Dangerous Magic

by Alix Rickloff

  As she dropped into the well of darkness, she caught a glimpse of sun, a heat like a drop of heaven. A voice whispered her name, a low, deep voice velvet-edged and thick as heavy cream. She reached a hand out into the darkness, felt an answering touch of cold fingers, and remembered nothing more.

  Chapter 38

  As the world dropped away, the crash of the surf became the haunting echo of fairy bells. Whispering Rafe’s name, Gwenyth sought the familiar clasp of a hand roughened by work as sobs burned her throat and loss crushed her chest in a vise grip.

  She descended deep into an endless abyss, a ghostly voice beckoning and luring her on. Below, golden shimmering light speared the oblivion, spreading upward, tearing great jagged holes in the dark, leaving behind ribbons of star-shot infinity fluttering within the expanding glow.

  “He is here,” came a voice gentle as a rush of wings, offering hope where there had been none.

  The light enveloped her. Seared her mind with its furnace heat. Callused fingers laced with hers. Broad. Strong. And as if the door of her Sight swung open on a bonfire’s brilliance, a vision swam into focus. Like those that had come before, though far richer and more detailed. A vibrant tapestry wrought in the most vivid of colors until her senses drowned.

  Rafe stood beneath an enormous fir tree, its trunk twice as big around as her cottage, its top lost in the twilight above. She trembled, desperately wanting to race to his side and experience the heat of his touch, yet terrified this was all merely dream and she would wake once more on the beach with Jago’s worthless consolations in her ears.

  “Nathan is dead. The Cormorant no more.” Rafe’s words reverberated in her head. Beat against her skull with the same force as the rolling waves of the ocean.

  She nodded, afraid to speak and shatter the illusion, for that must be what it was. There was no other way to account for this place out of time. This dream into which she’d fallen.

  The angles of Rafe’s lean face sharpened, and for the first time she noticed his eyes were as black as the void lying just beyond the circle of light, and his mind, once easy to read and open to her if she chose to intrude, was now locked against all invasion. A wall upon which her Sight broke and was turned aside.

  He stepped in front of her. Close enough that if she leaned forward their lips would touch in a kiss. But one meeting of their eyes and she was frozen in place like a rabbit caught in a hawk’s triangulating stare. She tried to look away, unable to withstand the ferocity burning within his gaze, but he caught her wrist, his touch ice cold. Placing her palm upon his chest where no heart beat beneath her hand, he demanded, “What have you wrought with your defiance, Gwenyth? What power have you unleashed in your desire to hold me here with you?”

  The strength of his stare sent a lancing pain through her head. An axe blade to the base of her brain. She wanted to fall to the ground, but he held her upright. Refused to allow her surrender.

  “Look to your future,” he commanded.

  Visions burst and cascaded across her consciousness like a hurricane wave. Engulfing her. Tossing her under. Slapping her down each time she sought to break free of the overwhelming torrent. One barely fading before another took its place.

  A group of mourners huddled around a grave, the burnt remains of the Cormorant jutting like bones up through the water just beyond the churchyard.

  Her own cottage aglow with lamplight and crowded with women. There stood Eliza Scobey and Polly Landry. Sarah’s tall thin form beside the bed. Betsy Faull holding a swaddled bundle, a tiny pink fist beating the air.

  A woman wrapped in a long woolen cloak standing alone and mist-shrouded upon the headland above the village, watching the sea and the roll of approaching storm clouds. The welcoming glow of cottages beneath her strung like jewels amid the gathering dusk.

  A child. Her child. Hair, a feathery dark nimbus framing her tiny face, eyes washed gray-green as the petals of a woodland violet seated cross-legged upon the hearth rug tugging a string for a tabby kitten. Gwenyth behind her at her loom, calm and smooth as polished marble. Cold as the snow swirling white across the landscape beyond their window.

  Years rushed past like water through a sluice, tumbling and spinning and gurgling into a life patched together like the ragged edges of a quilt.

  The child grew to be clever, strong and beautiful while Gwenyth aged, hair white about her stooped shoulders. Movements slowing. Hands crooked with work and with weather. Yet always shrouding their peace crouched the memory of what might have been. The sorrow of what they’d lost.

  “You gained the next Witch of Kerrow. Isn’t that what you wanted? Your heart’s desire?” Rafe asked.

  Was it? It seemed like so long ago she’d struck her devil’s bargain with him, arrogant in her belief she could separate head and heart. She understood now. Without risking love and then heartbreak, there would have been no child. Rafe had been the price she’d had to pay. But she could still back out. Naught was writ in stone.

  Rafe or her child?

  Inevitable doom descended upon her. How could she make such a choice when either way she experienced a loss of a part of herself? She cradled her stomach as if sheltering the growing baby.

  Surfacing once more in Rafe’s chilly embrace, she felt the tension thrumming through his body. Crackling along his skin like lightning. The changes she sensed in him earlier growing tenfold as if his earthly ties weakened and an older magic began shaping him into something more powerful.

  As far back as she could remember, she’d been a slave to this prophecy. The pattern of her life clearly set out like yarns upon a loom and no choice but to continue the design. Yet if she were to save Rafe and keep her child, she must tear out these stitches and begin anew, thus altering the destiny chosen for her by the gods.

  She struggled to speak, her throat closing around her denials. So, in the quiet stillness of her heart, she willed her desire into the void as if gripping the black center square of her tapestry.

  “Look at me, Gwenyth.”

  She squeezed her eyes tighter.

  “Look. At. Me.” Rafe’s words struck against her head until she must open her eyes.

  She obeyed, but this time she fought against the darkness. Battled the endless black beyond this sliver of golden light. Shaped the pattern in her mind as the visions washed through her once more, and she was carried away.

  An empty cheerless room altered to become a curtained bed where lovers wrestled, moonlight spilling silver across a carpeted floor, trees whispering in the spring breeze.

  The pale and worried faces of women transformed to Rafe kneeling beside a bed, his smile warm as summer, as he handed Gwenyth her newborn babe.

  The haunted eyes of a solitary child became father and daughter walking side by side down to the shore, the child’s face upturned to catch the light of a rising sun as Rafe swung her laughing up onto his broad shoulders.

  The grief of a woman standing alone upon the headland shifted to become excitement as a ship tacked into the shelter of the harbor, the cream off its prow white as milk, her man standing arrow-straight at the bow.

  The images retreated until once more only Rafe’s face remained, skin stretched taut over his bones. His eyes, steel-bright and sharp as obsidian, knifed into hers with an unflinching remoteness. The weight of her failure settled about her shoulders, dropping into her stomach. Shadows clambered back over her mind’s poorly erected bastions, crowding closer. Light faded against the relentless void of death.

  It wasn’t enough. She was losing him.

  Rafe dropped her hand and stepped back, a distance of inches that may as well have been a schism of miles as she felt herself being drawn back to the surface. “Let me go,” he said, his face settling into grave lines. “Let me be at peace, Gwenyth.” He began to fade like mist struck by the sun. Soon he’d be gone completely.

  “No!” The scream began in her chest. Ripped up through her throat. She reached out to Rafe with her Sight, only to be met with a tangled lab
yrinth seeking to pull her in, the shielded maze of his mind dragging her inch by inch into the nightmare of desolate emptiness. If she didn’t break the connection between them, she would not survive. There would be two graves within the Kerrow churchyard.

  “I’ll watch over you if I can,” Rafe whispered just before he disappeared completely. “I’ll love you no matter what.”

  And then he was gone.

  She was free.

  Chapter 39

  Gwenyth opened her eyes, immediately shutting them again against the glare of a late afternoon sun. Her mind overflowed with memories and dreams, too tangled to unravel. Only one mattered. Rafe was dead.

  Misery clutched at her heart, but she couldn’t bring forth tears. The ache was too great. The agony too raw. She focused instead on the feather tick beneath her and the linens scented with lavender and tansy, the murmur of voices from the front room, the vibrating weight of Cothey curled into her side. Anything to hold at bay her last image of Rafe, eyes burning with words unspoken and left too late.

  She shuddered and reached for Cothey’s reassuring warmth. As she shifted, her hand brushed against a corner of heavy, woven fabric. She paused, her fingers moving across the weaving, knowing it for what it was even before she felt the rough stitching crisscrossing its face. With a stifled cry, she crushed it to her, and at last the tears began to fall. From beneath her closed lids, they coursed silently down her cheeks, damping her pillow. The memories flooded forth, forcing her to relive them. Rafe’s death on the ship, Rafe’s death among the shadows. Which was truth and which was dream didn’t matter anymore. He was forever lost to her either way.

  Painful sobs tore through her until her throat ached and her head pounded. She forced herself to muffle the sounds of her anguish. She wanted no witnesses to her despair. No sympathy, no pitying glances.

  Despite her silence, someone must have sensed she was awake. The low-voiced conversation stopped, and, moments later, Jago’s face cautiously appeared around the edge of the door. A wary smile tipped the curves of his windblown cheeks and brightened his fox-brown eyes. “You’re back among us, are you? I’d begun to fear you found the lazy life of a great lady to your liking. You’ve been abed since the day before yesterday.”

  He caught sight of her red, swollen eyes and his brows drew up in surprise. “Why do you weep? It can’t be you’re so pleased to see me, it brings you to tears.”

  Gwenyth sniffed, scrubbing the back of her hand across both cheeks. His callous words stung her grief to anger. “Are you so cruel as to take pleasure in being proved right? Do you come to rub it in?”

  Jago stiffened. Coming farther into the room, he frowned, rubbing a hand across his chin. “You think I would take joy at seeing you run as close with death as you did? That I would rejoice because I could crow a victory over you?”

  She noticed the shadows smudging his eyes and the pallor of his skin beneath his tan and knew she misjudged him. Dropping her eyes to the tapestry, she ran her hand down the longest seam, stroking the ridge of heavy thread. A lump formed in her throat, and her anger faded back into numbing grief. “I couldn’t save him, Jago.” She choked back the tears as she struggled to speak. “I tried. But I couldn’t draw him back.”

  Jago’s face flushed pink, and the earlier smile returned. “Then I’ll have to ask who the man is that Vivyan speaks with even now? Mayhap a changeling? One of the fey?”

  Gwenyth shot upright, sending Cothey leaping from the bed. Her head whirled with dizziness; her limbs shook as if she suffered from the palsy. “Jago Killigrew, if what you say is naught but a story…”

  Jago threw up a hand, laughing. “On my word, Gwenyth. Captain Fleming lies on a pallet by the fire. Weak, feverish, but as alive as you or me. I’ll not ask how you did it nor what it cost you, but blessed heaven, lass, don’t ever play such a fool’s game with your life again. My heart can’t take it.”

  Disbelief shadowed her joy. Rafe lived. How had such a thing come to pass? She understood none of it and only Rafe’s face before her would lay her doubts to rest. She threw off the covers. “Take me to him. Now.”

  Jago put out a supportive hand as she rose. “Careful. You may be a mite shaky.”

  “If you speak truth, had I wings, I could fly,” she said, though she didn’t shrug off his help.

  Despite her boast, the floor heaved and the walls spun. With Jago’s aid, she hobbled into the front room.

  Vivyan bent over a pallet set close to the fire. The healing scents of linden and boneset rose in the steam from a pot of tea beside her. She held out a cup. “Come, Captain. Another sip only. It will make you rest easier.”

  “I don’t want to rest easier. I want Gwenyth.”

  The words were barely more than a whisper, but Gwenyth recognized the force beneath the raspy hoarseness. A coursing warmth flowed back into limbs she thought numbed to all feeling but pain.

  “She’s sleeping still, as should you be, sir,” Vivyan scolded.

  Tears sprang to Gwenyth’s eyes, but this time they were tears of joy and held none of the bitter sting of her earlier weeping. “I sleep no more.”

  Pulling free of Jago, she rushed across the room to kneel at Rafe’s side. His face bore the flushed cheeks and gaunt, tired lines of fever, but his eyes burned with recognition and then passion as he lifted a hand to cradle her face.

  “Do you live?” He glanced at her stomach. “Do you both live?”

  Vivyan melted quietly away as Gwenyth smiled around her tears. “We all live, and I intend on keeping it that way. Oh gods, Rafe, I thought I lost you.”

  She leaned into his hand, delighting in the feel of his warm, callused palm against her cheek. She shook with sobs as his thumb caressed her skin, brushed across her lips. She dropped to her knees, laying her head upon his chest, reassuring herself with his steady heartbeat beneath her ear.

  He gathered her into his arms, kissing her hair, her face, slanting a kiss across her lips that left her breathless and aching for more.

  “There was a great endless void,” he murmured. “A darkness that went on forever, but you were there. You held onto me when all I wished to do was drown in the black.”

  “I know,” Gwenyth leaned back, shaking her head in wonder. “I know all of it. No dream, but a truth almost stranger than dream.”

  Rafe closed his eyes. “I should be dead, Gwenyth. There was no way you could have—”

  She placed a finger to his lips. “But I did. I am no god’s pawn. I choose my own path. And I choose to spend it with you.”

  Rafe rolled up onto his elbows, his hand covering hers. She felt the strong pulse of him in even that small contact, and it thrilled her anew. She met his steady gaze. Like the gleam of sun upon a swift-moving stream, his eyes shimmered and flashed. Her Sight took hold. Her power reached out, drawing her beneath the surface of Rafe’s stare.

  The room fell away; the air hummed with a sound like thousands of beating wings as Rafe’s gaze became a sliding gray-green river of light. But as it was when they were in the strange shadow world, she could go no further. Rafe’s mind was shut to her. Surprised, she pushed against the walls of his consciousness, but only a steady, iron resistance met her attempts.

  She drew back until the luminous shine faded away and her vision was taken up again only by Rafe’s bemused expression.

  His voice held surprise. “This time I felt only the brush of your touch upon me, but my thoughts remain my own.”

  She dipped her head in acknowledgement. “You gained a strength and an ability while you lingered between life and death.”

  A smile brightened his eyes. “I gained you. The dream’s power is ended, Gwenyth.”

  She put out her free hand, caressing the strong lines of his face, the shadow of a beard darkening his chin. Leaning over, she pressed her lips to his with an aching need to feel the warmth of his flesh, the heat of his touch. He answered her hunger with a slow, lingering kiss that spoke more loudly than any declaration of love. She drew aw
ay, a smile of drowsy contentment upon her face. “It took the courage of a smuggler captain and the honor of a gentleman to do what you did for me. I once told you in the same way you learned to navigate the shoals and reefs you would learn to find your way between worlds. You have found your way, Captain Fleming. And it has led you home.”

  Epilogue

  June 1813

  A full moon and a sky bright with stars turned the sea into a diamond-bright blanket of black velvet. The ship heeled over as the wind filled her sails and hummed through the rigging, tousling the dark hair of the man who stood pacing the windward side of the deck. Waves creamed out from her bow as she sliced through the water like a seal. Cornwall’s shore lay just over the horizon, a bright smudge a point off his port bow. His heart swelled as he felt the surge of the ship beneath his feet and thought of the home that awaited him. His daughter would be there. Already over three months old and just beginning to laugh, her toothless grin as welcome to him as her mother’s passionate embraces.

  Gwenyth woke, heart thudding, body vibrating with unfulfilled passion. Not a vision of the future this time. An image of the past. A memory only days old of Rafe sailing into Polperro harbor with a ship full of cargo, wanting only to be home again.

  The room lay wrapped in silver-gray shadows. The grove of ash surrounding the house whispered in the spring-scented breeze; a nightjar called from his perch within the tangle of branches. Far off she heard an answering cry from the woods and the fluting echo of Goninan’s well tumbling over the rocks.

  Sending out a ribbon of thought, she touched the gilded dreams of the child wrapped and sleeping in a cradle across the room. As if he felt the brush of her touch, Cothey raised his head from the hearth, where he stood guard over the baby. His eyes glowed pale as quartz, and he set up a contented rumble deep in his chest.