Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1)

by Christian A. Brown

  V

  “A popped lock, a flower, and a gift of tears…not bad for a single breath. She always has such hearty lungs, our Eean,” praised Elemech, as the image of Magnus’s tears caught on Eean’s breath faded in her pool. “I still don’t know how much any of it will help. We’ve done all we can, I suppose. Anything more and we’ve overwatered the garden, and the roots will be too drowned to grow. It is time to see what the seeds of possibility bear.”

  “Hmm?” said Ealasyd, who wasn’t listening to her sister. She was instead at her workstation, sticking her tongue between her teeth in concentration as she whittled away at a piece of wood. The older sister stood, her feet protesting—already swollen from the alchemy of pregnancy, though her belly had yet to change—and wandered over to Ealasyd. She took a seat on the bench where Ealasyd crafted, and saw other wood figurines already carved and lying beside her sister. The child inside her was encouraging her motherly nature, and she stroked Ealasyd’s golden locks while she asked her about her creations.

  “I feel that these three scoundrels should have proper names. Something sinister, Elemech, as none of them is nice.”

  “Oh?”

  “Rotten as fall fruit and just as smelly. This one here, in particular.” Ealasyd held up the doll she was fashioning: a replica of a grinning skeleton in a robe made of feathers. She sniffed it and made a face. “Stinks, he does. Can you smell it? His soul has gone bad. We shall call him the Rotsoul, then. I would have done a dark sun around his head, because of the hidden light that shines and whispers to him, but I’m not that talented, sadly.”

  With her bone knife, Ealasyd pointed at a wooden carving of an emaciated man. He had animal whiskers scratched into his face, and his mouth was opened and wailing. He was naked and tied in chains. “The Bloodmerchant suits that one. Yes. For he buys and sells, buys and sells, like a rat with a hole in its belly scurrying mindlessly for food. He is an empty, sad thing that knows only to eat, eat, eat. And I shan’t tell you what. But it’s certainly worse than those grubs Eean would bring home now and then.”

  Ealasyd seemed unwilling to talk about the third figurine. It was a bit gruesome: a woman who looked quite slim and graceful, but as Elemech picked the figure up and turned it around, she saw that an ebony cave spider had been pinned to its back.

  “Oh, her.” Ealasyd frowned. “She might seem like a woman, but within her is a crafty she-monster with a thousand legs and eyes. Too many legs and eyes to do, really, so I felt that the spider would suffice. In fact, let’s just call her the Spider and leave it at that.”

  “Rotsoul, the Bloodmerchant, and the Spider…interesting,” said Elemech. But they were much more than that. Each of the three relics resonated with vibrations of fate, and she hungered to throw them into her pool and see what secrets they held. Her matronly kindness won over her craving, though, and she kissed Ealasyd’s crown instead.

  “When you’ve played with your toys awhile, I’d like to see them.”

  Ealasyd didn’t fancy this notion, as she never got her crafts back from Elemech, but she made no outcry and continued shaving bits from Rotsoul. He was nearly done, and she liked him the most out of the three vile dolls, for he was the wickedest and had an extraordinary tale to tell, she felt. Meanwhile, Elemech returned to her pool to sweep her fingers through it and watch in the ripples the pictures that only she could see. Once or twice, she made a hmm of curiosity, and Ealasyd asked her what for, but she did not offend Ealasyd’s innocent ears with the scenes of craven sickness and madness that she saw. The crimson orgy and spreading of a toxic seed. The birth of a new vile race of mortalkind. The Sun King was no more, but hollowed out to become an unholy vessel, and the shadow that drove him would soon thirst for the blood of Geadhain.

  IV

  THE BLACK QUEEN

  I

  In the pale milk of moonlight, he leaned upon his balcony. He was a creature of contraries held in balance: his hair was a tumble of the blackest blackness, his skin the pale and polar opposite of that; his mouth was a feminine pout set in a masculine jaw; his nose was a slash of crystal between two hard cheekbones; his brow was a cut block of ice; and he had enchanting emerald eyes, with long, luscious lashes that belonged on a temptress. The manner in which he held his chiseled athletic body was a pose of perfect surety. A carriage of superiority not come from arrogance but from an inherent greatness. The bearing of a king.

  While it might seem as if Magnus were stargazing, he was in fact speaking. Silently shouting across the vastness of Geadhain to his brother, who had fallen quiet and would not answer in their mind-speak for either of their sins. Nor could he feel any longer the fire of Brutus’s spirit: that gut-warming, purring beast of flame. Since the yawning ages of the world, that fire-beast had nurtured him, had flushed his cheeks against the bitter wrath of the Long Winter, had been the comfort to cling to while Brutus hunted the tundra for their survival. Brutus was his courage, just as he was his brother’s temperance; a cold wind to soothe a wild, flaming animal. Now he was empty. Brutus had shut him out. And Lila, his queen, his precious desert flower, was cowering elsewhere like a whipped animal. All he had left to echo in his head were the words of that vile monstrosity that had claimed or influenced his brother, and therefore himself, to such despicable heights. Words that were the coldest of comforts.

  In an instant, the repellent passion that has consumed him ends, and he is viciously aware of the slickness of vomit, semen, and blood that he swims in; he sees the battered beauty of his queen and knows exactly what his hands have done to her. Even worse, he feels the pain of her body and the misery of her spirit—for they are all connected through blood. Brother to brother, brother to wife. A circle of suffering and guilt. Only Brutus has no more to say. No more grotesque appetites to pollute him with, no feelings of guilt to share. Nothing. It is just Lila and him and the ruin of their love. He tries to speak—not with his mind, but in words—and all he can retch out of himself is a shapeless moan. She slithers out from under him, sobbing. He can only claw the air and then the wet stone as she lurches from the room. He will not pursue her. It would be unthinkable.

  When he is alone, well and truly, with no voices or emotions that are not his own, when he does not think it possible to feel more contemptible than he does, the voice comes to him. He seizes as it speaks from nowhere, blasting into his head as if a door within had been shattered by a hurricane.

  See the blood, smell your sin, and revile yourself, for you are as pitiful and disgusting as you are weak. Soon you will know a loneliness that scrapes you raw with despair. Soon you will know a sadness that devours you to the bone, one that rips love and honor from you. When you are empty, then you will understand my pain. Then, only then, will you be filled. You have taken what I value, and so, too, do I take all that you love from you. First your brother, then your love. I shall eat it all. Fear your doom, for it shall be an end so mournful that the stars themselves will weep before I eat them, too. Fear your doom, for the queen of Geadhain rises to claim her throne.

  That threat was the last of what he was left with. From his brother, who would not speak, from the mysterious whisperer that had poisoned them each, and from Lila, who hid for days and nights now, somewhere within the maze of the palace and would not reveal herself. He did not send for his queen or seek her out with his emotions. He cancelled all matters of state and retreated to his chambers. Before being king, he was a soul of ice and reason. He was the man who had lived the Long Winter, who had made fire with his Will when there was only ice. He would find a solution to this impossibility of events. He would create another flame in the darkness. After days of somber meditation, of putting aside the trivialities of grief and regret, the coldest side of his intellect had arrived at a solution. Where he hesitated was in taking that final step toward action.

  Enough, he told himself. The time has come. Cut the cord.

  He shed a single tear for what he was to do, weeping as a statue would—immobile, expressionless. The droplet
was swept away by a sudden and hungry wind. Magnus summoned his Will, and the space about him wavered with an aurora borealis of emerald and white light. Deep into himself he went, to build magikal and mental fortifications, to shelter his soul from an enemy that had ingress into any stratagems he would make. Resolutely, he sealed each memory of his brother away, turning it over in his mind’s eye like a favorite picture before locking it inside his deepest vaults. Brutus’s golden beauty, his wild hunts, his nurturing songs. Flashes of campfires, chanting, and walking with the first tribes across a glacial and unformed land. Memories of calling saplings from the cracked plain beneath Mor’Keth, which would one day be the green, sweeping kingdom of Zioch. Or the remembrance of gritting their faces against the sands of the screaming desert and choosing what slate from the red mountain of Kor’Khul Brutus would haul for Eod’s foundation. Such intimacy they had shared. As two children within a womb that never separated, so too did he and Brutus live together. He walled it all in, their love, and slid the final brick into place. When the magik ended, his sorcery drifted off him in glimmering gusts, and he felt colder and emptier than before. He had only his fury. He brooded on dark voices that called themselves queens and filled himself with plots of revenge.

  A presence entered him—a cozying sensation, like a glass of hot brandy and a crooning minstrel by a fire. It prickled his smooth chest. He called her his Spring, for she was the soft season that melted his iciness.

  “My Spring,” he said sorrowfully.

  Magnus turned to greet his queen, a woman as pleasing to the eye as her spirit portrayed. In the thousand years that they had been together, the sun-soaked nature of her Arhad heritage had never left her and she was as sultry and tinged as honey, and just as delicious to consume with his eyes. Her hair was golden-threaded spun sugar, her lips red and plump as an apple, and her stare fluted and yellow as two candies of amber. The whiteness of her wrap was nearly transparent against her curvaceous figure. He could trace the heavy teardrops of her breasts and see the faint shadow between her thighs as she walked through swaying curtains to join him on the balcony. As long as they had been together, his desire had never waned for her, but he felt none of that now. He felt only shame. The fleshbinders had healed her well in their time apart; only hints of bruising about her face could be spotted, and the necklace of welts had softened to green. Disgusted with himself and quite naked in a mere throw about his waist, he quickly faced away from her.

  She came up to him, and there was a painful hesitation as he waited for her to either strike or embrace him. She chose neither, but stood with him instead, and they watched the city and the stars together. Every moment he thought of reaching for her hand as it lay trembling on the balcony near his, but he knew it was too soon to touch. Undoubtedly, she would look at his hands, those that had loved, embraced, and caressed her since Eod was young, as instruments of violence for many months to come. Perhaps forever. In all their years, she had never been afraid of him. Not once. As they stood beside each other—conflicted, horrified, and yet yearning for the other—Magnus grasped how broken his relationship was. He discovered his own black beast then. He was not only angry with his brother, he wanted to harm him. He had discovered the monster of hate.

  “Punishment will not be enough,” spat Magnus, and his form illuminated with noxious, pale light. Lila stepped back. “I should have known from his secrecy these past few months. We cannot hide truths from each other. Or so I thought. But my brother has kept a secret, a terrible one, and it has nearly destroyed us. Perhaps it already has. I dread to think what he was doing when that sickness overcame me. I have allowed him to make a fool of me. I can never be forgiven, but I shall whip penance from him. Blood for blood, bruise for bruise. He will bleed as you have. This I swear.”

  The bitterness of her king’s remorse and rage chilled Lila into goose-flesh. A similar wrath had summoned her here, an expulsion of great power that she could not ignore, and she had questions regarding it and the rest of her horror that she would no longer chew on in exile. With the same steel that Magnus loved her for, she brushed off the oily shivers of revulsion and clasped the clenched fist that had beaten her.

  “I cannot hide from the shadow that looms over us, nor can I let you face it alone. I need to understand what has happened to you. To your brother. I need you to tell me about the voice.”

  Of course she had heard everything, he cursed. Magnus’s anger broke, his chill aura faded, and he allowed himself to be led inside.

  For a king, he lived as simply as the others in the palace: a four-poster bed billowing with pale netting, two birch chairs, a corner fountain and basin for cleaning, and a sandstone hearth. Lila deposited him in one of the seats near the fire and then quickly sat in the second chair, which was how they would relax and talk the long nights away. Such fond memories she had, though none of that fondness was present in her eyes that day. Magnus shrank farther and farther into his seat, the flickering fire’s shadows creeping long and forbiddingly across his angular face. He could not glance at her; it was like glaring into a scornful sun. She was stormy and unreadable. Once more, she demanded answers from him.

  “That poison that whispered to you. The one that infected your brother—for I have felt his bestial urges in you before, and that was not it. What was that evil?”

  “How can you be so collected?” Magnus asked, sighing.

  “Because I must be,” snapped Queen Lila. “There is no time for pity, not now, not when so much is at stake. The peace of a thousand years or more has ended. The kings of the North and South speak no more to the other, and madness has taken them each. You and he rule the greatest kingdoms on Geadhain and there are lives, countless lives, other than our own that balance on your fates. I shall have time to grieve for you or loathe you later. In fact, I have all the time in the world. For now, I need you to focus. Separate yourself from your anger, and think. Tell me who seeks to undo us, who can enter the minds of the Immortal Kings and twist them to wickedness. That is what we must discuss, not whether I love you, or whether I can, in time, forgive you, because the answer is yes to each.”

  Magnus trembled in appreciation.

  “Is it the work of the Iron sages?” she asked.

  Magnus waved off the thought. “No, something darker, more insidious. Something older.”

  “Older than you?”

  “Yes.”

  Queen Lila was at a loss for a moment, as she knew no living thing that could attest to that.

  “Whatever it is, this whisperer, this poison, as you say,” hissed Magnus, “it will not harm you again. I shut Brutus out. I sealed off our brotherhood with sorcery and vengeance. His impulses, or this vile spirit that calls itself queen, will not invade me again.” She pondered the gravity of his statement. The brothers and their unique bond of emotion, thought, and Will had existed long before she joined the fold—prior to Magnus’s invitation to her to drink each other’s blood in the ancient ritual of the Fuilimean. Unwillingly, she wed two men that day, not simply one. A reserved intellectual, a philosopher, and a tempestuous lover; and Brutus, a beast of pure fire and instinct. Even hundreds of years later, as their strange blood changed her into a creature more like them, she never fully understood the brothers’ bond or their makeup. If you drink from a mystery, you become one yourself, an old and only friend once said. And he was correct, the sage, for the brothers were a mystery. Things that should not be. A fragment of her always had felt isolated by her choice. Not quite an immortal, not really a mortal, but a third and unwanted creature that was neither.

  Despite Magnus’s love for her, she had always maintained certain insecurities that she was superfluous to the greater connection the kings shared. For as close as she and her king were, he spent much of his time in some otherworldly commune with his distant brother. The moments she had with Magnus in which they were truly alone, absent of Brutus’s wild passions, were what made the loneliness of their union bearable. Those were the moments when he spoke to her in
one voice, not two. Or when he lay her down in passion, and it was as if she straddled winter, for his cold was not punishing; his chills were shivering and clenching but titillating, and there was no telling where their bodies met or ended. In those moments, she did not doubt or regret any of the choices she had made. She was his and he was hers, and they were perfection. Now Magnus was entirely hers, with no threat of Brutus soiling the bed, although what a bleak and hateful road it had taken to gain that freedom.

  She wandered in and out of her thoughts, as the oldest minds do, until Magnus’s speaking roused her.

  “I have been living in a dreamer’s paradise. With my golden queen and my glorious kingdom and all the wonders of creation around me, like a child drowning in a bed of toys. I have been asleep to the world while the waking cry out in pain. How long my brother has been plotting this betrayal or the extent of his bargaining with these dark forces that assail us, I know not, but he must be stopped before word of his madness spreads. There have been murmurs of unrest in the simple mountain clans around Zioch for months. I have ignored them, thinking not to assert myself over my brother’s domain. I am sure that there are other signs of disharmony, if I were to look for them. You are right, my Spring, we are the axes of this world. We have appointed ourselves as such, and if we are to fall, then order will follow. I cannot imagine a world under the reign of the iron hands of Menos.”

  Queen Lila clutched the arms of her chair. “What will you do?”

  The king’s mind was a ceaseless machine. He had already considered a plan. Two of them.

  “I shall smash him into submission. I shall beat him back into the man I love and snuff out this dark whisperer, should it dare to reveal itself. Tonight, I rally. Tomorrow, I shall leave for my brother’s realm of Mor’Khul, along with nine legions and those who curb the elements to their Will, so nearly a thousand men. I shall not take more from Eod than that, for our city must be secured from what other threats might strike in my absence.”