And now, she smiled, she had met a man—a superbly strange one, but a superbly charming one, too. Unconsciously, she leaned out the window, sniffing the sky for his woodsy musk, as if he were upwind from her.
“What in the king’s name are you doing? If you’re not careful, you’ll fall right out,” cautioned Thule.
Morigan retreated from the window and turned to her master, who wore a dash of worry. She apologized.
“I was merely enjoying the day.”
“Where is your head today, Morigan? Are you well? If you’re coming down with something, I can make you a tincture.” He began to shuffle up out of his seat like an old dog, groaning and cracking. “Urgh…let me have a look at you.”
Before he righted himself, Morigan was at his chair, helping him to settle again.
“I have no fever or illness. I am fine. A little distracted.”
“I’d say,” scoffed Thule.
Morigan handed him back the scroll of interest for the hourglass—some officiously printed document with grand lettering and a seal that seemed important, which Thule quickly rolled up. Then she pulled a blanket off the back of his chair and draped it over his legs. Thule, who liked to pretend that he did not enjoy being doted on, when in fact he enjoyed it rather much, frowned at her nannying. Certain gesture of hers—the lightness of her touch, the flick of her wrists as if she were a stage dancer—reminded him of her mother, Mifanwae, his previous handmaiden, or even of his wife before that, and his scowl melted.
“Thank you,” he said. “You do take fine care of me, and I am not easy to care for.”
“No, you are not,” Morigan said, grinning.
“Would you like to tell me what has been bothering you now? Or will you keep me in suspense?”
“Bothering me? I’m not bothered.”
“You certainly seem as if you’re in a twist over something. You’ve always been a dreamer, Morigan, ever since your mother brought you here, clinging to her apron strings, and you’d stare at a wall or spot of air, seeing pictures and patterns that no one else could. But today is worse than most. I feel as if you’re a thousand spans away.” Thule pinched his face. “Is there some scoundrel sniffing around after you? I got rid of Master Simms and I’ll get rid of the next one even faster. No man should behave so basely. The next man who dishonors you will be shipped off as a milkmaid to those filthy lizard-cows of the Arhad, pulling their teats till his hands crack and bleed.”
“No, no, it’s nothing like Master Simms.” Morigan shuddered from saying the name. “Well, it is about a man, I suppose.”
Thule’s face fired with redness, and they each chewed on a silence.
“I’m going to get you some tea,” she declared suddenly, and left the room.
A man, thought Thule, and rage continued its slow kindling inside him. Morigan was so innocent of her comeliness, so careless of her charm, that he was often the champion of her virtue. Once, a few years back, she had come to him distressed about the holes she had found drilled behind her headboard, bathtub, and toilet—of all the sickest places—and shown him the crystals of farsight that were stashed in each. He had mustered his considerable clout with the Silver Watch for an investigation, and the culprit was found to be her very own land baron: Master Gregor Simms. Upon his command, Master Simms was cast out in the desert by dusk, exiled forever from Eod, and on a caravan to Menos, where that breed of man belonged. Morigan knew not the extent of his influence, any more than she knew the other details of his past. He was a private man in the winter of his years, and he did not wield his sway unless it was called for. He cared for Morigan as deeply as any father would. A fitting role, as she had no father, and his child was long ago in the ground. What serendipity that Morigan and Mifanwae had chanced into his life, turning a relationship of convenience into one of love.
All it took was a topple, he recalled. A nasty fall down the stairs, as all old fools eventually do, and he suffered an injury to his spine that not even the master fleshbinders could efficiently mend. After their sorcery, he was left trussed up in casts with a prescription for bed rest while time healed what magik alone could not. In his helplessness, he had commissioned a manservant to assist him. Several, actually, though the first batch were either incompetent or incompatible with his temper. Either way, they fled from his tower. When all seemed lost, fire-haired and fire-tempered Mifanwae had come with her quiet silver-eyed daughter in tow. That was an unbreakable part of the arrangement, as she had no husband or family to care for Morigan. Mifanwae proved impervious to his ranting and diligent with every task. When he had recovered, his life was so organized and comfortable that he had asked Mifanwae to stay on indefinitely. He even invited the handmaiden and young Morigan to take residence at his tower, but the woman dished him one of her sailor-born laughs at that.
Ha! The job I’ll take, as you’re not too kind and not too mean. You’re just the sort of man I can take orders from. As for the offer of a roof, I already have one for Morigan and me. If we’re being honest, I haven’t had a prick in my house since my daughter came around, and I don’t intend to break that blessed arrangement, she had said.
Thule was snickering at the ghost of Mifanwae’s pluck when Morigan returned with a clanking tray. She set it down on the footstool that she had earlier cleared and prepared his tea, fitting the porcelain cup into a familiar groove on the armrest of Thule’s chair. With the same nursing care, she then handed him a smoked-fish sandwich—a rarity in the desert and Thule’s favorite—to nibble on. The old sorcerer spent his nights restlessly, distracting himself with knowledge to escape the nightmares that sleep brought with it, and he rarely ate during these periods, so he was famished as she presented the food.
While he ate, smacking away like a child, he spoke to Morigan, whose gaze was again drifting off somewhere.
“There, you’re doing it again. Mooning. Over a man, I take it.”
“I am not mooning,” snapped Morigan.
“You certainly are. And it’s about time that you said who has snared your attentions so, because you’re not a girl given to idle fancy! I know that much. Should I be worried? Is he some vagabond? Some foppish troubadour with a feather in his cap and a pretty smile? Will I have to keep my eye on this one? Is he honorable? Or when he’s done with you will he be chasing the next skirted, titted thing that he sees?”
Morigan contemplated these questions with a frown. Her success with courtship was embarrassingly scant. In many ways, Mifanwae was a shining aspiration of womanhood and self-sufficiency, proof that any woman under the Nine Laws could eke out freedom enough for her and her child, and Morigan inherited many of the same skills. Well after Mifanwae’s passing, these lessons persisted, and she heard her mother’s voice as she trudged through the day. Work for what you need; don’t ask for what you can’t earn. You never need someone else’s hands if you have two of your own. For better or worse, she had grown to be a woman both as strong and as flawed as her mother. Sadly, there was no room in Mifanwae’s life for love. She wondered what had wounded her mother so, what it was beyond an absent lover, for as iron as Mifanwae’s spirit had been, she often wept in the night. Terrible muffled sobs. The sound of broken love. These cries lingered in Morigan’s memory, deterring her from the same fate. She scowled at every handsome smile. She treated her suitors as unwanted visitors in her time alone. She refused to experience the same pain as her mother had. Until the smith. For him, she had the wild urge to welcome pain if that is what it came to. Simply for the chance to hear more of his poetic allegories, or perhaps even to taste the redness of his lips.
“Witches teats! Get a hold of yourself. You can’t even hold a conversation today!” Thule exclaimed, and then proceeded to gobble up what remained of his sandwich and sip his tea.
Morigan moved the tray and sat. “You’re right. It’s this man…”
“So you’ve said, twice now. Glad to see that we are getting somewhere. Over nine hundred thousand souls call Eod their home—mind-boggling,
I know—and I’d say about half of those have a bit like mine under their britches. So you’re going to have to be a touch more specific about which man, if you would.” Master Thule helped himself to a few sips of tea, waiting for the handmaiden to answer. Eventually, after much hand-wringing, she did.
“He’s a smith.”
An honest trade, a man who toiled with his hands. Thus far, Thule had no objections; he nodded the girl onward.
“Well,” said Morigan, “he’s a smith, but we’ve covered that. I wandered into his shop the other day—quaint place, beautiful sign—looking for your damnable firesprig. Which, I think we can agree, is nowhere on Geadhain. I think you made it up, but that is neither here nor there.”
“I did not.”
“If you say so. The smith. His place isn’t the most welcoming at first, dark and warm, without windows, and only a great forge, but it is cozy in a strange way. He was working when I arrived, and he walked through the smoke like…like a dream.”
“Does this dream have a name?”
“Caenith.”
Caenith, the onomastics were ancient; the name was rather unique and would prove an interesting diversion for later. Thackery set down his cup. The girl was entranced by what she was seeing, and he felt a similar magnetism to her excitement, for he had never seen Morigan so absorbed. As she delved into the memory, the words tumbled faster and faster from her mouth.
“He is large…the largest man these eyes have ever beheld, with hands like cinder blocks and eyes that pierce right through bone and into soul. There is a wildness to him, but also a tenderness. He lives like an ascetic, like those men you once told me of who abstain from worldly vices and live in caverns, or the quiet monks of Sorsetta who hear the beat of the earth and live by what they catch and need nothing else. I get the sense from him that he is whole, or complete, as a man. I don’t know how old he is. I mean, he looks a few summers my senior, but he bears himself like a man much older. His weapons! By the kings, he has artful hands! Swords and spears and all these cruel things that are so beautiful you would not know their purpose is to kill. And his words, Master Thule! Oh, they are poetry itself! They run into the head like wine. That one awkward parting remark aside. But that’s just how he is, I think. Crude and cultured at once. He speaks like a highborn master, but lives like a pauper. It really is all so strange.” Morigan looked over, full of doubt. “Don’t you agree? Shouldn’t I be wary?”
Thule steepled his fingertips and carefully weighed a response. Morigan’s silver eyes were flickering with a spark that Thule remembered, distantly. He was old, quite old, and he had seen that spark but a few times in his years and once in himself. A fire that bloomed in the chest like a drink of brandy. An inescapable yearning from the toes to one’s twittering fingertips to be with another. He had loved Bethany like that once; loved her in the instant that he had seen her, even turned from him, even from afar. If Morigan spoke of this same ember of possibility, he would be a shameful man for not fanning it to a flame.
“I think that you are a wise young woman…chary and headstrong. As capable as your mother, if not stronger willed. I’ve never known you to absently cast your affections about, so there must be something to this fellow that has captured you so. All I ask is that you are careful. Men can wear many masks, and behind any of them can be a wolf.”
Suddenly it came upon Morigan. A wolf, yes, that is what chased her in the woods of her dreams.
“Amazing, I’ve lost you again! Barely a speck that time!” Thule said, laughing. “Go on, child. I think I know where you want to be today, and it is certainly not here. Take today, and no longer, and go and see this Caenith with the huge hands and odd customs. I expect you will be here a few sands past a seventh of the glass, no later.” Thule tapped a spot near his breastbone where Morigan knew that a small chronex hung upon a chain, one that he pulled out and showed her whenever she was tardy. “I shall spare you an ominous warning about what will happen to this smith if his intentions are impure.”
Master Thule never did explain to where Master Simms had mysteriously vanished. Shortly after his disappearance, the Crown had seized the property, and Morigan now paid her monthly dues to Eod’s coffers. At a price substantially decreased by some clerical estate-holding trickery about which she never inquired.
He waved her out of her seat. “Be off with you, then. Keep your wits high and your chastity higher! No one buys the spinrex when he gets the milk for free.”
“Master Thule!” She wagged a scornful finger, but wasn’t able to maintain a stern face, for her excitement bled through. She thanked the old man for his advice with a kiss upon his head, which he shied from like a poison but took anyway. After that, she was gone faster than a fair-weather breeze.
He had planned to get up and shuffle about, tearing up the shelves to find what he could on the peculiarities of the smith’s name, for he felt that there was a kernel of scholarly intrigue there, but fatigue was creeping into him. The tea was warm in his belly like a nightcap, and a ladling of sunlight was upon his head, making him sleepier.
He was slumbering a moment later.
Until the sun ran red and the first stars pricked light in Eod’s heavens, he slept without incident, wandering gray spaces with gray shapes and muffled sounds. Then the nightmares took hold.
He is on a field of grass, soaked in blood and rain, and holding the mangled pieces of his wife and child. An eye, a twist of hair, a hand fused into a foot, an empty bag of rubbery skin that is a face without meat to fill it—the disfiguration is so monstrous that he cannot even tell if it is Bethany’s or Theadora’s.
“They were already dead,” he pleads with himself. “Already dead. This is not your fault.”
His sorrow does not agree, and the cries tear themselves from his throat.
Thule woke screaming in his seat. With the gory nightmare fresh in his mind, it came to him where the name Caenith derived itself. In the oldest of tongues, the ones spoken before words were words, when men chattered in songs or warbled like animals to one another, three syllabic noises stood out to Thule. Kae-eh-nyth. Or Caenith, if strung together, had associations with blood, death, and hunting, respectively. A curious name for a curious-sounding fellow, he considered.
Rather interested in the object of Morigan’s affections now, Thule poured himself a cup of cold tea from the tray that the young woman had left behind, Willed it hot with his magik, and set to work.
II
It was quite a jog from King’s Crown to Fates Row, the modest, middle-class district where Caenith lived on the outskirts of the Faire of Fates, and Morigan took an earthbound carriage for part of the trip. She wasn’t a spend thrift and saved almost all of what she worked for, as Mifanwae had taught, but the urge to see the smith again was a weight as heavy as stone, drawing her in his direction. Her unburdening to Thule and his approval emboldened her further, for he was a father and friend—the only one she had, lonely as that might seem—and his opinions were valued. Never did she forget the cautious side of his encouragement, however, of his unusual but apt warnings of a wolf. The more she dwelled on the idea, the more she found that a wolf was a fitting match for Caenith’s character: wild, noble, and dangerous.
Once settled with her fare, she was deposited amid squat white houses and tall white shops, with roofs that glittered in the early evening light and streets filled with weary working folk headed home for the day or into noisy taverns, of which more than a few were around. Caenith’s house, she remembered, was in quieter environs a few blocks ahead. She stayed off the road and along the path, asking strangers to pardon her as she strode at a hastened pace.
Slow down. Get a hold of your wits or lose your knickers, like Thule said. I’m paraphrasing, but still, she warned herself. She didn’t know much about men. She had kissed a few, groped some of the hardness that they kept behind their trousers, but wasn’t impressed by much of it. In recent years, she had given up on courtship entirely, for men weren’t interested in courtsh
ip with handmaidens living in less respectable neighborhoods, even though she was sure that they had other uses in mind for her. Perhaps that was what intrigued her about Caenith so much, his biding patience or surety. She knew that he desired her in a ravenous way, and yet she felt none of the frantic insistence that her other suitors had expressed toward her. None of that childlike need.
You say that, but let’s see how he behaves tonight. This whole thing is silly. You’re acting as if you know this man when you spent maybe an hourglass with him. Therein was the rub: that for a stranger, it seemed as if she knew him so intimately. Or felt as if she grasped the most fundamental aspects of him: honor, bestial pride, and the beauty and destruction of a wild rapid. All that remained was to mine out the details. Why do I trust you? Of all the men I have met, only Thule has earned that right through burying my mother’s body with me, through sheltering me when I was alone. What right have you to command my trust as you do, Caenith? What right?
She proceeded down the lane with a fury in her step, her riding cloak billowing, her dark skirt sweeping the ground like a black ghost. She was a startling vision to those who saw her, and they moved out of her way as if she was a mad but exquisite queen. A few roughnecks, red in the cheeks and leering from a tavern porch, did not heed her stormy expression and whistled at her from their chairs. Pigs! she hissed with such righteous indignation that the fools pouted into their ales, feeling as if the Everfair Queen herself had shamed them. Night was hungry for the day, and sterling lamplights, their starry magik trapped in hanging glass spheres, were winking on alongside the lane. She arrived at Caenith’s run-down property even angrier from the catcalls, stomped up the stairs, and went to knock on the door. It was wrenched open before her knuckles touched the wood. There was the smith.
Some civility had found its way into his comportment this evening, though he wore it awkwardly, like an animal stuffed into clothing, and haphazardly, as if he had just dressed himself and not with great success. His highwayman’s shirt was a mess: its laces loose, a sleeve up, the other down, and the hem half tucked into trousers. The boots she recalled from yesterday. He wore a plain ebony ribbon in his hair, which was pulled back from his face. While he had certainly made the effort to be more trimmed than yesterday, she could only call him shorn, not shaved—she didn’t think he could ever be stripped to less than stubble. Still, he was no less disarming or enticing with his cologne of steel, sweat, and the deeper aromas of woods and silky fur, and what portions of his sinewy strength burst against his clothing took the remainder of her focus. She found herself completely drained of her anger and fumbling for words.
Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) Page 4