Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1)

by Christian A. Brown

  Faces are around them, but they are as black as the shadows of King’s Crown. They watch but do not intercede. A city brimming with sorcerers and learned men and not a fleshbinder or physician among them who will speak out. Perhaps it is because of her shrieking, because of her fingers bloodied from her attempts to scrape her mother’s tincture off the cobbles. Surely, she looks like a rabid thing and screams just as frighteningly.

  She has managed to haul Mifanwae’s head into her lap. Mifanwae takes a breath and sees her clearly, looks straight into her face, and the moment silences her. There are no final words; there is nothing more to remember her mother by, just that look.

  Rather suddenly, and peacefully, Mifanwae dies.

  Her mother is there one sand, and then she is lighter. A sigh that leaves for the heavens. Mifanwae’s head rolls sideways, watching that breath float off, chasing it.

  At last the cairn was before them, and Morigan awoke from herself. She knelt and touched the sandy stones, caressed their graininess, and reached for Caenith’s hand, which had an identical feel.

  “No one helped her. She died. In the greatest city in Geadhain…the City of Wonders.” Bitterly, she laughed. “My master arrived, but not in time, and I think he punishes himself for that, as unjustly as I do for my ineptitude.”

  “You were a pup; there is nothing you could have done.”

  “Perhaps that is true.”

  They were easy together in the silence of the night. Caenith knelt behind Morigan, drawing his arm about her, pulling her to his hardness, tickling her with his beard and fur. As sensual as his every gesture was, Morigan did not feel any insistence of desire. He was the perfect companion to her grief—tender but hard, giving and requiring nothing.

  “Thank you,” she said. She wasn’t sure how she had ended up at the rocky base of Kor’Keth, staring at her mother’s grave, on a cold desert night with a man who was not quite a man, but she was grateful for it.

  “I know that the hunt tonight has saddened you, but often the quarry is not what we seek. I listened to the song of Geadhain, to what honeyed praise it sang for you, and this is where I was led. It is good that you have come here. We appreciate life if we treasure death. I think this was Geadhain’s gift to you tonight.” Caenith concentrated, hearing the whispers of the stones, the scratch of sand over rock, the shift of grit over the bones beneath. He listened for a name. “Mifanwae. She would be glad that you have come here, even if only her shadow remains.”

  A tear rolled from Morigan’s eye. Before her sadness could deepen, a fierce cold breeze stole over the pair, and they huddled closer to weather it. On the wind, Caenith could smell the scent of dawn, like hay, along with spicier scents—moss, herbs, and loam—of the East. Was this a blessing? For as he looked, he saw what the wind had brought to Mifanwae’s cairn: a thin-stemmed white flower, borne from who knew what distant wood. The flower lay at the sandy base of the stones like an offering.

  “Brighten yourself, dear Fawn, and look.” Caenith slipped an arm over her, pointing to the flower. “I wanted to see if the she-wolf would bless my pursuit of you, and it seems that she has. Life amid death. I shall take that as a sign.”

  They watched the flower for a time as it fluttered on the sand but seemed content to stay. They remained in their embrace even though the elements no longer demanded it. Eventually, the flower was taken by the wind again, and Morigan’s head began to droop as shadows started to lighten in the sky. They prepared to leave, and Morigan was up in his arms in an instant. She bid her mother a sleepy farewell and then shut her eyes. The warm wind that was Caenith was moving once more. How long the trip to Eod took, she could not say, for weariness drained the last of her adrenaline, and this time she dozed off in the arms of her carrier. Now and again, he would stop to adjust her position as her arms dropped from his neck. Nonetheless, she might as well have been riding upon a mattress, so well was her comfort assured. In the flowing darkness of her dreams, she visited forests and ran with wolves; she flew over a cairn in the desert and there was her mother, standing atop the stones, pale and smiling.

  “Morigan.”

  Caenith’s stone-grinding whisper stirred her gently. She was quite hot, and he was slick with perspiration, too; he must have been running for a while. They slid off each other as she was set upright. Along with her cloak, Caenith’s ribbon had been lost to the night, and his hair was a tumbled mess.

  The sun was fingering the sky with red, and sleepy folks and lazy carriages were starting to appear in the neighborhood of less kempt houses with eggshell-colored facades, dulled roofs, and pockmarked sidewalks—Morigan’s district, was she paying attention. A coach master and his gray-horned steed trotted past them as they stood in the middle of the road; he shook his fist at the couple before taking a second look at Caenith and quieting himself. They ignored him, as they did all of what was going on around them. Morigan felt as if Caenith was waiting for a command from her. She could sense it in his wistful gaze and the distress on his brow.

  “My question,” he said.

  She tried to remember what Caenith was referring to, but there were so many memories already blurring in her head that she couldn’t think. She was relieved and elated when he simply asked.

  “Will you be my Fawn?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Caenith leaned in, his wicked smile cracking, his teeth sharper than ever. His hands came to Morigan’s tiny waist, fitting it like a corset. She wandered her fingers into his hair. An hourglass might have passed as they breathed into each other’s faces, as she pressed into his heat and he sniffed her and curled his lip. At last the tension broke. Caenith licked her lips before he kissed them and then swallowed her tongue. She tasted sugary and he tasted harsher: like wood-aged brandy and smoke. Their hands pawed the other; touching ivory skin, tanned skin, the tender meat of a breast, and the hard rod—nothing like the puny muscles Morigan knew—of a prick. When it was over, however many specks or sands she could not say, Caenith traced a wet line to her ear, bit the softest part of it, and then slid a promise inside. The Great Hunt begins…until tonight, my Fawn, he whispered, and then his warmth vanished like a cruelly pulled blanket.

  If Morigan’s eyes had opened fast enough, she might have seen the man bound into the nearest alley and leap tens of strides high over a startled cat and onto a roof. She heard the animal hiss, but when she looked about, Caenith was nowhere to be seen. On the street, there were only two witnesses to their impropriety: an old woman who was clutching her kirtle as if she had seen an assault, and a younger lad standing on the walkway, whose long face was even more afflicted from slack-jawedness. Morigan smoothed back her hair, checked that her breasts were in place, and made her way over to the young man.

  “Good morning to you, sir,” she said, and checked the sky to make certain. “Yes, it is morning. I was wondering if you had the time.”

  With shaky hands, the young man extracted a chronex: a small tempered hourglass tied to a pocket chain that was marked with larger and smaller lines. Regardless of how it was carried, it wouldn’t tip over or otherwise shift the pale sands inside beyond its prescribed loop, as these devices were synchronized by magik. Which meant from reading the glass that Morigan was well past tardy for her master.

  Fuk! Fuk! Fuk! I’m late for work! “Thank you!” she shouted, startling the man, and ran to hail the nearest coach.

  A speck later, she was jostling against the interior of a carriage, without any coin to pay for it. Not that any of that was important. Grinning like a simpleton, she pressed her face to the window of the coach and watched the sun rise with the joy of witnessing it for the first time. She watched its red and gold fire light up the cloudless sky as if it were the most profound experience of her life. It wasn’t, however, and she laughed and sometimes giggled maniacally all the way to Master Thule’s district. For she knew what a true mystery was. A wolf…a man…a race on a living wind through the night. Grief, loss, passion. For the most incredible thing that ha
d ever happened to anyone, had just happened to her.

  III

  AWAKE AND DREAMING

  I

  Thule’s unadorned white tower was as much of an eyesore as you could find in King’s Crown, and the neighbors were always filing futile complaints with the Crown. The disrepair and neglect manifested clearly when compared to the flowered lattices or ever-flowing fountains of fire that could be spotted in adjoining properties. No grand metal gate did Thule have to fence his holdings, just a rock footstep that seemed pulled right out of Kor’Keth, and a plain but heavy iron door. This simplicity spoke to his lack of pretension.

  Thule seemed fine when Morigan whisked into his study, out of breath and asking for her day’s wages in advance to pay the coachman waiting outside. He maintained a chilling silence as the young woman threw a hasty meal at him and saw little of her after that. Once done with her master, Morigan hurried about his tower from floor to floor, trying to make up for the hourglasses she had missed with an industriousness exceptional even for her hardworking self. Thule had a large tower with many unused rooms in need of a good airing out, which gave Morigan plenty to keep herself busy with as far as chores went. While she scrubbed, fluffed, and polished, her mind was a million spans away, running through the incredible adventure she had been on last night. She could still taste the smokiness of Caenith on her teeth, and when she was finished with each room, she thrust herself out the window, wondering if somewhere he was catching her scent.

  A wolf. A man. A man who is not a man. I don’t know who I met. I can’t say what you are or what you mean, but I like it. I want it. I count the sands until I see you again.

  Caenith consumed her thoughts. She saw his sharp smile flash in every wet sweep of the mop, his dark hair in every shadow; she heard his whisper in every breeze; she caressed his hard chest with every stone tile she washed. And yet, she felt alert, in great control of her faculties, brimming with mental energy, and as much as she accomplished, she never tired. The strange salutation that began last night circled often in Morigan’s head.

  “A toast,” said Caenith.

  “To?”

  “To awakenings.”

  Awakenings. She would ask him tonight what he meant. She would ask him many questions, she decided, and tried to reel some sense back to into her body. Later in the afternoon, when it was time for Thule’s tea and she had enough self-possession to face her master, she went into the study. Master Thule was not reading today, but staring off at menacing shadows drawn by the red hand of dusk on the wall.

  It will be night soon, she thought, and her heart began its pitter-patter. What instincts she had about Caenith told her that night was his hourglass.

  She removed Thule’s mostly untouched brunch, and he did not look at her directly, though after Caenith’s attentions, she was quite familiar with the sense of eyes crawling over her flesh and knew that he was furtively watching. She slipped away and down several winding flights of stairs, noticing the little blue spheres of sorcerous gas that lit the walls as she went and thinking of the sapphire kingdom she had visited last night. Shortly, she arrived at a dreary kitchen that was lit by a lonely slat of light like a prison window. She deposited the old food and made up some soothing white-thistle tea and one of Thule’s favorite fish sandwiches, hoping that would appease him. When she returned to the study, Thule was sitting up and alert in his chair.

  “Put the tray down and have a seat,” he said.

  How lucky I’ve been to avoid a scolding so far. Looks like my luck has run out, thought Morigan, sighing.

  The study was messier than usual, and there were piles of books in many places, as if she had not cleaned yesterday or for many days before. She chose the least teetering, lowest pile and placed the platter there, and then found another stack for herself to sit on.

  “This is about my lateness. I do apologize,” she said.

  “I am worried about you,” confessed Thule.

  “Worried? About me? Why?”

  “You are not yourself today.”

  Morigan contested this with a frown and silence.

  “You are acting strangely. What is going on with you?” asked Thule.

  Inside Morigan that effervescence persisted, like bees buzzing in her head, though not in a distracting way, for their song was a harmony she felt she could listen to, music that enlivened her. While her body was exhausted, her mind felt as if it would not sleep for weeks. She wasn’t certain if this was just a symptom of her fixation upon Caenith. She could not shake impressions of him from her mind any more than she could slow her brain’s endless whirring. She felt as if her thoughts were cast into a thousand seas at once. To the streetlamps that winked on as she went to see Caenith last eve, or how many books were on the floor about her toes—four, she noted, as well as their names. To crystal caverns and chores. To the sound of a child crying outside. Into the hot vision of a red kissable mouth, then another of Mifanwae’s grave glowing in the moonlight. Into memories of the past or fantasies of the future. Now that she had stopped working for the moment, this velocity of thought had not eased, but continued relentlessly. Still, she had no difficulty in sorting through each and every bit of it. Within her skull was a new presence: a churning machine, a pervasive awareness, and it showed no sign of slowing. As she sat, in that moment of quiet assessment, she was struck by the revelation that there was something going on in her head that she didn’t understand.

  From an outsider’s perspective, Thule had observed this change as well, progressively worsening through the hourglasses. Already, he had been worried about her associations with this smith, this Caenith. His night’s research did nothing to allay his fears and only uncovered vague myths of brutal, bloodlusting barbarians who shared the same rare name—though hopefully not the same heritage or inclinations as Morigan’s gentleman. But when she had arrived today in the state she had—disheveled, demanding money, wild, and speeding about the tower—he was suspicious that she might be involved with dangerous recreations, be that sex, narcotics, or some mixture of the two. She was definitely not herself. Nor had she even answered him. Instead, she continued to quiver in her seat as if she were receiving a current and stare through him as though he were made of air.

  By the kings, there is something wrong with her. Something is very, very wrong, he thought. He had lost a wife, a daughter, and Mifanwae. He’d be damned if he would allow Morigan’s health to slip away as well. Thule shuffled out of his chair and clapped his hands to get her attention.

  “Morigan! What’s the matter with you?”

  He rushed over and took her hands, which were vibrating and humming like struck metal. Suddenly, she seemed to focus on him, her pupils as sharp as two silver spears. Her gaze skewered him to silence—peering, peeling, piercing his head. Thule had the sense of the room fading away, fringed in gray mist, and that was the last he knew before blinking into elsewhere.

  Now, when Thule appeared before her, Morigan came out of her fugue a bit. On his face, written in wrinkles deeper than his skin, she saw his desperation. She felt his fear rolling off him in a stagnant black cloud. A terror of losing her. Why so much sorrow? she thought, and wanted to understand. In her head, the bees buzzed louder, and the cogs of her brain slowed on one flash, a single window in her mind. Only this was not a window that she had ever looked through, not a memory that she knew, not one of her own.

  She fell into it anyway.

  She is in the tumbledown stone cottage. A place comfortable with its disrepair; its small bird-pecked holes in the roof that let in strands of sunlight and the songs of their makers, its grass-patched walls stuffed with an errant flower or two. All day the hearth crackles here, and it warms the stones and fills the air with the aroma of meat and peppery herbs of a meal that boils in a pot over the coals. Every sign of tender maintenance tells that the folks who live here care not for material things, that love is their wealth. Through a corner of the window, she can spy the tangled thicket, the spidery trees, and beyond
that, the shadows of a forest like a black mountain range. Beyond the safety of these walls lies the Untamed, Alabion, where all wicked and evil things dwell.

  She recognizes that this is her home. But she has never seen Alabion. She knows it only from the tales her mother used to read to her. And yet, she knows it is Alabion that she sees outside the window.

  A door behind her opens. She looks, and there is a woman as beautiful and earthy as a spirit of the woods, with chestnut hair, the eyes of a doe, and a trim figure. She is carrying a basket filled with roots, berries, flowers, and seasonings, all cleverly harvested from the safest, thinnest reaches of Alabion. At the sight of this woman, a flush takes her chest and loins, and she feels the faintest tug of meat between her legs.

  (“Who am I?” thinks Morigan.)

  “Come help, Thackery,” says the woman.

  (“Now I see.”)

  Thackery moves to join the woman at the hearth. She is unpacking her basket in a stone sink beside the hearth, and Thackery slips behind her, whispering, “Theadora is asleep, Bethany. Dinner can wait.”

  (A memory within a memory then, and Morigan sees Thackery’s young hands and lean arms tucking a dark-haired, blue-eyed darling of a child under woolen sheets. She is no older than a handful of years, this child, and with the gentle beauty—and nature, she feels—of Bethany.)

  Thackery kisses his wife (the sword between her legs rises). She returns the kiss with passion and then unexpectedly pulls away.

  “My handsome Whitehawk,” she says.

  (Bethany’s name for the man who has helped many of Menos’s caged birds fly to safety—including his wife. Morigan understands this without reason.)