Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) (12 page)

What if Moreth was right? Closer consideration suggested that Morigan’s catatonia was deeper than normal. She still breathed, lightly, and he could feel her heartbeat, but it was fluttering out of pace with his. They should never be out of synch. Squeezing one of her hands and pressing their foreheads together, the Wolf whispered,
My Fawn, I need you to wake up. I need you to return to me
.

Nothing, not even a change in her lethargic pulse.

Morigan, wake up
.

Still nothing.

Morigan!

Moreth stared, dark and pitying. The company rose and gathered around the Wolf, their faces distorted with shock. Surely, this could not be happening. Morigan must simply be lost in Dream, as she had been so many times before.

“Morigan!” roared the Wolf, no longer using a hidden whisper.

He shook her roughly. She did not respond, but lay like a rattled doll in his arms. The gazes of the company started to cloud with tears and fear,
and their scents spoiled with the sour vinegar of terror. Having no other recourse, the Wolf surrendered to his beastliest urge. He did what animals do—what Macha had once done to him—when they are driven to the most hopeless extreme. He bit his bloodmate. Ripping down her garment so that it barely covered her breasts, he sank teeth that were now fangs into the meat of her pearl shoulder. At once, she bled. The Wolf screamed her name while sinking his teeth deeper.

Morigan heaved. A speck later, she shot up. Coughing racked her, and she leaned away from the Wolf and retched something into the grass.
That can’t be right
, thought Mouse, for she saw some wriggling matter in the steaming puddle of sick. Then something buzzed in the vomit, and Mouse’s stomach tipped. She quickly looked back at her friend. Morigan clung to the Wolf, collecting herself, shivering, unable or unwilling to speak. She was terrified, realized Mouse.

The Dreamstalker
, Morigan whispered to the Wolf.
It chased me. It hunted me while I slept
.

Shame consumed the Wolf, for he had not known of her danger, and he wanted to tear this foe into wet red hunks. Growling away his tears, he licked and kissed the wound he’d given his mate. That would make the bite heal more quickly than usual, although the wound to his pride would not.
I did not know. I did not know. I did not know
, he chanted in her head. Though he had physically injured his mate, he might have harmed her more through his ignorance. Contracting with fantastic strength around her, he squeezed her until it hurt them both. Morigan tried to console him. Still, the beast ruled the Wolf in this moment, and he refused to hear reason.

Most of the company maintained a somber vigil around the bloodmates, hoping for, but not expecting, an immediate explanation. Moreth, though, had taken up the gruesome task of sorting through Morigan’s sickness with the tip of his cane. After a while, his intrigued
hmms
became as grating as the Wolf’s rocking and grunts of suffering.

“What is it?” asked Mouse quietly.

The Menosian gestured her to draw close. Holding a hand over her mouth, Mouse leaned in. Even though these bugs were now quite drowned and dead in the matted grass, their hideousness confirmed her delirious
fear of insects. Moreth gathered the others away from the bloodmates to share the strange entomological finding. “Have you seen such a thing before?” he asked.

“Not really,” answered Thackery vaguely. They’d been through incidents of phantasms and walking illusions with Morigan before; nothing seemed beyond reason at this point.

“And this seems normal to you?” whispered Moreth. They hardly responded beyond the barest of shrugs; their conspiracy to keep him in the dark was poorly veiled. Moreth’s mask started to crack in rage. “I shall need to be let in on the secret handshake soon. I know we were once bitter enemies, but I deserve some scrap of truth. What is your objective—beyond discovering a mysterious relic of worship from an unnamed monarch of the past? A queen, was she? A Black Queen? We speak of royalty, yet your faces all pale as if we speak of nightmares. A nightmare queen, then, who shares some connection with Brutus, Magnus, wars, and a far-seeing woman who sleeps for a day, then wakes spewing maggots and flies. Surely, I cannot be expected to carry on trusting and supporting this lunatic cause while receiving little reason for any of my commitment.” Moreth waited for one of the company to validate his fury, and again felt the sting of their silence. “Surely?”

Moreth spat on the ground and walked away. When no one else gave chase, Mouse cursed and ran to catch him. Moreth heard her swishing through the damp field, and he waited, leaning in a gentlemanly fashion against a tall rock standing alone on the plains. Mouse was sweaty and frustrated when she reached him.

“As a fellow Menosian,” he said, while Mouse caught her breath, “you would know much about the art of keeping secrets. Gloriatrix, queen of our now doomed nation, is a master of dispensing information in exactly the right doses: never enough to cause panic or to overly illuminate a situation. When she told me that my services as a huntsman were needed in Pandemonia to locate a relic of indeterminable power, I assumed we needed it for use against Brutus, or whomever had leveled the Iron City. However, I see the fretful stares and whispers that pass so often among the five of you, and I wonder if we are not all marching to damnation. If I’m going to die, and in a manner worse than Pandemonia would grant me
in even the best of times, I should be allowed to knowingly embrace that future. I don’t like being kept in the dark. Tell me what is going on or I’ll take the few far-speaking stones I carry—our only hope of communicating with the outside world and coordinating an escape off this cursed rock—and try my luck without any of you.”

Calmly and eloquently, Moreth had given his ultimatum. Mouse respected the man for keeping so cool a front. She could not defend either herself or her companions against any of his accusations. Naturally, Gloriatrix had given him only the bare minimum of information, and unsurprisingly, the company he’d joined had chosen not to inform him of the more critical details: they hadn’t trusted him, and felt any appearance of partnership would be false.

And yet, in these first few days of their travel, Moreth had already proven himself capable and trustworthy. Perhaps even more important was the commendation of trust he had mysteriously received from the Wolf, who could smell deceit. Mouse made her own decisions, too, and had her own mind. Mouse could think of few reasons why she should not tell the master something of the real forces they pursued. The benefits of having the whole company in possession of the whole truth about their quest now seemed to outweigh any possible doubts. Mouse claimed a part of the rock next to Moreth, sitting shoulder to shoulder with the man. While she counted the strange stars that the Dreamers had once placed in the sky, she pieced together a grand disclosure: one involving the Black Queen, the war of the Kings, and the bits of her and Morigan’s journey a listener, and now fellow pilgrim, would need to comprehend the whole. It seemed right to begin with the moment she and the seer had first encountered each other, shackled together and as physically close as she and Moreth were now. “I had been taken. Held against my will by Sorren Blackbriar. While imprisoned, I met Morigan…”

Mouse was not a storyteller, although she’d picked up a variety of tricks from the Wolf’s fireside orations. But her telling was more suited to the moment precisely because of its succinctness, its lack of embellishment. She outlined all the major occurrences related to the dark forces at play: Morigan’s visions of the Kings, the revelations the company had received from the Sisters in Alabion. She made no mention of Caenith’s
father, her father, or any other of the companions’ secrets—although she made a brief, strained admission that death had claimed one of their company in Alabion. Moreth did not ask who had been taken or why.

In all, her chronicling of events took little time. Finally, Moreth knew what they sought in Pandemonia was an object of Fate, a relic that Morigan could use to read the heart of creation’s mother and destroyer: the Black Queen.

When Mouse had finished, he spoke: “We walk a thin road of hope. We face a primeval terror not even of our world, or at least not of the realms of the world that I understand—an enemy capable of corrupting the mind of an Immortal.”

“We’re quite fuked, you see,” said Mouse.

They laughed.

“Why are you here? Other than because of an obligation to your liege?” asked Mouse as soon as the humor had died.

“Come now, Mouse,” said Moreth. “Take away a man’s wealth, raze his country, attack his pride, and then expect him not to strike back? I am no monster, unlike the creature we seek. I am a man, with values and possessions that I love. What of mine still remains I shall fight for, just as you and your allies do. Our pasts are different, yet we share a fate—an abysmal one, if we do not find means to avoid it. I am glad you have named our enemy. I now have an outlet for my hate and a creature to hunt.” Moreth exhibited a bit of the Wolf’s primal anger as he spoke. Mouse sensed him trembling through their small point of contact at the shoulder.

They left their rock and returned to a scene far nicer than the one they’d left earlier: the Wolf, his savage self-flagellation over, sat upright and proud with his arms about his now wholly aware and awake bloodmate. Their gray and silver stares greeted the two as they joined the others around the fire. Mouse felt as if Morigan had been waiting for her return.

“Twice now,” said Morigan, “I have been haunted by a Dreamstalker, one who can move through the otherworld as I can. It claims to bring a message, although I feel nothing but disharmony and evil, and I do not wish to hear its words. The smallest whisper can become poison—” Morigan paused, assessing Moreth with a flicker of silver awareness, then
deeming him worthy of candor “—as we have seen with Brutus. So I shall not listen to this Dreamstalker or hear her message.”

“Her?” asked Moreth.

“Yes…” replied Morigan. “A
she
. I feel I spoke to a woman. A living creature, not a ghost.”

“Then there is another enemy who conspires in the shadows,” concluded Thackery.

Morigan nodded. “One bound, too, with the fates of kings and queens.”

There was a sense that she would speak more. However, now that the bloodmates were again in harmony and united, the Wolf became her voice: “Thus far, our greatest challenges in this realm have been the faults and monsters in ourselves: our trust, our faltering or unusual strength, our insecurity over what we face. But I smell a calm upon Mouse as sweet as the breeze and grassy breath of summer. It is the scent of unburdening. I see that she has cast her vote of confidence for our new companion.” The company looked to the Menosian, who preened a little from the attention. “This man has instructed us in magik, tracking, and survival during our journey. This man was our enemy not long ago, but it is the nature of wind to change, and we must be as the wind. We must not harbor divisions in our own company, not when we have terrors assaulting us in the privacy of dreams. Hereafter, we shall be a fellowship against the darkness. Perhaps not friends, but friends are not needed in war—only warriors and a code.”

“What is the code?” whispered Moreth, captivated.

“We shall hunt and destroy this Black Queen and all who serve her. We shall trust one another, even if our beliefs would damn us to eternal enmity beyond this island.”

Moreth went down on one knee, removed his hat, and said, “Aye. I swear allegiance to your code.”

Moreth’s posture of fealty had an instant effect on the rest of the company, each of whom went down on bended knee to the Wolf and Morigan seen waveringly through the flames. Strangely, the fire seemed brighter, the wind suddenly furious, the air sharply chilled.

“So it is spoken; so it shall be.” The company could not tell which of the bloodmates had spoken, which only compounded the aura of mystery. What mattered, however, was the trust and promise that sat in their
stomachs like warm porridge. The company felt curious rather than corrosively suspicious when they glanced at the waxy master of Menos, now sworn into their circle.

Moreth, still rather creepy, smiled, at the faces turned to him, as if seeing the company for the first time. “So it shall be,” he murmured.

III

PEOPLE OF GLASS

I

C
arthac’s winds were said to be the sweetest, saltiest, and most invigorating of any in Geadhain.
A true kiss of the sea
, said the men of boat and sail, these Jacks who often waxed romantic over the blue mistress. Kericot himself had once swooned over the beauty of Carthac, and had stayed in the city for a season to compose countless tunes, many still sung by the Jacks who toiled on boats in the thrashing sea. However, Kericot’s original finesse was often lacking in the simpler, modern renditions of his works they sung: limericks and ditties that portrayed a mistress far crueler than the one found in the great poet’s honeyed lyrics. For the Blue Mother possessed a streak of murder in her blood. She stormed often and without reason. She drowned men and made widows. Even when not wreaking havoc, the Blue Mother possessed a threatening temperament that could never be forgotten. The crashing, wailing Straits of Wrath that assaulted Carthac’s western bank served as a constant reminder. Most fishermen chose to trawl the colder, safer waters to the north. Even there, though, and even if men were cautious, accidents and deaths were not uncommon.