Dockalfar (61 page)

“I’m really in no mood for placing blame,” Azeral snapped.

Alex smiled at him patiently. “I can get her back. You can’t. Even if you take the Seelies, you’ll never win her confidence. But I can.”

“You forget. She claims to hate you, too.”

“I don’t forget. And like I said, it’s your fault. But I think she still loves me. Even the damned assassin says she does. She just needs to be convinced of it. She needs to understand what happened.”

“Oh, so you think explaining your – shall we say ‘enthrallment’ – will sweeten her regard for us?”

“So we twist the truth a little. Leanan did it all by herself with no encouragement from you. Victoria will believe it. You’re damned persuasive, you can convince a rock to bleed. You can convince her that you had no hand in warping my mind if you want. The point is, that if I can convince her to take me back then she damn well won’t strike at my allies.”

Azeral narrowed his eyes. Stared hard at Alex inside and out. Found honesty in the entirety of the proposal. He wanted Victoria. But he was angry enough at her betrayal not to balk at a bit of lying and manipulation to get her. And there was still the loyalty to Azeral. He made sure of that.

“I will consider it,” he mused. “What do you wish in return for this feat?”

Alex smiled coldly. “Just a soul. I’ve discovered that I can’t take proper vengeance against her lover if you hold his soul.”

Somewhat amazed at the request, Azeral laughed. He turned his face back to the window. Nothing of value. How true.

How tragically true.

“Do you know what I paid for that soul?” he asked. “I gave treaty never to encroach upon the lands of the Donn-clai-fian, the people of his mother. I gave three objects of power that my father had hard won and cherished. I gave them the use of my name in protecting their honor among other Donn clans. And quite literally more gold and gems than I have in my coffers now after having the damned creature for three hundred years.”

“Three hundred years?” Alex asked.

To him the time seemed an eternity.

Azeral scoffed at it.

“He’s an infant. A child whom I should have kept under lock and key until he had the maturity to resist the moon-crazed promptings of fickle human beauty. Bah! I might as well have the soul of a bendithy wash woman for all the good it does me now.”

“Then give it to me.”

Azeral turned a narrowed eye to him.

“Will you destroy it?”

“Eventually.”

“Slowly. The court finds their new toy a great entertainment. They’ve wagers on when his spirit will break.”

“Soon,” Alex promised. There was hatred there. Deep, dark hatred. It was heated by the vibrancy of the need for Victoria.

“Do you think that the exchanging of a soul is so easy a thing?”

“Do you think winning Victoria over will be?”

For the first time in days Azeral laughed honestly. He reached deep into the pocket of his tunic and felt the cool surface of the pendant he had gone back to his keep to retrieve. He pulled it out by its chain. It was finely covered with rune signs. Wards to keep imprisoned something that naturally strove to unite with flesh. The runes bonded it to him and him alone. They were protection as well as a means of control. For if his soul ceased to be, then the soul imprisoned in the rune charm would as well. It was an excellent method to assure the Ciagenii had a healthy concern for his master’s well being.

He held it up before Alex. The human stared at it in incomprehension. “That’s it?” he asked doubtfully. He reached out a hand to it and Azeral let him touch its cool surface. The human felt nothing, he knew, for it was attuned only to him.

“It’s not a matter of possessing this trinket,” Azeral whispered. “It’s a matter of binding your soul to his. Is that what you want? So that when he dies, you feel it to the core of your being? So that you know if you wish to, exactly what it felt like for him to couple with your woman? What he feels when you strike him? Or how he felt when the court took turns raping him?”

“Why didn’t you?” Alex accused.

“Why didn’t you know he was going to betray you?”

Azeral straightened, frowning. He had not known because he had not wished to. Because the torment of a captured soul blending with his was not to his liking. Because he had trusted, after three hundred years of service, that the child would not betray him.

He shrugged. “Call it neglect,” he admitted. “I paid no attention where I should have.”

Alex withdrew his hand, shivering.

Then his eyes turned cold, his mouth hardened. “Fine. Give it to me.”

Azeral laughed again. So many things were amusing him this morn. He thrust the pendant to Alex. “Do you have a rune sign?”

“A what?” Alex took it gingerly.

“A name symbol? A personal mark?”

Alex shook his head. Azeral frowned at him, concentrated and nodded abruptly.

“You do now.”

Azeral touched the pendant with the tip of one finger. Its coolness turned to heat. With a blaze of effort he erased the rune sign for himself and put another in its place. He felt something leave him. A lightening of his soul. It wrenched free eagerly, and he felt a moment of relief in its going. Alex gasped. He almost dropped the pendant, would have if Azeral had not pinched the chain between his fingers. The Lord of the Unseelie court smiled.

“What would have happened if it had broken?” Alex asked.

“It could not have,” Azeral assured him. “Not while the strength of your soul binds it. If you had dropped it before your rune sign was complete – the assassin might have had the knowledge of a soul before his death.”

~~~

Alex put the chain about his neck and tucked the pendant inside his tunic. It had been a shock, the transfer. More a surprise, than anything else, feeling something sentient but dormant sliding to nestle among the workings of his own psyche. It was not a complete persona.

Not even close. It was very much like an embryo, underdeveloped and under-nurtured, but alive, a thing separate from himself. It was, he came to understand, a soul that had never known a body. It was incomplete. It was tormented in that incompleteness.

The torment was infectious. Alex understood why Azeral distanced himself from it. He had to put up shields himself to dull the feel of that other entity that he had taken on. There was a way to control the body through the soul, but Azeral had not taken the time to explain any details.

Someone was searching for him. He felt the niggling scratch of another magic latching onto his presence. He did not bother to block it, recognizing the aura immediately. Leanan. The presence withdrew and he cursed. He really had no desire to deal with her now. But deal with her he would, for presently she came sashaying down the corridor, her fine brows drawn, her lips pouting.

“Where have you been all the night?” she demanded.

He declined to say he had been brooding and shielding his presence.

“In the gardens,” he said, willing her to drop it. She glared at him and violently brushed off the suggestion.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she hissed, eyes narrowed to catlike ferocity. Her anger lashed at him.

He stepped back a pace, not wanting direct confrontation, yet not knowing how else to avoid the prying fingers that clawed at his thoughts. Something had slipped. Somehow she had figured out that he was not jumping at her whim quite as much as he used to. He wondered if Azeral had leaked his concern with Victoria. It would be like him to set them at odds.

“Leanan, stop it!” He very firmly but gently pushed her out of his mind. She stared at him, wide-eyed. He smiled, trying to soften the ejection. “Do I go prying about inside your head?”

“Do you?” she hissed. “I wonder.”

“Leanan.” He took her arm and linked it in his. She barely allowed it. He guided her down the corridor. “I needed to be alone, that’s all. Don’t be mad at me just because I’m growing into my magic. After all, it’s you that awakened me to it.”

“You’re thinking of her,” she sulked.

He gave her the most shocked of looks. “I absolutely was not! Where did you get that?” In fact he had not. He had been most diligently contemplating advising Dusk on who the new owner of his soul was.

“You were,” she insisted, but she looked uncertain now.

He bent down and kissed the side of her mouth. “Was not.”

She did not know how to respond that juvenility. “If you were not thinking of her, then why were so upset when my father informed you that the Ciagenii had dallied with her?”

“I was. But not about her,” he said smoothly. “He made a honor oath to me and he broke it. That’s what I was mad at.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“Yes,” he said immediately and with such firmness of mind that she was left gaping for a moment before she blithely went on to another subject. The conversation veered sharply away from accusations, as he willed it too. It was just a matter of patience with a powerful mind.

Sooner or later they let their guard down and he could slip in and direct their thoughts down the path he wanted. It could so easily work the other way. It had on too many occasions. He was determined never to let his guard down in this court again.

~~~

The smell from the ogre trenches was becoming intolerable, even for the hardened sensibilities of a spriggan. There were fifteen regrouped Ogre battalions camped out around the Seelie keep. Each battalion consisting of a little less than fifty ogre’s each, after the depletion of their ranks from the battle to get into the grove. Seven hundred ogres milling about in comparatively tight quarters for almost a week created a stench of monumental proportions.

Bashru wished desperately to be sent out on patrol. To be sent back to the mountain keep to fetch some trivial item the sidhe developed a whim for. Anything but to be stuck in the midst of an increasingly stagnant camp. Word was out, of course, that the Lady Tyra was on the trail of the fleeing Seelies and once she picked up the track the troops would be sent out. But she had left all of two days ago and the spriggans contemplated among themselves, around their own crackling campfire that the Liosalfar had led the Mistress of the Hunt far astray.

The spriggans were in a sour mood.

Their number was the lowest in the forces Azeral had brought to root out his enemy.

And they had come last, lagging far behind the ogre and goblin troops. By the time the spriggans had reached the keep it had long since been taken and the greedy goblins had done what looting the sidhe would allow. The spriggans complained among themselves, dark hunched little men who cast evil glares to the camp around them.

Bashru fit well among them, more dour than most, more nervous having some personal knowledge of exactly what was transpiring here, while his companions cared naught and knew even less.

It was mid-afternoon and the shade from the trees made the forest floor a sun dappled mosaic. Cook fires were being started in preparation for the evening meal. The smell of too-new wood being burned was poignant in the air. The sidhe approached the spriggan camp as the little men were contemplating where to steal a proper chunk of meat for their fire. The whole of the spriggan company hunched their shoulders and glared up at him furtively as he stopped before their circle.

He had the war helm and red cloak of a battalion commander. One long arm came up and indicated Bashru.

“You. You’re wanted at the keep.”

A sickness surged in Bashru’s stomach and threatened to spill out his throat. He stared bug eyed at the sidhe, hoping if he waited long enough the sidhe would decide it was someone else he wanted. The sidhe did no such thing. He stared pointedly at the spriggan and finally with an impatient gesture, ordered.

“Now!”

Grumbling to cover his terror, Bashru climbed to his feet, following as the sidhe whirled and headed back towards the keep. The sidhe said nothing to hint at what Bashru was being summoned for, although Bashru’s imagination came up with numerous offenses that the sidhe would take great pleasure in punishing him over. They were in the outer gardens and circling around to the back of the keep when the sidhe asked all of a sudden, “How well do you know the woods around here?”

The spriggan stared at the tall back, surprised by the question. He saw no harm in answering truthfully. “My folk come from the eastern forests, but way south of south of here. I suppose I know these woods well enough not to get lost.”

The sidhe stopped and peered at him.

There was something vaguely disquieting about him. Something Bashru could not put a name to.

“Do you think you could find the Vale of Vohar?”

Bashru opened his mouth, then shut it with a snap. What type of test was this? What did it matter to the sidhe if he knew where the ancient vale was. They knew.

He stared hard at the sidhe and suddenly the disquiet changed to something else. Suspicion. He lost his certainty that this was a sidhe. Illusion. In his mind or outside it, there was an illusion being played. His tight, dark little spriggan mind squeezed shut in determination, stubbornly refusing outside influence of his perceptions.

Spriggans were notoriously difficult to manipulate once they were on to magical efforts to do so. The sidhe lost much of his grandeur and some of his grace.

The fear dried up and indignation took its place. Bashru did not like being played for a fool. It was in no wise a sidhe but the damned human playing the part. Bashru backed up a step and glared accusingly.

“Can’t fool me, evil creature,” he hissed. “What games are you trying to play?”

The charade exposed, the human swept off the helmet and stared levelly down at the spriggan. There was in his eyes, something seriously dangerous. The look made Bashru hesitate to say more.

“No games,” Alex said quietly.

“What I want to know is if you could find this Vale the Seelies have supposedly fled to.”

“And if I could?” Bashru asked suspiciously.

“Then you’ll take me there.”

A sputtering laugh escaped the spriggan. Spittle flew in a wide arch. Alex wiped a fleck from his cheek.

“You’ve lost your mind, human! Why in Annwn would I do any such thing?”