Two arrows whistled past, narrowly missing Linnet where she knelt before the mirror. She was staring into it, lips parted, her face transformed by a remarkable expression—a child’s wide-eyed wonder, mingled with a powerful yearning.
“Linnet?” He coughed to clear his lungs. “We have to go.”
“Aye,” she murmured, her gaze never straying from the polished plate. “But not that way.”
He followed her gaze to the mirror, its clouded surface filled with swirling fog. It coalesced into a slow-moving vortex, with darkness at its heart. The sight filled him with unreasoning dread.
“What are you doing?” he rasped. Lack of air was making him dizzy. She herself must be barely conscious.
Yet she stood before the mirror, calm and unafraid as flames crept down the canvas and crackled across the roof. As she stared into the polished plate, an otherworldly wind seemed to stir her hair and garments. The russet fire in her dark curls brightened. Her tawny eyes glowed with amber light.
In that moment she was pure Fae, her skin suffused with pale fire as though the moon shone inside her.
Head to foot, he tingled in her presence.
Beside them, the straw pallet crackled and smoked. Nowhere to run, except into a hail of deadly arrows...or...
“Zamiel,” she breathed. Her voice thrummed with power. Never looking away from the swirling vortex, she extended her hand to him.
This is madness, he thought. But he’d rather die hand in hand with Linnet Norwood than face the empty bleakness of eternity without her.
Burning with resolve, he uncoiled to his feet and clasped her hand firmly in his gauntleted grip.
On his feet, the air was scorching, too hot to breathe. He could feel his eyebrows crisping.
“Which way?” he gasped, knowing either way lay death.
For the first time, she turned to him and smiled, an expression of such sweetness and certainty it made him dizzy.
“This way,” she said simply, and stepped into the mirror.
Chapter Twelve
Linnet returned to herself slowly, as though waking from deep sleep. It was the myriad of niggling discomforts that woke her.
She lay tumbled face down across damp sandy ground, her face cushioned on a bent arm. Her corset was a cage of fire cutting into her ribs and waist, her farthingale and petticoats hopelessly twisted around her legs. Her hair had fallen completely free and cloaked her face, hiding the world around her.
Her right arm was flung wide, aching fingers crushed in someone’s grip.
With a gasp, she shook back her tangled curls. A minute, an hour or a lifetime ago, she’d been burning alive. Now she lay in a rough stone cave, blue sky and sunlight framed in its mouth.
Lying beside her, limbs akimbo, sprawled a slender figure in black fighting leathers and high boots, a red-streaked rapier gripped in one gauntlet. His face too was hidden, draped with a swath of ebony hair like a discarded banner.
Zamiel.
Moving stiffly, she tried to free her hand. At the first sign of movement, his grip convulsed around her throbbing fingers. Linnet released an involuntary yelp, and he jerked awake.
For a heartbeat he lay gazing up at her, one dazed purple eye peering through tendrils of fallen hair. Then, in a breath, he uncoiled from the ground.
“Careful,” she croaked, in a voice gone rusty.
Graceful as a cat, he scrambled to his feet and stood swaying. His gaze scanned Linnet’s disheveled form, then the mossy rocks around them. When he saw the cave entrance, his soot-streaked face went slack as he uttered an exclamation.
Heart pounding, Linnet pushed to hands and knees, but the cave seemed to shift beneath her. Vertigo swirled through her.
Swiftly he knelt beside her, hands closing around her shoulders.
“Take your time,” he rasped. “I have a feeling we’re not in any rush.”
“How can that be? Get me up, for Bride’s sake!”
“Stubborn woman,” he muttered. Yielding to her insistence, he steadied her while she got her legs under her. The world wavered around her, but Linnet caught a glimpse of the view that alarmed him so thoroughly.
Framed in the cave’s jagged mouth, a rugged green coastline rose against shattering blue skies. The hushed, rhythmic susurrus she’d taken for the wind rose from the turquoise sea, foaming against a narrow beach.
Linnet subsided limply onto a rocky ledge. “Where in the bloody hell are we?”
“And more to the point,” he murmured, “how did we come to be here? I seem to have a distinct memory of following you into that blasted mirror.”
“Ye did.” She groped for a few threads of memory. “We were trapped. The roof was burning. I knew we’d never survive those arrows, yet we couldn’t stay as we were. When I’d first looked into the mirror, I felt the accursed thing drawing me in.”
“But I covered the mirror in time,” he recalled. “My eyes—all Dominions have the gift of angel fire, but I thought I’d lost mine. Yet it came back in that wagon, and it was blinding both of us.”
Bemused, she absorbed this revelation of divine power. One more miracle to accept.
Slowly, like a blind woman in a strange room, she felt her way through the memory, unspeakably grateful that at least she could remember. God be thanked, she hadn’t lapsed back into the lost years.
“When the shroud fell, I looked again...and I just knew, aye? The mirror was a door. And somehow...I knew I was the key to open it.”
Fearing his reaction to this fanciful tale, she knotted her fingers in her lap. Perhaps this was more of her madness, but Zamiel had experienced it too. He alone might believe this wild tale.
Calmly he nodded, as though she’d said nothing remarkable. “I know little of Faerie magick. Perhaps, in extremis, your Faerie blood opened you to whatever power is in your birthright.”
He paused. “Could you do it again, do you think?”
“Open a door between places with my so-called magick?” She crossed herself at the thought. It was witchcraft, was it not, to claim magickal powers? If her Papist background didn’t do it, all this talk of mirrors and magick would surely get her killed.
Still, he’d asked a reasonable question and was patiently waiting for her response. She dragged her scattered wits together.
“If I had a mirror...I don’t know. Surely I can’t open a portal just anywhere, aye? Come to that, I’m not sure I’d want to try.” She swallowed hard. “It was like leaping from a cliff in the dark, Zamiel. I’d no notion where we were going, and no control.”
“Fair enough. I’m not sure either of us would be up to another adventure at the moment.”
For the first time, he seemed to notice the rapier in his hand. Grimacing at the dried blood that stained its length, he set about cleaning the blade against a mossy rock.
As her own strength seeped back, Linnet gathered her hair into a thick braid and bound it with a loose thread. Her tresses seemed longer by a handspan, a development that troubled her greatly. Yet she brushed the soot briskly from her riding habit and took stock.
They’d traveled...however they’d traveled...with the clothes on their back and naught else, not a drop of ale or a crumb of bread to sustain them. She was wearing her mother’s locket, aye, and her belt-purse contained a few coins. They could purchase food somewhere, if any could be found.
At the thought of food, her belly growled. She was ravenous and parched besides. Clearly they couldn’t remain forever in this cave, wherever they were. Bracing herself to confront whatever waited, she made her way to the cave mouth.
Raised in the mountain stronghold of Glencross, she’d rarely beheld the sea. Now, watching the jade-green water foam against the sand, racing toward her vantage and receding, a feeling of slow enchantment stole through her. A balmy zephyr, sharp with the tang of salt, rippled her skirts around her boots.
The warmth of that playful breeze gave her another unsettling jolt.
“Wherever we are,” she murmured to Zam
iel, standing at her shoulder, “we’ve traveled through more than space. It’s February in London, aye? What would you call this? May?”
He shaded his eyes and looked around with interest. “Or June.”
“June, he says, cool as dammit.” Her voice went brittle with barely contained fear.
Aside from the sheer impossibility of the notion, there was something vaguely, unsettlingly familiar about the concept...traveling between realms, traveling through time...that roused the sinking dread she associated with the lost years.
Had she done this sort of thing before?
“In Faerie tales,” she said slowly, “ye’d fall asleep in a ring of stones and dance with the Fair Folk till dawn, then wake to find a hundred years had passed in the mortal realm. Do ye think—surely we’ve not lost more than three or four months at the outside?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m hopeless with mortal time.” Zamiel shrugged, maddeningly unconcerned by the prospect.
But then, he’d left nothing behind he cared about. She had Glencross and hungry mouths to feed come winter. She had desperate people who needed her to reconcile with the Queen, marry a proper laird and bear a strong heir.
Fighting to contain the bubbling rise of panic, she ventured into the brilliant light of a summer morning. She saw nothing and no one on this deserted stretch of beach. But a worn set of stone stairs snaked up the rocky cliff toward the moss-green heights.
At once her heart lifted—because where there were stairs, there were likely people.
“Are we fugitives, do ye think?” she asked. “We resisted arrest by the Queen’s men, aye?”
Zamiel arched a skeptical brow. “If those were the Queen’s men, and not merely Sir William Cecil’s, they surely reported that we perished in the flames. What else could they say?”
“Maybe they kept it quiet.” She nibbled her lower lip. “If we happen upon someone, we’d best be keeping ourselves to ourselves.”
“What, I’m not allowed to introduce myself as Zamiel, Angel of Death and Son of Lucifer, exiled to roam the earth as punishment for my sinful ways?” He flashed his irrepressible grin. Despite everything, her heart fluttered. “Now where’s the fun in that?”
“I can scarce believe it myself,” she murmured. “But I saw what I saw. Yer wings, yer crown of black flame. Sweet Jesus, yer eyes.”
“Don’t think about it,” he urged. “My angelic origins are a bit beside the point given our current circumstances, aren’t they? Your Faerie magick brought us here, wherever ‘here’ is. We ought to be thinking about that.”
I’d rather think about you, Zamiel.
But she would never say so. Whatever had befallen them, whatever the truth of her origins, she needed to return to Glencross at the end of this business. There could be no place in that future for the exotic, impossible creature beside her.
Resolutely she gathered her skirts and struggled through the sand toward the rough-hewn steps. “There’s naught I can do with witchcraft. Even if I have some ungodly power, a Christian woman has no business fiddling about with it. Besides, we won’t need magick to find out where—and when—we are.”
“And they call me rash and intemperate,” he muttered. “Let me go up first with the sword, at least.”
Privately she felt he’d taken enough risks on her account. When he returned to court, he’d have a great deal to answer for.
As he climbed before her, light-footed as a chamois, she couldn’t help admiring his rakish frame, lean and deadly in black fighting leathers. His lush mane swayed against his back like a cloud of ink. If she touched it, she knew exactly how the silken tendrils would caress her fingers. The memory made her body pulse with wicked desire.
Unlike hers, his hair seemed no longer, a thought that gave her some comfort. He hadn’t even the shadow of a beard—but then, she’d never seen a trace of whiskers on him. She wondered if perhaps the Court of Heaven had neglected that small detail of verisimilitude when they prisoned him in this body.
If his hair didn’t grow, did that mean his body didn’t age? If he never repented, and his heavenly arbiters never relented, would he remain in that body forever, as heartbreakingly beautiful in a thousand years as he was at that moment?
If so, she’d found another reason why any lasting attachment between them was impossible. Another reason, if she needed one, to keep him at arms’ length.
United in their instinct for discretion, they climbed the treacherous path in silence, save for the labored breath of exertion. Suddenly Zamiel stopped, one gauntlet rising. She froze, heart laboring from more than the climb.
For a long moment, she heard naught but the crashing hiss of the sea. Then her ears picked out a faint tune, rising and falling on the wind. The haunting melody of a woman singing, a soprano so sweet it made her heart ache. Slowly, it dawned upon her that she knew that melody.
A sweet, sharp pain pierced her heart like an arrow. She clutched her throat, pulse thundering through her veins.
At her gasp, Zamiel turned sharply. When he beheld her, alarm invaded his features.
“No, Linnet, wait—”
Too late. Evading his belated attempt to detain her, she darted past and scrambled up the path. As she rounded the last bend, the heights exploded into view.
A lofty gray stone castle floated against the vault of heaven, turrets crowned with slate-blue caps, gossamer pennants streaming from battlements and crenellations. Around the base of this ethereal vision swirled a pearly mist, enveloping the narrow causeway that provided the sole access to this castle perched like a butterfly on the edge of the world. On all sides, the sheer cliffs plunged straight down to the jade-and-turquoise expanse of the heaving sea.
Now, though, she had eyes only for the lush green field spread before it, long grasses starred with golden poppies. Among them, a slim woman in a saffron gown wandered idly, her basket piled high with yellow blooms. Above the river of russet hair rippling free to her waist, a circlet of sun-gold poppies crowned her brow.
When the woman dipped gracefully to pluck another bloom, the familiarity of that simple gesture twisted Linnet’s heart. A choked cry burst from her lips. Heart soaring like a hawk in flight, she launched into motion and flew across the field.
Sweet-smelling grasses swirled around her legs, slowing her, until she hoisted skirts and farthingale to her knees. Heart in her throat, she cried out, a lifetime of grief and longing fused to one simple word.
“Mother.”
Catriona Norwood, the Dowager Countess of Glencross, glanced up and dropped her basket. Poppies spilled over her feet in a sea of citrine. One hand rose to her mouth as though to contain whatever she might have cried. Linnet caught a bare glimpse of her heart-shaped face, all pert nose and pointed chin and rosebud mouth. Her wide eyes shimmered, the same sherry-gold Linnet glimpsed in the polished plate.
She looks not a day older...yet even more lovely.
By the time she reached her, Linnet was sobbing. She clasped her mother’s delicate frame in her arms. So petite she was, her tall daughter towered head and shoulders above her now. The haunting sweetness of poppies enveloped her.
Catriona Norwood cradled Linnet’s face in her tiny hands and looked searchingly up at her.
“Ye’ve found me then, little bird,” she said in her singsong lilt, the flavor of Scotland thick as butter on her tongue. “Dinna greet, lass.”
“How can I not weep?” Linnet demanded, laughing through her tears. “All these years, I thought you were dead. Mother, why—why did ye never send word?”
A lifetime of pain rose up to choke her, a hot flood of repressed fury that seized her by surprise. Until that very moment, she hadn’t allowed herself to recognize how utterly betrayed her mother’s abandonment had left her, how profoundly Linnet blamed her for the bleak years that followed, as she’d eked out her living under Edward Norwood’s unsparing eye.
Even now, peering into her mother’s wide, innocent gaze, she glimpsed no hint of sorrow or remorse for Cat
riona’s utter failure to discharge a mother’s foremost duty—to protect her children.
Gently her mother released her and stepped back. Her pixie features turned remote. “I never sent word because I’m dead to the Norwoods, aye, and all the mortal realm. And so I’ll stay.”
Linnet absorbed the words like a blow to the sternum. So easily her mother excused a lifetime of hardship and suffering?
To behold her now, fresh and unspoiled as a maid, she wondered how anyone could ever have mistaken Catriona Norwood for mortal. Her beauty was too ethereal, her step too light on the earth. Her fair skin glowed gently behind the gold dust of freckles—Faerie kisses, she’d called them—scattered across her wild-rose cheeks.
Catriona was James of Scotland’s daughter, but her mother must have been something else.
A Faerie.
Slowly, Linnet stepped back, her changeable heart now aching and empty.
“Ye should have told me, Mother,” she said flatly, “or taken me with ye.”
“And how could I be doing that with a lass of five, either telling ye or taking ye?” Quick as lightning, Catriona’s famous temper flashed forth. “If I’d told ye, they’d have burned ye for a witch, and yer tender age no deterrent! And if I’d taken ye, yer father—damn his cold heart to Hades—would never have stopped hunting me.”
Like flint striking steel, her mother’s anger ignited Linnet’s. Bitter realization flooded through her.
“So ye sacrificed me and Colin for yer own escape. Do ye even know he died, Mother? Our poor sweet lad slipped and fell from the heights. Colin dashed his brains out on the cobbles while ye sang and gathered flowers in these fields!”
Catriona glanced aside, one hand drifting to the moonstone crescent at her throat—twin to the crescent the midwife Modron had worn, clearly a religious symbol. Again that sense of familiarity tugged at her, distracting her.
“I felt his passing,” her mother murmured. “He was blood of my blood, was he nay? Even if he sprang from his father’s wicked seed. But some souls are born for sacrifice. Ye left him behind yerself when ye fled Glencross, didn’t ye?”
Laura Navarre - [The Magick Trilogy 02] Page 21