The Forests of Dru
Page 19
~ 15 ~
The magic grabbed at her, hard. Rather than a geyser, it yanked her under, the waters of the oasis closing over her head, crushing the breath from her lungs.
No—filling her lungs with water. Which should have drowned her but… then she could breathe it. It swelled in and out of her, her chest like a larger heart, beating the fluid in and out. Sustaining. Nourishing.
Oddly it reminded her of that dream again, of the fire burning her throat, and Chuffta saying it didn’t really do that.
“I’m here. And yes. Same, but different.”
She tried to frame a reply, but couldn’t. Her mind-voice didn’t work underwater. Only it wasn’t water, it was sgath. A more viscous sgath, purified, but intense. So much. She worked harder to breathe it out again. Couldn’t.
“Oria?”
“Oria!”
She opened her eyes and gasped, air burning into her lungs. Lonen’s face loomed above hers, echoing on several levels of physical and sgath sight. Waking her from another nightmare? No—the clatter of the gold mask against stone still rang in the air, a harsh bell of warning, a tantalizing chime of waltzing stars.
“I’m here.” She drew in more air as slowly as she could, using the physical discipline to focus on pulling hwil into place, shutting down all but physical sight. That steadied the world. “I’m fine.”
Lonen’s mouth firmed into a harsh line. He gripped her, and she realized she lay on the floor, half in his embrace. “I would greatly prefer,” he began in a ragged voice that was nearly a shout, then paused to calm himself. “If you could not do the stopping breathing thing anymore. That would be much better for my continued sanity.”
She reached up to touch his face, diverting her fingers to stroke his silky beard when she realized that was the naked hand. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Yes.” He took a deep breath, let it out, then offered a crooked smile. “Well?”
“She pooled sgath, all right.” She struggled to sit up and his arms tightened briefly before he let her go with a sharp shake of his head. Not for her, but for himself.
“Here?” he asked, giving the floor a suspicious look, his fingers twitching for the battle-axe lying next to them. Even discarding it in haste, he kept it near.
“Not exactly, but nearby. It’s hard to tell because there’s a lot of it and it’s very old. Like it’s sat and … grown solid over time. Does that make sense?”
Lonen gave her an incredulous look. “Seriously? No. None of this makes sense to me, but I’ll take your word for it. The mask?”
“Connected me to it, yes. I’ll have to think about how to work with it. Instead of being like drinking from the geyser below Bára, or breathing the mist of the forest, this felt like inhaling stone.”
He frowned over her shoulder—in the direction of the mask he’d dashed out of her hands, she realized. “That can’t be good for you. We’ll put it back for now.”
“No.” She pushed to her feet, finding her legs weak. With a resigned sigh, Lonen stood, too, helping her up with a hand under her elbow. “Where’s Chuffta?”
“Here.” His mind-voice sounded strange, and she turned even as Lonen pointed.
Her Familiar perched next to the mask, one talon hooked in a hole where the ribbons would be tied. “Are you all right?” she asked him, wondering as she did if she’d ever asked him that before.
“Yes. No. I don’t know. I feel strange.”
“Strange how?”
“Like I want to be bigger. Much bigger.”
Oria eventually agreed to let Lonen be the custodian of the mask. The fact that she didn’t want to give it to him—and that Chuffta showed a similar reluctance to part company with the Arill-cursed thing—finally convinced her of the wisdom of it.
Left to his own devices, he would have sealed it back in its crypt. But Oria refused to even consider it. Her fervor, and the fiery burn in Chuffta’s gaze, made it clear he’d have a battle on his hands if he insisted.
And Oria shone with magic again, her hair lifting as she moved, swirling in the unseen currents, her skin as radiant and shimmering as when he first glimpsed her. When she paused to draw her glove back on, the saint in the retablo seemed to gaze over her shoulder, the resemblance so uncanny they could have been sisters.
He handled the mask himself only with gloved hands, wrapping it in layers of leather and tying knots in the ties that bound it. Under the close watch of Oria and Chuffta, he buried the thing at the bottom of the saddlebags. If Buttercup danced sideways when he added the packs to the warhorse’s back, that surely had to be because the steed was restive from being cooped up.
Oria would know if there was any reason to fear. And she would tell him. He glanced at her, the remote cool of her face, her gaze drawn inward, contemplating.
“Oria.”
Her bright copper eyes, molten with magic, lifted to his when he spoke her name.
“I want you to promise me you won’t use the mask without me present.”
A line drew in between her brows. “I might need solitude.”
“Then we’ll figure it out, but no going behind my back on this. You or Chuffta.”
She cast her gaze down, her cheeks pinking, revealing that she’d considered it. “Lonen, I—”
He gripped her shoulders, forcing her to look at him, her expression no longer serene, but cagey and assessing. “I mean it. If I have to be a brute of a barbarian about this, I will. But I’ll have your promise on this.”
Copper fire snapped at him, his skin tingling with the seething static of magic building like a summer storm in a densely hot afternoon. The kind that produced lightning and no rain. And blazes that devoured forests. “Oria, love, listen to me. You know I’m right.”
She firmed her lips in mutiny, then the fire fogged and she cast a glance at Chuffta, perched on Buttercup’s saddle. Huffing out a breath between pursed lips, she closed her eyes briefly, a sweep of lashes and gone, then smiled at him, her gaze once again more herself. Abruptly he remembered that dream in her bed, that first night he slept with her, when her eyes had turned Trom black.
The hairs lifted on his neck.
“You’re right,” she was saying, and he shook off the memory. Or was it premonition? “You have my promise. Neither Chuffta nor I will touch the mask without you. You are its keeper and….” She moved into him, wrapping her arms around his waist, burrowing against his chest. “It frightens me, Lonen.” Her voice came soft and muffled.
He cupped her head in his hand, using the other to pull his cloak around her, though she hardly needed more warmth. “It frightens me, too,” he admitted. “Let’s leave it here.”
“No.” She raised her face, leaning into his hand. “We need it.”
“We can find another—”
“Not ‘we’ as in you and me. We as in Bára, and Dru. Something here started long ago and we’re simply picking up the threads of it. Even if we leave the mask here, the course is set. Can’t you feel it?”
He could. He didn’t much like it, either.
Her gaze went up to the peaks over his shoulder. “So, we ride on and up. And I’ll practice with Tania’s sgath along the way.”
“Tania?”
“My long-lost aunt. I’ve decided to give her name to my ancestress-of-the-chapel.”
“Is that wise?” The feeling of premonition still sat heavy on him.
Oria gave him a look. “I am not calling her Odymesen’y.”
“I understand, but perhaps a different name…”
“Why—what objection do you have?” She gave no hint of what, but something about her wide eyes made him think she kept them deliberately guileless.
“I think there’s something you’re not telling me.”
She laughed, the magic glinting through it, seeming to manifest in the air like crystals to shower to the ground. No, it had begun to snow. That’s all it was.
“Come on, Destrye.” She tugged him toward the horse. “Let’s go see t
his lake and talk your mother into sponsoring this wedding you want so badly. And I’ll tell you the little I know about my aunt Tania.”
Chuffta took off as he lifted her into the saddle, white wings etched against the wintery sky. Oria lifted a crimson-gloved hand to her Familiar and he nipped at her fingers as he flew past. When she transferred her gaze to Lonen, as he settled behind her, she smiled with affection, dropping the hand to caress his cheek.
“It will all be fine,” she murmured. “Trust me.”
He did. But he held her close, and sent a prayer to Arill to hold them in her hand.
About Jeffe Kennedy
Jeffe Kennedy is an award-winning author whose works include novels, non-fiction, poetry, and short fiction. She has been a Ucross Foundation Fellow, received the Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship for Poetry, and was awarded a Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award.
Her award-winning fantasy romance trilogy The Twelve Kingdoms hit the shelves starting in May 2014. Book 1, The Mark of the Tala, received a starred Library Journal review and was nominated for the RT Book of the Year while the sequel, The Tears of the Rose received a Top Pick Gold and was nominated for the RT Reviewers’ Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2014. The third book, The Talon of the Hawk, won the RT Reviewers’ Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2015. Two more books followed in this world, beginning the spin-off series The Uncharted Realms. Book one in that series, The Pages of the Mind, has also been nominated for the RT Reviewer’s Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2016. The second book, The Edge of the Blade, released December 27, 2016.
Her other works include a number of fiction series: the fantasy romance novels of A Covenant of Thorns; the contemporary BDSM novellas of the Facets of Passion; an erotic contemporary serial novel, Master of the Opera; and the erotic romance trilogy, Falling Under, which includes Going Under, Under His Touch and Under Contract.
She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with two Maine coon cats, plentiful free-range lizards and a very handsome Doctor of Oriental Medicine.
Jeffe can be found online at her website: JeffeKennedy.com, every Sunday at the popular SFF Seven blog, on Facebook, on Goodreads and pretty much constantly on Twitter @jeffekennedy. She is represented by Connor Goldsmith of Fuse Literary.
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Titles by Jeffe Kennedy
OTHER FANTASY ROMANCES
A COVENANT OF THORNS
Rogue’s Pawn
Rogue’s Possession
Rogue’s Paradise
THE TWELVE KINGDOMS
Negotiation
The Mark of the Tala
The Tears of the Rose
The Talon of the Hawk
Heart’s Blood
For Crown and Kingdom
THE UNCHARTED REALMS
The Pages of the Mind
The Edge of the Blade
SORCEROUS MOONS
Lonen’s War
Oria’s Gambit
The Tides of Bára
The Forests of Dru
CONTEMPORARY EROTIC ROMANCES
Exact Warm Unholy
FACETS OF PASSION
Sapphire
Platinum
Ruby
Five Golden Rings
FALLING UNDER
Going Under
Under His Touch
Under Contract
EROTIC PARANORMAL
MASTER OF THE OPERA E-SERIAL
Master of the Opera, Act 1: Passionate Overture
Master of the Opera, Act 2: Ghost Aria
Master of the Opera, Act 3: Phantom Serenade
Master of the Opera, Act 4: Dark Interlude
Master of the Opera, Act 5: A Haunting Duet
Master of the Opera, Act 6: Crescendo
Master of the Opera
BLOOD CURRENCY
Blood Currency
BDSM FAIRYTALE ROMANCE
Petals and Thorns
OTHER WORKS
Birdwoman
Hopeful Monsters
Teeth, Long and Sharp
Thank you for reading!