed. With a bow of her head and quiet thanks, Joanna gathered her belongings and slipped back into the darkness of the castle.
Alone.
Chapter 1
Anowen Castle, Spring, 1810
Some four miles north of the River Humber, Anowen Castle greeted a cold April morning with little fanfare. As mists of gray light began filtering through the budding greenery of the forest that surrounded the castle, servants pulled the draperies closed and turned the gas lights down for the day’s rest.
Joanna stood by the grand doors in the castle foyer. Prepared for the rising sun with a woolen shawl over her shoulders, the queen kept her back against the safety of the wall alongside the doors.
A half hour went by as the French queen kept vigil. The passing servants spared her a brief glance before moving on with guarded expressions. As they crossed into the halls, Joanna heard them whispering.
Finally, Joanna was rewarded with the sound of horse hooves echoing from the courtyard. A scent of parchment that betrayed the blood of an Elder Immortal drifted ahead of the rider, and Joanna recognized the heavier steps that sounded as they climbed the stone stairs outside.
“I am here,” Joanna warned as the door opened.
Its progress stopped almost immediately, and one of the coven’s High Queens peered from around the wood.
Ayla Sørenson stood head and shoulders over most men of the time with a frame befitting that of her Norse ancestry. Of all the family, it was only Ayla who Joanna could not hear on their weave, but she had learned over time that Ayla could not hear their music either.
The silence, the withering was a killer of hearts and character, and yet for the century and a half that Joanna had known Ayla, she had always been as she was now.
Pale-faced with pin straight black hair that fell to her shins when unbraided, Ayla dressed in black clothes befitting mourning garb. Widow, they called her — mortals and the family both. Whether it was for her clothes or her silence or the whispers of a loved one lost in the massacre that had culled Anowen’s family decades before Joanna had been turned, the Frenchwoman did not know. No one ever spoke of the time before she had been stolen into eternity if it could be helped.
And Ayla certainly did not.
The High Queen’s flat expression rarely changed save for the ghost of smiles or gentleness. Today, a wilted pink blossom tucked above Ayla’s ear offered a splash of color to her dark palette.
The Elder’s eyes drifted over the French woman in a quiet study before she wedged herself through the crack she had made in the entrance. In silence, Ayla closed the door again and began to shuffle through her saddlebag.
Joanna closed her arms around herself, clutching at an elbow to draw it closer as she watched the Widow fish. At last, the High Queen drew forth a bundle of letters, strapped with twine.
“For you —” Ayla passed off the treasure before reaching up to pluck the flower from behind her ear. She held it for Joanna to take. “And for you.”
“Did it come with the letters?”
“It came from me.”
“Oh!” The blonde’s face warmed with a blush, and she bowed before tucking the blossom into her hair. “Merci, ma Seigneuresse. Ayla.”
“You should be abed, Joanna. The sun will do you no favors.”
“Ah, oui. I knew it was delivery day. I was expecting….”
“Fan mail?” Ayla’s lips curved a faint smile as she nodded toward the bundle. “How are your books doing?”
“Très bien.”
The stacks of mail from her readers were growing larger by the month, and she could barely hold today's bundle in one hand. Joanna smiled as she brushed her thumbnail down the edges of the envelopes and took in their weight with a fluttering sense of pride.
Her flutes skipped for it, and the sound of her music and the feel of the butterflies in her heart startled her. She had not had such a burst of feeling since her turning had infused life into the coven. The sensation passed almost as quickly as it had come, and Joanna’s music quieted along with her silence as she listened for her soul’s song.
Ayla spoke above her, distracting her, “It may suit you better to meet your publisher directly. Women do write in this age.”
“He may stop publishing my work if he knows I am a woman. They do not sign their names… Or they use a man’s pen name.”
“You bring in enough money, he should not care — unless he is a fool.”
“Or… proud. Which he is, ma Seigneuresse.”
A smile ghosted Ayla’s lips. “And so, your admirers think you a man, and it falls to Mathias to exchange your bank notes to keep your secrets.”
Joanna pulled the bundle against her chest, and her lips thinned. “Does he mind terribly?”
“Of course not. I am only amused that you have likely made women fall in love with him — though he insists he is not the writer. He is less amused, perhaps.”
The blonde lifted the letters to press them against her lips, her brows furrowing. “I did not mean….” Her words trailed off, and she shrugged, dropping her attention to her mail. Within the stack, she found a letter from her publisher. Almost as soon as she had peeled it open, Joanna felt a turn in her stomach.
A five-pound note slipped into her fingers, but it was not her expected royalties that had her concerned so much as the plain script she saw in the attached letter.
… Desire to meet you face to face…
She almost dropped her handful were it not for Ayla’s reflexes catching hold of her hands and the letters. With a grimace, the queen pulled her hands free, leaving her mail in Ayla’s hold so she could press her fingers against her face.
“I suppose we could send Mathias in your stead,” the High Queen murmured after flipping Joanna’s letter over in her hand.
“Non!” Joanna stepped back before closing in once more to snatch her letters away. “Non. The way it is is the way I like it. I do not… This is how I want it to stay.”
“The day in our eternity will come when a woman can be recognized for her work," Ayla said evenly. "And J.L. Holt cannot write forever, Joanna. Why not now? The worst that will come is —”
“I do not want… I do not want to tarnish it. I enjoy this. The letters from… admirers of my work. The newspapers who want poems. My publisher may drop me for the deception. This is… all I have outside the castle.”
“It does not have to be thus, Joanna — inside of the castle or out. Our worst fear is often not so terrible as we make it out to be in our hearts.”
Joanna drew the letters closer to her chest and shook her head. “I believe I should return to bed, Ayla. Thank you for collecting my letters. I… may give Mathias a reprieve from the bank this mont
h.”
The queen curtsied politely to her Elder before turning to bustle down the hall.
Ayla’s voice followed behind her. “Do not forget to rest before the hunt this eve, Joanna.”
By then, however, the blonde was rounding the corner to escape the conversation entirely.
Chapter 2
Easthaven, England
A half-moon had already risen in the sky when Joanna’s hunting party left the castle that night. Beyond their carriage windows, the lantern light swung on its post above the driver’s bench, casting a wavering orange glow around the rocking vehicle. Past the dancing flame, the colder light of the moon washed the rolling countryside of Easthaven in silver.
The French queen watched the landscape pass them by, breathing in the faint scent of manure and hay that permeated the carriage walls despite the blend of polishing oil, leather, and mixed perfumes that marked the interior of the transport. She closed her eyes, imagining another landscape; one with a barn huddled down alongside a cottage as if they were a married pair. There, the farmlands were more hills than flat, and the tools were older, making the back strain as its caretakers fought the stony earth.