Imogen stared up at the remaining two spires of a tumbled-down temple. Ivy dripped from their roofs in lacy curtains, creeping toward the flat table of an altar open to the sky. “Tell me of this temple. What god did you build it for, and did you worship him yourself?”
“Not a god,” Cededa said beside her. “A goddess. And no, I didn’t worship her. I worshipped no one, except myself on occasion.” His amused look held more than a touch of self-mockery. “I don’t even remember her name. A deity of spring maybe, or fruit trees. I recall her supplicants offering pomegranates.”
“And you weren’t a supplicant.”
“Hardly.”
In the three weeks since her arrival in Tineroth, Imogen occupied her time with exploring the fabled city and killing its king with her touch. He stood at the top of the temple steps with her, looking none the worse for her fatal caresses. Dressed in worn silk that had once been finer than any ell of cloth she’d ever seen, he surveyed the fallen worship house with a bored expression.
She didn’t truly believe he could lift her curse, but she couldn’t discount what she saw. What she felt. Cededa had touched her face with a bare hand and didn’t drop dead at her feet. That alone had stunned her almost speechless. And she had touched him many times since then at his invitation. He might not possess the ability to break the curse, but his resistance to it left her almost as euphoric as he when he discovered the nature of her malediction, though his joy was a macabre thing. Never had she met anyone so thrilled at the idea of dying.
He was a mystery. Sublime, beguiling, malevolent. Cededa had been a model host to his unexpected guest, but Niamh’s words were never far from her thoughts.
“His people called him Cededa the Fair, then Cededa the Butcher.”
Even without those disturbing words, she recalled the effigy on the catafalque, the cruelty captured in marble, untouched by time or weathering. He stole her breath, and not just because of his physical beauty.
Cededa motioned her to follow him, and they picked their way through the cascade of rubble spilling across the temple floor. “The father of one of my wives designed this temple,” he said. “This one and several others throughout the city. I’ll take you to see them, if you wish. One is still mostly intact.”
Imogen’s pulse raced as it always did now when Cededa offered to escort her through Tineroth, describing the city as it had once been—a thriving metropolis bursting with life and noise. Raised on Niamh’s colorful tales of her time in Berberi, she easily imagined similar scenes in ancient Tineroth. “Oh yes, please. I want to see the entire city before I leave.” She paused, caught by his first remark. “One of your wives? How many did you have?”
The idea didn’t surprise her so much as intrigue her. Niamh might have kept Imogen isolated from the wide world, but she didn’t keep her ignorant. While the kings of Berberi and Castagher married only one woman, there were other monarchs who married several, each occupying a position in the spousal hierarchy.
Cededa’s mouth, with its natural sneer, quirked into a brief smile. Imogen instinctively pulled away when he reached for her hand. He waited, palm turned up, until she entwined her fingers with his. “Come,” he said. “I’ll show you. It’s been a long time since I’ve been a husband to anyone, and stone recalls better than I do the names of those I took to wife.”
He led her to the remains of a nave and a lone column, it’s top third broken off, but still standing. Cededa scrubbed away the layer of lichen from part of its surface to reveal symbols carved into the stone. Imogen recognized the similarity between the writing here and that on the bridge beneath the statues. Fascinating, and for her, unreadable.
Her companion traced one line of script with a fingertip. “A monk was assigned to record the names of the women I married. This is the architect’s daughter. All I remember of Elsida was fine skin and a crooked-tooth smile. She was my thirty-seventh wife, I think.” He shrugged at Imogen’s raised eyebrows. “I’ve lived a long time and married for many reasons; none for affection.” His gaze drifted, as if he looked inward at a memory long buried. “I remember Elsida’s father better. A man of vision who saw buildings as living beings. I think he left a small part of his soul in every temple and house he designed or built.”
Imogen surveyed the temple’s shattered shell and hugged herself. If the gods had any pity, they set free whatever lingering soul thread the architect had woven into his creation when it was destroyed. She hugged herself, chilled even in the city’s humid warmth. “What are the other names?” she asked.
Cededa’s gaze turned outward once more. He leaned closer and read the names aloud, pausing sometimes with furrowed brow as if trying to recall a long-dead wife’s face. His hand rested flat atop one name. “Helena. The most beautiful woman ever born. She bore me seven children.” He read more names, and Imogen counted sixty-two wives before he paused at the last name. She took a wary step back as his demeanor transformed, reminding her of their first encounter, when he threatened to cut her throat with his glaive.
His pale blue eyes were cold, and he drew his hand away from the column as if the stone burned. “Gruah. My last wife, my judge, and my punisher.”
Caution warred with curiosity. Imogen wanted to know more of this Gruah, but every survival instinct she possessed buzzed a warning that such an idea invited severe consequences. Even if she were fog-brained, she couldn’t misinterpret the warning in Cededa’s frigid expression.
A tense silence swelled between them before she grasped her courage with both hands and changed the subject. “How many children did you have? Just the seven by Helena?” Hard to believe this icicle of a man with his deathless stare had once been someone’s father.
He blinked and met her eyes, as if seeing her for the first time. His features relaxed a little, and Imogen breathed a soft sigh of relief. “With that many wives, not to mention the concubines, I fathered armies of children.”
And outlived them all, she thought. How sad. Immortality exacted a heavy price. “Did you have a favorite child?”
The space between his eyebrows knitted into a pair of lines. “At first I did.” He shrugged. “I didn’t really know most of them. Seventeen raised revolts against me. Six planned my assassination. Two almost succeeded.” His lips twitched as she stared at him slack-jawed. “Why so appalled? Rebellion and regicide are bedmates in the game of kingship, witch’s daughter, and they usually start with one’s siblings or offspring.”
Cededa the Butcher. What had he done to earn such a ghastly title? What made his children hate him so much that more than a dozen led rebellions against him and six tried to kill him? Maybe it wasn’t him so much as their own greed and thirst for power. Hard to become monarch yourself when your parent didn’t age or die of sickness. Still, she didn’t truly believe him a harassed innocent, not with such a brutal moniker attached to his name. And he called his last wife his judge and punisher. What did he mean? An icy wash of fear sluiced down her spine.
Her expression must have given away her thoughts. Cededa’s faint amusement disappeared. He watched her the same way a hawk watched a mouse hiding in a wheat field. “Afraid, Imogen?” he asked.
His tone was dead, flat. Pride might tempt her to deny it, but no one in their right mind would lie to this man. “Yes.”
Something flickered in that piercing gaze. Regret. “It wasn’t my intention,” he said in a warmer voice.
Imogen’s fear faded as quickly as it appeared. “I believe you.” She didn’t lie about that either.
They stared at each other for a moment. Sixty-three wives, Imogen thought, and each likely struck dumb or terrified at their first sight of him. He certainly left her speechless on numerous occasions since her arrival.
Cededa stepped over a pile of broken masonry, smaller bits crunching under his boot heels. “Come,” he said. “Tineroth has a library, or what’s left of one, two avenues away.” He paused to glance at her over his shoulder. “Unless you want to see something else.”
“A library,” she breathed out in a reverent voice. If anyone ever built a temple to her, she’d ask them to make it a library. “With many books?” Who cared if she couldn’t decipher the languages in which they were written. There was magic in the feel of parchment and ink.
Again that brief smile lifted the corner of his mouth. “Scrolls mostly, but there are some books. I can’t vouch for their condition.”
As he promised, the library stood two streets away, surrounded by a garden gone wild and choked with weeds and the ubiquitous ivy. Cededa helped her over a swathe of climbing vine, his bare hand warm in hers, his body seemingly unaffected by her touch. While in much better condition than the temple ruin they’d just left, the library showed the marks of destruction like every other building she had so far explored in Tineroth. Half of a staircase led to a second floor and then a third where shelves housed what must have been thousands of scrolls. All inaccessible to her unless Cededa could fly.
He chuckled and shook his head as if he heard her thoughts. “I’ve a few talents at my disposal. Flight isn’t one of them.” He gestured to a far corner, tucked under one of the stairwells. “Start there,” he said. “The newest scrolls are stored in those niches and won’t turn to dust when you disturb them. If you find something that interests you, bring it to me, and I’ll translate.” He nudged her toward the treasure trove and left her to idly explore another part of the library.
Imogen watched him for a few moments. Had he come here when the library stood whole and undamaged? He had once been a warrior king. That was how legend remembered him, yet she fancied he might have appreciated some of the scholarly pursuits.
The scrolls were predictably undecipherable, and in some cases illegible, their ink faded to ghostly scratches on the parchment. She brought Cededa her first armful of documents to translate. He made a perch of an overturned column top and invited her to sit beside him while he read aloud.
Most were inventories of harvest yields or the results of city court rulings. One made Cededa’s eyes flash and his lips thin to a tight line. Imogen glanced from him to the scroll and back again. “What is it?”
“A writ of arrest for the act of treason. My arrest.” He flung the scroll across the vast room before crooking his fingers at her. “Give me the next one.”
She wordlessly handed him another scroll. Who called for the king’s arrest those many centuries earlier? Was it even possible to arrest a monarch then? She didn’t think one could do it now.
The rest of the scrolls were more like the first bunch, dry accounts of trade goods and shipping bills, marriage records and births. She gathered the ones piled at her feet to return them to their cubby holes. “Your world then is much like ours now I think.”
Cededa snorted softly. “I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad one.” He tipped his chin toward the opposite side of the room. “Try those over there. You might have better luck and discover something more interesting than who bought flax or a pair of oxen.”
His words proved prophetic. The first scroll Imogen extracted from a painted box and unrolled made her eyebrows climb. While the ink might be faded on documents of lading, this scroll retained the vivid hues of both paint and ink.
Pictures illustrated inside decorative frames revealed themselves with the scroll’s slow unrolling, and Imogen’s eyes rounded with each revelation. Niamh’s forthright teachings regarding bed play, even the more intimate details she’d written of her relationship with Varn in her journal, didn’t compare to the lascivious scenes painted on the scrolls.
“You’ve found something that’s snared your attention,” Cededa called out. “Bring it, and I’ll translate.”
Imogen glanced at him and let the scroll roll itself closed. “I don’t think this one needs translating.” She picked her way to him, handed him the scroll and resumed her seat beside him. Her smile widened to a grin at his startled expression.
“They kept these in the library?” His obvious shock made Imogen clap a hand over her mouth to contain her laughter. She cleared her throat and grasped one side of the rods as he unrolled the parchment to its full length.
Each brightly painted square depicted a sexual act—sometimes between a man and a woman, sometimes between a man and a man and sometimes between two women. A few involved several participants. The painter wasn’t what she’d call an artist, and she had a more difficult time deciphering whose limbs and appendages belonged to whom. She peered closer at one of the scenes. Was that a goat?
“Look your fill?” Cededa’s dry question interrupted her perusal. His pale eyes shone in the gathering gloom. “It’s getting dark. We’ll return to the palace so you can eat. Bring the scroll with you. You’re right, it’s self-explanatory.”
“What is it? Instructions for lovemaking?”
Cededa stood and relinquished the scroll to her. “Hardly. More like fucking.” An odd shiver raised gooseflesh on Imogen’s arms at his blunt declaration. “It’s a list of services offered at one of Tineroth’s brothels. Such things were commonly posted outside the business. Odd to find one stored in the library.”
Imogen stared at him and then at the scroll in her hands. Her first glimpse of the painted scenes had elicited surprise and then a tingling warmth that coursed through her body. While she wasn’t at all interested in the finer details regarding the goat, she did want a closer look at the others. Their graphic intimacy flustered her and left her with questions Niamh had not answered in her bid to prepare her daughter for adulthood, even a solitary one.
While her curiosity about the scroll raged, Cededa’s interest had waned almost instantly. Beyond his initial surprise at finding the document here, he’d exhibited no more reaction to it than to any of the dull ones he first translated for her.
Granted, a man with as many wives and concubines as Cededa once possessed, was probably familiar with the how, why, when and where of every scene in the scroll. And more that weren’t painted there. Still, his lack of reaction was something beyond boredom of a thing done many times and reminded her of those moments when he coaxed her to run her hands over his bare torso, trace the silvery outlines of the Tineroth key collaring his throat and shoulders. Then too, he showed no reaction to her touch. Only that first time, when he experienced the power of her malediction, did he show any emotion and that time had nothing of desire about it.
Imogen frowned. She had no misguided notions regarding her looks. She was neither plain nor beautiful. Only unremarkable. Niamh had always praised her, but what loving parent didn’t see the beauty in their child? Still, she wondered at Cededa’s reserve, the absence of either attraction or revulsion to her touch. His was an almost ascetic demeanor, one that confused her, and if she were honest, put a dent in her vanity.
She rose and tucked the scroll under her arm. Her vanity would have to remain dented. The king of Tineroth had generously offered a means for her to live a normal life. She’d not be ungrateful by being discourteous. There were other questions about him she dare not ask, ones far less trivial than why he didn’t react as other men might to the graphic sensuality captured in vibrant paint or the enthralled caresses of a woman cursed with death in her fingers.
“What do you want to know, Imogen?”
So lost in her thoughts, she jumped at his voice, uttered near her ear. Cededa leaned in close, pale features sharp with interest now.
“You startled me,” she admonished and offered him a weak smile. It’s of no consequence, Sire. Just idle thoughts.”
He straightened and crossed his arms. “Unlike many women I’ve known, Imogen, you dissemble poorly and probably wouldn’t recognize coyness if it bit you on the hand.” He returned to his seat on the column top. “I’ve almost nothing left to me except time, and far too much of that. We can sit here all night if you wish until you choose to tell me why you’re frowning and burning holes through me with your stare.
She blushed, scrambling for some response that might appease him. “Would you believe me if I said I was admiring your looks?” She groaned under her breath. That was less than inspiring.
Cededa laughed, the expression temporarily ridding his fair features of the malice carved around his mouth. Imogen really did gawk at him with admiration then. He was truly breathtaking to behold.
The laughter died, but a smile remained. “Make no mistake. I’m flattered, but you’ve complimented me many times on my handsomeness without impaling me with a look.”
He’d given her the perfect opening for which to satisfy her curiosity; still, Imogen floundered. How did one ask so intrusive a question without sounding shallow, or even worse, insulting? She grasped another, less controversial topic.
“How is it you speak my language?” She brightened. That was good. And true. Too overwhelmed by Tineroth and its solitary ruler, she hadn’t even considered the oddity of his ability to speak her tongue so easily.
His eyes narrowed, his gaze measuring as if he judged her honesty and found it lacking. “Your mother,” he said. “She read to me as I healed from wounds. I listened, and I learned.”
It was Imogen’s turn to give him a doubtful look. That wasn’t quite how Niamh described it. Ash and bone coming together to remake an entire man was a lot stranger and more complex than healing wounds.
“I’ve never seen you eat or drink,” she said. “Not in all the time I’ve been in Tineroth. Do you not hunger or thirst?”
Cededa scowled. “I suspect that isn’t the question hovering on your tongue. But I’ll answer it.” He stood a second time and grasped her hand. “Come with me. I’ve something to show you.”
He led her back to the palace, through hallways and past rooms she’d become familiar with, down stairs she was certain hadn’t been there earlier in the day.
They entered a suite of rooms on the second floor through a pair of enormous doors equal to those that served as the palace entrance. Inside, an impenetrable blackness reigned until Cededa conquered it with a whispered word. Torches blazed to life on their own, spilling golden light across a space as grand and as neglected as the receiving hall.
Cededa led her to its center and released her hand. “These were once my chambers.”
Imogen pivoted in place, silent and stunned by the grandeur before her. The ceiling curved high above her, beyond the illumination of the torches. The floor lay concealed in a layer of dust ankle deep, but in places where the drafts stirred it clear, she spotted complex mosaics made of brilliantly colored tile. Rotted tapestries hung in tatters from bent hooks, some shredded by age and moths, others by the more ordered cut of a sword blade.
Light flickered on the walls, revealing a series of frescoes that stretched from floor to as high as the rooftop of her mother’s cottage. Those above an arm’s stretch were faded but otherwise untouched. Those below, however, bore the same ruin and destruction she’d seen on the statues and the murals in her chamber.
A pile of wood lay heaped in one corner, remains of what must have once been an enormous bed. More rubble littered the room, as if someone had come in and smashed every stick of furniture to splinters.
“Gods,” she whispered. “Who destroyed so many beautiful things?”
“I did.”
Her mouth fell open. Cededa had defaced his own palace? She blinked. “Why?”
His silent footfalls sent clouds of dust swirling upward as he paced the chamber’s perimeter. “I didn’t do this myself. Men of great anger and great purpose wielded their hammers and their chisels against these chambers, and others, but I was the reason for their actions.”
A melancholy settled on her spirit as she viewed the damage wrought. “Is yours the face destroyed on each statue? Each mural?”
“It was my face then.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“I was not as you see me now, Imogen. The Waters changed me in more ways than just longevity.” He reached out and ran a fingertip over one of the murals, tracing the faded outlines. “To answer your question, I don’t thirst or hunger. My body doesn’t need food or drink, or even sleep if I wish it. Some might say it’s a gift of the Waters to their guardian, a means of survival and protection.”
She frowned. “I don’t know that I’d call such a thing a gift. You’d never starve, but there is a pleasure in good food, good wine, and a soft bed if you’re lucky enough to have them.”
His dry chuckle echoed in the expanse. “Yes, there is. And you’re wise in your observations. Unfortunately, the Waters’ gifts are not truly gifts. Each comes with a price. I have no need of food or water, no need of sleep. My sight and hearing are greater than any mortal man’s, and I walk with the tread of a ghost.” One hand curled into a fist, though his voice remained even. “But I cannot even eat or drink for pleasure. All is dust in my mouth. I’ve almost forgotten the sweetness of honey.” He paused. “Or the taste of a woman on my tongue.”
Imogen stiffened. She’d asked him one question. He’d answered several, including the one she most wanted to ask but didn’t know how to approach. “You’ve lost your desire?”
His short chuff of laughter echoed bitter in the torch-lit chamber. “I lost my manhood long ago. I hardly remembered the belly-burn of desire.” That otherworldly gaze rested on her, heavy and no longer cold. “Then you crossed the bridge into Tineroth and brought sweet death with you.”