The Brush of Black Wings (3 page)

“
Call Cael, Silhara.”

To her relief, he ceded the argument and
stepped across the circle of melted snow and burnt grass. A hard
winter wind cut through the trees, whipping long strands of black
hair mixed with white across his face. He closed the distance
between himself and Martise and reclaimed his weapons. His dark
eyes remained on her face as he sucked his lower lip between his
teeth and whistled loud enough to make her ears ring.

They didn’t have to wait long. The magefinder
loped into the clearing and immediately skittered sideways from the
ruin, tail tucked between his legs. Fur rose in a stiffening ridge
along his back, and he growled low in his throat.

“
He senses something now.” Silhara
watched the dog before turning to her. “He didn’t do any of this
when you first arrived?”

Martise shook her head, waiting for the
inevitable reaction from the magefinder as he slinked closer to
them. His hackles rose even higher, extending to the ruff of fur
that bristled around his neck. He circled her, brown eyes now
crimson and glowing as he breathed her scent through nostrils
stretched wide and quivering.

Silhara’s eyebrows rose. “What is
this?”

Martise hugged herself. “I don’t think my Gift
was destroyed at Ferrin’s Tor.” Silhara’s swarthy features paled at
her words. “I think you drained it almost dry. What remained hid
deep, so deep even Cael couldn’t sense its presence. Something in
the ruin could. When I touched the step, whatever waited in its
center awoke and awakened my Gift as well.”

She wanted to glance away from Silhara’s
stare. He had a way of nailing one’s feet to the floor with a look,
and in those sloe-black eyes she saw both unease and cold-blooded
calculation.

“
Are you sure? We’ve tried to call
it forth since Ferrin’s Tor, to no avail.”

She rubbed her arms, fighting off a chill that
froze her bones from within. “I’m sure. Whatever lingered in the
temple didn’t leave of its own accord.” She described the power
that dragged her toward the ruin, the entity’s strange command, her
Gift’s manifestation, first as a bolt that split the tree and then
as a wave and a spear that attacked the radiant column until the
green light blew out like a candle snuffed.

Silhara listened without interruption, his
eyes more often on the ruin than on her, for which she was
thankful. He remained silent when she finished. While Martise
didn’t much care for him vivisecting her with his gaze, she wished
he’d say something.

She took his weapons a second time when he
left her side to approach the ruin once more. This time, his tone
was snappish; spells cracked off his lips and sparked from his
fingers. Martise sensed his fury, saw it in the tiny bolts of
lightning that shot through the miasma of spellwork he built to
encase the temple in a cage of lethal wards. Anything that tried to
break through would get more than a warning shot. These wards were
meant to kill.

He left the clearing, pausing long enough to
retrieve her basket. A grim smile touched his mouth as he handed
her the container. “I missed a morning’s tupping, and you battled a
demon because of these. They’ve caused too much trouble to leave
behind.”

She handed him the knife and dagger in
exchange. “Those wards won’t hold forever.”

Silhara shrugged. “They’ll hold long enough
for me to return, raze the ruin and cleanse the ground. I’ve more
important things to see to at the moment.” He lifted a hand to
trace the outline of Martise’s face with one calloused finger. “Can
you still feel your Gift?”

She leaned into his touch. “Yes. Alive and
well.” Her Gift flickered inside her, a low-burning flame brought
to life after years of extinguishment. She feared its return—almost
as much as she rejoiced in it.

As if he sensed her euphoria, Silhara’s mouth
turned down in a severe frown. “Martise, this isn’t a good
thing.”

She sighed. “I know.”

CHAPTER THREE

Gurn’s pleased expression at the sight of a
basket full of mushrooms darkened when Silhara put away his
weaponry and announced “We have a problem.”

Martise gave the servant a reassuring smile as
she shrugged off her cloak and left it on a chair to follow Silhara
out of the kitchen. “It’s not as bad as he makes it sound.” She
scowled at the disbelieving snort echoing back from the doorway.
“Ignore him, Gurn.”

She jogged out of the kitchen and caught up
with Silhara at the base of the stairs. He turned a flinty stare on
her when she tugged on his sleeve. “It isn’t a doomsday prophecy,
Silhara.”

His mouth tightened. “Isn’t it?”

With the power of her Gift singing through her
veins, Martise found it impossible to see its return in the same
grim light. She said nothing more as he ushered her up the stairs
ahead of him, his hand warm on her back.

Once inside their bedchamber, he lit the
brazier and closed the shutters that led to the balcony. His eyes
gleamed in the semi-darkness. “I don’t want to be punched straight
off the balcony just in case your Gift is no longer friendly to
me.”

Martise winced. He’d coaxed awake the magic
inside her several times in the past. It had always responded like
a lover, except once. Then he had been possessed by another and
choking the life out of her. As with the demon in the ruin, her
Gift had risen to her defense in the most punitive fashion. Silhara
still complained of aches and pains brought on by that
confrontation.

He stood before her, smelling sweetly of
orange blossoms and almost shimmering with anger. “From what you’ve
described, your Gift’s resurrection isn’t just a low spark ignited;
it’s a bonfire.” His brow knitted, enhancing his ready scowl. He
plucked gently at her sleeve, his touch light, reassuring. “You
know my opinion on seer-bonding, but I need to know how much is
returned to you. The choice, however, remains yours.”

She stepped closer to him until his shadow,
cast by the brazier’s red light, enveloped her. “Ah, the fine
manners of a courtier,” she teased in an attempt to lighten the
grim moment.

Silhara didn’t crack even a hint of a smile,
though she caught a brief glimmer of humor in his eyes. “No need to
be insulting,” he said.

Martise coiled one of his shirt lacings around
her finger. “I trust you. You know that.” She tugged on the
lacing.

He nodded and slipped an arm around her waist
to draw her against him. “Let’s see if your Gift will embrace me or
throw me across the room like a sack of grain as it once
did.”

“
You weren’t yourself
then.”

“
An understatement of colossal
proportions.”

His free hand slid along her neck before
burying itself in her hair. His lips were soft against her
forehead, the incantations he spoke on her skin breathy caresses
that alternated between hot and cold, leaving gooseflesh on her
arms and hot spots on her shoulders. The spells enveloped her, and
she opened to them, quaking in Silhara’s arms as his presence and
his sorcery sank into her, overwhelming every sense.

Almost sexual in its nature, the seer-bond
between them was seduction instead of invasion, and Martise’s Gift
surged in response to Silhara’s seeking. Incorporeal, except for
the amber light that haloed her body and Silhara’s, her Gift waxed
and waned on a gentle tide, coaxed out of the shadows not by threat
but by a dour mage’s enticing words.

The Gift poured out of her like water through
a sieve. Silhara gasped Martise’s name into her hair and clutched
her hard against him, his wiry frame shivering with the force of
its generosity. She tried to speak but could only utter a gasp that
echoed his. She sagged in his arms, her vision clouded by the
miasma of amber and the crimson light of their two Gifts melding.
Every nerve in her body sizzled, accompanied by a yearning for her
husband that consumed all thought.

Somehow they made it to their bed without
falling to the floor, only to collapse amidst the bed linens still
rumpled from the previous night’s slumber. Frantic hands shoved
clothing aside; kisses broke on labored breathing, and Martise’s
thighs gripped Silhara’s narrow hips hard enough to make him grunt.
His hair, loose and untamed, curtained them in a black shroud as he
rose above her only to sink down and slide into her with a hard
thrust.

Martise arched, her hands clutching the folds
of his shirt as she matched his rhythm. His features, highlighted
by the glow of spellwork and her Gift, drew into even harsher
angles, and his eyes rolled back in his head. She buried her face
in his neck, the flex of tendons and muscle tight against her cheek
as he groaned in release. His hips kept their pace, slowing only
when Martise shuddered in his embrace.

The light of her Gift pulsed around them as
her sight, dotted with black spots, blurred. Exhaustion hung on her
like a sodden cape, and even the lingering heat of her climax
couldn’t chase away the cold seeping under her skin from both the
room’s chill and Silhara’s seer-bonding.

“
Enough,” Silhara commanded in a
slurred voice. “Enough, Martise. Let me go.”

She inhaled on a gasp, and her eyes snapped
open at the sharp internal crack that set her head spinning. The
light surrounding her and Silhara faded. She lay in his arms, held
close to his chest. His command had been for her Gift which
reluctantly retreated after he broke the bond that bound him to
it.

Once she caught her bearings and the room
ceased to spin before her eyes, she found Silhara watching her with
a somnolent gaze. Thin rivulets of perspiration marked shining
paths from his temples to his jaw, and high color graced his
cheekbones. The light of her Gift was gone, but she didn’t imagine
the haze of power that rimmed his body in a crimson aura. Martise
licked dry lips. “Are you stronger now?” she asked in a breathless
voice.

Still buried inside her, Silhara tucked a hand
under her buttocks to nestle her closer to him and maintain their
connection. The brief smile he gave her didn’t reach his eyes. He
peppered her face with soft kisses before speaking. “You’ve milked
me dry for the moment, and though I should be, I’m not weary. Far
from it.” His fingers flexed on her hip. “Yours is a puzzling
power. Guarded and miserly with everyone but me. And then it’s too
generous. The challenge for me isn’t to draw out your Gift but to
keep it from drowning me and depleting you.”

Her eyelids felt as if someone had tied
millstones to them. She’d trade a body part at this moment for a
chance to sleep. “Maybe it likes you as much as I do.” She patted
Silhara’s arm before succumbing to a yawn.

“
This is serious,
Martise.”

The fatigue consuming her vanished abruptly,
as if Silhara had invoked another spell to revive her. She stared
at him wide-eyed. His expression was no more severe than usual, his
dark eyes no less secretive, but his statement caused her stomach
to flip and her heart to pound under her ribs. Curt, grim, and to
the point, he’d uttered it in the raspy voice she’d grown to love,
but this time it held a thread of something she’d never thought to
hear from the Master of Crows: fear.

She traced the arch of one of his eyebrows. “I
know it’s serious. I’m not treating this lightly; I just don’t fear
it yet. It’s too new again, almost impossible to believe that my
Gift is somehow returned to me.” She recalled the being in the
emerald light. “Besides, I’m more concerned with what’s lurking in
that temple than what’s lurking inside me.”

“
Whatever it is, it’s obviously
drawn to your Gift.” Silhara kissed the space between Martise’s
eyebrows and eased out of her. She grumbled a protest when he stood
and straightened his clothes.

She sighed and rose to join him, smoothing
down the wrinkles in her twisted skirts before taking up a spot
near the brazier to warm her hands. The residual heat from
lovemaking had evaporated, leaving her to shiver and wish she
hadn’t abandoned her cloak in the kitchen. The cold affected her
more now than it had an hour earlier. Silhara had drawn not only
power from her, but body heat as well it seemed.

He came to stand before to her, still bearing
the remnants of the seer-bonding in the faint glow on his skin and
clothes. His calloused fingers traveled the line of her collarbones
above her tunic. “I’d give back to you the strength I took, but I’d
rather not risk killing you.”

Her Gift, a well from which a powerful mage
like Silhara might drink, carried dangers beyond defense of its
host. The weakest spells turned potent, beneficial ones murderous.
Silhara had brought down a god with her Gift’s help. She was
willing to deal with a day of yawning and accomplishing little. Far
better that than being immolated on the spot by a well-meaning
spouse and her own magery.

“
Did you want to try a spell of
your own?”

Martise shook her head. “It probably won’t
work. You know the nature of a Gift doesn’t change. It’s simply
refined or suppressed.”

Silhara tucked her close to him. She savored
his body heat, the scent of neroli oil and the faint musk of
love-making that clung to him. “You won’t know for sure unless you
try,” he said.