The Brush of Black Wings (15 page)

Silhara cursed the servant, his lineage,
Wraith Kings, weepy Glimming women, smelly dogs and most of all
Conclave priests while he stood naked in the snow-shrouded bailey
in the depths of winter and bathed away the stench of blood, demons
and broken kings.

A blanket smacked him in the face when he
entered the kitchen, wet and shivering so hard he could no longer
speak. Gurn had built the hearth fire to a roaring inferno. He
cocooned in the blanket and stood as close to the hearth as he
could without setting himself on fire. When he no longer quaked
like a sapling caught in a windstorm, he downed a pot of hot tea
and abandoned Gurn for the woman sleeping peacefully in their
bed.

Silhara slid under the covers and gathered
Martise close. She sighed in her sleep and stretched against him.
This, he thought, was bliss unmatched; the complete and utter
antithesis to the horrors that still lingered in his mind when
Megiddo touched him and shared a world of nightmares beyond
description and agony that defied comprehension. He rubbed his
cheek against the top of Martise’s head and stared unseeing at the
closed shutters that kept the room dark.

There had been little he could do for Megiddo.
The magic that transformed him was so old and so inhuman, there was
no way he could mimic it and return the monk to his former self.
His best hope lay with a woman with every reason to abandon him to
his fate. Silhara doubted she would. He’d witnessed Acseh’s grief
and, like Martise, believed her sincerity when she promised to
help. As an accomplished liar himself, he recognized one at thirty
paces. Acseh wasn’t a liar.

Martise turned in his arms, and her eyes
opened. Her soft smiled warmed him from the inside out. She twined
a length of his damp hair around her finger and let it slowly
unravel. “You’re awake and clean. It’s like magic,” she
teased.

“
Hardly magic,” he scoffed.
“Unless you want to call a bucket full of ice water and a brush
that stripped off three layers of skin magic. Not to mention I
think my balls are still tucked up somewhere beneath my
stomach.”

She tutted at him in false sympathy even as
her hand wandered down his torso until she reached what she sought.
Silhara moaned softly as her hand wrapped briefly around his cock
before sliding lower. He spread his legs and groaned this time as
the heat of her palm warmed his bollocks. She could touch him this
way a thousand times for a thousand years, and he’d never grow
tired of her hands on his body.

They exchanged languorous kisses until Martise
pulled back. “You promised me a swiving, crow mage,” she said and
gave him a mock frown.

He arched an eyebrow, concentrated less on
what she said and more on the way her hip sloped toward the deep
curve of her waist and how soft her breast felt in his hand. “I
believe you promised me the same, apprentice.”

Her slow smile hinted at a long day of missed
meals, no work and an exhaustion that guaranteed another three days
of sleep. “Well then,” she said. “Far be it from me to break a
promise.”

He’d called it a swiving, but that term was
reserved more for the quick tumbles with nameless partners. Silhara
made love to Martise and she to him. When they rested, she stroked
his hair in silence or tugged on the locks when he tickled her
toes.

During one interlude, he rested his head on
her belly, skating the edge of sleep. Her question brought him wide
awake.

“
My Gift never revealed itself on
the gray plane, Silhara. Or before that either when Megiddo cast
the geas that brought me to him in the temple. It isn’t gone. I can
still feel it inside me, but something’s wrong.”

He personally hoped her Gift faded away and
never returned. He didn’t even like calling it a Gift. It was more
a burden, a dangerous one that made Martise vulnerable and a
valuable prize to win if any knew how her power worked. Her Gift
had awakened the sleeping force buried under the temple, calling
forth its exiled master. It was an annoyance and a
menace.

He said none of this to Martise and instead,
kissed a circle around her navel. “Do you want to seer-bond? It
usually responds to me.”

She nodded. “Do you feel up to it?”

Not really, but Silhara hadn’t missed the
worry in her voice and sought to reassure her. “I don’t think I’ll
come to any harm. Besides, I survived that hellish bath outside and
Gurn throwing soap at me. This will be easy.”

Seer-bonding with his wife always rejuvenated
him and left her weakened—mostly because her Gift, eager to meld
with his own power, poured out of her as if she were a sieve. He
cautiously reached for it this time, ready to break the connection
if he saw Martise fading.

Strangely, her Gift was more reticent this
time. Silhara felt it dance along the edge of his senses, touching,
caressing , as if glad to feel him there but unwilling to embrace
him. It retreated as quickly as it appeared, leaving him with the
impression of a butterfly sealed tightly in the sanctuary of its
cocoon.

The crimson light of his own Gift surrounded
him and Martise. What little amber light of hers appeared curled in
tendrils around the red corona and disappeared.

Martise stared at him, wide-eyed. “It’s going
away, isn’t it?” She blinked hard, trying to force back the tears
that welled in her eyes.

He shook his head, puzzled by her Gift’s
behavior, but certain it wasn’t diminishing. “No. It’s still there.
Still strong.” He frowned a little at her happy sigh. “I don’t know
why it chooses to hide. It’s as if it guards itself though there’s
been no threat against it lately.” That wasn’t a good thing.
Guarding itself did no good if it refused to protect Martise, and
not once had it appeared to fight off Megiddo during her
captivity.

She hugged him, her smile wide, the tears
gone. “I’m just glad it’s still there.”

Silhara wasn’t, and its reaction to the
bonding bothered him, like an itch he couldn’t scratch. Something
was still wrong, it just wasn’t the “wrong” Martise first
assumed.

He put the thought from his mind for later.
For now, he had a happy, naked woman in bed with him. There were
far better ways to spend the hours than fretting over why something
he just wished would go away was actually accommodating him to a
minor degree.

They spent the remainder of the week preparing
a ritual that would destroy the temple and wipe clean any
necromantic magic that lingered from Megiddo’s sword. Gurn took the
wagon and made a trip to Eastern Prime, returning with four large
bags of coarse salt.

Silhara glared at the wagon’s contents as Gurn
swung down from the high seat. “How much did that cost
me?”

The giant servant dropped a woefully light
coin bag in his palm.
“That’s the change,”
he
signed.

Silhara growled. If he ever saw the Wraith
King again, he’d extract the price of the salt out of his hide. It
was a good thing he could take out his frustration on the temple
itself, and by the time he’d leveled the structure and furrowed the
spoked-wheel design beneath churned dirt, he wasn’t quite so
annoyed at the blow to his humble coffers.

White salt mixed with mud and dirty snow,
sparkling in the weak winter light. Silhara cast a last spell on
the ground where the temple had stood and gathered the empty salt
bags to return home. One down, four to go. The branches above him
rustled, and he glanced up to see a crow following him, hopping
from tree to tree. A ray of sunlight struck the black feathers, and
for a moment he was reminded of Megiddo’s robes—dark and shadowy
and writhing.

He shook his head, banishing the image. There
were better things to think of. His wife waited at home, still
asleep. That made him frown. Martise was normally an early riser,
excruciatingly energetic and cheerful, even before the dawn sun
broke the horizon. For the past two nights, she’d gone to bed
early, claiming exhaustion and slept deeply, not waking until well
into the morning and only because Silhara coaxed her out of bed
with tea.

He couldn’t shake the worry plaguing him, and
his stride lengthened as he made his way through the wood toward
the manor.

He found her still asleep in their bed, buried
under blankets until only the top of her head was exposed to the
room’s cold temperatures. Silhara stoked the brazier to life and
paused to scrutinize her still form.

She had assured him the day before she felt
fine, just worn out, as if she’d toiled in the orchard for days on
end. Silhara had looked to Gurn who only shrugged, as clueless as
he was about Martise’s exhaustion. It might well be their time on
the gray plane had somehow drained her, but Silhara had his doubts.
Her weariness seemed sudden and extreme, separate from anything
born of dark magic, and he’d sensed none of the black arcana on
her. In fact, the spells he cast to reveal any hidden malice
flattened and faded, as if she wore some invisible armor that
resisted, if not completely repelled sorcery. If she didn’t return
to her old self in the next few days, he’d resort to more extreme
measures.

He leaned down and kissed the top of her head.
She didn’t stir, and he left her to slumber peacefully in the
slowly warming chamber.

Gurn nodded to him as he passed the kitchen on
the way to his study. Unlike his bedroom or the frozen pit that was
the library, the study welcomed him with a heated embrace. Gurn had
visited earlier and started a fire in the small hearth built in one
corner. Flames flickered in lit oil lamps, casting a golden light
across a table littered with scattered parchment, scrolls, ink
wells and quills.

Silhara raised the wick on the lamps perched
on the table, watching as their flames stretched higher and
brightened the space. He sat down in the chair behind the table,
dragged a piece of parchment towards him and dipped a sharpened
quill into the closest ink well.

He had made no promises to the Wraith King
beyond the agreement to help him escape the gray plane if he
wished, but he’d made a promise to himself, and it was as much to
purge his mind of the bitter draught of another man’s memories as
it was to correct the wrongs of history.

The scratch of the quill joined the pop and
crackle of kindling consumed by the fire in the hearth as Silhara
committed to print what had been lost or twisted over centuries of
time.

A Recounting of the Wraith King
Wars

As Written by Silhara of Neith,
Master of Crows

The king who dwelled in darkness
led the dead to conquer the damned.

Five kings made spirit, bound to
the sword.

The king is the sword. The sword
is the king.

~END~

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