“Did you speak much with my mother when she cared for you?”
They sat on the floor of another of the palaces numerous rooms, a low table between them. Torchlight painted sent shadows cavorting across the walls.
Cededa’s fingers hovered over an ornate game piece as he pondered his next move and ignored her attempts at distracting him. He jumped the piece two spaces and removed three of hers from the game board. “No. One of the last things I regained in my healing was the ability to speak. But she spoke to me often enough. Read to me as well. Remember when I said it’s how I learned your language?” He moved another piece onto the board, putting her most powerful player at risk.
Imogen hissed and hunched closer to the table for a closer look—a fruitless effort. Nothing hid on the board. He was a master at the game, and while Imogen played well, she was no match.
She studied the pieces. “Niamh wrote in her journal that you were burned.”
Cededa waited until she moved her designated piece and sealed her fate in this round of Senet. “I was burned. Burned until I was nothing more than an ash heap and a pile of bones.”
Her eyes rounded, horror darkening her irises. “Dear gods. Were you aware the entire time?”
“Yes.” He made his next move and conquered one corner of her territory on the board. He didn’t elaborate. Such memories were not to be shared or detailed. The agony, the heat, the consuming flames. Jeering faces and laughter, the ribald jokes and toasts with ale cups as he bellowed his pain to the cold moon until he could no longer see or hear. They had scattered his ashes to the winds and tossed his bones into the forest, a desecration of the man who’d decimated their numbers before they overwhelmed him.
He’d lain for days in a pile of leaves somewhere far beyond Tineroth, an abomination half healed, half remade and still smelling of the fires that had burned him to nothing more than scorched bone.
Niamh hadn’t fled when she found him. Instead, she’d bound him in layers of magic as natural as he was unnatural and sequestered him a private room in her home so he might renew in peace.
He welcomed the solace, the brief moments of touching the living world, even when the soul of Tineroth and her cursed waters shrieked inside his head for him to return. That compulsion could not be conquered. The city he once ruled had become the city he now served. Once he was whole again, he’d left Niamh’s house, leaving behind a key to the city and a promise to offer aid if she ever needed him. He never expected to see her again. He never dreamed he’d meet her daughter.
A light caress glided across the back of his hand, breaking into his bleak thoughts. In the torchlight, Imogen’s features were soft with sympathy. Her fingers laced with his over the Senet board. “I am so sorry, Cededa. Was it the Waters that healed you?”
He nodded. The colossal power trapped inside a tiny stream hidden far beneath Tineroth’s caves made Imogen’s bane look like child’s play. Burned to a mound of ash and blackened bone should have ended him. The agony he suffered during the burning made him beg for death, but even fire couldn’t conquer the Waters’ effects. Cededa was reborn, cinder by cinder until he stood before Niamh, whole and unmarked by his immolation, except for the memories scorched into his mind.
“The Waters are a blessing then,” Imogen said.
His hand convulsed in her clasp. “Is that what you believe?”
Her grip tightened, and her gray eyes narrowed. She peered at him intently, as if searching for the right words. “No, I don’t believe it. I believe you’re more cursed than I am.” She used her free hand in a gesture that encompassed not only the room they shared but Tineroth itself. “What blessing is there in living an immortal life caught between worlds? Alone?”
Cededa chuckled and lifted her hand, turning it to place a kiss in her palm. He could name one blessing now—he’d lived long enough to meet and fall in love with Niamh’s extraordinary daughter. He lowered her hand but kept it clasped in his. “I ruled an empire, one built by my grandfather and expanded by my father, but empires are more slippery than eels and harder to control. I needed more time to expand my lands, consolidate Tineroth’s power, bring other kingdoms under my rule. More time than a single mortal’s lifespan.”
The recollection of that far-off age, when he’d been consumed by avarice and ambition, held a pain greater than his immolation by mercenaries intent on stealing the Waters. “Imagine my joy when we discovered the Living Waters. I’d have ten lifetimes, twenty if I wished, to expand my empire. I’d be king of the world, not just the lands I’d inherited or conquered so far.”
Imogen frowned. “There’s nothing noble in carrying on a legacy of conquest.” She eased her hand out of his grip, and he let her go.
Cededa arched an eyebrow. “You know nothing of empires, Imogen.” She blushed and looked away. “A monarch who chooses ideals over power isn’t a monarch for long.” Experience had taught him that.
She must have caught the regret tainting his declaration. “Was it worth it? Drinking the Waters?”
“No.” She made to ask another question, then closed her mouth abruptly. “Say or ask it, Imogen. No use in hiding your desire to do so.”
She hesitated before forging ahead. “When did you become Cededa the Butcher?”
His insides froze at the question. He expected it, had always expected it from the moment she crossed the bridge and begged his help. Who wouldn’t want to know how someone came by such a grotesque title?
He dropped his gaze to the Senet board, moved his king through her defense wall and crushed her army in the game. When he looked up once more, he caught her eyeing him warily.
“After I led soldiers into Mir and destroyed yet another rebellion. I made a lesson of the city.” His voice was soft, toneless. “We left none alive.”
Imogen fisted her hands in her skirts. He heard the gasped trapped in her throat. She swallowed hard. “The women?” she whispered. “Children?”
He shook his head. “None left alive,” he repeated. “It took us three days. The canals and the fountains, even the river ran red with blood.” Only Tineroth’s screaming for his return had ever drowned out the screams of the dying that still rang in his mind.
Imogen lunged away from him, knocking the table with her knee hard enough to make the Senet board and spill the game pieces onto the floor. He watched, unmoving, as she scooted back on her haunches, desperate to put space between them.
The Butcher. He’d given her the truth, if not the answer she probably wanted. Not a hyperbolic title risen from the dramatic retellings of a popular fable, but a name earned and deserved. A part of him withered away at the sight of her scuttling back from him, revulsion twisting her features. He knew what she saw—the monster of legend, the reason why each of his images, except the catafalque, had been destroyed, why his people had finally revolted and why his greatest sorcerers had wrenched Tineroth from her anchor to the world and cast her into oblivion, and him along with her.