“Cordelia, please.”
“Goodbye.”
She pulled the hood over her face. The sealskin flowed together, enveloping her in her true form as she dove into the starlit waters of Lake Meera, to the cold, silvery cheers of the merfolk below.
Chapter 25
Long Shadows
We didn’t linger to listen to the Mermish songs as they welcomed back the land-lost selkie. I supported Alastair up the cliff path, Akarra following overhead, carrying in her claws what remained of his armor. Selwyn refused to come. He hadn’t moved from where Cordelia had left him, unseeing eyes staring at the water. After my third plea fell on grief-deafened ears, we gave up and headed back to the castle without him.
No servants met us at the door. Rhys stopped us by the garden gate, but he took in the sight of a shivering, half-naked Alastair, noted the heat shimmering around Akarra’s open mouth, and let us pass without questions.
Niall Selwyn did not return to the castle.
Tending Alastair as he recovered and seeing to Mòrag’s broken leg took up my attention for the rest of the night. Whispered rumors acquainted the servants with the details of what had happened on Long Quay, and by the next day the castle was in an uproar. Over the course of the morning Rhys and Chirrorim rounded up some of the braver servants to scour the shore from Long Quay to the dead mermaid’s beach, but they returned without success. Selwyn had disappeared. That evening the stableboy found his master’s prize stallion missing.
“We ought to go after him,” Rhys said after the stableboy slunk away, ushered out of the Lake Hall by Chirrorim. “Clearly the man’s not in his right mind.”
“Where do you suggest we start?” Alastair asked. He wore his bearskin cloak, clasped at the throat and tucked well around his shoulders. Since we’d returned to the castle he’d kept it close, even when sleeping, and in every room we entered he gravitated toward the fireplace. We’d eaten dinner at a small table pulled almost onto the hearth. “Do you have any idea where he’s going?”
“How should I know?”
“You knew him.”
“Not that well.”
“I don’t think he wants to be found,” I said.
Rhys sprang to his feet. “Yes, it’s all very well for you. You two can climb on your dragon tomorrow and leave all this behind you, but some of us have to live here. Lord Selwyn had no heir and no other family, which means that when word of his absence gets out, there’ll be chaos in the lake towns.” He paced along the hearth. “The magistrates will want to call for a new lord sentinel, and the lords from Langloch and the coast will want their share in the decision. The lord from Langdred has two sons. He may want to see his youngest set up in Castle Selwyn before the year is out. And that’s not counting—”
“Captain, lest you forget, Selwyn’s not actually dead,” Alastair said.
“He may as well be. And anyway, it doesn’t matter. If the local lords and magistrates won’t fight for the position of lord sentinel, they’ll fight to be steward of the castle until he gets back, which would give them the lordship anyway. Whoever holds the castle holds the lake. It’s always been that way.” He stopped, considering. “We could always pretend.”
Alastair and I looked at each other.
“Yes, why not?” Rhys said. “No one but you witnessed what happened on the quay. If we spread the word that he’s ill, we could buy a few weeks’ time.”
“I think you underestimate the intelligence of some of the townspeople,” I said. And the speed with which gossip travels. With any luck, or perhaps lack of luck, word of Selwyn’s disappearance had already reached Morianton and the surrounding villages. “Captain, why not just let the magistrates choose a steward?”
Rhys frowned. “Perhaps you’re right. We’re only guests here, after all, and—speaking of which, how much longer do you plan to stay? You won’t want to get caught anywhere in the mountains when the snows come. I’d bet we’ll see the first storm before the fortnight is out. We’ve gone too long without one already.”
He spoke in the fast, friendly way that suggested he wanted nothing more than for us to take his advice and ask no more questions. I hid a humorless smile. He might as well have handed us a written invitation to stay.
“We’ll return to Pendragon as soon as we’re certain Castle Selwyn and the towns nearby are safe again,” Alastair said. “In the meantime, we owe it to the cantor at Morianton to tell her what’s happened.”
“Unless you think she’ll try to take over the castle herself?” I said.
“Brigsley-Baine?” Rhys said. “No, she’s a decent sort. But she will tell the magistrate.”
The fact that my sarcasm had passed without so much as a lifted eyebrow proved his mind was truly elsewhere. “With the stories the servants are already spreading I’d think it a miracle if they don’t already know something happened,” I told him.
“Aliza’s right, Captain,” Alastair said. “He was their lord. They deserve to know. To let them think otherwise is dishonorable.”
“We—oh, very well. I’ll ride out in the morning.”
“Akarra and I will come with you.”
Rhys agreed without much enthusiasm. After they set on a time and a meeting place he bid us goodnight and excused himself.
“Do you think he’s going to try to run?” I asked after he’d gone.
“No,” Alastair said carefully. “He’s mercenary through and through. Whatever he’s afraid of, he won’t leave until he’s sure it won’t work out in his favor. I’ve seen his like before.”
“What do you think he’s hiding?”
“Something he didn’t have to worry about when Selwyn was around,” Alastair said with a thoughtful expression. “I’ll keep an eye on him tomorrow.”
I leaned back in my chair and stared at my unfinished food. The bread was burnt and the meat was cold, but that wasn’t what I found unappealing. Nausea no longer plagued me, but in its place was another kind of emptiness, a sad, small hunger that no food could satisfy. Thoughts I’d pushed away since Cordelia’s disappearance came creeping back, dark thoughts of dreamless sleep, of hollow sympathies and dead men walking and eyes too full for tears.
“I haven’t forgotten, you know,” Alastair said after a minute.
“Forgotten what?”
“Lyii-Lyiishen.”
The unexpectedness brought me back from the edge of the mental precipice. “The mermaid?”
“I swore an oath. Our work here isn’t done yet.”
I thought of the Mermish king’s warning of a hard winter with a pang of homesickness. Exposing the Green Lady and her haunting of Castle Selwyn had only been half of the contract, and I had the dreadful feeling it would prove to be the easier half. The memory of the Wydrick-thing on the beach still made me shudder. “I know.”
“Aliza,” he said in a quiet voice, “I didn’t ask before, but I’m asking you now. Stay here tomorrow.”
Protests rose inside me, old, familiar complaints I’d clutched to my chest like poisonous jewels since the moment I’d taken the Daired name. One by one I held them up to my mind’s eye and, for the first time, saw them clearly for what they were. Their luster had faded; their facets were chipped and broken. I tossed them aside in disgust. All that bravado, that recklessness, that desperation to prove myself: how empty and arrogant it seemed now. Alastair was right all those weeks ago. I’d seen the battlefield, but I’d never truly understood it. I’d never known loss like this.
“I won’t go wandering the mountainside,” I said, “but I can’t do nothing.”
My look must’ve told him the truth my voice refused to carry, because he didn’t try to dissuade me. “I know. I wouldn’t want you to, and we need to know what we’re facing on the human side.”
“Politics?”
“Politics. Find out what Mòrag and the servants have to say about the local magistrates.”
I nodded. Bells chimed in the distance, marking the late hour. The crackle of the fire echoed ar
ound the empty room, casting the only light aside from the candlesticks on the table. In Selwyn’s absence lights no longer burned at all hours and darkness had crept back into the corners of the castle, but it was a homely, domestic darkness, and it hid no evils. I thought of what awaited us tomorrow. If Alastair and Rhys wanted to catch the cantor and magistrate first thing in the morning, they’d—
I straightened in my chair. Those weren’t bells.
“It’s the merfolk,” Alastair said.
We listened. The strains of a Mermish lament penetrated stone and glass, blood and bone, piercing me to the soul. Tears gathered in my eyes but I refused to let them fall. No words in Mermish, Eth, or any other language could fit the shape of what I felt. “It’s for Lyii-Lyiishen, isn’t it?” I asked. “They’re still mourning her.”
“Yes.”
Another minute passed. The fire burned lower. The shadows lengthened.
“It doesn’t ever end.”
“Someday it will. Not today. Not tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe not next week or next month or next year, but someday.”
“Do you know for certain?”
He reached for my hand, but the table was too wide, and there were too many things between us. “We’ll have another, Aliza.”
“That doesn’t change what happened.”
“I know.”
“And what if we don’t have another child?” Desperate words tumbled from dry lips. “What if we can’t? She said I carry death inside me. What if she’s right?”
“She wasn’t.”
“How can we be sure?”
“Khera, stop. This is the Green Lady talking, not you.”
“This is me. She only told me things I already knew.”
“She wasn’t telling us the truth. She told us whatever would hurt us most.”
I stood and faced the fire, hugging my arms around my chest as if by holding on hard enough I could somehow keep the pieces of my broken heart from splintering any further. “She chose well.”
“No, she didn’t. Aliza, it doesn’t matter whether or not you can have children, and even if you can’t, I would never resent you for it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I made a promise,” he said in a quiet voice. “I gave you my word before our families and before the gods. You are my wife, now and forever, and I love you. There were no conditions.”
The gentleness with which he said it broke down the last of my defenses, and that illusion of distance shattered. His words crossed every inch of the uncountable leagues between us and drew me back with him. Tears spilled over my cheeks, rolling like rain clouds over the desert inside. I buried my face in my hands, shoulders heaving, and wept.
I might’ve cried for a few moments; I might’ve cried for years. Time did not meddle in the business of grief.
After a while the sobs that shook my body steadied, then stilled, and a clean, exhausted calm drifted over me. The wound was still there, raw and ugly, but the bleeding had stopped, and my heart felt whole again, or as whole as it could be. Mòrag was right. You do live.
Alastair touched my arm. I looked up. His eyes too were wet. “Dance with me,” he whispered.
“Why?”
“Because neither of us can stand on our own anymore.”
“There’s no music,” I said, but my hand met his.
“Listen.”
The Mermish lament was fainter now, the haunting melody weaving through the rhythm of our beating hearts. It was quiet, and distant, and it was enough. We moved together, graceless and awkward, weighed down by grief and fear and regret, but still moving, still alive. I leaned against his chest. The bearskin prickled against my cheek, drinking the last of my tears. My head felt light, but for the first time in days it was the lightness of clarity, not emptiness, and I knew what I wanted. I slid my hand under his tunic. He stopped dancing.
“It’s been too long,” I said, no longer caring that we were standing in the castle’s Lake Hall, nor that any number of servants could enter unannounced at any moment. I knew only the raw, untempered need to be close to him, to feel in some tangible way that our lives hadn’t ended. “Kiss me.”
He did, long and deep. I fumbled with the pin that secured the cloak as he guided me backward. He ran his fingers through my hair, his other hand moving toward my skirt as my shoulders met the wall.
“Alastair,” I whispered and he paused, his breath ragged against my cheek. “No, don’t stop.”
“This isn’t—wise.”
“I don’t care.” I tugged at the buckle of his sword-belt. “I don’t care that we’re in the Lake Hall. I don’t care that the doors are unlocked. I don’t care if the whole bloody kingdom barges in. I want you. I need you.” I kissed him again. “Everything since we arrived has been complicated. Let this at least be simple.”
He braced himself against the wall and put some space between us, studying me not with the hunger I wanted, but with concern. “The midwife told us to wait.”
“What?”
“Madam Threshmore told us before she left. She said we should wait a week or two. To let you heal.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“You said thank you and told her we’d do whatever she recommended.”
“I . . . didn’t know what I was saying.”
“You were a long way away.”
“It’s been days. Surely that’s long enough? I feel—” I paused. The blood had stopped some time earlier, but even then it was hard to say if my body had fully healed. A lost child and the terror of everything that had happened on Long Quay had blurred the lines between physical and emotional pain beyond recognition. “I’m all right.”
“She said a week.”
I leaned up and kissed his neck just below his ear, enjoying the small, desperate sound he made in his throat. He closed his eyes.
“At least a week. Aliza, please don’t make this any more difficult than it already is.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” The buckle of his sword-belt gave up under my fingers. It fell with a satisfying clink. “Do you really want to wait?”
“Thell no.”
“Good.”
“But,” he pulled away, “I will if I have to.”
I scowled up at him. “You do realize I’m in a position to make you regret this in the future.”
“Quite a lot of me is regretting it right now,” he said with a rueful smile. “I’m sorry, khera.”
“I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to make love to me.”
He sidestepped my attempt to kiss him and picked up his fallen sword-belt. “When we get back to Pendragon, I promise I’ll make amends. Thorough amends,” he added in my ear, the roughness of his voice sending a renewed shiver through me. “And after that we can talk about all the ways you’ll make me pay for this.”
I gave up. With exaggerated care I adjusted my skirts and the neckline of my dress. It was a little war and a playful one, but it stood as an island of normality amid the tempest-tossed seas of the last few days, and I clung to each moment, looking for ways to draw it out.
So I waited until we were on the threshold of the guest suite before turning to him and saying, “By the way, as you’re so happy with the idea of sleeping alone, I believe you’ll find the divan quite comfortable tonight.”
Alastair and Rhys left at dawn the next morning, Rhys picking his way along the eastern road to Morianton below Akarra, who flew just far enough behind to keep Rhys’s horse from bolting at every flap of her wings, but close enough to keep the gelding moving at a brisk and terrified trot. I stayed close to the castle. Inquiries about the attitudes of the surrounding noblemen were best started with the person who, in all likelihood, had been alive longer than most of them.
Mòrag surveyed me over the rim of her teacup. Bretta had helped me brace and wrap her leg when we returned from Long Quay, and she now sat with it propped up on a chair by the kitchen fire where she could supervise the comings and goings of the maids.
Her hair hung loose around her shoulders. It made her look softer, older, and frailer than before. Her tongue, however, had lost none of its sharpness. “Seventy-two northern winters I’ve lasted, child. A few broken bones aren’t going to send me to my grave,” she said when I asked how she was feeling. “I’ll be fine. Did I see your husband and his dragon fly off toward Morianton this morning?”
“They’ve gone with Captain Rhys to tell the magistrate about Selwyn’s disappearance.”
“Lord Niall was a fool to run.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“No idea. This castle was his life. If he left, it means he doesn’t plan on returning. Nevertheless, I pray the gods grant him peace. He was—” She stopped and looked me over again. “No matter. Lady Daired, I really don’t see why you’re still here. The Green Lady is gone. Chirrorim is keeping watch on the castle, and Rhys could’ve delivered the news to the nearby towns without Lord Daired’s help. You should be on your way home before the snows come.”
“You’re sure the Green Lady won’t be back?”
There was an almost imperceptible pause before she answered. “Yes.”
I cocked my head. “Why do I have the feeling you don’t believe that?”
“Oh, I’m sure she won’t be back to haunt the castle. I’m just not convinced she’s dead.”
“Well, that water was very cold and we didn’t see her surface.”
“A few minutes ago you said your husband stabbed her through the heart, yet she pulled it out and smiled.”
I conceded. “She was—is—alive though, isn’t she? She could swing Alastair’s sword, so she must have substance. On the quay she called herself one of the Eldest. Do you know what she meant?”
“Stories have been around of a dark spirit of the Wastes from time immemorial, child. She must’ve thought the name fitting. And of course she’s alive, though not like you or me. I’d wager she has more in common with ghasts and ghouls than humans and selkies. ‘Frogs of the soul,’ the bards would say, with one foot in both visible and invisible worlds. And frogs can live a long time underwater.”
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