Authors: Alexa Egan
She saw those generations of women, faces melding
and merging through time, down to her, clear, bright, and startling. But she also sensed the shades of those not yet born—dimmer, faded, and ragged as an old cloak. Daughters not yet conceived. Seed not yet spilled. She was the linchpin between these two lines. She was the hinge upon which her house’s fading hopes rested.
Callista squared her shoulders, placing a hand back upon Key, as if anchoring herself among women past and future.
“I’ve made my choice.”
* * *
David found Callista in the Addershiels library, curled in a chair by the window, head buried in an enormous book. He didn’t enter at first. Instead he leaned against the doorframe and regarded this surprising, miraculous woman who’d burst into his life like cannon fire, turning him upside down. Making him feel again. Making him love as he’d never loved before. As he watched, she licked a finger and turned the page, her brows scrunched in thought . . . or confusion. Hard to decide which.
He cocked his head, hoping to read the spine, but her skirts were in the way and all he managed was Th . . . Nur . . . oire. Hardly helpful. This much
was
obvious. It was no romantic novel or swashbuckling adventure, not unless the hero had just died or the heroine had run off with the cabin boy. Callista wore a three-furrow frown, and he could almost hear her teeth grinding. Beyond that, she seemed relaxed, her hair bundled hastily up in a bun, one foot bare, the other dangling a slipper.
“Do I have a carrot sprouting from my ear or a boil on my neck?”
He smiled. “What gave me away?”
Her eyes met his over the top of the book, glimmering with laughter. “You’re not exactly unobtrusive when you enter a room, and your stare is like being struck by lightning or smashed by a falling piano.”
Straightening from his post at the door, he took a seat on a nearby couch. “I’m not sure whether to be pleased or offended by that comparison.”
“Pleased, I think. It had the women of London fawning over you.” Her glimmer brightened to a giggle, which she quickly smothered. “Poor Lady Fowler with her etchings. I almost feel sorry for her.”
“You needn’t. Hearts never entered into it. It was a game to her . . . a quick thrill . . . a way to relieve the tedium of her days and the loneliness of her nights.”
Her gaze dimmed. “For both of you.”
He didn’t respond. There was no need anymore. Callista understood the depths he’d reached and had not shrunk from him in revulsion or fear. His horrors had been laid bare and she’d not run. Her courage and compassion still shocked him, but it was the laughter they shared and their comfortable familiarity that bowled him over. He nodded toward the book in her lap, letting the moment slip away.
“Is this what you’ve been up to while I’ve been laid out like Egypt’s last pharaoh? Raiding Gray’s bookshelves?”
“All your stories about the Imnada intrigued me, and I was curious about Rinaci and Edern. Did you know he took the shape of a boar twenty-five feet tall with teeth as long as daggers?”
“Yes, and when he roared in anger, the trees bowed before him and the skies cracked with lightning. There are a thousand tales of Rinaci. Each more unbelievable than the last.”
“Do you believe the
afailth luinan
a legend with no truth behind it?”
“It sounds like madness . . . my blood able to save a life? To close a wound? I can only wish I possessed such a power. Do you know how many friends and comrades I lost to French guns on the battlefield? Loyal soldiers I could have saved?”
“You said your grandmother believed that every legend bore a grain of truth.”
“My grandmother was a dreamer. She believed the ancient sagas of the ships that rode the stars on waves of light and fire, bringing the clans to earth. She honored the N’thuil, voice and vessel to the crystal Jai Idrish. She respected the wisdom and the guidance of the shamans of the Ossine. And, thank the Mother, she didn’t live to see the splintering of her people and the ultimate shaming of her grandson before the Gather.”
“But the way you speak of her, it’s clear she loved you. Surely she would have stood by you. She wouldn’t have turned away when you needed her most.”
“The
avaklos
, those shapechangers who reside outside the Palings, are always suspect, their allegiance to the clans always under question. It would have pained her, but Gram would have done what was necessary to uphold the family’s honor. She would have obeyed the laws, no matter the cost.”
“The laws are wrong, then, and should be changed.”
“You sound like an arrogant lordling I know who
thinks just because he wants something badly enough he can make it happen.”
“And why not? That’s how dreams are realized.”
“Because it’s as much a fantasy as Rinaci and Edern. Wanting isn’t enough.”
“That’s when you have to work and fight for it.”
“Has Gray been whispering in your ear? I feel as if I’ve had this conversation before.” He rubbed a hand over his face and the back of his neck. “You ask me what my grandmother would have done had she been faced with my crimes. Gray lived that situation. His grandfather is leader of the Imnada, but he spoke not one word as his grandson was handed over to the Ossine. The years of war hardened Gray, but it was the Duke of Morieux’s denunciation that transformed him.”
Her gaze drifted to his shoulder and the scarred flesh she knew lay beneath his shirt. “How”—she ran an agitated finger up and down the edge of the book—“how did you survive such an atrocity?”
A question with no easy or comforting answer. His muscles tightened to knots, his back twitching with a ghost pain as real as the red-hot iron that burned his mark away. “Survival
was
the punishment, Callista.”
“Lord Duncallan says that if Beskin catches you, it could be the death of the Imnada rebels. That you know too much.”
He laughed. “It’s rare that I’ve been accused of too much intelligence, but I suppose it’s true. The answer is simple; don’t get caught.” His smile faded. “Or kill Beskin first.”
“You barely survived . . .” Her words faded, but David was well aware of his shortcomings during his last confrontation with the Ossine.
He would not make the same mistakes again. He would not flinch. He would rip that damned silver sword from the bastard’s hand and bury it in his chest hilt-deep.
“Eudo Beskin has been a blight on my soul for two years. It’s time I repaid him for his tender mercies.”
Her gaze wandered over his face as if seeking some answer; her breath quick, her body trembling. “And Corey? My brother? You can’t face them all alone. ”
“The wolf doesn’t hide, Callista. It hunts or it dies.”
“But it’s impossible. How can there be peace when so many on both sides are unwilling to look beyond a hatred going back millennia?”
“Simple,” he answered, meeting her steady gaze. “One person at a time.”
* * *
That night, when sleep refused to come and the dark seemed fraught with restless shades, she knew exactly where she was going. Rising from their shared bed, she tugged on a heavy, quilted robe. It dragged the floor and the sleeves fell down over her hands, but it was warm and smelled of David. She cast one last glance at his sleeping form twined within the blankets. The dying fire illuminated his muscled frame, brightened the gold of his hair, carved deep lines into his face. His normal sun-bronzed skin seemed faded and washed-out, but just looking at him sent butterflies banging around her insides and squeezed her heart. Turning abruptly, she left his room for hers.
This bedchamber was twice as large and three times as elegant, but devoid of the memories of love-damped skin and soft, shuddering moans. There was
nothing here but fine furniture, expensive curios, and her own uncertainties. Before she could change her mind, she took down the box from the top of a high cabinet, lit a single candle, arranged the bells before her, and then, among the flickering, crawling shadows, she read each and every letter from her mother to her lost family, beginning with the first effusive explosion of excitement and hope through the years that followed until the last few notes, just as crammed with anecdotes and news about her life, but the happiness had faded. Nothing left but grief and resignation.
“She loved you. Surely she would have stood by you. She wouldn’t have turned away when you needed her most.”
Her words to David echoed back at her from the high ceilings and dark windows. When she spoke, had she been referring to his grandmother or to the Armstrong family, who’d cut off their wayward daughter as completely as if she’d died? How could her aunt have done this to her only sister? How could she have abandoned her with nothing? Not a word? Not a hope?
Callista folded the last letter and traced the first symbol. The notes of Key rang pure, shattering the gloom, cracking the barriers between one world and the other. An icy wind rushed forth, riming the table-top, frosting her breath, and curling against her bare toes. She wrapped the robe more tightly around her, touched each bell in quick turn, and stepped into death.
The tree-lined brick path stretched out before her, but this time the statues depicted writhing limbs and arched backs, erect members and open mouths; each pose more erotic than the last.
Callista looked away, ice melting off her flaming face, even as she felt a throbbing between her legs and a tingling in her breasts. She gripped her bell tighter in the bone-chilling cold, but she would not go back through the door. Instead, she headed for the house on the hill and the dimly lit windows that seemed always out of reach.
Inhaling a breath of icy air, she stepped off the path and struck out across the lawn. The grass crunched like glass beneath her feet and a snow-scented wind buffeted her, tearing at her robe, freezing the very breath in her lungs. The path had gotten her nowhere, the house had remained always in the distance.
Not tonight.
The way grew more perilous, but Callista pressed on. The steep, rocky hill cut her hands and feet to ribbons, seeping the gray earth with black blood. Bent and crooked trees sprouted from crevices in the rock, their leaves rattling like bones. Now and then she caught sight of a spirit among the colorless landscape, but when she turned her head, the spark would flit out of sight and she was left once more alone. She paused on a narrow lip of rock, her hand ready to sketch the symbol that would bring Blade to her hand, but the sounds faded and she could not linger long lest the cold sap her strength before she accomplished the task she’d come for.
It might have been miles she walked as her feet burned, then throbbed, then went numb and ice crusted her robe and hair. It might have been weeks or years she traveled, no way to know within this starless landscape, but suddenly the hill broadened into a wide, sloping lawn. The house loomed gray and silent before her.
Windows stared like empty eyes and a doorway gaped like a wound. She climbed the steps and crossed the threshold into a dim entryway. Candles burned pale blue in sconces and on tabletops while blue flames danced in a marble hearth. As she passed from room to room, upstairs and down, she recognized the arched doorways, the antlered stair, the oriel window above the landing, from her mother’s descriptions. Killedge Hall, the seat of the Armstrong family.
She called Summoner to her, the blood from her injured hands leaking onto the carved faces like tears. The world was silent but for her own heavy breathing. With a swing, she rang the bell, the chime vibrating along her bones, pushing against her lungs, heating her blood. She whispered the words of the spell as she traced the symbols that would call the spirit to her.
A gossamer mist rose up before her, thin as vapor, and slid toward the doorway to the empty garden. Callista rang Summoner once more and painted more symbols in the air, binding the spirit. It struggled, the mist darkening and twisting like smoke in a drafty chimney, but Callista had been trained well, if not thoroughly, and the bell’s chime held it fast.
“What do you want with me?” The voice shimmered high and frightened as a figure took shape within the mist: a round face with a permanently soft and vulnerable expression, a body that in youth had been willowy but with age had grown gaunt and then skeletal, and arms that Callista ached to have embrace her.
“I wish to see what you see . . . Mother.”
The spirit’s expression never changed, never
warmed, but she nodded before sliding into Callista’s skin and taking her over. She blinked, seeing the house, not as it was in death, but as it had been in life; golden stone in a long summer-afternoon light, a green lawn, and a sparkling stream. A girl raced before her; hair in pigtails, hand fisted on a kite string. A shout came from her lips. “Wait, Dee! My kite’s caught in the bush!”
The girl kept running and laughing, her scarlet kite fluttering above her.
“Aunt Deirdre,” Callista whispered.
The image gave way to another. It was night now and the house rose dark upon its hill. A carriage stood on the lane by the spinney; a tall, thin man with eyes sharp and clear blue as marbles smiled and took her shaking hand as he helped her into a carriage. He called her a name and kissed her lips as the house grew smaller behind them.
Faster the images appeared and vanished.
An ugly boy, his face ruddy, his lip jutting out in a pout, a swaddled bundle, a room drafty and cold with mold crawling like seaweed across the ceiling. A creaking bed where she and the man laughed and made love, a windswept cemetery by the sea. Stooped and ill and bent over, she wept, a letter falling unheeded in her lap.
“This is the past,” Callista said. “I wish to see the future. What happens to me? Is there hope for David? I wish to see what you see.”
The spirit seemed to harden within her. Callista couldn’t breathe, her throat tightened as if she would choke and the air turned gray and murky, but the images continued.
A dead man with a blade in his throat; David, bent and shaking as he slid a silver blade across his palm; a wolf running across an empty hilltop as a crow dove like a shadow before it; Corey’s scarred face flushed and twisted with excitement; a crowd of gray figures beneath an enormous stone wall; a woman kneeling; a knife falling; and the twisting unending paths of death stretching on forever.