Nora Roberts's Circle Trilogy

by Nora Roberts

  Moira didn’t dream. She simply dropped into a void and floated there. She had Hoyt to thank for the hours of peace, she thought as she began to wake. Hours of peace where she hadn’t seen a child’s face blurred together with that of a monster.

  Now there was work to be done. The months of preparation had whittled down to days that could be counted in hours. While the vampire queen mourned, the queen of Geall would do whatever needed to be done next.

  She stirred, sat up. And saw Cian sitting in the chair near the simmering fire.

  “It’s still shy of dawn,” he said. “You could use more sleep.”

  “I’ve had enough. How long have you watched over me?”

  “I don’t count the time.” She’d slept like the dead, he thought now. He hadn’t counted the time, but he had counted her heartbeats.

  “Your wounds?”

  “Healing.”

  “You’d have had fewer of them, but I was weak. I won’t be again.”

  “I told you to go. Didn’t you trust me to deal with two of them, especially when one was half my size? Less.”

  She leaned back. “Clever of you to try to turn this into a matter of my trust in your fighting skills instead of my lack of spine.”

  “If you’d had less spine and more sense, you’d have gone when I told you to.”

  “Bollocks. The time for running is well done, and I would never have left you. I love you. I should have taken him with the sword, quickly. Instead, I wavered, and tried to find a way to drive him off so I wouldn’t be the one to end him. That moment of weakness could have cost us both. Believe me when I tell you it’s burned out of me.”

  “And the misplaced guilt that goes with it?”

  “May take a bit longer, but it won’t get in the way. We have only two days left. Two days.” She looked toward the window. “It’s quiet. This time just before dawn is quiet. She killed a young boy, and came to love what she’d made of it.”

  “Yes. It doesn’t make either of them less of a monster.”

  “Two days,” she said again, almost in a whisper. Something inside her was already dying. “You’ll go when this is done, if we win, if we don’t, you’ll go back through the Dance. I’ll never see you again, or touch you, or wake to find you’ve watched over me in the dark.”

  “I’ll go,” was all he said.

  “Will you come, hold me now, before the sun comes?”

  He rose, went to her. Sitting beside her, he drew her against him so her head lay on his shoulder.

  “Tell me you love me.”

  “As I’ve loved nothing else.” He met her lips when she turned them to his.

  “Touch me. Taste me.” She shifted so she lay over him, trembling body, seeking lips. “Take from me.”

  What choice did he have? She was surrounding him, saturating his senses, stoking his needs till they burned. Offering as much as demanding as she pressed his lips to her breast.

  “Take more. More and more.”

  Her mouth was hot and desperate as she pulled away clothes, her teeth nipping at his jaw in sharp, quick bites while her breath shuddered.

  She was alive now, burning and alive, with everything inside her rising, aching. How could she step back from this? The love, the heat, the life.

  If she was destined to die in battle, then she’d accept it. But how could she live—day after day, night after night—without her heart?

  She straddled him, taking him in, hips whipping as she fought to feel more, to take more. To know more.

  Her eyes gleamed, almost a madness, and stayed locked on his. Then she leaned to him, and her hair fell, curtaining them both, trapping him in its texture and fragrance.

  “Love me.”

  “I do.”

  His fingers dug into her hips as she drove him toward the jagged edge of peak.

  “Touch me, taste me, take me.” On a cry, she lowered her throat to his lips, pressed that soft flesh with its pounding blood against him. “Change me.”

  It was beyond him to stop the flood, it gushed through him, hot, strong, turbulent—and through her, he knew, as her body bucked and quaked. And shuddering, she rubbed that throbbing pulse against his mouth.

  “Make me what you are. Give me forever with you.”

  “Stop.” As his body shook, he shoved her away with a force strong enough to nearly send her to the floor. “You’d use what I am against me?”

  “Yes.” Her chest burned with the tears that streamed through her voice. “Anything, anyone. Why should we find this only to lose it? Two days, only two days left. I want more.”

  “There’s no more to have.”

  “There could be. Lilith loved what she’d made, I saw it. You love me now, and I love you. We wouldn’t stop with the change.”

  “You know nothing of it.”

  “I do.” She grabbed his hand as he rolled out of bed. “There’s nothing I haven’t read. How can we just turn away from each other, and go on? Why should I choose death on the field rather than by your hand? It’s not true death if you change me.”

  He pulled his hand free, then seemed to sigh. With a gentleness she couldn’t see in his eyes, he framed her face. “Not for all the worlds.”

  “If you loved me—”

  “A poor female trick, that phrase. Not worthy of you. If I loved you less, I might do exactly what you ask. I have before.”

  He moved to the window. Dawn was upon them, but there was no need to draw the drapes. Dawn had come with rain.

  “I cared for a woman once, long ago. And she loved me, or loved what she believed I was. I changed her because I wanted to keep her.” He turned back to where Moira knelt on the bed, silently weeping. “She was beautiful and amusing and bright. We’d make interesting companions, I thought. And we were, for almost a decade until she ran afoul of a well-aimed torch.”

  “It wouldn’t be that way.”

  “She was twice the killer I was. She liked children best. She was beautiful and amusing and bright—and no less so for the change. Only once she was like me, she put those qualities to use luring toddlers.”

  “I could never—”

  “You could,” he said flatly. “And most certainly would. I won’t turn the brightest light of my life into a monster. No, I’d never see you like me.”

  “I don’t see a monster when I look at you.”

  “I would be, again, if I did this. It wouldn’t just be you who changed, Moira. Would you damn me all over again?”

  She pressed her hands to her eyes. “No. No. Stay then.” She dropped her hands. “Stay with me, as we are. Or take me with you. Once Geall is safe, I can leave it in my uncle’s hands, or—”

  “And what? Live in the shadows with me? I can’t give you children. I can’t give you any kind of true life. How will you feel in ten years, in twenty, when you age and I don’t? When you look in the mirror and see in your nature what you’ll never see in mine? We’ve already stolen these weeks. They’ll have to be enough for you.”

  “Can they be for you?”

  “They’re more than I ever had, or thought to. I can’t be a man, Moira, not even for you. But I can feel hurt, and you’re hurting me now.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I feel as if everything in me is being squeezed. My heart, my lungs. I had no right to ask you, I know it. I knew it even when I did. Knew it was selfish and wrong. And weak,” she added, “when I’d sworn not to be weak again. I know it can’t be. I know it can’t. What I don’t know is if you can forgive me.”

  He came to her again, sat beside her. “The woman I changed didn’t know what I was until that moment. If she had, she’d have run screaming. You know what I am. You asked because you’re human. If I don’t need to ask you to forgive me for being what I am, you don’t need to ask me to forgive you for being what you are.”

  Chapter 19

  For most of the day, Moira worked with Glenna forming, forging and charming the fireballs. Every hour or so two or three people would come into the tower and
haul away what was done to store them in their stockpile outside.

  “I never thought I’d say it,” Moira began after the fourth straight hour, “but magic can be tedious.”

  “Hoyt would say what we’re doing here is nearly as much science as magic.” Glenna swiped at her damp face with her arm. “And yes, both can be boring as ever-living hell. Still, you’re doing this with me cuts back on the time and increases the payload. Hoyt’s bound to be closeted with Cian over maps and strategy all day.”

  “Which is probably just as tedious.”

  “Betcha more.”

  Once again Glenna walked the line of the hardened balls they’d made, hands stretched out, eyes focused as she chanted. From where she stood at the worktable Moira could see the constant use of power was taking its toll.

  The shadows under Glenna’s green eyes seemed to deepen every hour. And each time the flush the miserable heat brought to her cheeks faded, her skin looked more pale, more drawn.

  “You should stop for a bit,” Moira told her when Glenna completed the line. “Get some air, have a bite.”

  “I want to finish this batch, but I will take a minute first. It reeks of sulphur in here.” She walked to the window, leaned out to draw in cool, fresh air. “Oh. This is a sight, Moira, come look. Dragons circling over tent city.”

  Moira wandered over to watch dragons, most of them mounted by riders training them to dive or turn on command. They were quick studies, she mused, and made a bold, bright show against a hazy sky.

  “You’re wishing you could take a picture of it, or sketch it at least.”

  “I’ll spend the next ten years doing sketches and artwork of what I’ve seen these past months.”

  “I’ll miss you so much when this is done and you’re not here anymore.”

  Understanding, Glenna draped an arm over Moira’s shoulders, then pressed a kiss to her hair. “You know if there’s a way to come, we will. We’ll visit you. We have the key, we have the portal, and if what we’ve done here doesn’t earn the gods’ blessing, nothing could.”

  “I know. As horrible as these past months have been in so many ways, they’ve given me so much. You and Hoyt and Blair. And…”

  “Cian.”

  Moira kept her eyes on the dragons. “He won’t come back to visit, with or without the blessing of the gods.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He won’t, even if it were possible for him, he won’t come back to me.” Little deaths, Moira thought, every hour, every day. “I knew it all along. Wanting it different doesn’t change what is, or can’t be. It’s one of the things Morrigan was telling me, about the time of knowing. Using my head and my heart together. Both my head and my heart know we can’t be together. If we tried it would tear at us until neither of us could survive it. I tried to deny that, disgracing myself, hurting him.”

  “How?”

  Before Moira could answer, Blair strode in. “What’s up? A little girl time? What’s the topic? Fashion, food or men? Oh-oh,” she added when they turned and she saw their faces, “must be men, and me with no chocolate to pass around. Listen, I’ll get out of your way, I just wanted to let you know the last incoming troops have been sighted. They’ll be here within the hour.”

  “That’s good news. No, stay a moment, would you?” Moira asked. “You should know what I was about to confess. Both of you have put your heart and blood into all of this. You’ve been the best friends to me I’ve ever had, or will have.”

  “You’ve got a serious voice on there, Moira. What did you do? Decide to turn to the dark side and hang out with Lilith?”

  “It’s not so far from that. I asked Cian to change me.”

  Blair nodded as she walked closer. “I don’t see any bites on your neck.”

  “Why aren’t you angry, or even surprised? Either one of you.”

  “I think,” Glenna said slowly, “I might have done the same in your place. I know I’d have wanted to. If we walk away from this, Blair and I walk away with our men. You can’t. Do you want us to judge you for trying to find some way to change that?”

  “I don’t know. It might be easier if you did. I used his feelings for me as weapons. I asked—all but begged him to make me like him when we were at our most intimate.”

  “Below the belt,” Blair stated. “If I were going to do it, that’s the method I’d have picked. He turned you down, which tells me there can’t be any doubt what you are to him. Back to me again, I’d feel better knowing he was going to be just as miserable and alone as I was when he had to take a walk.”

  Moira let out a surprised and muffled laugh. “You don’t mean that.”

  “I said it to lighten things up, but down in the gut? I don’t know. I might. I’m sorry you’re getting the shaft in this. Sincerely.”

  “Ah well, maybe I’ll have a bit of luck and die in battle tomorrow night. That way I won’t be miserable and alone after all.”

  “Positive thinking. That’s the ticket.” In lieu of chocolate, Blair gave her a hug. And met Glenna’s eyes over Moira’s shoulder.

  It was important, Moira knew, for the last of the troops to be welcomed by their queen, and to show herself to as many as she could in the final hours before the last march. She walked among the tents as twilight came, as did the other members of the royal family. She spoke to all she could. She dressed as a warrior, with her cloak pinned with a simple claddaugh brooch and the sword of Geall at her side.

  It was well after dark when she returned to the house, and to what she knew would be the final strategy meeting with her circle.

  They were already gathered around the long table with only Larkin standing apart, scowling down at the fire. Something new, she thought with a little quiver in her belly. Something more.

  She unpinned her cloak as she studied the faces of those she’d come to know so well.

  “What plans are you making that has Larkin so worried?”

  “Sit down,” Glenna told her. “Hoyt and I have something. If it works,” she continued as Moira walked to the table, “it would win this.”

  As Moira listened, the little quiver became a frozen knot. So many risks, she thought, so many contingencies, and so many ways to fail. For Cian most of all.

  But when she looked into his eyes, she understood he’d already made his decision.

  “It lays most on you,” she said to him. “The timing…if it’s off by a moment—”

  “It lays on all of us. We all knew what we were taking on when we started this.”

  “No one of us should be risked more than the others,” Larkin interrupted. “We may sacrifice one of us without need, without—”

  “Do you think I bring this lightly?” Hoyt spoke quietly. “I lost my brother once, then found him again. Found more, I think, than either of us had before. Now doing this, doing what I was charged to do, I may lose him again.”

  “I’m not getting a sense of confidence in my abilities.” There was a tankard on the table, and Cian lifted it to pour ale. “Apparently surviving over nine hundred years isn’t considered a strong point on my résumé.”

  “I’d hire you,” Blair said, and held out her cup. “Yeah, it’s risky, a lot of steps, a lot of variables, but if it works, it’d be one hell of a thing. I’m figuring you’ll make it through.” She tapped her cup to Cian’s. “So this has my vote.”

  “I’m not a strategist,” Moira began. “And my magic is limited. You can do this?” she asked Hoyt.

  “I believe it can be done.” He reached for Glenna’s hand.

  “We got the idea, actually, from something you said back at Castle Geall,” Glenna told her. “And we’re using Geall’s symbols. All of them. It would be strong magic, and—I think—though it takes blood to bind it, pure.”

  “I believe separately we have more true power than Midir.” Hoyt scanned the faces around him. “Together, we’ll crush him, and the rest.”

  Moira turned to Cian. “If you stayed back? A signal to you, to all of us onc
e all the steps have been taken—”

  “Lilith’s blood on the battleground is essential. She has to be wounded, at least, by one of the six of us. And Lilith’s mine,” Cian said flatly. “If I get through or don’t, she’s mine. For King.”

  For King, Moira thought, and for himself as well. Once he’d been innocent, too. Once he’d been a victim and his life taken from him. She’d shed his blood, fed him hers. Now, what they’d shared might be vital to the survival of mankind.

  She rose, carrying the weight of it, and walked to Larkin. “You’ve already decided.” She looked back at the four who sat at the table. “Four of the six, so it would be done as you’ve planned however Larkin and I vote on this. But it’s best if we’re together. If the circle agrees, with no breaks, no doubts.” She took Larkin’s hand now. “It’s best.”

  “All right. All right.” Larkin nodded. “We’re together then.”

  “If we could go over it oncemore.” Moira came back to the table. “The details and the movements of it, then we’ll pass this on to the squadron leaders.”

  It would be like a brutal and bloody dance, Moira thought. Sword, sacrifice and magic playing the tune. And the blood, of course. There must always be blood.

  “The first preparations in the morning then.” She’d risen to pour and pass short cups of whiskey for each. “Then we’ll each do our part, and the gods willing, we’ll end this. And end it, fittingly I think, with the symbols of Geall. Well, to us then and the hell with them.”

  When they’d drunk, she walked over to the vielle. “Would you play?” she asked Cian. “There should be music. We’ll have music, and send it out to the night. I hope she hears it, and trembles.”

  “You don’t play,” Hoyt began.

  “I didn’t speak Cantonese once upon a time. Things change.” Still Cian felt a little odd, sitting down with the vielle, testing the strings for tune.

  “What is that thing?” Blair wondered. “Like a violin with gout?”

  “Well, it would be a predecessor.” He began to play, slowly, feeling his way back from war to music. The oddness faded away with the quiet, haunting notes.