He gently touched her nipples. She cringed at first, but then seemed to relax. Slowly he steered her to the bed and sat her down. She began to quake so violently, he feared her nervousness and tried hard not to think about why. As she lay down, he gently began to kiss her all over. She kept her arms by her sides, not touching him. He found it odd but was willing to accept it.
His hand slipped down from her breasts to her belly, to the tuft of hair below that, then between her legs. Her thighs tensed, trapping him there. Her eyes shot open and she stared at him.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, looking away from him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She was crying, and the small tears running down the sides of her face were like knives cutting into his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he said, turning away. “I should have known better.”
“No,” she said, grabbing him. “It’s not you. It’s not…what you think.”
“Then what?” he said, whirling on her.
Rachida slid away from him, her head drooping, her eyes downcast.
“I have never been with a man,” she said. “I have never even liked a man. Moira is the love of my life and has been ever since we were children.”
“So…you don’t like me?”
“No, I like you, Patrick, just not…in that way.”
Patrick couldn’t contain his exasperation.
“Then why are we here?”
She sucked on her upper lip, looking absolutely radiant despite her obvious sadness. “I wish to be with child. I wish to be with your child.”
Patrick groaned. Not this again. Not now. Why didn’t she ask him for a ride to the moon or for him to shit gold into a chamber pot? There were plenty of other impossible things she could try to barter out of him for sex.
“I see,” he said, sighing. “I thank you for telling me so, but I’m sorry to say, you’re going to be greatly disappointed.”
“Why?”
“I can have no children.”
That caused a sad grin to stretch across Rachida’s exquisite countenance.
“I know of your…problem,” she said. “Your sister told me. I have taken precautions in that regard.”
“You what? How?”
“A little bit of research. A little bit of magic. Antar helped greatly in that regard. And Peytr’s library is extensive.”
“And that’s all it takes? I won’t have to lick a toad or eat a bunch of mushrooms? Because I’ve tried both, at my sisters’ behest, and I assure you, neither had the promised effect.”
“No toads, no mushrooms.”
“Oh.” Patrick leaned back on the bed. He looked to Rachida again and narrowed his eyes. “But why me?”
“You are from one of Ashhur’s First Families,” she said, running a hand through that exotic curly hair of hers. “It had to be you. Haven was built for the solidarity of all peoples. All who want to live within our borders can do so. I have always wanted a child, and I want that child to reflect the values that we’ve instilled in this land. What better symbol than a child born of the offspring of the First Families of both gods?”
Patrick really didn’t think such a child would be all that special or amazing, but then again, it wouldn’t take much convincing for him to give her what she wanted. The word please was really all that was necessary, and even that was debatable.
“You are certain your spells and whatnot will work?” he asked.
She bit her lip.
“As certain as I can be,” she said.
He reached out and fanned his fingers over her eyes, closing them.
“Despite my appearance, I do know my way around a bedroom. If you’ve never been with a man, then let me guide you. Don’t look if you don’t want to. Think of Moira or your hope for a baby—whatever you need to do. Just let me know if I hurt you.”
“You’re still willing to do this?” asked Rachida in a faraway voice, keeping her eyes closed. “You do not find this an insult to your honor?”
Despite the bizarreness of the past hour, Patrick let out a heartfelt laugh.
“Trust me, Rachida, I’ve been insulted in far, far worse ways than this.”
CHAPTER
21
A sentry patrolled the bridge in the deep of night, blocking any chance Crian had at crossing, as usual. He lingered at the edge of the Ghostwood, peering around the trunk of a giant spruce tree, waiting, hoping he might get his chance soon. The sentinel disappeared around the bend, offering him a brief opening, but a replacement soon appeared. He fell back into the safety of the woods, cursing to himself.
There was smoke in the distance, appearing over the sepia-colored grasses like a bulbous black snake. A cookfire, he assumed, lit by the unit that had been sent to capture him. He snuck back through the trees to the small camp he’d made untold days before. It was a rustic setup, nothing but a pile of clothes for a bed and a torn-apart nightshirt tied to a tree for shelter. He’d lost his candles while in flight, dropping them in the middle of the dark and confusing woods. Not that he minded too badly. These woods, and the lengthy river that ran through them, were all that had saved him from capture. All throughout Neldar, the Ghostwood was considered a haunted and evil place. Superstitions and legends abounded of how the ghosts of the dead resided there alongside the lingering specters of the creatures that Celestia had supposedly spirited from Dezrel to pave the way for humankind.
But Crian knew better. Of all his family, he was the only one whose relationship with Jacob Eveningstar had been amicable, and when he was younger—before the First Man had left the east to take up permanent residence in Ashhur’s Paradise—Jacob had taken pains to teach him the topography of all of Dezrel, disclosing what was legend and what was not, describing the many natural oddities that existed throughout the land’s four corners. Jacob had laughed off the legends of Ghostwood, which was known for its haunting murmurs.
At the center of the forest lies a bubbling hot spring. The heat creates gas that must escape, which it does through tiny gaps in the ground. When those gaps breathe, it sounds like moaning, or a steady, sinister whisper. But that is all there is. There is no such thing as ghosts, child, and if they once existed, they are as gone as the dragons are.
Crian slumped down cross-legged beneath his shoddily constructed lean-to and, reaching into his sack, removed the mirror he’d brought with him when fleeing Omnmount. He placed it in his lap and took a swig of stream water, which stung his throat with its odd, sulfurous tang. He stared at his reflection in the vibrant moonlight. Gently he touched at the silver strands of his hair, which were poking through more and more now that he lacked the means to hide them.
So be it, he thought. I’m never going back to Veldaren, and I will never sit at my father’s left hand again. When I take Nessa and Moira away from here, we’ll flee deep into the Paradise. I can grow old there.
He didn’t know if his plan would work, but he had heard that Ashhur was a loving and forgiving god, with an undying affection for the pathetic and downtrodden, and none were more pathetic and downtrodden than he. All he did know was that he could never return home again. Avila’s words were proof of that. If all of Haven were to be massacred, including his own excommunicated sister, there was no mercy to be found in Karak’s lands. Crian’s own hand had signed his death warrant with a flourish of blood the moment he brutalized Avila. It was an act he regretted. He truly did love his sister, even though their relationship was contentious. But for her to do what she did, to come on to him like that and then taunt him with promises of Moira’s and Nessa’s deaths.…
That was in the past, a different problem for a different day. If he wanted to survive, he had to focus on the present, and right now his greatest dilemma was finding a way to cross Karak’s Bridge and escape into the delta. Hardly an easy task. The soldiers chasing him were his own, men he’d trained, men he’d considered his brothers. They knew he lurked in the forest, and constant patrols hemmed him inside. Always their bows
were at the ready. Crian couldn’t even risk wandering deeper into the woods so that he could jump into the river and bypass the bridge entirely. Should they hear him or spot him swimming along, he’d have no safety from their arrows. His only saving grace was time—and their superstitions.
“It’s a shame you’re not with me, Nessa,” Crian said, sighing at his exhausted reflection. “We’d have all the privacy in the world in here.”
A high-pitched whistle suddenly bit at his eardrums and made him wince. He glanced all around him, but there was nothing there. The whistle sounded again, again coming from nowhere. Something tickled at the back of his mind, and as if by instinct he glanced down at the mirror that lay in his lap. His lips quivered, and his eyes nearly bulged from his head.
The mirror no longer showed his own reflection; instead, a vaporous apparition fogged over the reflective glass. He could make out the shape of a face, or perhaps a skull of some sort, along with a deep red outline that shimmered when the smoke inside the mirror billowed. He wiped at it with his sleeve despite his fright and the pain of the constant whistle in his ears. Nothing. No change, just the phantom leering out at him. A paralyzing tremor froze his limbs and set the nerves behind his eyes to throbbing, as if invisible lightning had coursed through him.
Go.
The word entered his head much like the tip of an arrow, piercing the front of his brain and making him cry out in surprise. He collapsed to his side, the mirror sliding off his lap, now clear of smoke and haunting images. He rolled on the ground, over leaves and jutting roots, pain shooting through his entire being. Pressure built in his head, threatening to explode his skull, gradually becoming more and more awful until he let out a primal scream of terror. The pain began to dissolve, but that word kept repeating in his head, louder than before. This time he listened.
GO!
More screams, these not from his own mouth. He jerked his head up and looked around, but the forest was empty save for the chattering birds in the canopy overhead. He scurried to his feet, snatching his sword from its dry place beneath the lean-to, and stumbled down the path he had created. Branches tore at him, scratching at his face as he ran in the darkness. He made it to the path’s end, where he used to sit for hours, day and night, watching the soldiers safeguard the bridge. The screaming multiplied the closer to the forest’s edge he ran, and in his waking nightmare he imagined a parade of hideous monsters slipping out of the shadowed gaps of the world, lopping off heads and devouring entrails, turning the southern banks of the Rigon into a bloody form of the fiery underworld.
And then he reached the carnage at the edge of the forest. Soldiers, those still alive anyway, fled in all directions. Chasing them, almost lazily, was a formless mass of smoke that shimmered black and silver in the moonlight. It surrounded the men, gray tendrils whipping from its swirling center, knocking them aside as they shrieked in unimaginable terror, and then disappeared into the tall grass in a spray of red. The smoke was gradually moving away from him, progressing toward the opposite side of the Gods’ Road. Crian watched, his feet made of lead, his mind locking tight. What he saw—it just couldn’t be. Jacob couldn’t have been this wrong about the forest.
Again that voice, this time softer, more serene, yet oddly more urgent than ever.
Go.
The spirits of the Ghostwood were real. They had watched over him, lurking in his thoughts, stealing into his dreams. Had they felt his love for Nessa? Did they sense his frustration and anger toward the soldiers who chased him? This shapeless creation before him—was that its normal form, or could it shift and change, perhaps even becoming human?
He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to know. Before him was an opening, and he would not dare refuse the spirits’ command. Crian burst from the line of trees, running at a full sprint through the open space. All that separated him from the bridge was a couple hundred feet of green grass. He didn’t dare take his eyes off his goal, didn’t want to even acknowledge the misty cloud that slowly receded away, leaving trails of body parts strewn about the grass. As he ran through its lingering presence, a chill seeped into the very depths of his bones. He held his breath, waiting for it to take him, to crush him like any other mortal, mocking his hopes.
It never did. His feet churned up bits of grass and chunks of dirt and rock, and his ears still rang with the echoes of the soldiers’ piercing screams. By the time his boots fell hard on the steel-reinforced granite surface of Karak’s Bridge, he felt like sobbing.
It took much less time to cross the bridge, and once he was on the other side, he spied a large structure of some sort in the near distance, situated at the base of the mountain that rose behind it—the Temple of the Flesh, he assumed—and then he was flying alongside the river, keeping up a constant speed, no matter how dicey the footing became. Integrity swung useless in his hand. A part of him wanted to stop, to rest his burning chest, but he didn’t dare. His footfalls would not slow until the Ghostwood was banished from his sight. Besides, there was still the chance he was lost in a delusion or a dream, that Avila’s men, his men would come storming into the delta. These lands were considered neutral no longer. It was enemy territory now, and according to his sister, it was full of enemies to be crushed.
The terrain became marshy and damp, and finally Crian’s mind returned to him. He collapsed to his knees, gasping in air. He couldn’t run further. He just couldn’t. A glance behind him showed Karak’s Bridge in the distance, and beyond that.…
He looked away. The Ghostwood terrified him, and a deep part of him wanted to never, ever think about it again. When his breathing grew more controlled, Crian rose back to his feet. He had to be careful now. With things as they were, there was no guarantee he would be treated as a guest rather than a threat. Sticking to the cover of the twisting wetland mothertrees and swampy vegetation, he struggled through the quagmire, his boots constantly getting sucked beneath the mud or ensnared in vines. He heard recognizable animal sounds: the repetitive bleats of the whippoorwills, the throaty exclamations of whooping cranes, and the ominous splash of large, hidden bodies dropping into the bog. He kept his wits about him, remembering the lessons Moira had taught him about staying alive when trapped in the delta swamp. Head down, keep moving, don’t turn around for anything. This wasn’t his first venture into the wilds, after all. Hopefully it wouldn’t be his last.
It was morning by the time he found the landmark he was seeking—a vast garden of blood roses and orchids that exploded in red and white brilliance from the drab greens and browns of the swamp. The sound of the ocean rumbled in his ears, not very far away. He immediately climbed the bank, yelping as he narrowly avoiding the snapping fangs of a frightened bogsnake. Keeping close to the spiky vines of the roses, he worked his way through a tightly woven copse of trees. When he emerged on the other side, he breathed a sigh of relief, almost falling to his knees and crying his thanks to the sky. A small, brown-rooted courtyard led to the rear of a simple log cottage with a hay-lined roof. Moira’s cottage. He was here at last.
Throwing caution to the wind, he went straight for the front door. He didn’t care who saw him now—he had no secrets left to hide. He rapped lightly on the wood, a grin stretching across his face, and tapped his foot impatiently as he waited for Moira to answer.
She never did.
Gently he leaned his weight into the door. It rotated inward, unbarred. He stepped inside, hesitating just before he crossed the threshold. The windows were unshuttered, letting in the light of the rising sun as well as buzzing insects that circled the bowl of fruit sitting on Moira’s simple kitchen table. It was the same table they sat around whenever he visited, chatting about loved ones, the taste of the many luscious and exotic soups Moira would set to boil in her inglenook, the beauty of the sunrise over the vast eastern waterways—anything but the life of enforcement and violence he lived outside this peaceful delta.
Moira’s simple three-room cabin, filled lovingly with a lifetime’s worth of tr
inkets and curiosities, was his own sort of haven. For the first time in his thirty-eight years of life he appreciated the significance of the place’s name. Haven: a place of safety and shelter, a refuge for the unwanted, the outcasts…but this place would be none of those things once his father had his way.
Swatting at a large horsefly that was hovering in front of his face, Crian pivoted on his heels and left the cabin. If his sister wasn’t here, there was only one other place she could be. He strolled out the door, making sure to close it behind him, and veered left down the dirt cart path that passed in front of the property. He walked casually, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. This far south, the delta was sparsely populated. Not twenty years ago it had been a disorganized harbor for miscreants and starving thieves who dwelled in the swamps and survived by assaulting passing wagons en route to the meager docks that bordered the Thulon Ocean. Deacon Coldmine had led the drive to clean the place up, aided by Rachida and Peytr Gemcroft. The scum had scattered in all directions. It was in the delta that Crian’s carriage had been attacked that fateful day he met Nessa and her malformed brother. Crian had given up his sword in thanks for their aid. The thought of the blade put a smile on his face. Winterbone, a beast of a thing he’d had difficulty carrying. Father had been none too pleased to learn he had “lost” it, but of course his reaction would have been far worse if he’d learned the arduous thing had been given to an offspring of Ashhur. Crian knew the mutant DuTaureau still had it, and that thought brought his mind back to Nessa.
Fifteen minutes later, the Gemcroft Estate loomed before him, rising above the surrounding mothertrees and apple blossoms like a mythical stone monster. What had started out as a simple log cottage had, over time, grown into a building whose immensity was only dwarfed by the amount of ardor that had gone into its construction. The stones making up its walls had been extracted from the Pebble Islands and were inlaid with traces of precious gems. The roof was made from the halved logs that had formed Peytr’s original cottage, painted with exotic dyes produced from the ink of a hundred thousand miniature squids farmed off the delta’s shores.
Dawn of Swords Page 32