Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  The night lengthened as Björn unwound his side of events, from the onset of Malachai’s tragic madness, through their discovery of deyjiin, to what he knew of Arion Tavestra’s fall at the Citadel. He made no apology for Arion’s decision to slay the Mages, nor even gave her a reason for it, only admitting that he’d claimed the act as his own; and he told her how he and Cristien Tagliaferro had found the Fifty Companions hiding in the Citadel’s catacombs, and what he’d done about it. Finally, he confessed to her how he intentionally tricked her, Raine and Seth with misinformation, and how they’d twisted the nodes leading to T’khendar to protect Alorin as much as to prevent others from harming themselves in attempting to follow them there.

  But he did not tell her why he couldn’t have trusted her with these truths from the outset.

  Darkness still clutched the land when he was finished, yet the night felt thin—Alshiba felt thin. She’d eaten all she could hold, but only hollow bereavement filled her.

  It didn’t matter anymore how wrong she’d been about him—all of her and Raine’s suppositions, their conjectures, their vehement claims—Björn had intended them to misunderstand. He’d drawn the outline of their reactions long before he’d departed; they’d merely colored in the shapes as if per his own instructions.

  Of course his ring gleamed as brightly as the day of its forging. Despite all of the heartbreak, the tragedy, the anguish and loss…he’d remained true to Alorin throughout. But he had not remained true to her.

  The worst part of it was that in some way—in whatever way he used to justify keeping everything from her—he’d probably been right to do so. Much of the frustration she’d experienced during the lengthening centuries had simply been the contesting of one irresolvable fact: that despite all semblances, Björn could only be acting in the realm’s best interests.

  Alshiba exhaled a slow breath and rose from her chair. Her legs felt unsteady beneath her heart’s uneven rhythm. Understanding posed an impotent comfort for her grief. She laid a hand on the back of her chair, unable to look at him, not wanting to look at him unveiled of all her misjudgment.

  “If you love me, as you claim,” she voiced quietly, “you’ll stop coming here. The aftereffects of your visits are too devastating.”

  He came up behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders. His words fell softly across her ear. “As soon as you’re Healed.”

  Healed? She leaned back against his chest, feeling like her heart was breaking and breaking. Only it wasn’t her heart, it was some essential part of herself that she could never regain. She hardly had room for breath for the suffocating loss. “Why can’t I hate you?” She turned in his arms. “Why won’t you let me hate you?”

  He brushed her cheek with his thumb. “Because it’s not the truth.”

  She wrapped her arms around him, in spite of her inclination to push him away. If only she could stay there with her head pressed to his chest and think of nothing, recall nothing…no reprimands, no demands, no drums of duty calling her integrity to act. Let her thoughts be quiet and her heart know a stolen, impractical, all but impossible moment of peace; let her find rest within the strength of his arms holding her.

  She blinked against burning eyes. “What now?”

  “Now?” He ran his lips across her hair and then sank his hands into it, drawing her head back to look up at him. “Now…” his gaze became molten, “we must resolve a depressing foray into missed opportunities.”

  Alshiba caught her breath.

  He pushed on before she could upbraid him for pretending innocence of her dreams. “I’ve rewoven your life pattern. You’ll need to study it yourself now, learn its pathways.”

  Only an idea so momentous could’ve distracted her from the remonstration she’d been preparing for him. She stared at him, dumbstruck. It was one of those well-known ironies that Healers couldn’t see their own life patterns—the forest for the trees, and so forth—but if she could see it…if she knew how to find it…in the future she could Heal herself.

  “You’re—” she paused with her mouth open and changed course mid-sentence, “offering to show me my own life pattern?” She pulled back from him, her eyes widening. “By Epiphany’s Light—how?”

  He smiled down at her. “The visualization works on the same principal as a binding. We would need your blood, or we could…”

  Her eyes hardened, his suggestion too clear. “No.”

  He ran his nose along hers. “Alshiba…”

  Her heart launched into a painful cadence, draining determination from her voice. She pressed her forehead to his chest. “I can’t believe you’re asking this of me.”

  He gave a low chuckle. “You want me to ask this of you.”

  Epiphany give her strength—she’d only needed one good reason. He’d given her an irrefutable one.

  He didn’t wait for her to speak the words. He knew the desires of her heart—Lady’s light, it was beating its consent loudly enough for her staff to hear it at the other end of the mansion.

  In a breath he’d lifted her in his arms. A few long strides carried her to the bed.

  “But I’m so tired,” she protested as he laid her down.

  He hovered above her with desire making his eyes gloriously dark. “I think we can fix that.”

  And planting his mouth on hers, he proceeded to do so.

  Their hands found each other deftly. They knew each other’s ways. She hardly noticed their mutual disrobement, only the moment when her bare form knew the full weight of his.

  He moved into her, body and mind, and as he pulled her up beneath him, he drew her thoughts into his own. Light blinded her, and then a rushing channel of elae resolved into view. As a river rounding a bend towards a mountain, her life pattern appeared for an instant, looming before her vision, but then they vanished into it, became it, charging blissfully into the canyon of her pattern upon the waters of the first strand.

  He navigated the river of her life pattern as an expert guide, showing her all of its twists and bends, coursing headlong down the tumbling thread of her existence. But this was not all he did.

  Upon the ship of his intention he pulled the first, second, third, fourth, fifth—every strand of elae—miles-long pennants streaming from the mast. He wove them as he sailed—sewed—stitched anchors within her pattern, the lengths of each fluttering in between, as ribbons loosely basted.

  Until the moment when the motion of his hips synchronized with the motion of his intent, and then, all at once, he pulled those ribbons tight. Alshiba arched beneath him, against him, her mind bound now with kaleidoscopic lights, color, sound—

  The harmony of the strands flooding through Björn’s mind into hers made a concert of their lovemaking, the sweet melody of aesthetics counterpointing the darker shades of sensations both painful and exquisite.

  He’d never made love to her like this. He composed a symphony of the lifeforce, and played the strands as if he worked them all innately. She’d never asked him if he did—she’d never imagined he could—

  His desirous growl ripped her back into the moment, the motion, the force of his body thrusting into hers and his power coursing the channels of her pattern. Björn wasn’t going to let her think about anything but the harmonious interweaving of his lifeforce, mind and power with hers.

  Alshiba felt him stripping her life pattern of the distraught energy that had darkened her light for so long. He seared her, cleansed her, unmade and rewove her upon studier truth, scoured her down and filled her up anew…

  Over and over, until she became, once again, a star to mirror his own.

  Fifty

  “An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe in it.”

  –Náeb’nabdurin’náiir, Chaser of the Dawn

  The day bid farewell to Tambarré and night claimed the world while Ean slept, caught in the throes of true dreams. All the long night, the dead fish of memory bobbed to the surface, until the sea of Ean’s awareness became clogged with unwelcome tr
uths.

  When the day dawned anew, Ean felt its warm summons brightening the horizon and sought to wake. Sunlight filtered between the slatted wooden shutters of his room, illuminating dust motes and glinting off silver lamps, but though it cast its light across Ean’s sleeping eyes, it couldn’t draw him out of the dark depths of dreaming.

  Oh, he tried to find his way back to those sun-streaked waters! But his countless nights without sleep and his days of continuously working elae had assured an eventual reckoning, an untimely trade that had finally caught up with him during the dark hours of exhaustion.

  Dreams now held Ean’s awareness in thrall while they unraveled their unpleasant imaginings—not the deep, lasting dreams of restful sleep, but the disjointed, fitful dreams of a mind trying to wrest itself free of a possessive will…

  *—*

  “Björn won’t do it.” Arion shut the door behind himself and walked to the mantel and a waiting carafe of mulled wine. He sloshed it into a goblet and turned a frustrated look to Isabel. “He says he loves me too much.”

  Perfectly positioned on a settee, Isabel kept her gaze on her project, which currently involved two long needles and a large ball of yarn. “If I do what my brother will not, does that mean I don’t love you enough?”

  “Love is a specious excuse to deny my request.”

  Her mouth curled upwards at the corners. “I realize the experience of having your way thwarted is new to you, Arion, but my brother rarely denies you anything, much less for specious reasons.”

  Arion eyed her while he drank his wine. After a time, he draped an elbow on the mantel. Two thin gold bands glinted on every one of his fingers. “And you, Renaii…why will you deny me?” He only used that name for her when he wanted to remind her of his utter and complete devotion, or when he was intending something dangerous and desired her blessing on the endeavor.

  The faintest of furrows came to Isabel’s brow. “I thought we agreed I wouldn’t look down your path…that you wouldn’t ask me to.”

  “I’m asking you now.”

  The furrow in her brow became ever so slightly deeper.

  Arion dropped his arm and leaned his shoulder against the mantel instead. “If our roles were reversed…Isabel, if you’d seen something you couldn’t make sense of and it was within my power to assist you, do you doubt I would do it?”

  She set her needles down in her lap and looked up at him. “No.” Then she picked up her needles again and started winding the yarn around one of them. “But you’re not exactly known for prudence.”

  “Nor you for reticence, High Mage.”

  One corner of her mouth curled amusedly. She flicked her colorless gaze up to him and then back to her work. “For most, to know their future is to become the effect of it.”

  “I’m not most people, Isabel.”

  “Arion, even you may not be immune to the phenomenon. Prophecy puts a person at the effect of their own decisions. They think the future is set.”

  “Have you ever known me to be the effect of anything? I’m the one who causes the effects, going forward to—”

  “Achieve the effect one has intended despite any and all odds, yes.” She lifted a smile up at him.

  Arion draped an elbow on the mantel again, drank his wine and considered her.

  There were times when he felt so stricken by his love for Isabel van Gelderan that he could barely look at her; at other times, her beauty and brilliance so awed him that he couldn’t look away. She would find him staring at her, utterly enraptured, with embarrassing regularity.

  Abruptly he clapped his empty goblet down on the mantel and turned to pace in the open space between them. “Isabel…I must know. The things I’ve seen…” He shoved both hands through his hair, beset by the intricate patterns of cause and consequence that had been haunting him for days. They appeared before his vision again, seeming more corporeal than armchairs and furnishings—patterns of arabesques drawn of glass in the air, each swirl representative of choice and action.

  “I wish I could describe it to you.” He lowered one hand, the other still being pinned to his head as if to help suppress his confusion. “I’ve never seen such spiraling paths forming so complex a design. If I but understood my own path, I could see the whole of it—Isabel…” he spun and dropped to his knees before her and took her knees to gain her crystalline gaze. “Think of what it might mean to the game to know these things.”

  Her brow furrowed deeply as she regarded him. “We cannot know what the Malorin’athgul will do. They have no paths. The Sight cannot predict them.”

  “But their steps cross my path—this much I’m sure of! This much you’re sure of.” He gazed intently into her eyes. He understood what he was asking of her. He prayed she loved him enough to take that risk. “If I but knew the rest of my path…Isabel, I could predict them. We’d know what we’re going to be facing. We could plan far in advance of the curve of time.”

  Her expression grew troubled. “What if we look together and you don’t like what you see?”

  He squeezed her knees. “It doesn’t matter if I like it; it matters only that I’ll know the truth of what will be.”

  “What will be…” A tension came into her tone. “The only true future is what you cause to become, Arion.”

  “Which I can’t do nearly as well if I don’t know what I’m going to face.”

  She looked back to her needles and yarn with one arched brow. “Whose reasoning is specious now?” It was only one delicate eyebrow lifted with inquiry, but there was plenty of challenge in it.

  Arion pushed back to his feet and resumed his pacing. He shoved hands behind his back and shot her looks of perilous importance every few steps, all of which she calmly ignored. How could she just sit there looping string into knots when such a momentous dawn of possibility brightened their horizon?

  After a moment of stalking stormily back and forth and not getting due attention for it, he strode to refill his goblet and then turned exasperatedly to her. “Why in Epiphany’s name is the High Mage of the Citadel crocheting?”

  She arched a brow without looking up from her work. “Technically, I think this is knitting.”

  He opened his arm and bowed to her point. “Fine. Why is the High Mage of the Citadel knitting?”

  She smiled while looping her needle again. “I’ve been given to understand this is what noble ladies do when they’re with child.”

  It took Arion an embarrassing breath of time to process those words. Then he flung his goblet aside, jumped over a low table and grabbed her up by the shoulders. He searched her eyes with a sort of wondrous exhilaration bursting in his core. “Isabel…you’re going to have a baby?”

  She smiled at him.

  Incredulity gripped him as he stared at her. Then he fastened a fervent kiss upon her mouth, swept her into his arms, and started carrying her determinedly off.

  Isabel saw where he was heading and laughed. “I do believe this is how we got into this situation to begin with, my lord.”

  Arion threw the fifth into the doors and carried her through them towards their bed chamber.

  Isabel protested with amused exasperation, “My lord, I’m already with child.”

  He growled hungrily into her ear, “Let’s make another.”

  “I’m given to understand that Nature requires us to finish making this one first.”

  Arion blew the fifth to close the doors behind them and pressed her down beneath him on the bed. He hovered over her, his arms braced at her sides. He could hardly breathe, the room was so choked with possibility.

  He captured her laughing gaze with his own. “Will you do it, Isabel? By Cephrael’s Great Book—if not for me, if not for us even, will you do it for our son?”

  Staring into his eyes, she asked him across their bond, So sure that our child will be a boy?

  You sense it as well as I. That pattern is clear.

  She held his gaze. Then she closed her eyes and opened her mind, her thoughts…her
will to him. This invitation echoed another more carnal one, a deeper resonance that had already formed a humming energy between them.

  To feel Isabel’s mind unfolding, enveloping his unto her own, blending, merging…to feel her surrender to him and yet somehow by that very action encourage his own surrender to her…even the rush of wielding the lifeforce paled by comparison. Isabel drew Arion into the shared space of awareness where their minds resonated harmoniously; the plane of binding where they would exist eternally together.

  Arion closed his eyes and laid his forehead against hers, exhaling a tremulous breath. “Will you do it, Isabel? Will you look down my path?”

  She lifted her mouth to meet his and gave her answer in a kiss…

  —the dream shifted—

  Arion swam in a river of light.

  He and the Enemy bobbed upon the raging current of the Pattern of the World, their bodies parted by its rushing stream. Further behind him on the river, the Enemy’s face formed a furious mask. Arion wondered what his own revealed.

  He cast another anchor towards the Citadel’s weld, but the hooks found no purchase. Either he’d missed—unlikely—or the weld itself had been destroyed.

  The Pattern’s river tore at him, waves of power ripping at his consciousness, at his very being. To ride that current with neither anchor nor destination was to become unmade by its power.

  Arion hastily cast more anchors to the nearest points he could find—one to Tal’Shira, one to the weld in Tregarion, and one long to the north. He felt each of them hook and catch. The lines went taut.

  Arion suddenly stood still while the river rushed around him. He turned amid that golden light, seeking the Enemy.

  The latter had anchored himself as well, for he was approaching Arion now across the swirling flood. The Enemy spun his blade, cutting the currents, staining them, so that they carried downriver to Arion the smoldering char of his touch.

  “A modestly impressive attempt,” his eyes glinted darkly from a face sketched by the Pattern’s glow into rigid angles, “but ultimately futile.”