The Cedna (Tales of Blood & Light Book 2) (11 page)

“Enough!” I twisted against his hold on my arms. “Let me touch you.”

He held out. “Don’t be impatient.”

“But I want to touch you.”

“You are touching me, though not with your hands. Feel all the other places.” He moved his body against mine.

I closed my eyes and followed his suggestion. Again, he licked me, on the throat, the collarbones, across the shoulders. He released my wrists with an admonishing pat, telling them to remain still. I clenched my hands to keep them from moving.

He made me feel more like a goddess than I ever had as the Cedna of Gante. He held my hips as he lifted that secret part of me to his mouth. I couldn’t help myself; I put my hands on his head and let his hair flow around my fingers. I pulled, wanting more. His worship was not enough. I wanted to consume him.

“I need more,” I whispered.

He lifted his head and smiled, a flash in the dim light. “So do I.” He slid up my body in a graceful motion and pushed into me in the way of mating. I stifled a scream by sinking my teeth into his shoulder, though the pain had not startled me. I was accustomed to pain. But pain had never contained this fiery seed of pleasure. I followed the burn. He wound his hands with mine as he moved inside me. Our palms matched—the exact same size, his soft, mine rough.

I drowned in the heady sensation of our bloodlights intermingling, his pearly light weaving around my dark shadows. A tiny braid of our lights separated and flew away from us, lodging in the opal by the bed, a twist of black and moon-white, forever preserved inside that glassy crystal.

W
hen I woke
Onatos lay beside me, one arm curling me in a gentle embrace. I didn’t want to move, so I stayed still, watching the dawn creep through the slits in the shutters. The chamber door remained open as I had left it the night before. I winced.

I slipped from beneath his arm and padded to the door, closing it, pulling the latch.

“What are you doing?” Onatos sat up.

“The door was open.”

“Gods, my love! You cannot come down here anymore.” He ran a hand through his hair and his face creased with worry, but he smiled as I crawled back into the bed and faced him.

“Shhhh.” I put a finger on his lips and burrowed into the bedding, melding my body against his. His arms came around me, and a soft blanket of amnesia fogged my mind. Onatos’s touch stifled the screaming beast that had been echoing in my head. I never wanted him to stop touching me.

Eventually Onatos forced us up from his bed. “You have to go back to the Towers,” he insisted as he searched the ground for my clothing.

“If I stay, will you come to me there?” I took the dress from his hands and donned it reluctantly.

“Cedna. You cannot leave. I am your jailer. If you flee, I will have to catch you. If you go, I’ll only bring you back again. Save us both the trouble and stay.”

I bit hard on my inner cheek to control my face. I would make no promises if he would make none to me.

“But you’ll come to me? Up in the Tower?”

Onatos sighed. “When I can, my love. When I can.”

I did not understand his hesitation, nor the intricacies of this sayantaq way of mating, and I did not want to come across as unsophisticated, so instead of arguing, I caught his face between my hands and kissed him. “Do not neglect me for too long.”

By the time I found my way back to my room in the Towers, the sun had reached its apex. I spent the afternoon working the blackstone for lack of anything else to do.

Laith arrived as I worked. “When you strike the stone, you look like a magitrix,” he told me. “Like you’re in a trance.”

“I am,” I said.

“You do magic?”

“It is a small magic. I let my hands go into the Spirit Layer, what my people call Yaqi.”

“You mean The Aethers?”

“I believe so. The Aethers is what you call the place where you see the lights—the aetherlights, yes?”

“Oh, yes. It’s so pretty there.”

“You can see it?”

He nodded. He pointed at the center of my chest and his eyes blurred for an instant. “Yours is different. I’ve never seen black aetherlight before.”

I recoiled from his almost accusing finger. Could he see what had transpired between Onatos and me the night before? Matings left clear evidence in Yaqi for those who knew to look for the visible binds. Ganteans called these ung-aneraqs, blood-heart-breaths, thin cords made of the intertwined bloodlight of partners. “Does your father know you can do this? See the aetherlight?”

Laith nodded solemnly. “Of course. He’s going to send me to the Conservatoire to study magic when I’m old enough.”

I put down my sculpting tools and shooed Laith off lest he linger too long and see the new connection I shared with his father.

I
could not sleep
. I wanted Onatos to come, but not even my handmaiden had arrived to bring me supper. My stomach growled and my heart ached. I drifted off into a restless, hot dream.

A soft touch on my face woke me. Onatos broke into a smile as I opened my eyes. “Hello, my love,” he whispered. “Are you hungry?”

“My maid never brought me anything to eat,” I complained as he pulled me from the bed and brought me to the table in my room.

“I sent her away. I brought you a delicacy from Lysandra,” he said, taking the chair opposing mine. “The maid will not return. I cannot have her here with you if I wish to visit. Our secret cannot go further than us, Cedna.”

I took a bite of the biscuit before me. Sweetness exploded in my mouth.

“It’s baked almond paste and honey,” Onatos said, watching my delighted face.

“What about Laith?” I demanded before I took another bite.

“What about him?”

“Can he know? About us?”

Onatos stood up, pressing both palms onto the table. “Absolutely not! He’s a child. He should not know about such matters!”

I tapped my lip. “Laith might know already,” I admitted. “He sees things in your Aethers—”

“How do you know that?”

“He visits me almost every day. These mating binds between people are visible in the lights, you know. He may well have seen—” I gestured from the center of my chest towards the center of his “—the cord that now connects us.”

“Damnation,” hissed Onatos. “But it is a rare mage who can see so clearly, and Laith has no training. Did Laith
say
he had seen this?”

I pushed aside the rest of the treat, worried Onatos would leave because I had distressed him.

“No. I only wondered.” I stood and wrapped my arms around Onatos, sliding my hands beneath his shirt. “It’s already done, Onatos.” I unlaced the ties that kept his shirt closed. He succumbed to my advances far more easily than I expected.

Afterward, he rubbed my whole body, though his fingers lingered on the travesty of my arms, as if he could erase the innumerable scars there or smooth away the pain that had formed them.

“What happened to you, my love?” he whispered. “Who did this to you, and why?”

I, who had known no fear through all the rituals that had scarred me, now quailed to reveal those acts. What would he think of my people and me? I kissed him, hoping I could not only silence his questions, but also repress my own uncertainties.

H
e came
to me night after night, bringing pleasure to my darkness, casting a spell of forgetfulness over me. In Onatos’s arms, I forgot the desperation of the screaming beast locked in my mind, but after we made love, he’d touch my wrists, tracing the scars back and forth, and the questions would pour from him as if he could not restrain himself, bringing the unwanted memories back.

“What happened here, who cut you?” He rubbed his thumb over the most recent scar. Perhaps he imagined the ravages of a lover had left me so disfigured? Did he not know that I could never allow my body to anyone but him? I recognized jealousy in his questions; he was not satisfied to have only my body; the man wanted all of me, even the darkest secrets cobwebbed in the back of my heart.

“It is ritual,” I finally told him, almost frightened by the intensity of his gaze as he questioned me. My words were entirely inadequate. He would never understand. No one would understand, certainly not a man who’d grown up in the soft embrace of southern silk.

“Rituals? Are the Gantean gods so bloodthirsty?”

“It is not gods who want my blood. It is the whole world, Onatos. The Cedna was made to offer her blood as sacrifice. We call this tunixajiq, the keeping of the balance. Ages ago, when the Ganteans first brought magic into the world, they fashioned a system to sustain it. The Cedna keeps the balance. Magic is the hungriest child the world has ever birthed.” I knew, because of my absence, the Elders would be feeding the Hinge frantically with others’ blood. I still made my offerings, but I doubted my blood served very well when given so far from the source. I squeezed my eyes closed, awash with guilt.

Onatos murmured, “I do not understand. You say there is a power in Gante that keeps magic in the world? And you make blood rituals to keep this power satisfied?”

“That is how I got my scars—those rituals. The Cedna must give her blood. I must cut myself even now, every few days, to feed it.” I gestured at the fresh cut he’d probed.

Onatos frowned. “How could such an evil practice sustain magic? Our mages do not make blood rituals or anything like that. It is not necessary, even if it is what your people believe.” He shook his head and leaned over to kiss the scars on my wrist. “You must stop injuring yourself this way, my love. I cannot bear it. I hate to see your pain.”

Had I expected a sayantaq lord to understand? Having revealed the deepest of Gantean secrets, I finally saw how pointless our struggle to keep so much hidden truly was.

No one here in the south would believe us anyway. Not even Onatos, who loved me.

O
natos
never visited
me during sunlit hours, but Laith came often to share a meal or to watch me work the blackstone.

“What does your father do all day?” I asked him as I sipped my favored orange juice one afternoon, sitting by the fountain. Laith liked to rest his head in my lap, and he would let me run my fingers through the hair that reminded me so much of Onatos.

“He runs the Alcazar. He listens to cases from the people of Amar. He writes letters and reviews accounts,” Laith said. “Sometimes he takes me riding in the mountains.” He pointed at the fine vista of jagged peaks that soared even above the Alcazar’s Towers.

“He never sees Lady Daria?” I hated to imagine the two of them together. No matter how much Onatos called me his “love,” Daria remained his mate, his wife.

Laith squinted up at me. “He only goes to her when he wants to see the baby, Jaasir.”

I’d nearly forgotten about the other child. The notion that Onatos had two children by other women only increased my frustrations. “How is the baby?”

Laith pushed out of my lap. “Hardly even a baby, now. I hear he can walk, but I don’t see him anymore. Lady Daria won’t allow it.”

“She’s like a bitch-dog with a single sickly pup,” I muttered.

Laith dissolved into a fit of giggles, rolling onto the grass. “A bitch-dog!” he cried. “Just like a bitch-dog! One of the poufy ones with the funny haircuts that court ladies keep.”

Onatos’s son never failed to cheer me when my bad moods struck.

Onatos arrived late. I had not slept, had not even gotten into the bed, for his absence left me too anxious. I was pacing the room when he arrived.

“What are you doing still awake, love?” he asked as he eased the chamber door closed. He was always so careful, so precise. I wanted him to take risks for me, to be uncontrolled, passionate, loud.

“You’re late.”

He sighed and slouched into a chair. “It’s been a busy few days. I’m planning a trip to Galantia in a sidereal’s time—I will finally present my case to Mydon.”

“You’re going Galantia? Will you bring me?” I came to his side and let the silk dressing gown I wore fall from my shoulders.

Onatos ran his fingers down my bare spine. “Just because my wife refuses to go, I cannot bring my mistress in her place. Think of the scandal—the bastard Onatos Amar cavorting with the imposter Cedna of Gante when presenting a legal case!” He threw back his head and laughed. “To say nothing of the fact that Mydon would not be pleased to see you in the High City. Your sentence is to take place here, love, and you still have half a year to serve on it.”

Had six moons already passed since my coming to the Alcazar?
Since becoming Onatos’s lover, I had lost all track of time. A chill ran through me as I thought of Gante, and the scream in my head that reminded me of everything I’d left behind.

For the first time, I did not enjoy Onatos’s mirth. “I am not an impostor.” He tried to soothe me by drawing me to bed with him, but I resisted. “How can you call me that? King Mydon has stolen my home from me! He has allowed Malvyna Entila to sanction the murder and destruction of my people and given her a title and a land that does not belong to her. And you do not even question it! Do I mean so little to you?”

He appeared shocked by my anger, dropping his arms at his sides. “There’s nothing I can do for you and your people, love. I’m sorry for it, I am. But I am Mydon’s sworn vassal, and have little choice but to follow his decrees.” He reached for me again. “Don’t ruin the time we have together. This is our respite, don’t you see? We must be each other’s comfort. We can bring each other happiness we might never otherwise experience, but we must seek our happiness quietly, or it will be taken from us.”

I let him draw me down into his softness, but a growing discontent was brewing, and the scream was growing louder.

A
s the days
led up to Onatos’s departure for Galantia, I grew even more restless. He still came to me at night, but I failed to be what he wanted. I was too much; I could not be his quiet, secret mistress. Did he not feel the tightness of the bind that connected us in Yaqi? Did he not feel the pull? All my tears had been stolen from me long ago; no self-respecting Cedna could allow herself private misery, but one night, three days before Onatos was due to leave, I could not sleep. I thrashed in bed. He rested at my side, though I knew he would rise before dawn to return to his own room in the Court. Then he would spend his whole day pretending I did not exist.

I sat up and threw off the light cotton sheet, the only bedclothes I could tolerate in the southern heat. As my feet met the cool floor tiles, Onatos snaked an arm around my waist. “What are you doing, love?”

“I can’t sleep,” I hissed.
Not when I know you are leaving me so soon.

He sat up and prevented me from standing. “You are like a fire,” he murmured. “Constantly ablaze.”

“It’s never this warm in Gante. Not even in high summer. We need that kind of inner heat there.”

He pulled me back against the pillows, stroking my hair. I closed my eyes. “Do you miss it? Your home? Do you miss Gante?”

“No.”

“They why can’t you settle, my love? You know I’ll give you a place here in my Towers forever. You know I’ll take care of you. And yet, you’re forever on the edge of flight. I fear every night I will come here and find you have disappeared. What will I say to Mydon when I have lost a prisoner he entrusted to my care?”

I burst off the bed and whirled to face him. “Is that all you care about? Saving face with your damned liege lord? Is that all I mean to you?”

“Cedna—”

I snatched one of the silk curtains hanging from the bedframe and ripped. I needed to hear the sound of some kind of destruction.

Onatos sighed. “Look at yourself.” He rose, slipped into his breeches, and pulled on his boots. He shoved his hands through his midnight hair. His calmness only made my fury rise.

I tore the bed drape all the way in two and threw the pieces on the ground. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“I mean you act like a child! You act as though our private desires must rule above all others. As though we had no other duties, no other responsibilities, no other obligations. As though we lived in some other world. Perhaps I am not the man you want me to be. Don’t behave like a child, Cedna. I have obligations I cannot put aside for your whims.”

“What?” I shrieked. “
You
have obligations? What about mine!”

He had already turned and slammed the bedchamber door. I stood naked beside the bed for many long moments after he was gone, feeling more alone than I ever had. Who was he to tell me of duty?

O
natos visited
me one last time before his departure, arriving laden with books, which he stacked on the table in my chamber.

“You might need entertainment while I am away in Galantia,” he explained, stroking the leather book covers. “I brought you an encyclopaedia of Lethemia.”

I eyed his peace offering skeptically as I ran a finger over the gold text on the top one’s cover. We had exchanged no words since our argument, and he had hurt me with his derision. I knew more than he could ever imagine about sacrificing myself for others. Why did he not understand my role as the Cedna? Why did he not believe me when I explained what I was? Everything he did hurt me. I had given him my few soft parts, and he had bruised them.

“I do not like to read,” I muttered. Not true. I didn’t even know how. My education had been neglected, growing up as I had, shunned and hidden in the Kaluq caverns. Yet another fact of my life that privileged, perfect Onatos Amar would never understand.

“You may enjoy it if you get bored enough.” He tried to put a good face on his departure.

“I have my blackstone. I have Laith.”

“Laith? Is he still coming here?”

I nodded.

Onatos shook a finger at me. “Be gentle on him, Beautiful. I’m sure he’s madly in love with you. One harsh word from you will tear the boy apart.”

“I would not speak harshly to Laith! And Laith would never try to hide me up in some dusty tower—he’d be proud to call me his mother.”

Onatos shook his head. “You will not be consoled, will you? Very well, my love. I will dream of you every night while I’m away.” He bent over and laid a kiss on the top of my head.

And with that, he was gone.

W
ith Onatos absent
, I had no distraction from the long scream, the beast’s scream in my head. Onatos had been the only cure for it. I spent my days working the blackstone, striking and striking again. I didn’t stop until Laith poked his head up from beneath the aqueduct.

“When are you going to bring me Leila?” he chirped as he wrapped his arms around my waist in greeting.

I stroked his hair. “Who’s Leila?”

“My baby sister.” He buried his face against my abdomen.

I froze with my hands mid-stroke. “What sister?”

“
My
sister. She’s growing inside you right now. I can see her.”

I grabbed hold of the boy’s wrists. “What do you mean, you can see her?” Laith confirmed a fear I had been ignoring for several moon cycles. I had known what the absence of my moon-bloods meant, but his words forced me to acknowledge my predicament.

“I can see her light inside of you. Pale blue, edged with dark. Small.” He held out his fingers to indicate the size.

“You can see that right now?”

He frowned. “It’s not like seeing you, but it has colors and shapes. I see it with the part of my head that understands what I see with my eyes.” He tapped his temple.

He was as slippery as Atanurat.

“When will you bring her to me?” he persisted.

“Not for a while. She has to grow before she comes out.”

He nodded. “I remember. Jaasir took a long time, too. Will you let me hold her? My father always said Leila would be my sister to love. Jaasir isn’t mine, but Father says Jaasir will have his own sister. Leila is going to be mine.”

I still didn’t understand. “Who is Leila?”

He sighed. “Father says my sister will be Leila. Laith and Leila; the names go together, see? You aren’t like Daria. You wouldn’t take my sister away from me. So you must have Leila. Daria won’t have her.”

His reasoning was almost clear. Apparently, Onatos longed for a daughter to name Leila. A shiver ran through my spine. Had Onatos been planning this all along? Was he simply using me as a means to gain this daughter, an illegitimate companion for his bastard son? My face flushed.

Laith deserved the truth more than lies, but I offered him neither. I did not know if he would ever meet his sister.

I
hated
the lack of Onatos. He had been gone for over a moon cycle. I could not sleep, and my growing belly showed even beneath loose gowns. The beast screamed and screamed. I doubted the choices I had made, and my doubts melded with the scream inside my head.

Onatos’s harsh words continued to cut:
as though we had no other duties, no other responsibilities, no other obligations.
I knew only too well the obligations that hung over me. Every time I sliced open my wrist, I grew more and more aware that my blood wasn’t doing enough. I could feel the shivering tremors in the veins of the earth beneath my feet. I owed the world, and I had been away from Gante too long.

I knew I had responsibilities; I was no child. Though I cut my wrist every five days and let the blood seep into the Lethemian soil, it wasn’t the same as giving the blood to the Hinge on Gante. If magic was to remain in the world, I had to return to Gante, and if I did not leave while Onatos was away, I did not think I could. I longed for his presence as a drowning woman craved the air.

How to make such a choice? The woman wanted the man. The goddess knew a world depended on her sacrifice. The two halves of me could not meet.

One midnight, while my blood screamed and my head muddled with doubts, I took up a shard of blackstone and gouged the soft flesh of my arm. Dark blood welled and dripped. I closed my eyes. A Cedna knows that sometimes her choices do not belong to her.

No one was nearby, and so the only bloodlight I could see in Yaqi was my own, a roiling patch of shadow. I saw the ung-aneraq I shared with Onatos, the brightest light in my field of vision, his moonlight thread wound with my black, stretching into a fading horizon.

You are back, daughter.
Skelton Woman did not show her face when she spoke, but I knew her rasping voice immediately.
You have neglected me too long.

“I know, Mother,” I whispered into the still southern night. “Forgive me.”

My bones grow dry when you feed me with such poor nourishment.

“What can I do?” I pleaded. “I bleed and bleed, but I cannot feed you. I am failing as a Cedna.”

As I said you would.

How her words hurt me! “I want to do better. I want to help.”

Then
you know what you must do.

I did know, but every part of me resisted. My heart broke to think of leaving my Onatos. I feared my reception in Gante, where they would call me traitor or worse.

“I’m afraid, Mother.”

It is a weak woman who lets her fears rule her. You know what you must do. Cednas are made for sacrifice.

“I bear a child. I cannot return to Gante. They will take her away from me. They will take her and cut the cord that connects us—”

You would reject the ways of your people? What kind of Cedna are you? Your people are dying. Only you can help them. For what purpose were you made?

“I fear they will kill me, as they did my mother.”

Your fears are a taint. Death comes to everything. A Cedna does not fear the inevitable. Whom do you serve? Yourself or the Iksraqtaq?

Do you not hear that scream, child?

The howling beast’s pain nearly doubled me over in the courtyard.

I began to cry.

H
ours later
, I rose, shaken. Skeleton Woman’s message left no doubt of what I must do, but my limbs were heavy with dread. To go back to Gante meant leaving myself behind. I would have to become the role I never wanted. The sacrifice. A sacrifice has no personal aims; she cannot. She must exist only for duty, only for others. I had to shove down my own raw emotions, my fears, my loves, my hopes.