Biondine, Shannah

by Shadow in Starlight(lit)

  The village temple was the only stone structure Preece had seen so far. It gleamed like a giant pearl in the setting sun. He glanced at Lockram nervously. "I have misgivings about this. If I'd refused, 'twould no doubt have offended the old one, but - "

  "It's not a royal palace or Cronel's castle," Lockram interjected. "The people don't gape at you or whisper behind your back that you must be some beast. They've no interest in your mating habits...beyond finding you a bit of a disappointment. More than one maiden's asked if you prefer boys. I simply replied that you've a woman far away and you miss her. 'Tis at least part of the truth."

  He nudged Preece toward the open doorway. "They wait to show you they value your presence here. Let them give you this. When all is said and done, 'tis not such a very great thing, to drink and dance and be lighthearted of an eve. You might try it just this once."

  They went in, to find a different mood than they'd expected. The temple was overcrowded. Ataraxians they did not recognize from the local village were present also, their robes of different hues, some embroidered with strange designs on the hems. The atmosphere was somber.

  The feast itself also was no bawdy revelry, but an orderly progression through a series of courses and dishes the two Glacians did not recognize. The banquet culminated in a lengthy formal speech by the elder who'd come to invite them earlier that day.

  He concluded his words of praise and thanks by calling Preece to the front of the temple, where the child and her family stood. They bowed and spoke to Preece in words Lockram did not understand, but it was clear the Ataraxians offered appreciation. Then another man approached in a hooded robe. The entire temple had grown strangely silent. As though every Ataraxian present knew something of great moment was about to take place.

  Preece turned to face the stranger, even as the newcomer dropped his hood back onto his shoulders. Lockram choked on the meat he'd been idly chewing.

  The two men were reflections of one another. Both were tall and lean of build, equally fair of face and coloration. Both were crowned with long, straight hair falling to their shoulders, hair that gleamed like freshly spun silver or eiderdown.

  Another Waniand warrior lived here in Ataraxia.

  * * *

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  "Deeply honored am I...to at long last encounter the cousin foretold to me," the stranger announced in a voice that rang clear and pure as a clarion. He turned slightly, waving his hand, and yet another robed figure came gliding forward from the shadows.

  Preece flamed instantly. This tattered robe, this charlatan trickster he knew only too well. Lecherous wink or inveigling mock innocence. Bourke.

  "What is this, old one?" Preece demanded. "Your idea of a merry jest? No one laughs."

  "Least of all my stalwart, war-making kinsman," the Waniand replied with a solemn nod. "I have been told it is against your nature to be jocular. I have been told you survived long years alone and are accounted a man of dark mystery. I approve."

  "Change him," Preece snarled, turning away from the fair-haired stranger to glare at Bourke.

  "He is - "

  "Change him," Preece roared, his fists clenching against the burning need to murder someone. Something. Anything. Beginning with this cruelly foul wizard who dared to taunt him like this. "Turn him back into the sheep or dragonfly or gutfish the Creator made him and stop this pretense. There are no others of my clan left. He is not my kinsman."

  "I come from the out-island near here," came the soft answer from the tall stranger. "There are a group of Waniands there. We have waited for you, son of my uncle. I am not Preece, but Taroch clan. Did your father never speak of his clan roots?"

  Preece glanced around and dimly realized the Ataraxians watched him with intense interest. Only Lockram looked uneasy. He did not understand what was being said. But the Ataraxian tongue was very similar to Preece's native language, the language his parents had used long ago. Which was spoken fluently now by this tall stranger...who claimed to be a trueblood warrior of the Taroch clan.

  Tarochs were complements to the warbringers. Besiegers who swarmed enemy holdings and encampments, breached outer defenses, paved the way for their Preece cousins. Tarochs weakened the foe and made possible the lethal strikes from the Preece. The two branches of warrior bloodlines were hopelessly entwined. The individual warriors themselves so alike in devotion, intent, and aims that they were oft said to know one another's thoughts.

  That could not be so, or this Taroch would know Preece wished for his swift dispatch to meet Satan.

  "You are displeased," the Taroch said. "Your arrival stems from pain and bloodshed, as is right for your station and our purpose. Come with us. There are scrolls and tomes prepared by the ancients that will help you understand."

  "I do not wish to understand," Preece snapped. "I do not wish to know of these texts. I do not wish to be here, to hear any more of this. I am not a jongleur, traveling for the entertainment of others." He glared at Bourke again. "You have done this. Do not seal your fate with a lie, Bourke. You told me of this place when I was too young to know aught of the world. You swore it was beautiful. Aye, and miserable, too. Filled with treachery. No better than Glacia."

  He turned and made for Lockram. "We leave this befouled place of worship."

  "But...who's he, Preece? Waniands are rare. He - "

  "Tal would not want this, Kaelan Preece."

  The words were a rattling whisper that nearly shook the stone walls.

  Instantly the Ataraxians fell to their knees and pressed their brows to the floor. Preece stopped and turned to glance over his shoulder. Bourke no longer appeared as a hunched old man, but as a tall, hale warrior. With a bright silver-gold beard and gleaming tresses beneath a thin platinum crown. Preece's father.

  The anger retreated, displaced by shock and amazement.

  One thing Preece had long understood about the wizard's shape-shifting powers: Bourke could only assume forms he could view and replicate. He could not now be the image of Preece's sire without having laid eyes upon the man at least once.

  "When?" The question came out as a harsh croak.

  "The day they begged me to take you from the forest. Tal lay mortally wounded, a pulsebeat from death. Your mother, Sarent, lingered perhaps an hour longer, his stiffening fingers clutched in her own. She told me who you were. That I must hide you and bring you here one day. Yes, I told you of this place and stoked the fires burning deep inside your heart. This place has ever been a large part of your future destiny. You must read the texts of the ancients...and the scroll left by your father."

  The strange warrior inclined his head and gently spoke. "The loss of a proud and noble king must not go unavenged. This you know. And were he my sire, I would want to know his wishes and follow his command. I would bear the burden placed upon my shoulders proudly, for we are Waniand, cousin. One blood. One purpose."

  "Mine is not to be king of Glacia, I warn you now." Preece glared at Taroch. "I have known corrupt monarchs. Cronel, and Bobos before him. I have no yearning to claim a throne."

  Preece turned back to Lockram, who shifted his weight and looked from the Ataraxian elder to Bourke, then to the strange Waniand, then back at Preece. "Their speech is most odd. I do not understand their words, but you have never before worn your inward feelings for all to see. You are badly shaken, my friend, by what they have said. So, I think it best I find amusement elsewhere this eve. You must stay and talk with them."

  Lockram summoned more dignity than Preece had ever seen him possess and strode from the temple. Several Ataraxians took his cue, murmuring, bowing. They slipped away like moving sound-shadows, and soon Preece found himself alone with Bourke and the Taroch warrior.

  Preece allowed them to show him into a connecting chamber. He eased himself onto a carved stone bench and perused the tomes and texts they set before him. The lore was Waniand, very similar to the tomes he had studied in Bourke's cave as a youth. The tale they revealed was one of sorrow. Of shining grea
tness and equality besmirched and ultimately destroyed by avarice, enmity and greed. His race, his people, had been decimated in purposeful mass genocide. Their scant remaining hopes were pinned upon a handful of carefully chosen offspring.

  The strongest. The fiercest. The sons and daughters of ancient, regal lines.

  Resurgence was avowed, through a great battle to be fought in the distant realm that was once a Waniand stronghold within an arête of ice and snow.

  "Glacia." Preece breathed it in wonder. He glanced up to find only Bourke left watching him. Waiting.

  "It was Waniand. All of it. Before it was carved into small, petty kingdoms. My people once dotted the mountains like sheep. Gone. All of them. Slaughtered."

  Bourke slowly nodded. "As your parents were. Out of fear. Greed and ambition, too, but mainly a jealous fear. Your people are all but invincible in times of war. Sharper minds cannot be found. The ability you Waniands have to divide and conquer or to surge together and fight as one...your hot blood and mysterious rituals. The lesser races feared what they did not understand. Coveted what they had not earned."

  He sighed. A deep, rattling sigh like very old bones, bleached and dried by wind and sun. Preece wondered briefly exactly how old the necromancer was. What he was. What this fight had to do with him and his kind. "Your kind...smote along with mine?"

  Bourke made a dismissive gesture. "I owed a penance from long ages past. I have paid it. You are here and the great wheel shall turn."

  Anger sparked anew. A low flame flickered in Preece's belly. No matter the reason, Bourke had purposely deceived him - for years. "You let me believe there were very few others, that as trueblood I was nearly the last of a dying race. You made me want this place because . . ." He stumbled. It was hard to speak aloud.

  Appalling, yet obviously true.

  His entire adult life had been a travesty. Fighting and saving up coins to buy a vessel. Dreams of Ataraxia and its crystalline waters, bright sun, glistening sands...all just a wizard's enchantment.

  Preece had been summoned to fight again.

  He was still a mercenary - only this time he was offered no purse. No promises of gold or glory were dangled before him to purchase his blade. He was to unsheathe it out of some unwanted sense of duty. His obligation to moldering antecedents, to his dead parents. To people he barely remembered. People he never knew.

  A cousin he did not wish to know.

  At the price of his freedom, his happiness, his lifemate.

  His rage exploded at the thought. "Moreya Fa. Damn you, sorcerer! She was another bewitchment. Naught but a calculated entrapment. Satan's prick, but you're good! A beautiful Yune helpless against the firedrakes who find her as irresistible as most males. Save this one, who was fool enough to misbelieve I could not fall beneath her spell. Bat rumps! You know I detest bats. You knew I would refuse."

  Preece snorted and began to laugh. The action brought slicing pain to his healing chest and ribs, tears to his eyes, but still he laughed. A horrible, acidic howl that was anything but merry. "What the hell was she? A lizard, a hatchling firedrake transformed to look human? Aye, that would explain why adult dragons kept trying to reclaim her. You disgust me, Bourke. I w - "

  "She was just a Yune maid, foolish knave! Forsooth, I did implant the dream of this place. I admit that. Not through spells, but simple word pictures. Tales afore bed for a lad who needed a dream."

  "Aye, and a beautiful noblewoman as lifemate for a man all believed to be a misshapen ogre! My lifemate! Can you not fathom how you've destroyed me? You might as well have torn out my still-beating heart or sliced off my cock! A warrior's lifemate becomes his reason for all else. You sent me to Cronel, knowing of his plot, knowing I could never have her beyond the brief time that would take me here. All of it was done solely to get me here. For my cousin. For him to be king."

  Preece discovered scalding tears trickling down his cheeks. He did not care.

  He could not draw a normal breath. His chest hitched, stung, screamed with each gasping sob. He did not care.

  The sun could wink out on the morrow, the moons crash down like gigantic dragon stones and crush him. He did not care.

  "She is your lifemate," Bourke insisted. "Merely a mortal woman, with an unusual attraction for firedrakes. You were not hired to bring her here, Preece. 'Twas still your own notion to come. Were she with you still, it would change nothing."

  "Ah, but her very strangeness, her freakish nature made this all the better choice, did it not? For there are no firedrakes here. Do not lie and say you never considered that in your scheming, Bourke. You used her to get my cooperation. She bears no l - "

  Preece could not believe how low he'd sunk. Had he been about to say love? Waniands did not espouse the ridiculous notion. He was losing his sanity, faster and faster, losing everything. He'd seize one or two last wits and try to rise above the disaster he'd made of his life.

  "I do not want to hear of her. The Yune was naught but one of your concoctions or spells. You can protest all night, but I'll never change my mind. You deceived me. She was an integral part of that deceit. I wish nothing more than to forget I ever met the witch."

  "She is in your blood and sinews," Bourke argued, "With you always and ever, do you wish it or detest it. I'd naught to do with your choice of lifemate. I saw how you regarded her. I warned you away more than once. 'Twas no magician's trick. Moreya Fa Yune is just what she appears to be, and were you not such a half-blind, stubborn ox, you'd realize her caring is genuine. She risked her life for you, let herself be imprisoned that you might fly free."

  "Carefully heeding your instructions," Preece snorted, wiping at his cheeks.

  "Nay, dolt! But we shall argue no more. 'Tis simple enough to cast a spell of forgetting. Mayhap when you encounter her and know her still, when your body calls to hers, when your spirit recognizes its true home, you will see I had no part in the selection of your lifemate."

  "Aye, cast such a spell!" Preece agreed too quickly. "Do it, and be quick about it! Know this, too. Once I leave this accursed temple, I never want to lay eyes upon you again, old man. I have asked you for little all my life. I ask for that. To never be plagued with your presence again."

  "Beware such hasty declarations, my son, or - "

  Preece spun and began stalking out of the temple. "I am not your son. I am Kaelan, son of King Tal and Queen Sarent. As you have succeeded in reminding me most painfully. I repeat myself very seldom. Do not make me say this again: I want no memories of Moreya. And it is my will to see or converse with you nevermore, wizard."

  Preece awakened hours later to find himself sprawled on the berm formed by the exposed root of a twisted palm tree. His robe was torn. The gritty sand around him and beneath him had somehow gotten into his throat and inside his eyelids. He must have imbibed far too heavily of leequesh the night before at the feast.

  The feast.

  He moaned as the memories rushed back, stirring the sour taste in the back of his throat. There had been another Waniand at the temple last night after the feast. A Waniand who proclaimed himself Preece's cousin. Preece had seen the scrolls and tablets, the texts of the ancient truebloods that told of a distant future when the leader of the Taroch would join forces with the last of the Preece clan to retake the throne of Glacia.

  The throne conveniently left vacant when . . .

  Odd. He had the distinct feeling no ruler currently wore the crown in Glacia, yet Preece couldn't say why or how he knew as much. His mind still retained dark images long associated with King Cronel: fat, overweening pride, lechery, the infamous bastard polydact. And as Preece wrinkled his brow, he grasped a faint wisp of teasing recollection. Something cataclysmic had swept Cronel from the Glacian throne. A servant...whose?

  Why couldn't Preece remember? He'd not been here in Ataraxia so very long.

  He got to his feet and stumbled down the strand toward the hut he shared with his friend. "Forsooth, but 'tis of no import any longer," Preece muttered aloud. "I mu
st seek Lockram and fight him for the last sliver of soap. I smell like some accursed goat."

  Goat. The word brought him to a halt. Not a goat, but....

  Tahr. Aye, he'd ridden a great tahr into battle. He missed the animal. What had become of it? Another damned mystery. Why did it strain his faculties to recall even the simplest things of a sudden?

  He took another whiff of his sourish garments and body stench and frowned at the obvious answer. He'd have to avoid leequesh in future. He'd drunk too deeply the night before, and clearly the Ataraxian wine had begun to rot his brains.

  Bourke tried to float back to the loose sands after Preece shambled off. Instead of settling easily onto his rump, the wizard tumbled from the tall palm headfirst and very nearly snapped the bones in his neck.

  He was too old for tricks any longer, an inner voice warned. His time was nearly at its end.

  Bourke sighed and stared at the Waniand's retreating back in the distance. Even for a wizard of inestimable talents, the warrior's boyhood had coalesced too soon into manhood and the supreme challenge Preece would soon face. A trick of the stars, the others had warned him. A ripple in the cosmos and a spirit's allotted time in a given sphere was done.

  Bones and sinews withered and snapped.

  Patience was sundered by frustration.

  The solution was to let go the stubborn mortal frame.

  Bourke would grant Preece's wish. They would nevermore meet face to face, never speak again. The knowledge was like a blade to the old one's heart, for Preece had badgered him into casting a malicious spell that could have untoward effects lasting for generations. An eon of mortal time.

  "And the balking dolt is wrong. She is his rightful lifemate. He chose well in this. She is his best accomplishment, a prize beyond that of any he's attained in all his years as a fighting man. Yet he will know her not, and eschew much of his past in Glacia. Out of spite. Accursed stubborn ass!"

  A wild donkey somewhere in the island's interior objected.