“Yer Honor? Sea-shakes got hold o’ ya already? We haven’t even cast off yet.”
The seneschal struck violently at the air behind him, knocking the man flat with a gesture.
“Leave me in peace.”
The sailor, long accustomed to the strong arm of command, rose quickly from the deck and slipped away. When the sailor had gone, the seneschal focused his attention again on the voice in his mind, the demon that shared his soul.
“I will not be questioned by you in this,” he said in a low voice, fighting the grip behind his eyes.
You are taking us away from our place of power, where our dominion rests, unchallenged. Why?
The seneschal stood a little straighter.
“A debt is owed me, a debt I had written off a lifetime ago and a world away.”
So if you decried this debt a lifetime ago, why pursue it now?
The seneschal ran his fingers angrily through his hair, as if seeking to gouge the nagging voice from his scalp.
“Primarily,” he spat, “because I choose to. And I do not wish to answer to you about it.”
The dark fire of F’dor spirit that clung to his essence burned blacker within him, making him nauseous.
I can see we have a misunderstanding of roles here.
“Yes,” the seneschal agreed, “though I am certain we have differing opinions on who is transgressing on the terms under which we have agreed to associate with one another.”
The voice of the demon was silent for a moment, leaving only the sound of the wind and the sea, the cry of the gulls, and the distant noise of the port growing busy as morning came. When it spoke there was a crackling sound in its tone, like a fire, the flames calm but seething underneath in the coals.
I have allowed you far more autonomy, far more independence, than most with our arrangement would have.
The seneschal exhaled sharply.
“Perhaps that is because I took you on voluntarily, if you recall,” he said. “You have benefited greatly from my strength, from retaining my independence. If you wanted a passive host whose life essence you could suck out, use as a parasitic moss uses a tree, surely there were thousands of sickly, pathetic rabble after the Seren War ended that you could have taken on; a flower-seller, perhaps; a fishwife, an infant? You chose me because I offered you a host healthy of body and mind, a soldier, a leader of men, with power of my own that you could share, but it was never part of the bargain that you would possess that power outright. If you had wanted a servile lackey, you should have chosen a host within your ability to subdue, with strength less than your own, one you could conquer, could make your own unwillingly, could hollow out and feed off of until you moved on to someone better. You would never have been able to take me on then, never would have conquered me against my will.” He paused, feeling the ebb and flow of the demon’s spirit coursing through his veins. “You cannot do it now.”
The sea wind gusted again, snapping the mains’l violently, then settling into a calm breeze again. The seneschal felt the heat within him dim as the demon considered his words.
You have not done poorly in this bargain yourself, the voice said when finally it spoke again. You wanted life unending. You have had it.
“Yes,” the seneschal acknowledged, “yes, I have. And so have you. I might point out that when I came to you your host was dying, alone, unable to drag the sorry remains of his crumbling body out of the water that was filling the dungeon in which you were held captive. I saved your sorry life, have brought untold glory to you, the power of elemental wind to mix with your fire —”
In return for immortality.
“Yes. A fair trade. And all in all, it has been a beneficial, in fact, inspired pairing.” The seneschal clutched the railing, prepared for another onslaught of demonic rage. “Except on those occasions when you forget that I have the final decision as to where we go, what we undertake. You, sadly, have no choice but to come along. Unless you wish to leave now.”
The demon chuckled; it was a harsh, rasping sound that scratched against the seneschal’s ears. You always were foolhardy. Think which of us will have the worse of the bargain if I should decide to do that.
“My wager is on you,” the seneschal said as the sun crested the horizon, splashing the ocean with golden light. “After sixteen centuries of unquestioned dominion, feeding your hunger for fire and ruin, I think it would be amusing to see how you fare as a cabin boy or a whore strolling the docks. Look around you; is there anyone in particular that you crave to move on to? Perhaps there is a tavern wench you might like to have as your host? Then perhaps you too can know the feeling of being fornicated over and over again, as I do when you try to assert yourself.”
The voice of the demon cackled.
It might be interesting to take you up on that. Were we to part company in the next beat of your heart, I would not die; I would be weaker, ’tis true, but when one is immortal, a setback is merely a delay, not an ending. It would almost be worth the loss of stature and power to take up residence in another, any other, just to watch your body shrivel to dust and blow away in the wind before my eyes. The fire returned, soaking into the internal edges of the seneschal’s consciousness. You do know that is what would happen, do you not? Without my essence you would not only be a dead man, but one who owes Time a dear debt he has no means to repay.
“Go then,” the seneschal snarled. “Cast yourself out. Better still, allow me to do it for you.”
Your rashness will be your undoing, if not now, then later, the demon said solemnly.
Again the voice fell silent, and the seneschal gripped the deck railing. The demon was the embodiment of chaos, of destructive impetuosity. He prepared himself for battle, or being tossed into the sea, or into oblivion.
You are in pursuit of a woman, once again.
The seneschal clenched his teeth, seeking to bar the F’dor spirit from the inner reaches of his mind, but it was like trying to hold back the sea; the hot fingers in his brain probed mercilessly, unyieldingly, violating what little space was left to him. He could feel it searching the hidden realms within his head, finally coming upon the thoughts he had sheltered from it, grasping them, digging them out like a root from the dirt.
Have you learned nothing? the demon chided angrily. Do you not recall what happened the last time you let your lust get the better of us?
“Yes,” the seneschal said bitterly. “I recall it well, and would change nothing about it, given the chance. It gave both you and me a night of unmitigated joy in the glorious suffering of an Ancient Seren, and the boon of a bloodline in the child that was born of that night.”
A useless freak. A monster.
“Nonesuch!” The seneschal’s voice, low and guttural to avoid calling attention to himself, ground against his throat as if against shards of glass. “Faron is a beautiful creation, unique, with powers only beginning to be realized. And should either of us ever be in need of a vessel in which to seek refuge, Faron is perfect.”
Thank you, no. I have higher expectations of a host than that. I have no desire to share my life’s essence with what is essentially a human fish, blind in daylight, boneless, timid —
Violently the seneschal raked his nails down the sides of his head, gashing stripes of blood across his cheeks.
“Enough of this! If you wish to move to another host, do so now, or submit to my will! I will brook no more of this nonsense!” In his rage the seneschal closed his eyes, concentrating on the spiritual tethers that bound the demon to him, hooks in the core of his essence that he had untied the night before, to allow their combined spirits to inhabit Faron. All thought of self-preservation vanished; he quickly found one metaphysical tie and in his mind seized upon it, preparing to cast off from the demon as the ship soon would from the dock.
Stop. The scathing voice quavered.
Silence returned to his mind. The clouds that had blanketed the sun as it rose thinned and broke open, causing the morning light to shimmer in dusty streams across the water.
The seneschal held his breath, waiting for the demon’s reply, longing for the cool darkness belowdecks where Faron waited. He wondered whether the monster he had carried voluntarily, its metaphysical talons embedded in his soul, would make good on its threats. There was nothing he could do but wait.
Finally, when the voice spoke again, it was subdued.
Tell me of this woman, and why this is so important to you.
The seneschal inhaled, allowing the salty air to fill his lungs to their depths. He allowed his mind to wander back over ancient fields of summer grass, the Wide Meadows of the Island of Serendair, now nothing more than seagrass in the sand beneath the boiling waves of the sea. He concentrated on the memories he had made there.
“Her name is Rhapsody,” he whispered, struggling to keep the word light on the air, reverent, like a psalm, a holy laud, though he knew it was far past impossible for his profane mouth to ever utter such a prayer. “I knew her in Serendair, before the cataclysm. She is beautiful; eyes green as the emerald forest, hair of gold like ripened sheaves of wheat. But that is not why.”
Then why?
The seneschal tried to form thoughts, words around the memory. “She is spirited, alive; passionate.” The thought of the disdain he had routinely seen in her eyes many centuries before rose up like bile in his throat, stung his pride all over again now as it had then. “Stubborn, surly, defiant, argumentative. Foolish.” And she loved me, he thought, allowing himself a fraction of a second to bask in the rumination, then driving it from his mind before the demon could seize upon it.
The knowledge that she had sworn her fealty to him had salved many a difficult moment, had kept him warm through a thousand dark nights in the time before the demon, when he was a mortal man in the vanguard of a coming war. He could still summon up the memory of the oath she swore to him before he had left her for the last time, a memory he had consigned to the dark vault of loss long before, too painful to think about without going mad.
I swear by the Star that my heart will love no other man until this world comes to an end.
The fact that he had forced her into the pledge, had made her promise it, knowing that she was unable to lie, as he held the life of a young girl in his hands before her eyes, had dissipated in his recollection long ago. She had given her word, and Lirin had rules about such things inbred in their blood.
If she had said she loved him, it must have been the truth.
The loss he felt when the word had come to him as he was embroiled in the early battles of the Seren War that she had vanished, when he was within a hairsbreadth of reclaiming her, had almost killed him. She had been stolen by the Brother, the Dhracian assassin known as the most proficient killer the Island had ever seen, even more proficient than he himself had been. There was no trace of her to be found, and so he had assumed that the Brother had killed her and tossed her body into the sea, as the Dhracian’s disinterest in temptations of the flesh was renowned. He had wept, for the first time in his memory, tears that rained like acid and had driven him into even greater fits of destruction, sacking villages and torching the Wide Meadows in the vain hope that the wildfires he ignited would help purge his soul of the despair he felt at her loss.
And now he had come to find that she was alive, had survived the destruction of the Island just as he had, had undoubtedly sailed away before the cataclysm with the other Cymrian refugees who had made their way across the world to the Wyrmlands and had taken shelter there. She, like he, had cheated Time, had robbed Death of a conquest, had obtained the same immortality that the other Cymrians and their descendants had obtained.
And she had married. Word had come via the shipping lanes of a royal marriage in Roland, but he had paid it no mind, until the name Rhapsody had come to his ears again, after sixteen centuries of silence.
It was then that the jealousy had begun to brew. He took to walking the docks at night, passing by dock wenches and drunken sailors that otherwise would have been easy prey, wondering if the Rhapsody he had known and this new queen that he had heard tell of could possibly be one and the same. When the curiosity turned to obsession he had summoned Quinn, one of the sailors who was his unwitting thrall, and sent him on a mission to discover if by the smallest stroke of Fate it might be the woman who had pledged herself to him. Until last night, it had seemed almost impossible to believe that it might be true.
And then Quinn returned, confirming his greatest hope, and his greatest dread.
She was alive.
After all these centuries, the death of the Island in volcanic fire, a journey that had taken the lives of many of the refugees, and the war that followed, she was still alive, half a world away. Still wearing the locket she had worn when he knew her. She was alive.
And married.
And happy.
His thoughts blackened as the rage returned.
She had lied to him.
She had broken her oath.
She needed to be taught the consequences of such actions.
“Why?” he said aloud, his voice beginning to shake in the effort to suppress his fury. “Because she is the single best knob I have ever experienced; a bedwench of limitless charms. A talented slut, a rutting whore who broke an oath to me. I seek to reclaim what I lost when that happened.”
The voice of the demon was weak, like the graying ash of a long-burning fire that had expended much of its fuel.
Not again. Let us not do this again. Remember the consequences: remember how weak we were left the last time you gave in to the desire to knob a woman. Each child you father breaks open my essence, our essence, leaving us diminished. Sate your lust in blood and fire, not between a woman’s legs. What you leave behind there —
“I will leave no seed behind this time,” the seneschal retorted, gripping the railing as the light from the rising sun flattened over the sea. “When Faron was conceived I was still human, my blood only slightly tainted by your essence, because you were still so weak from the transfer of hosts. Now I am F’dor, having carried you for sixteen hundred years. There is very little, if any, human blood left in me. And F’dor, like all other Firstborn races, choose whether or not to break open their souls in the act of procreation. Believe me, I have no intention of doing that again; I want nothing between Rhapsody’s legs but me. I plan to spend a goodly amount of time there, making up for all the time she owes me. So rest easy; your power is safe.”
There was another long silence while the demon considered, peppered now by the increasing noise from the docks, the cacophony of activity as the harbor swelled with life and traffic. Finally the voice within his mind spoke; it was soft, as though tired, resigned, but still bore a resolute tone.
Very well. Let us be off, but with the intent on returning as soon as you have retrieved that which is owed to you. I wish to get back to the terror, the burnings, the mad beauty of the destruction we have wrought here.
The seneschal absently fingered the hilt of Tysterisk as he thought back for one last moment to the image of Rhapsody’s face as she swore her pledge to him; she had called him by a name he had long forgotten until now.
There; is that enough for you now, Michael?
Michael, he had been called in that other life. He had all but lost the memory of it.
Michael, the Wind of Death.
“Believe me,” he said again, “where we are bound, there will be more than ample opportunity for terror, for burnings. I promise you, the mad beauty of the destruction we have wrought here will pale beside what is to come when we make landfall on her shores.”
Violet
The New Beginning
Grei-ti
7
HAGUEFORT, NAVARNE
The master of the range flashed the signs from one hundred fifty yards — twelve centers, two inner ring, nine outer ring, one perfect alignment.
Gwydion Navarne sighed, then signaled for the targets to be moved back. While the rangekeepers dragged the haybutts about in the distance he gave his longbow a shake, t
hen gently ran his fingers up the grip. He had spent more than a year in its making, had carefully blended wood, horn, and sinew, cured it lovingly. It was a weapon of which he was greatly proud, even if it was still not a masterpiece; it, like he, was in training, learning, stretching to its potential.
This afternoon he was not proving worthy of it.
He was so focused on trying to sort out the problem with his angle of flight that he did not hear the approach of the hoofbeats until Anborn was already upon him.
“You disappoint me, lad.”
The snort of the black stallion shook Gwydion from his concentration, and he looked up into the face of the Lord Marshal, the ancient general of the Cymrian army, who was staring down at him from his high-backed saddle, watching him as intently as a bird of prey watches a mouse. Gwydion shook the bow again.
“My apologies, Lord Marshal. I’m working on my free-flights, albeit dismally this afternoon.” He nodded to Anborn’s man-at-arms, an older First Generation Cymrian with gray hair and a deeply lined face, weathered from the sun, who always traveled on horseback with a pair of crossbows drawn. “Well met, Shrike.” The soldier nodded in return, dismounting.
The general snorted in the same timbre as his war horse, then reached behind him and unstrapped his crutches from their saddle bindings.
“I’m not disappointed in your accuracy, boy, but in your choice of projectiles. I see you have a fondness for those flimsy Lirin sticks.” Anborn sighed dramatically. “I should have had a long talk with you before your adopted grandmother moved in here and destroyed your sense of arrow flight with her Lirin preferences.”
Gwydion laughed, then took the reins as the Lord Marshal dismounted slowly, Shrike standing ready, as always, to support him should he lose his balance. In the three years since Anborn’s crippling, Gwydion had never seen it happen.
“Actually Rhapsody has little preference for arrows, and not too much interest in archery anymore,” he said. “She brings me back the long whitewoods whenever she goes to Tyrian if she can.”
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