Mistress by Magick

by Laura Navarre

  Despite the alarm humming through every nerve, she launched her barb with the same artless grace she would have deployed at the French court. She even softened her pointed query with the teasing smile that had brought Henry of France to his knees.

  “I wonder if that would work. Somehow I doubt it.” He studied her, dark eyes narrowed as though she spoke a coded language he must decipher. That weighted silence stretched again between them.

  “What are you thinking, Lord Calyx?”

  “What I’m thinking,” he murmured, “is that you’re a dangerous woman, Lady Jayne. I’m thinking you’re a firebrand I’ve allowed aboard this ship, and every man aboard is kindling to your flame.”

  Her too-tight bodice constricted her lungs, making it difficult to breathe.

  “Even you, my lord?” she whispered. English again, the language she spoke when all her careful defenses dissolved, a constant danger in his perilous presence.

  “Not me, Jayne.”

  A queer stab of disappointment darted through her.

  His baritone rumble caressed her like a lover.

  “I’m the spark that ignites your flame. I’m the flint striking steel that makes you burn.”

  Her bodice was definitely laced too tight. She gazed at him, mesmerized, as though he’d cast a spell to bind her. Low in her belly, liquid warmth pooled and pulsed, that wicked heat he could ignite so effortlessly. She wondered if he felt the same behind that maddening codpiece.

  Two steps forward and she could find out for herself.

  He swept her an elegant leg and lifted the lid from a chafing dish.

  “Shall we dine?”

  With the ease of a man who regularly served dinner à deux, he set up a makeshift table between the desk chair and his trunk. Seated primly in the chair, fine linen draped across her lap and a goblet of blue Murano glass in hand, Jayne was grateful for the respite—fleeting though it was.

  For a pirate, Calyx de Zamorra laid an elegant table. He served her on a silver plate with bone-handled cutlery. Jayne applied herself to a wing of capon seasoned with sage and rosemary, a sallet of fresh greens sprinkled with vinegar and a thick wedge of brown bread still warm from the oven, smeared with pungent cheese. The red wine was Gascon, dark and rich.

  In her nervousness, she found herself sipping more of it than she should.

  Watching him wield his fork and knife with a delicacy that would do credit to a king’s table, she lifted her brows.

  “For a man at sea, you lay a superlative table,” she said in social Spanish. “You must allow me to convey my compliments to your chef.”

  “This early in a voyage, it’s no trick to eat well.” He laid another wing of capon on her plate. “Give it another fortnight, when the fresh food is gone. We’ll be eating ship’s biscuit and boiled beef with the crew.”

  “In that case, I am nothing more than another mouth to feed,” she pointed out. Best to launch her offensive early, thus to defer his own. “Not to mention a dangerous source of envy and discord to your crew. I’ve seen no other woman aboard.”

  “Nor will you,” he said equably. “This is no pleasure cruise, but a holy crusade, condesa, the Great Enterprise that will save troubled England and her troubled souls from eternal damnation.”

  “Precisely.” She leaned forward. “Surely your so-called mistress will be frowned upon by your Catholic officers, preached against by your chaplain.”

  “My chaplain has long since despaired of my morals. As for my officers and crew, they’re no more holy than I am. We’re polyglot pirates from a hundred ports. Many of them aren’t even Spanish.”

  She cast about for another argument. “They say ’tis bad luck to sail with a woman aboard. Do you not fear the impact of my presence on their spirits?”

  “The Arcángel’s a lucky ship. They all say so. The Archangel Michael watches over us.” He shrugged. “Of course, that will change if we suffer a few more incidents like this morning’s freak storm. If my men suspect you’re behind it, I wouldn’t care to wager on their tolerance.”

  She swallowed hard, the savory capon turning to ashes in her mouth. She didn’t need his warning to know she played a dangerous game. But her unpredictable magick was the only card she had to play. Clearly, she must be more discreet and more careful when she summoned it again.

  Or else she must find some other way of getting off this accursed ship.

  “In that case,” she said blandly, “I shall pray the weather stays fine and the sea placid as a millpond. But I am curious, capitán. If your crew were to suspect a witch, would their suspicions not turn to you?”

  In the midst of buttering his bread, he stilled—the careful stillness of an animal who knew what it meant to be hunted. A muscle twitched in his jaw. His mocha gaze flickered to the heretical armillary and alchemical treatises crowding his shelves—then, strangely, to the mirror.

  “Ah,” he said, with dangerous softness. “You studied me carefully before you set foot aboard this galleon. Of the hundred-plus ships in this fleet, was it my whispered penchant for the magickal arts that led you to target me?”

  A delicate shiver slid through her. She’d heard enough about his peculiarities in the elegant casas and drawing rooms of Lisbon. Philip himself had called him odd and ungodly.

  Calyx was watching her like a stalking tiger, poised to leap. Carefully she laid her fork beside her plate and sipped her wine, buying a few moments to think.

  “Have you such a colorful reputation, monsieur?” She slipped into flippant French, the language where she’d learned to lie. “I wasn’t in Lisbon long enough to know.”

  “Were you not, comtesse?” Effortlessly he followed her lead, as marvelously facile with language as she. “Haven’t the good courtiers told you I’m a freak, the son of a woman whose husband had her locked up for a madwoman and threw away the key? Son of a poor raving fool who suffered fancies and delusions, who believed angels roamed the earth and spoke to her?”

  His voice snapped through the air like a bullwhip, making her flinch.

  “Have they told you my own father, proud scion of the oldest pedigree in Castile, alternated between fits of melancholy and black rage? That his own family lived in terror of his unpredictable and violent temper? That he once disemboweled a servant for spilling the soup—slaughtered the poor old fool in full view of the horrified guests and his own hysterical wife?”

  Appalled, Jayne raised her hands to quiet him, to still the flood of grief and despair and helpless fury. “God have mercy, Calyx! I had no idea—”

  “Did no one tell you I’m the son of a madwoman and a monster? That the same bad blood pumps through my veins? That if I ever sire children of my own, I’m certain to pass on the curse to them?”

  Violently he thrust to his feet, chair scraping roughly across the floorboards. She thought he was going to storm out. Instead he prowled like a caged beast, head lowered, fists clenched as he fought for control.

  After learning of his father’s vile temper, she ought to be terrified.

  Somehow she felt no fear of him. Behind his thunderous brow and knotted jaw, she saw neither madman nor monster, but a man tortured by a lifetime of grief. He’d witnessed his mother’s suffering and been helpless to save her. Now he would hear forever the bitter voices of self-loathing and regret.

  She of all women knew the sound of those voices. They whispered her to sleep every night. They told the litany of her sins like Rosary beads.

  In lieu of forgiveness, she’d sought atonement. But she recognized a fellow sufferer in Calyx de Zamorra. As she watched him wrestle his demons, her heart ached with compassion.

  “I have heard naught of that, my lord,” she said gently. “Perhaps your family history is not so bruited about as you fear. All of this happened long ago, did it not?”

  His agitated strides slowed. He turned toward a portrait of the Annunciation, where a soft-faced Gabriel with ivory wings murmured to a rapturous Mary. On the carved stand beneath, a glittering garnet
Rosary entwined a worn Bible. He touched these keepsakes so reverently she knew they’d come down to him from his mother.

  “It’s ancient history,” he said. “By the time I was old enough to remember, my father had already ordered his mad wife confined—for her own health, he claimed. And my mother was already mumbling about the angel who visited her at night. By the time I left for court, my father had been ignoring her for years. She viewed his neglect as a blessing.”

  His dark gaze turned toward Jayne. “How was I to know when I ran away and took ship for a life of high adventure, he would blame her? How was I to know he’d transform her life to a living hell? Do you know what he did to her?”

  Wordlessly she shook her head. She wanted to assure him he didn’t have to tell her, but she sensed the words howled to be spoken. At the best of times, she perceived, this was a man in torment. With the conquest of his mother’s homeland looming, the demons that drove him must be shrieking in his head.

  “He ordered her to repent for leading me astray, to do penance for her sins—as though the poor woman had done anything else since she came to Spain except repent for being his wife.” His stark eyes stared into the window of his own private hell. “He ordered her tied to her prie-dieu with only a sour old priest to attend her, so she could do naught but pray, night and day. I’m told she learned to sleep there.”

  “Dear God,” she whispered.

  “My sainted father ordered her fasted on bread and water, forbade her to bathe or change her gown, told her cleanliness and fine clothing were sinful vanity. She could rise from her prayers only for the chamber pot—and her weekly flogging.”

  His voice cracked. “He said it taught her humility...my mother, who never raised her voice above a whisper in his presence! By all accounts, I don’t know who enjoyed those floggings more—the old fiend who tended her or my father. When he could, the Conde liked to punish her himself. Afterward, I’m told, he would bed her.”

  Slow horror spiraled through her. A leaden vista opened before her—the gray sea of despair that had swallowed an exiled Englishwoman, a woman quite similar to herself. Jayne too had been exiled to a living Purgatory in a foreign land. But at least Antoine de Boulaine had not bound and beaten her like an animal.

  The small strained voice sounded nothing like hers.

  “What—what happened to her?”

  “I’d been gone six years.” Idly he plucked at the Rosary. “Chained to an oar in a corsair’s galley for the first three. My dreams of high adventure on the Mediterranean came to a swift end when the ship where I’d booked passage was captured. Fortunately, I had an education—a head for mathematics and language, and a penchant for mechanical things. All talents the old cutthroat who purchased me found useful.

  “With cunning and patience, I earned my freedom, along with my first command—a splintering bucket of a galleass. Dios, that ship was devilish fast! So I tried my hand at a little pirating of my own.”

  His mouth twisted. “I was too proud to stomach the prospect of returning home with nothing, si? My letters went unanswered, but I assumed that only meant my father had forbidden her to respond. When I’d amassed enough wealth and prestige to armor me against his scorn, I finally returned—only to find my mother had been dead for years.

  “In truth, her death was a mercy. Do you want to know how she died?”

  She almost said she didn’t. This story brushed too near her own grim reality. If Antoine de Boulaine had not been old and ailing, if Jayne had not had Ryder for comfort in those first terrible years, and later the fragile hope of winning him back—could she have suffered the same fate?

  Despite her own queasy fear of that bleak landscape called despair, Calyx needed to say the words. He needed to exorcise the demons howling in his soul or run mad himself.

  She made the only choice she could. She would shoulder some tiny portion of the crushing weight he carried.

  “Tell me,” she said softly. “How did she die?”

  He turned toward her, face fractured with pain. “She waited for the day the priest’s vigilance strayed. Then she flew through the finca like a wild thing. Can you imagine how she must have felt—fleeing that corner of hell into the bright world beyond?”

  Jayne held her breath, knowing how this tale would end.

  “She must have known they would retake her. She made the only escape she could.” He covered his face with a callused hand. “She flung herself from a high window and dashed out her brains against the cobblestones.”

  A ripple of shock and misery rolled through her. Of course Catherine Knyvett, born a free woman, would have taken her own life. As she flung herself toward freedom, the tormented woman must have felt relieved. Perhaps she’d believed her guardian angel would catch her.

  The celestial figures wavered and blurred around her as Jayne’s eyes filled with burning tears. But there was someone who needed comfort more. Blindly she pushed to her feet and crossed the cabin to the solitary figure bent before his mother’s Rosary, scrubbing fiercely at his brow as though he could scrub away his guilt.

  Uncertain whether this proud and tortured man would rebuff her, she laid a tentative hand on his shoulder. Beneath the crisp linen, his powerful muscles were knotted and quivering with suppressed emotion. Gently she squeezed.

  “I’m so sorry, Calyx,” she whispered. “More sorry for her grief and suffering than you can possibly know. But—what happened to her—you were not to blame.”

  “Don’t try to comfort me. I was entirely to blame.” His rough voice splintered as he fought for control. “It was me he wanted to punish, the recalcitrant rebel who’d embarrassed him at court.”

  “You were just a boy. What could you possibly have done?”

  He stared at her through eyes like burned cinders, raw with pain. “First I fell in love, or so I thought, with a girl whose mother burned for heresy in the Auto da Fé. Then I rose up before the King to defend her and had to be carried out by the guard. After the girl herself reproached me for drawing attention to her shame—after my father whipped the skin from my back—I ran away to sea.”

  “Who could blame you?” she murmured.

  “I should have gone back to the finca and taken my mother with me,” he said fiercely. “Even though, in all likelihood, she would have refused to go.”

  “Of course she would have refused! No gently bred lady is like to leave her anointed husband for a life of piracy with a twelve-year-old boy.” She kneaded the taut line of muscle along his shoulder. “Believe me, Calyx, she would never have gone with you.”

  He searched her face as though she held truths he burned to discover. She met his desperation straight on and drowned in the mocha darkness of his gaze. Truly, he possessed the most remarkable eyes for a fair-haired man, paired with bold black brows that intensified his striking appearance.

  Drawn toward him by an invisible force, her hand slid across the plane of his shoulder, fingers trailing lightly across the crisp linen. His breath hitched with an audible rasp. Swallowing hard, she eased her fingers across the tanned sinew of his throat. His pulse thudded hard and fast against her skin. Despite the cool night air ghosting through the porthole, heat blazed from his skin and crackled between them.

  Body of God, what are you doing? demanded the scandalized voice of reason. Do you want him to seduce you again?

  Scarcely daring to breathe, she laid her hand along the jutting line of his jaw. Beneath her fingers, his skin was satin-smooth, though he hadn’t shaved that morning. The harsh scrape of whiskers was simply absent.

  Haven’t the good courtiers told you I’m a freak? The words he’d hurled echoed through her mind. I have bad blood running through my veins.

  Some would say she was a freak herself, a throwback to her distant Faerie heritage. But she would lay odds that Calyx de Zamorra was no Fae. Like called to like when she saw one. Just look at Mordred, the dark Prince of Camelot, whose mere presence on this ship filled her with niggling unease.

  But
if he was not Fae...

  “What are you?” she whispered, light as breath. “Calyx de Zamorra, Scourge of the Spanish Main. Who are you truly?”

  Behind the proud lines of his corsair’s facade, pain surfaced like a leaping fish.

  “Don’t deceive yourself, Jayne. I’m a rogue and a killer.”

  Impatient, she shook her head. “You’re a pirate. I’m certain you could not have survived your captivity without—”

  “I’m a patricide.” The word dropped like a stone to shatter the crystal stillness of the night. “When I learned what he’d done, I challenged Rodrigo de Zamorra to combat. I killed my own father.”

  Jayne gasped. The words rang through her head like church bells.

  Clearly he expected her to be repulsed. It was written clear as script across his hard face, the bitter certainty that any Christian woman must reject him. Was that why he favored courtesans and dockside whores? Did he believe no decent woman could stomach him?

  Her heart contracted with pain. This too was a familiar anguish. Who knew better than she the pain of rejection, the exile’s pain, the grief of the lost soul cast out from home and hearth into darkness?

  The residue of his confession lingered like an aroma on the night air. He expected her to be revolted by him.

  I killed my own father.

  “By all accounts, it sounds as though you did the world a favor,” she said wryly. “God in Heaven knows, there were times I longed to kill mine. He did naught to defend me from the Queen’s spite, just stood by quivering like a rabbit while she sentenced me to a grotesque marriage and banished me from her sight. ’tis been ten long years since that day, and still I have not forgiven him.”

  Slowly the certainty of rejection faded from his face. The grim look of a man bracing for a blow eased, obliterated by the blaze of passion.

  “The more fool him, for letting you go,” he said roughly, pulling her hard against him. Her eyes fluttered closed as the dark heat of his kiss consumed her.