by Carol Berg
As the flood of misery swept me along, my tormentor spoke less and less, and I sank deeper into chaotic dreams. I drowned in fear and pain, suffocated in madness, too weak to claw my way out. Though I feared him above all men, only my master could grant me breath.
“Here, taste this. It’s very sweet—makes Voushanti heave. But your sister told me you had a special love for mead.”
“Bless you, lord,” I whispered as the wagon jolted onward. “Bless you.” I licked what he dabbed on my lips and mourned because it tasted like pitch instead of mead. But I did not tell him so, because I was afraid he would abandon me to the dark and the visions. “Please speak to me, lord.”
“I’m sorry for my reticence, Valen. I’ve naught of cheer to report. So if you’d have me speak, then you must excuse my mentioning serious matters when you are so sick. Every hour brings us closer to the solstice, and I am in desperate need of a plan. How do I find the Danae? How do I persuade them to trust me? If you don’t get well—of course, you will—but if you don’t, I’ll be in a pretty mess.”
“Likely I’ll be sicker on the solstice,” I mumbled into the moldy wool. “Even if I survive this.”
“And why would you be sick on the solstice? I expect you to have your head clear of this cursed craving long before then. From what your sister told me, you’re never really sick.”
“Solstice is my birthday.” The effort of conversation made my head spin. “Always sick.”
“Indeed? You must have been a horrid child. Did you make yourself sick on your birthday? Too many sweets? Too much wine?”
This birthday…what was it? I had thought of something…before sickness and mania took me. Something nagged, like dirt left in a wound. Mustering every scrap of control I had left, I dug through the detritus of memory. Seven. The mystery of seven. My grandfather had confirmed it.
“On some birthdays, my disease got worse. On my seventh birthday, I set fire to my bed and ran away. On my fourteenth: I hurt so wicked, I took nivat the first time. Twenty-first: thought my prick would fall off. Almost killed a whore…” The wagon lurched and bumped. I clutched the blankets, shivering, and fought to keep talking. The dark waters of madness lapped at my mind. If I sank below the waves, I would never rise. “Gods, I am a lunatic. Always have been. But Janus says I’ll be free on this birthday—twenty-eighth. Dead, more like. Every seven years, I go mad.”
He was so quiet for so long, I panicked, flailing my arms in the darkness. “Please, don’t leave me, lord. Please!”
“I’m here, Valen.” He caught my arms and laid them gently at my side. I welcomed the searing torment as he laid a firm hand on my head. “That’s an extraordinary tale…seven, fourteen, twenty-one…and now twenty-eight. It reminds me of something in Picus’s journal. Picus was my father’s tutor, himself a monk as well as a sturdy warrior, sent to protect Father as he grew up in Danae fostering, and to ensure he learned of his own people. Picus wrote endlessly of numbers and their significance, especially seven and four. He it was who calculated the sevenfold difference in the spending of life in Aeginea. The Danae themselves pay no heed to numbers past four—the completion of the seasons that they call the gyre and their four remasti, or bodily changes: separation, exploration, regeneration, maturity…”
Moments seeped past in the dark. The horses whinnied. The cart jostled. The hand on my head quivered. My master’s voice shook when he took up again, though he had dropped it near a whisper. “You have always been rebellious…out of place…never sick, save for this peculiar disease festering in your bones. Your grandfather favored you above all his progeny…the same man who stole a treasure from the Danae…to which he claimed a right. Janus de Cartamandua, by coincidence the very same man who provided unimpeachable witnesses to your pureblood birth—his own two boyhood friends.”
Of a sudden, hands gripped my shoulder like jaws of iron.
“How blind I have been,” he said, “I, who have read Picus’s journals since I was a child. Think, Valen. Of course you can’t read. Of course confinement and suffocation madden you…make you feel as if you’re dying. Confinement within the works of man kills them. But you don’t die from it. Remember on the day your sister was to take you from Gillarine, Gildas gave you water—I’d swear on my father’s heart it was from the Well, already tainted with Gerard’s murder—and it poisoned you. But, again, you did not die, only got wretchedly sick, because you are both and neither. By all that lives in heaven or hell, Valen…”
And the truth lay before my crumbling mind, as gleaming and perfect as the golden key of paradise, as solid and irrefutable as the standing stones of my long questioning now shifted into a pattern that explained my father’s loathing and my mother’s drunken aversion and every mystery of my broken childhood. My father’s damning curse hung above it all like a new-birthed star in the firmament: You are no child of mine.
Indeed, my blood was no purer than Osriel the Bastard’s, at most only half Aurellian—and that half given me by Janus de Cartamandua, not Claudio. But unlike that of my rightful king, the taint that sullied my pure Aurellian heritage was not the royal blood of Navronne, but that of a pale-skinned race whose members were exceptionally tall, had curling hair, and could not read. Thou, who art without words, yet complete.
“…you are Danae.”
The cart bucked once more, and I lost my feeble hold on reason. The tides of pain, fire, and madness engulfed me, and I heard myself wailing as from a vast and lonely distance.
PART TWO
The Waning Season
Chapter 8
The angel sponged my chest with warm water and chamomile. I scarcely dared breathe lest she realize I was awake—or as much awake as I ever seemed to get amid my cascading visits to hell and heaven. The sponge moved lower. A pleasurable languor settled in my belly and spread to knees and elbows. This moment was surely wrought in heaven. But who would ever have expected heaven to smell like chamomile?
She lifted the sponge, sloshed it in a metal basin, and squeezed it, the sound of dribbling water setting my mouth watering as well. Her washing was always quite thorough, the water deliciously warm, her fingers…ah, Holy Mother…her fingers strong and sure. Her hands were not the tender silk of a courtesan’s, nor were they rough and callused like those of a dairy-maid or seamstress, but firm and capable. Tough, but unscarred. Her voice named her female, but when she leaned across me to reach my sprawled arm, her body smelled of clean linen hung out in the sun to dry. An angel, then, not a woman. But her hands…
“I think you are beginning to enjoy this too much, Magnus Valentia.” The angel’s breath scalded my ear. “Either you are feigning sleep or your dreams have broached the bounds of propriety. Know this, sirrah: I would as soon tongue a goat as indulge a man’s pleasure—no matter the marvels of his birth.”
The warm sponge touched my groin…I groaned as gatzi drove me back into hell.
Magnus Valentia. The name attached itself to me in some vague fashion throughout my ensuing visit to the netherworld. As familiar spiders crept through my bowels with barbed feet, breeding their myriad children, who then flooded out of my nose and mouth and other bodily orifices, and as gatzi strung me up on a cliff of ice and lashed me with whips of fire, I examined the appellation carefully. Shoving aside pain and madness—what use to heed the twin keystones of my universe?—I turned it over and over in my ragged mind: Magnus Valentia. It wasn’t quite right. Not a lie, but not truth either. The few bits of truth I experienced—the angel’s sure hands, clean smell, and astringent tongue, the clean cold air that blasted my overheated face from time to time, an occasional taste of pungent wine, the plucked notes of a harp—had a certain rarefied quality about them, a hard-edged luminescence that distinguished them from mania.
The uncertainty of name and birth dogged me until I next came to my senses—or at least what portion of them I could claim. A flurry of hands rolled me over in the soft bed and restrained my wrists and ankles with ties of silk. I could not fathom why my
caretakers bothered with such. The only movement I seemed able to command was licking my parched lips.
A hand on my forehead brought the world beyond my eyelids into sharper focus. I smelled…everything…dust and stone, the faint residue of burning pennyroyal, rosemary, oil of wintergreen, medicines and possets, old boots and dried manure, cinnamon and ale, evergreen branches, chamomile, and soap. But unlike the usual case of late, the varied scents did not corrode my flesh. Hell’s minions had been using my senses as instruments of torture.
“The spell seems to be taking hold,” said the woman—the angel. Her voice crackled like glass crushed under a boot. “His last seizure spanned only an hour, and each seems milder than the one before. He no longer tries to injure himself. His body now responds to pleasure as well as pain. As Your Grace has rejoined us, perhaps he’ll open his eyes. He reacts to your presence as to none other. And not entirely with terror. Does that annoy you, lord?”
Someone drew up a sheet of soft linen to cover my naked shoulders and the touch of its fine-woven threads did not make me scream. I almost forgot to listen as I contemplated this odd experience.
“Will he have a mind left after all this? I need him capable. This very hour would be none too soon.” The man’s voice slid into my thoughts like a sharpened stake into soft earth, rousing a frantic need for sense and strength. Despite his intriguing language of sanity and reason, instinct screamed that to lie here bound and muddleheaded in his presence was dangerous.
Filled with eager dread, I fought to open my eyes, but succeeded only in stirring up remnants of madness. Just punishment. I had broken vows…indulged perversion…done murder…soiled my bed…and now I had to pay. Dancing shadows swirled in the landscape of my head, parting to reveal scarlet light glaring from the empty eye sockets of sprawled corpses, a brawny man pinned to the earth with wooden stakes, skeletal fingers drawing me into the snow-blanketed bog, pulling me down and down into the icy mud. Drowning…suffocating…freezing…yet never, ever dead. Seven times seven times seven years was I condemned to live and die, buried in the ice. A wail rose from my hollow chest.
The angel’s hand on my back silenced my cry before it reached my throat. Her sere voice swept away the nightmares as if they were no more than ash, drifting like black snow about my bed. “I cannot even venture a guess as to his state.”
She moved away. A clank of iron, various rustlings and thumps, and a mumbled “flagro” produced a rush of sound and a moment’s blistering heat behind me, surging to attack the legions of winter.
“Yet indeed the fellow’s constitution is extraordinary,” she continued. “A fortunate man—that is, one who did not die gnawing his own appendages—would experience the most acute nivat sickness for six weeks after quitting the doulon. Certain effects—nausea, high-strung nerves, tremors, and sweats—would then linger for nigh on a year, and susceptibility to the craving for the rest of his life. This man, or whatever you think he is, is emerging from the acute illness after only a fortnight. Perhaps your theory as to his birth explains why. Whatever the source of his resistance to nivat’s worst effects, each succeeding hour convinces me that this sensory disorder that remains is, indeed, fundamental to his body’s humors. Yet I see no more evidence of immortality or inhuman strength in him than I see of wings or halos or blue sigils glowing from his skin. Look at the scars on his thigh and shoulder. He’s been wounded a number of times, and he’s been enslaved to the most virulent of all enchantments for near half his life. No physician could tell you more of his nature than that. Consult priests or talespinners, if you insist on more.”
“I’ve not yet confirmed the details of his birth,” said the man. “And we’ve no idea the implications of dual bloodlines—such bloodlines. Of course, he would be neither immortal nor invulnerable. You’ve not mentioned this to anyone else?”
“Certainly not. I’d sooner spread plague than dose idiots with more superstitions. It’s wretched enough to see their response when I confess that my employer is Magrog the Tormentor’s rival, while I am forbidden to reveal that he’s naught but a disease-ridden celibate with a diabolical bent for magic and an overgrown opinion of himself.”
“Someday, mistress, you truly will overstep.” Frost edged the man’s words, so bitter that my tattered soul curled into a ball and hid, certain I was fallen to hell again.
But my astringent angel laughed, her fearless merriment a silver sword banishing the demon gatzi that tried to take shape behind my eyelids. Pillows lay soft beneath my cheek; tendrils of warmth wafted from her hearth. Even the silken ties that bound my wrists and wrapped each finger made me feel safe and protected in her presence.
Receding footsteps crossed my muted chamber, then clicked on tile as they passed into a place of echoes. Behind my eyelids I envisioned a long, wide passage of clean white stone, bordered by arches hung with brightly woven curtains. The lamps that hung from the high ceiling shone, not with burning oil or lit fingers of wax and braided wick, but with the pure blue fire of daylight, held captive within their glass panes. The image held the same hard-edged truth as the angel’s hands and stray moonbeams.
Whence came such certainty? I could not have seen. I’d been a raving lunatic since well before they brought me here, my eyes covered, my ears and nose stopped to tame the agony of my senses.
“Someone’s coming to sit with him? I don’t begrudge you rest after this long siege, but I’d not have him left alone.” The man’s voice echoed faintly down the passage.
“The fellow must have some charm about him,” she said, sere as the uplands of Ardra. “Everyone seems eager to take a turn to help—even your little heart’s bane. I’ve made a schedule…”
Gatzi surged out of the corners of my mind, pricked at my skin, and drew me downward into the frozen bog. Mud and water filled my lungs, so I could only choke and gurgle, not scream.
“There, can you feel it, Brother? A marvel as we’ve not seen since we left Palinur. Awkward as this might be for us were you sensible, Saverian said that to expose your skin might do more good than harm, so…”
Hands drew stale linens away, tugging gently where they snarled my tucked limbs, carefully settling the scant weight about my hips. The touch of air on skin set off a defensive tremor deep within me where some primitive function kept my heart beating and lungs pumping. Yet it was merely sharp-edged heat that bathed my flesh.
Every nerve burst awake in that moment, not in the overstretched agonies of madness, but in a fevered baptism of delight. My lungs filled with light. My ears rang with its brazen song. I tasted its tart and searing flavor. And as heat filled my veins, I groaned and uncurled, stretching to gather more of it before hell’s minions snatched it away.
“Dear Brother, I’m sorry if this hurts you!”
My eyes flew open to dazzling brilliance, and a sweetly curved form shimmering red against the haloed light—my angel. The memory of her strong hands tending my naked flesh sent the liquid sunlight in my veins surging toward my groin and possessed me of such aching desire, I dared reach for her wrist, even as I breathed fire. “O blessed one…”
“Brother Valen, the Mother be praised! What are you—?”
I drew her close and kissed her—gently, for angels are but cloud and music and divine light, thus bruise easily. Her lips were as sweet and rich as heaven’s cream. Her silken gown flowed as water on my skin. And underneath that fabric…As my left hand fingered her bronze corona of soft hair, my right released her wrist and smoothed the gauzy robe from her shoulder. Great gods of earth and sky, what gift of mortal substance have you granted your holy messenger? My mouth followed my hand’s guidance, as it unmasked the tender hollow below her shoulder and the firm swell of her breast…skin so like silk…
“Brother, what magic do you wield? Ah, Holy Mother…your hands are unbound. I’ve never felt such. We ought not…”
I kissed her lips to quiet her. Suffused in exquisite radiance, she yielded to my embrace, only a sighing breath as my hands slipped away
her layered raiment, until she lay entwined with me, her skin cool against my fever, no sexless divinity, but full and ripe and enduringly female.
Hands cupping her firm backside, I drew her sweet center against my swollen need and buried a groan in her neck. Gods, I had been ready for an eternity. I tumbled her over, released her to the pillows, and straddled her. She lay beneath me in the brilliance of winter sunlight, arms flung over her head. Her eyes were closed, long lashes delicate on her cheek, lips full and slightly parted, golden skin flushed. Ready, too. I inhaled deeply.
As if a finger had snatched a blindfold from my eyes, her scent snapped me awake. Fennel soap. Thyme and leeks. Woman. Elene.
I hesitated, quivering with the difficulty of restraint, trying not to let thought or fear intrude where they had no place. Naught had changed but my perceptions. I touched two fingers to her lips and drew them down the fine line of her jaw and her neck, across her breast, and down to her belly. She shivered deliciously.
I smoothed my palm across her belly…and a certainty intruded on my overcharged senses, one of those spine-rippling moments of prescience I’d experienced throughout my life. I must not lie with her. Some heated core within her insisted I had no right.
Shaking with pent desire, I snatched my hand away.
“Lady…” I drew a wavering breath and shifted to the side, making sure not to touch her again. Then I spread the fallen red silk over her, gathered the tangled bedclothes into my lap, and turned my face away as if I had not looked on her abandon. Assuredly this was not her first time to lie with a man. Was it my own past sin that burned my conscience and stayed my hand? Fire-god Deunor, what had I done?
“Forgive me, lady.” My voice sounded coarse and strange, scarcely audible. “My madness has drawn you in. Or some magic of the sunlight. Unable to control—By the Goddess Mother, I would not take you unconsenting. By magic. Even mad, I can’t believe I would.”