Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3)

by Christian A. Brown

  He most definitely did not. “What do you mean? I know who you are. I know of you and your husband.” With fury, he added, “I’ve listened to enough whispers in my day to know of the sick appetites you two possess.”

  “Sick appetites?” Beatrice smiled; her teeth seemed larger and sharper than they had been just a moment ago.

  Alastair swallowed. “Whips, harnesses, instruments that look as if they’re made for pleasure, yet are intended for no pleasure I—or any sane man—would crave. You and he are filth.”

  Beatrice laughed. “Oh. I thought you meant the people I ate.”

  Without a doubt, her teeth had narrowed to needled points: her smile had an ovoid quality, and her mouth was now more a hole than a pressing of two lips. Suddenly, her hair twisted from white to black and blew around her head in a wavering mess, reminding Alastair of the fanning of a dangerous lizard’s crest. A gust of blackness, twin and tattered scarves that expanded into much greater shapes—sweeping things—flew from Beatrice’s back. A wind assaulted him from nowhere, carrying with it Beatrice’s stench, the sweet decay of fruits. Terror choked his breath. Gasping, he fell off the bench and crawled for his life. Shouting to the sleeping master within him, he pleaded for Charazance to intervene. Although static—a tickling, a laugh—prickled in his chest, he received no reply but a vague sense of mockery. Doomed. He was about to be eaten by a monster in the gardens of Eod.

  Beatrice called from behind him, her voice distorted, likely by all the teeth now clustering in her mouth. “I asked you not to incense me! I asked you not to wake my shadow! Idiot! Graaah! Now I must eat. I must taste passion; I must chew meat.” A skin-scraping wail escaped the tortured blood eater as she tried to fight back the goring agony in her stomach, the hunger that she was compelled to satisfy. As her slavering shadow fell upon his back and her claws reached forward to rend his spine and spill out his gushing redness, she called upon the last of her mortality and offered the wastrel a last chance at life. “A song! Sing for me! Sing for your miserable life!”

  Song? A song to save his life? A claw tore through his cloak and tunic like a knife through paper. Alastair cried out, but he was a performer—and a desperate one, at that—and he forced the scream into a note. He sang. Madness, terror, pain and all, he sang whatever tune popped into his head. “A Moonless Night” spilled from his mouth. Alastair slithered out from under the cold shadow and managed to stand while continuing the verses, hopeful now that he would not be murdered. The five lines of pain on his back, throbbing with a numb ache, gave him a forceful timbre and imbued the song with the passion, real passion, the monster had requested. After “A Moonless Night” had ended, though, Alastair discovered he hadn’t the courage to turn around.

  “One more,” she said, sounding normal again, and farther away. “How about ‘All the Fair Ladies and Gents?’”

  The request wrenched at Alastair’s heart. For a moment, he simply stood there, stunned. It was a song he never performed. To sing it would mean calling upon all the deepest pains in his life, and so he had always laughed, connived, and gambled his way out of every request to do so.

  Who is the beauty by the fire? The woman who strums and wavers notes that somehow have all the black-hearted, grizzly murderers in this grungy tavern enthralled? Her fingers move over the guitar, creating a dark breeze that echoes her hair. She does not so much pluck the strings as caress them. In her patchwork skirt and peasant’s blouse, she makes him think of wanderers, of the Romanisti—the old bards, soothsayers, and thieves of Geadhain, who once moved in caravans and lit the night with tambourine music and gin-soaked howls. These had been his people, long ago. They do not exist anymore…and yet this tanned, night-haired, and sultry bard, she who enchants with her voice, she who sparkles and smiles with her eyes, could be one of them. She stirs him with her gaze, and her thick hair of curled black ribbons, her hourglass curves, and the earthen lows and giddy highs of her voice possess a Romanisti essence he remembers. She summons her music from her soul. Her song, her ancient song, brings him back to the campfires, the chatter over Kings and Fates. He thinks of the first time he felt a young lady’s hand upon his body, tasted the burn of liquor in his throat, told a lie, picked a pocket—all the ancient, secret, and beautiful moments of his life.

  When the music ends, the whole tavern is silent. Men are too bewildered to clap. In time, though, they remember their manliness and clap and make comments about what else the swarthy temptress might be able to do with her mouth. He wants only one of two things from that mouth: another song or a name. Still enchanted, he finds himself standing before the woman, who is tuning her guitar and not paying him much heed.

  “What is your name?” he asks.

  She looks directly at him. He’ll be damned if the woman doesn’t have a Dreamer of Chance inside her, too, because she smiles as confidently as if she does.

  “Belle,” she says.

  “I told you to sing. I shall help, as you seem to have lost your voice,” said Beatrice.

  As she approached Alastair, she opened herself to the memories, to the spirit of the woman she’d long since eaten and who now lived alongside the monster in her flesh. Every now and then, Beatrice found it impossible to distinguish between Belle’s memories and her own. There were instances when she’d mistaken Moreth for a stranger, even as she had his prick inside her body. There were times when she’d woken from her dark dreamless sleeps wondering where her sons were—only to cruelly recall that her womb was anathema to life. As she sang in the rich tones of her spiritual passenger, she felt as if she were, in fact, the woman who’d kissed Alastair’s shocked pink mouth that night in the inn.

  Belle and Alastair had spent almost a whole season together in Menos, a golden summer in a city of gloom. By day, they had shopped markets and collected food and drink with which to replenish themselves after their exhaustive tumbles in bed. She remembered his skilled fingers, his kisses, even the way his armpits smelled after they’d heated the room and their bodies too much. By night, they had continued their lovemaking on stage. They had slid their voices over each other: kissed notes, thrust chords. Their duets had lulled the Iron souls of Menos into states of slowly applauding wonder. Then she’d woken one day, reached for Lucien—that’s what he’d called himself then—and grasped nothing save for emptiness and heartache. The rogue had vanished without giving her a note, a kiss, or an explanation. Belle had never learned why. Although she’d desperately prowled the streets of Menos, she could not find him, and she was eventually forced to return to Heathsholme. She’d never been given a chance to tell the wily bastard that he’d left her with more than a broken heart—he’d also left a seed of life in her womb. Belle’s memories continued to flash within Beatrice, even after the music had ended.

  “Do you remember now, Lucien?” whispered Beatrice; her hunger felt curiously sated. The song was done, and she’d sung most of it—he seemed wavering toward tears. Caressing his shoulders and back, she peeked through the torn fabric of his tunic to see whether in her rage she had envenomed the man. She had not. She’d grown adept at restraining the worst aspects of her monster, like a cobra that could release poison only when it chose to kill. The “sick appetites” she and Moreth indulged in together demanded a certain self-discipline. Belle had loved and cared for this man, or he would now be well on his way to becoming a bloated, toxic, black-seeping corpse. “She…I…We never trusted another man after you,” continued Beatrice. “She loved you, man of many names, loved you as truly as I love my husband. You had a chance to redeem yourself when Fate threw you into each other’s paths again, in Riverton. Yet you played your game with her again…” Another memory filled her.

  Nowadays, Belle takes less work in Menos. She cannot focus on her craft when the sound of every pair of boots crossing the threshold of a tavern causes her to look up and think: is it him? Now she works in Riverton and heads to Menos only when she has been hired to perform at private parties hosted by horrid—though wealthy—Iron nob
les. Heathsholme is merely a ferry and a cart ride away, a few hourglasses at most. She can thus spend most of her summers with Galivad, and his high-pitched giggles and great brown eyes are what inspire the happier, jauntier tunes she sings when not in the Iron City. Galivad is so bright and doting a son, so in love with his mother, that he almost makes her forgive the scoundrel who left him to be a bastard.

  The sound of boots announces another arrival at the tavern. As has become her habit, she glances at the entrance. A man stands in a doorway glowing with the blood of dusk. Although she can spy nothing beyond his copper shadow, her heart pulls like a leashed animal and identifies the man by his spirit scent, his presence, alone. When he walks over to her, she finds herself unable to play. She ignores the patrons, who are angry that their magikal trances have so abruptly ended. For before her is the wastrel, the scoundrel, the thief of hearts. Although she’s readied a million curses and accusations to throw at him, her hands come up empty, and instead they caress his face and pull him in for a kiss.

  When their kiss finishes, he grins. “I see that you remember me, Belle.”

  “I see now that all she was to you was a diversion.” Beatrice sighed. “A dalliance to pass the time in your strange and long life. She never had a chance to tell you all that burdened her heart with the weight of a mountain, for you didn’t even spend the night that time. You left in the dark, like a rapist. I find that term suitable, as you raped her hope, her wish for any romantic love. How dark her songs became after that, though you never heard another…The second betrayal planted a second seed, which you fertilized with your shite and then ran from. Belle couldn’t look at her new son without feeling ripped apart from the inside. So she gave the infant away. To her sister.”

  Finally, Alastair awoke. “Second seed? S-son?” One of the reasons he fuked with such abandon was that he knew he was sterile. Unable to produce an heir for his voivach—his king and biological father—he had felt such shame that he had fled from his Romanisti band. In hundreds upon hundreds of years, he’d never fathered a child. What this woman said was impossible. “I cannot have children. My seed is thin. I’m impotent.”

  Beatrice’s thoughtful air deserted her, and she shook him. “I should not feel the emotions and know the memories of prey I have consumed, and yet magik—damnable as it is—fuks everything!” Her aggression stirred the darkness in her, and she released the man before the monster could get out. She stormed over to the bench and sat. A draft blew up Alastair’s tattered tunic, and it roused him to move, walk, and tentatively retake his spot on the end of the same bench. Not sure what to say, the pair remained silent and sighed. Beatrice’s tale was far from the strangest thing to have graced Alastair’s ears, and he managed to work though his befuddlement.

  “You’ve eaten Belle…” he whispered, then checked to see whether any others were around; they remained alone. “Now she lives within you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which means that you recall everything she and I shared.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And I have a son.”

  “Two.”

  A faintness swept over Alastair: the trickster had run out of cards to play to save himself. Even so, he sought some way to free himself of this responsibility. When shite hit the window, he’d found that the most reasonable course of action was always to run and leave someone else to clean it. He’d survived centuries thanks to that code of cowardice. But the pressure of responsibility, the great and powerful memories of Belle, now swept over him so fiercely that he trembled and then shattered in a sob. The last time he’d cried this hard was when Maggie had been tortured—or perhaps when the yaagha, the witch woman of the Romanisti, had told him his fruits had no seeds.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” said Beatrice. “Belle was certain that you’d run, as you always do. I figured I would have to eat the father of my boys and then go explain the mess.”

  She patted him with her cold hand. He wept and curled further into her icy embrace. They stayed that way for many sands, each perversely pulled to the other. Beatrice quietly tingled from their intimacy, recalling sights, smells, and lustful and heart-warming memories of this man who was not her husband. The thief of hearts, meanwhile, clutched at this cruel simulacrum, this monster, who was nonetheless the only woman he’d ever truly loved.

  After his mistress had driven him away from Belle the first time, forcing him to go on an expedition to the grim shores of Terotak, he’d returned to Central Geadhain with a desire to find the woman with whom he’d made music and love. She understood him. She saw things in him that he lied about to all others. However, his quarry moved in different circles now, and whenever a convenient opportunity presented itself to hunt down Belle, his mistress seemed to find yet another errand on which to send him.

  Then one day he had walked into the Porcine Belly, a rustic sea-rocking inn built on an old steamboat in Riverton, and found Belle enchanting all those present with her music and beauty. It was as if Charazance had finally decreed that they could unite once more. Their union was not to last, though, not even till dawn. Charazance had torn him from a lover’s heavy sleep with yet another demand for yet another service—one that couldn’t wait, not even long enough for him to say goodbye. Being a coward, he had convinced himself that leaving surreptitiously would be kinder. It hadn’t been. Beatrice’s accusation was just: he’d left in the night like a criminal.

  Suddenly, a man who had lived on the elegance of lies realized how shallow he had become. Still, he had children—two sons, it seemed—and he’d found Maggie. Was it too late to make a meaningful life? Would anyone want him if they knew who he really was? Furthermore, who was he? He had forgotten himself.

  “Stevoch Vastyir,” said the man, puffing up, snorting away tears. “Disgraced prince of the Romanisti, and scoundrel of a thousand names. Earlier, you asked for my name—my true name—and that is the one with which I was born. That is the name from which I have run for centuries. But I shall run no longer; I shall lie no more.”

  Charazance filled him with electric jitters. She’d awakened and appeared amused by his turn in personality, by his suggested gallantry. Evidently, Beatrice was intrigued as well, and she smiled. “I am glad to make your acquaintance. I wish that Belle could have met the slightly less spineless man I now see before me. Bravery is only bluster until it is backed by action, though; you will have to prove you are worthy of being a father.”

  Stevoch’s stomach lurched at the thought—clearly, it was not as ready as his mind.

  “I have never birthed children myself,” admitted Beatrice, her head bowed. “But I feel the love that Belle had for her children. For both of them, even the one she could not keep. I know that motherhood and fatherhood are bright and sacred gifts that must be protected. You may think me horrible, but I am grateful to have eaten so noble a creature. I am grateful for how she has changed me, and made me mortal.”

  “Do you know where my children are?”

  Beatrice took his hands; hers were bitingly cold, but Stevoch held on regardless. “I do. A miracle of circumstance has already reunited you with one of your sons. You see him every day.”

  He did? Who?

  “A young man,” she continued. “A man to whom I have grown attached. A man who feeds me with his songs, his magikal songs—gifts from his mother. You see me with him often. We are rarely apart.”

  “Galivad?” He gasped.

  Beatrice nodded, then slammed him with another revelation. “But he is only the first of your abandoned children. I believe I also know the identity of your second son. While I never watched him grow, never saw intimations of the man he would become, he had one feature that could not be changed by the passage of time…”

  “What?” he demanded, grasping at the woman, desperate in a way that exceeded his control and understanding. Beatrice kissed his head. Consumed by one of Belle’s fantasies, she nearly kissed his lips, too. The fallen Romanisti prince, too, almost succumbed to love, seeing
past the monster of ice to the spirit no facade could conceal. By the Kings, he’d loved her. He had wanted to invite her into his life. Perhaps they could have begun a new caravan, a culture of music and celebration, one not ruled by hierarchies, crime, and expectations of manhood and lineage. However, he’d lost that chance, and she’d lost her life. He and Beatrice began to accept their bitter loss, and instead of relinquishing themselves to passion, they held one another until the memories passed. Afterward, they quickly parted, their faces became serious.

  “Our other son…” said Beatrice. “He possessed a birthmark. On his cheek. One he would never outgrow. When she saw the babe, my sister—Belle’s sister—declared that it shone like the one true—”

  “Star of the North,” finished the prince.

  Birds now returned and resumed their cheeping, though they did not approach Beatrice.

  “Then you think the same as I?” she asked.

  A spellsong: a sorcerer of music. The prince knew that a talent such as that could grow only in a garden of true powerful love and art. A vagabond prince and a woman whose voice was magik. Both of his children were royalty, and it was high time they were reunited with their traditions and inheritance—and with their father. Feeling stronger, clearer in his head than he could recall having been in centuries, Stevoch stood, kissed the hand of his departed beloved, and went in search of his family.

  “I am a father,” he declared steadily.

  Beatrice—and Belle—believed his conviction.

  VIII

  An ominous sky running with crimson—its clouds evoked an air of doom. Elissandra couldn’t pull her eyes away. You must be here, and there. Both places, but in one body. You must be the bird of sun and moon, mother and sword to the Daughter of Fate. Soar from where you are to where you must be. Whispers of the dream played a game of hide and sneak in her head.

  “Mother?” Tessa pulled at Elissandra’s dress. “We’re supposed to be working on my Arts today, not hunting for omens in the sky.”