Summer lay fully upon Castagher. Imogen stood on her balcony and watched the sun set on the harbor. She’d never been this close to the sea before and admired the way the water turned to liquid fire in the sun’s reflective light. Ships rocked on languid waves, and farther out, in open water, Castagher traded on its newly acquired shipping lanes.
A door opened and closed behind her, alerting her to a visitor. She recognized the click of her cousin’s boots on the floor and braced herself. “I’m out here, Your Majesty,” she called to him.
The clicking grew louder, accompanied by the scent of rosemary and beeswax candles. Imogen turned to Hayden as he took his place beside her. Charming, handsome, and with a sharp wit, Hayden of Castagher oozed insincerity. His overtures of friendship rang false, and his gaze on her made her feel like a moth trapped in a spider’s web.
“Out on the balcony again, I see.”
She summoned a smile with effort. “I have one of the best views in the city. Seems a shame to waste it.”
He acknowledged her compliment by preening. “True, but can’t you find a moment to join me in the main hall? We’ve a talented bard to entertain us at supper and a harpist from Minos. The best harpists come out of Minos, you know.”
Imogen honestly didn’t care if the harpist came from the royal stables and brought fiddlers from the catacombs with them. They’d had this conversation in various incarnations several times. Hayden had tried to coax her out of her room and join him with his court in the great hall.
She indulged him once, and that had been enough to know she was feared by the courtiers and unwelcomed in their midst. Her curse, weakened by Cededa’s touch, had returned full strength once she left Tineroth. Even had she been made free of Niamh’s bane, none would trust her enough to test it. While she found the courtiers’ reactions to her a perfect excuse to avoid meals in the royal hall, she was more isolated and alone in Castagher’s court than she’d ever been in her life.
“Please extend my apologies. You know I’m uncomfortable around so many people in one place. Nor are they comfortable around me.”
Hayden’s mouth thinned. “They’ll hold their tongues if they know what’s good for them.” He sighed and leaned against the balcony’s ledge. “You’re a lot like your mother, you know. She had this sweetness about her. A sweetness that hid a stubbornness worthy of a mule.”
Imogen offered him a tight smile. She’d known early on that she was Niamh’s fosterling, and while she’d been curious about her parents, her foster mother’s distress at the questions she asked had made her reluctant to push for more. Niamh had been a strong and giving parent despite the dark beginning they shared between them. Only now, learning of her through Hayden’s recollections, did Imogen regret not knowing Selene.
Unlike the rest of his court, Hayden showed no fear of her touch. He grasped her gloved hand and bent to kiss her knuckles. A cold shiver made her fingers twitch. “If you change your mind, tell your maid. Someone will escort you to the hall.”
“Thank you, cousin.” Now go away.
He paused at the balcony doors. “Solstice will be here in a few days. Castagher celebrates with a festival by the water. I want to take you there.” He frowned. “You can’t stay in your rooms forever, Imogen. Consider my invitation.” A threat and a command wrapped in silky words.
Imogen nodded. “I will.” She waited until he closed the door behind him to wipe her hand on her skirts.
Solstice. She had great plans for that day. Despite the trappings of luxury and privilege, she was a prisoner of Castagher and Hayden her jailer. He had sent soldiers to abduct her and bring her to him. She had been the proof he required to claim rights of trade from Berberi, the bride promised to him when he was merely a child and she a babe hardly a week old.
She had listened, numb, when he explained why a small army had scoured two kingdoms to find her and deliver to his care. Even his knowledge of her curse didn’t deter him from planning their union. She wasn’t a beloved bride, merely a means to an end, as many aristocratic women were in matters of marriage.
She despised Hayden for his single-minded ambition and casual disregard of her feelings, but she reserved her greatest loathing for Dradus, his sorcerer. Sly, deceptive and calculating, he made Imogen’s skin crawl with revulsion. He’d earned her enmity when he used her to break Cededa, intensifying it to hatred when he revealed how he found her on their return trip to Castagher.
“I raised Niamh’s body from the grave for a little chat.” He smirked at her horrified inhalation. “You can learn a lot of from the dead if you ask the right questions. The witch told me where to find you.”
“You’re fouler than the bottom of a privy pit,” Imogen spat. “I hope she curses you from her grave.”
His smirked deepened. “Like she cursed you?” Imogen froze, and the smirk turned to a full-blown shark’s grin. “She didn’t tell you, did she? Took her secret to the grave.” Dradus folded his hands under his chin. “Niamh of Leids became the castoff mistress of King Varn when he married your mother. A woman scorned is a dangerous creature; a sorceress scorned, a lethal one. She laid a death geas on your parents, but something went wrong, and you inherited the curse. You killed two wet nurses, a maid and your parents before someone figured out you were the assassin.”
Imogen wondered when all the air had suddenly been sucked out of the room. She couldn’t breathe. Dradus watched her with a reptilian gaze and the smirk she so badly wanted to strike off his face with one killing blow. “You’re lying,” she said. “Niamh would never cast such a geas, if only because she loved me and liked children. She’d never put me at such risk.”
She did believe; however, in her foster mother’s need for revenge. Niamh’s journal revealed how much she loved Varn. Broken-hearted, enraged, she might well have sought vengeance against him and the woman he took to wife.
The mage shook his head. “Niamh didn’t know Selene was pregnant. When she discovered what happened and that Varn’s sister planned to have you drowned, she stole you away and disappeared.”
Niamh, who had devoted her life to raising and protecting Imogen, had been the reason for her curse. Tears clouded her vision, and Imogen forced them back. Never would she cry before this piece of filth.
Her foster mother had begged her for forgiveness on her deathbed. Deep inside, where Dradus couldn’t see, Imogen wept. For herself and a life so profoundly altered by another woman’s revenge, for Niamh who willingly sentenced herself to raising a child who wielded death in her touch, and for the parents she never knew who welcomed their firstborn into the world and died because of it.
Imogen had fled Dradus’s presence and avoided him now as much as possible. Hayden favored him; she wished him dead and remained wary whenever they crossed paths. His questions regarding Tineroth and Cededa held all manner of traps designed to catch a slip of the tongue or glean a secret. Imogen silently thanked Cededa for never telling her where the Living Waters pooled in Tineroth. Dradus would get nothing from her.
He often told Hayden his studies called him to other cities and towns, and he disappeared for several days, returning with a frustrated scowl and more probing questions for Imogen. She suspected he returned to the gorge in the futile hope of resurrecting the Yinde Bridge and a second crossing into Tineroth. He believed Cededa dead, killed by his own magic and the river that accepted his plummeting body. Imogen didn’t naysay him, though she fervently hoped he was wrong.
All her plans, her desires, her reason for not falling into despair rested in the belief that Cededa had survived and returned to Tineroth.
She abandoned the balcony for her room. Long shadows stretched across the floor, and her maid Lila circled the room, lighting lamps to chase away the darkness. She eyed her mistress as one might a barely tamed beast—cautious and ready to take flight at the first hint of attack.
Imogen quelled the urge to roll her eyes. Lila was no different from any of the others. Her fear of Imogen’s curse hadn’t lessened with time or Imogen’s friendly overtures. She curtsied nervously, nearly setting her skirts on fire with the lit candle she carried.
“’Good evening, Your Highness. Will you be wanting your supper in your room tonight?”
The question was virtually rhetorical at this point. Since she’d first arrived at Castagher, Imogen had only eaten in the feasting hall three times, each occasion an interminable evening characterized by rude stares, whispers and insincere smiles.
“Yes, Lila. Thank you.”
The maid bobbed another curtsey before fleeing the chamber. Imogen waited until the door closed before pulling a travel sack from under her bed. In it she’d stuffed a water flask, a few days’ worth of pilfered oat cakes and a dress discarded by the palace’s head laundress. To these, she added a heavy cloak and a small purse containing four skells of silver, enough to buy a horse and ride to the Castagheri border. The sack went back under the bed. Thank the gods her maids were lazy and didn’t bother to dust under there. All she could do now was wait.
The days before Solstice crawled on feeble legs. The entire city prepared to celebrate, and for once Hayden didn’t insist Imogen join him in the upcoming celebrations. Death’s handmaiden among a drunken crowd of celebrants presented too much of a risk. Imogen occupied herself with studying the map she had tucked away in a book of poems. She had memorized every detail but studied it a final time before tossing it in the fireplace’s grate where the flames greedily devoured the parchment.
She thought of Niamh once more. She might have discounted Dradus’s revelations as lies, but Hayden verified most of them.
Stricken by her lover’s change of affections from his mistress to his new wife, Niamh had gone mad. The need for vengeance had overridden any sense of reason or compassion, and she’d leveled a dark power against King Varn’s wife, never knowing until too late that her bane had stricken the unborn child Selene carried.
Death ran like blood through Imogen’s tiny hands, striking down any she touched, including Selene, Varn, the midwife and three nursemaids. By the time Niamh discovered the devastation her curse had wrought, Varn’s sister had stepped in and instructed the newborn be taken out of the castle and drowned in the nearest well. The maid assigned to the hideous task never saw the blow that struck her down or the fleet shadow that gently lifted the sleeping infant from her cradle and vanished with her into the night.
Imogen refused to cry in front of Dradus, but she sobbed alone in her room until the tears ran dry. That night she dreamed of Cededa and his wraith wife Gruah. Gruah held out a nebulous hand, wispy fingers curling around Imogen’s. In the dream, she spoke and her voice chimed like tiny bells in a summer garden. “Yours is a great heart, Imogen. Can you forgive?”
The next morning she woke, a lightness and renewed sense of purpose filling her. Now, she sat on her bed, dressed in castoffs with her journey sack near her feet. She’d forgone gloves as being too distinctive. Instead, she buried her hands in her pockets and prayed none would put her in a position that she’d accidently touch them. A linen kerchief covered her hair, and she practiced slouching so as to appear shorter than she was. With any luck, those still awake in the castle were either too drunk on wine or too sleepy to recognize her.
The night sky was slowly paling as she sneaked out of her room and tiptoed down the hall toward the back staircase used by the servants. Only the head cook and a scullery maid were awake, and they remained in the kitchen.
Imogen’s luck held as she navigated a path through Castagher to her fortified walls and finally past the gates to the post stables where the horses for hire were kept. The stable master leered at her but didn’t question where a laundress had gotten the funds to rent a horse. Within the hour, she was galloping toward the borders shared by Castagher and Berberi. If her luck stayed with her, she would reach the gorge in three days’ time.
The miles flew by as the horse galloped steadily toward Tineroth. Imogen measured the distance and counted the hours. Solstice was almost here. Desperation grew within her. Reaching the gorge was the easy part. Reaching Tineroth before it vanished from the world, another thing altogether.
She left the horse at a stable in a village bordering the forest. The wood welcomed her, a shelter of dappled shade and relief from the hot sun. Imogen traveled south on foot through thick underbrush and reach the gorge at twilight. Across the gorge’s empty space concealing mist parted briefly to reveal the flickering, shadowy outlines of buildings. Home.
Unfortunately, she no longer had a key to unlock the door or summon the bridge that would carry her across the divide.
A far off sound drifted to her ears. The voices of men calling, the unmistakable resonant baying of dogs tracking their quarry.
“No,” she breathed. Surely, Hayden hadn’t noticed her gone or tracked her so soon! Dradus’s vulpine features rose in her mind, and she growled. “You rat bastard. You set a spy on me.”
Imogen paced along the cliff’s edge. She had nowhere to run. Besides, she had only one place in mind she wanted to be, and at the moment it was out of reach. She picked up a rock and threw it over the cliff’s edge in frustration. “Cededa!” She shouted, uncaring if the hunting pack heard her.
The dogs’ baying grew louder with renewed excitement. Imogen threw another rock. “Cededa!” This time her bellow carried far across the divide. Still nothing from the other side. A terrible fear nearly consumed her. What if the immortal king had not survived the fall into the river? What if Tineroth no longer held her last living son captive?
More shouts behind her, this time close enough she expected to see horses and dogs burst from the forest understory at any moment.
“Cededa!” She shrieked his name a third time. There’d be no fourth time. Dradus’s hunters were almost on top of her.
Tears blurred her vision, an impotent fury born of frustration and despair threatening to consume her. Suddenly the air in front of her wavered, rolling and shimmering. The Yinde bridge took shape, vague but solid enough. At the other end a pale figure waited, and Imogen cried out, exultant.
Her euphoria died a quick death when a shaggy-haired hound broke from the trees and loped toward her. Dradus’s command of “Catch her!” urged it to a faster pace.
“Run, Imogen.”
Cededa’s cool voice carried on the wind, and Imogen’s feet grew wings. She dashed across the bridge, feeling it dissolve almost immediately under her feet. If she stumbled, she’d plummet to her death. Behind her, a cacophony of howls and curses rent the air. Imogen took a running leap, landing hard enough in Cededa’s arms that he grunted and staggered backwards, almost losing his balance.
Imogen wrapped her arms and legs around his body, uncaring that she nearly knocked him to the ground. He lived. Still bound, still trapped but here, waiting for her.