My first awareness was of a small tongue licking my fingers and a furry muzzle pressed against my cheek, tickling my ear with its whiskers. I hissed and lifted my head. One of the Black Pearls adjusted my glasses on my nose, withdrew the chain of my necklace from around my chafed wrists, and hung it around my neck.
I focused on her with difficulty. “Nine?”
“You dripped onto our cages,” she said. Seven stopped lapping at my hand and straightened beside her, and the two of them regarded me with their lambent turquoise eyes.
“Ah, God,” I said. “Help me, please.”
They braced my shoulders and between the three of us I wiggled out of my cage and half-fell, half-landed on the ground on my knees. My wrists gave before they could take my full weight, and the two caught me.
“Sorry,” I managed.
They said nothing, only helped me rise and steadied me as I swayed. My lapse had been horribly long, for night had fallen, and at the sight my heart sped in terror. Had it been enough time for Thameis to have summoned his kin? They had not come for me, but I couldn’t imagine it being long now. I squinted at the sky, but nothing in my life had prepared me to be a navigator or a fieldsman: the stars were another language I had never learned to read, and staring at their stubborn enigma I couldn’t guess how long it would be before the sun rose. I was only conscious of a hunted, desperate feeling. And yet... I looked back at the cages of the rest of the Black Pearls, at the cages scattered all around the complex.
“You can’t free us all,” Nine said. “It is generous of you to think of it.”
“Am I so obvious then?”
She shrugged, a lithe movement of her narrow black shoulders.
“Where now, Master?” Seven asked.
I began to tell them that they should run, escape, be free... and realized the futility of it. They were as ill-equipped to jaunt into the wilderness as I was. Kelu might have managed it and perhaps even enjoyed her brief existence as a rogue on the fringes of elven society, but these two reminded me more of Almond: not precisely docile, but not ready to be catapulted into the uncertainties of complete independence. In time perhaps... but until then, I would have to care for them. “Help me to that building,” I said, nodding toward the central one. “We need to fetch the Fount and leave before we are discovered.”
“The Fount,” Seven said, eyes wide.
“The very same,” I said and started that way.
This was when I discovered that my sense of the magic of the world had not become quiescent during my faint. Hobbling along on the genets’ shoulders, I shuddered at its caress, and how it grew thick with brambles and thorns the closer we drew to Amhric’s prison. Great gorged veins of it sprouted from beneath the building, breaking the pattern of the earth beneath us; so strong was this foul wrongness that I grew dizzy as we approached. How I made it down that hall I will never recall, only that as we reached the door I thought of the king and collected myself for the effort to come.
The genets stopped on the threshold, leaving me to stagger to the bed on my own... to grasp that gaunt and colorless shoulder and whisper, “Amhric. Wake up.”
His lashes fluttered. As I watched, the warmth flooded him, igniting the fire beneath his skin and licking him in gold and copper and auburn. I shivered with inexplicable emotion, some nameless longing, and perhaps he sensed it and that was why he engulfed me in a swift embrace, bringing me into his aura of gossamer autumn.
“We have to go,” I said. “I’ve been discovered. It’s only luck that I made it here at all.”
“All right,” he said. “O my brother... wait a moment.”
“There’s not a moment to waste,” I began, but he touched a finger to my mouth. I fell silent.
“From the earth through me to you,” he murmured. “For that you have great need.” He touched two fingers to my brow; his forehead came to rest there, beside them. And as I drew breath to ask the tide of light and life rushed into me and chased the worst of the weakness away. With it came a sense of the world as a great and beautiful pattern, a harmony expressed in waves and pools of cold and warmth, forever moving in an elegant pas de deux indescribable in its liquescence. I choked back a sound, certain it was too intimate to be uttered in company.
He lifted his head and asked, hushed, “Better?”
“Yes,” I said, hoarse. “Thank you.” Clearing my throat I said, “Now, hasten, please.”
He nodded and slipped off the bed, turning toward the door... and there he halted as if struck. As he and the genets met one another’s eyes I knew this moment was passing with the swiftness of my racing heart and yet it seemed as if we were all paralyzed.
At length I said, “The genets made with your magic. These are Nine and Seven of the Black Pearl line.”
“I knew what they did,” Amhric said. “Oh, but they never let me see...!” He opened his arms, and swift as shadows moved by wind, the two were in them, licking his face and wiggling their tails and purring.
“Enough,” I said. “Back down the corridor.”
They parted from him as if my word was law and fled into the dark. I watched them go, then glanced at the king. “I would have thought that it would discomfit you.”
“What Suleris did and does is vile,” he said. “But I could no more blame the genets for their makers’ acts than I could blame rain for falling.” Then he stepped toward the corridor.
And I, obeying some instinct older than stories, held out a hand. “I go first.”
He paused, then inclined his head, and so we went: the genets before us, the king behind me, and all the compound still asleep... but not, I thought, for long. Nevertheless I could not suppress another glance over my shoulder at the cages.
“Could you...?”
He shook his head. “No. The uses of my magic are proscribed heavily by the king-gifts. But I can channel what is left of our shared energy and you may undo the enchantments, if you wish—”
“I can’t,” I said. “It would incapacitate me.”
“Then we will come back,” Amhric said. “And make this right.”
I nodded and led him out of the compound and into the field. When he stumbled I lunged for him, and my own movement set us both to tottering. I grimaced as we swayed. “Fine pair we are. I don’t suppose magic could make us run faster.”
“It could,” he said. “If I were well enough to wreak something so vast. But they have left me very little by way of resources.”
“I don’t understand how magic can do that and not open the locks...”
“I will explain it, when we have more leisure. You need to know.”
“I imagine I do,” I said and sighed as we trudged up the hill toward the tree where I’d last met the genets. “In the mean... hold a heartbeat.”
He stopped, and I took my pendant in my hand. Blood had caked the chain and the tassel was a ruin, but the steel pedigree remained unchanged. Without allowing myself any time to brace against it, I tore into my wrist again and resumed walking.
“At least tell me if it is customary for the elves to solve everything with blood,” I said, wearied.
“Once upon a time we carried glass knives specifically for the purpose you just put your name to, for glass is sacred and has meaning particular to us,” Amhric said. “Those were brighter days, when our blood meant more to the world.”
“How long ago was that?”
His smile was nostalgia and regret both. “Long enough for us to still die a natural death.” He glanced at my wrist. “To what purpose was that particular offering?”
“I am summoning our ride,” I said. “But we should hurry. They will find us.”
He nodded and fell silent, and together we made what time we could across the grass, the Black Pearls ranging before us like uneasy scouts. As we traveled he remained much the same but I deteriorated; my limbs consumed the bright flush of energy he’d gifted me and left me brittle and clumsy. We had not been fleeing long before it was his hands steadying mine as we crossed a dark stream, his shoulder braced beneath my arm as we forged uphill, his steady gaze that slowed my erratic breathing and reminded me to remain calm.
“How long before they come for us, I wonder?” I asked.
“Suleris owns Kesína,” Amhric said. “It may be we won’t see them at all in the countryside; they’ll have someone waiting for us at the port.”
“Then I suppose we won’t be going to the port,” I said, determined.
“Someone comes!” Seven exclaimed.
“Something...” Nine amended.
The dark disgorged the drake’s sleek body and ember eyes.
“Ah, thank God,” I said, stumbling forward to grab its reins. It pressed its head against me and huffed across my chest, then lifted its chin and stared, narrow-eyed, at king and genets. On its back, Kelu said, “You could have given us a little warning.”
“I didn’t have the chance,” I said. “Thameis found me out.”
“Oh!” Almond said. “You brought cousins!”
“What were you thinking?” Kelu asked, irritated. “The drake can’t carry two elves and four genets!”
“Then some of us will have to walk,” I said. To Amhric, “Get on.”
“Oh don’t be stupid,” Kelu said, sliding off the back of the drake as the king put his foot in the stirrup and hauled himself into the saddle. “The two of you get on the drake, the rest of us will jog alongside. Don’t pretend that you could possibly keep up. You can’t even stand straight.”
Every word fell like a blow, but she was correct. I looked up at Amhric, who offered me his hand.
“Come,” he said, voice gentle. “They are healthy and uninjured, we are neither. It is no shame.”
With a sigh, I clasped his wrist and let him pull me up behind him. “Fine. But we need to get him a horse and then we can all ride.”
“Which way?” Kelu asked.
“The direction opposite the port,” I said. “And as fast as possible.” I called to mind the map from Thameis’s study. “If we have to build a raft and pole it to the next island, we’ll do it... it would be safer than heading where they expect us to go.”
“North then,” Amhric said, turning the drake’s head.
“North,” I agreed.
We rode unmolested for the balance of the night and all of the morning, halting only to allow the genets an opportunity to rest. I had expected more conversation between them, or even some vying for dominance as with animal packs, but either they were more human in that regard or they communicated the necessary information intangibly, because they arranged themselves in formation around the drake and never spoke an unnecessary word. For the initial hours I concentrated on our destination; when we halted I dismounted and paced a halting circle to return some circulation to my recalcitrant limbs. But by the afternoon I had no discipline left to work past the growing pain; it was all I could do to cling to the back of the drake and endure, and so to that endeavor I devoted all my remaining powers.
“We should stop,” Amhric said after the distant purple mountains eclipsed the setting sun. “Eat, rest.”
Kelu glanced off the path. “There’s a farm near here we can borrow a horse from later.”
Amhric nodded and guided the drake to a fold in the earth overhung with trees and surrounded in brush. As the genets scattered, he dismounted and held up a hand. I didn’t bother to object, though when his aid proved inadequate to the task of keeping me from collapsing into the trench I did flush. The drake stretched its neck down so it could nuzzle me as I fought tears of frustration, and so trapped in that mire of self-loathing and helplessness was I that I barely felt the king arranging me so I was sitting with my back to the wall of the trench. A few moments later he draped me with the drake’s damp but warm saddle blanket. I curled up under it, shaking, and wished with desperate abandon for anything to make this weakness end. How naïve I’d seemed in Evertrue, turning up my nose at Stirley’s drugs! The memory of the bleakness that had driven me to try to separate myself from this life returned, seductive. There was not enough poppy in the world to return me to normal... and what cause had I to think that a sorcerer of Sedetnet’s obvious amorality would ever keep his word? If I could even bring myself to buy my life from him with Amhric’s.
I hid my face in my shoulder and strangled my bitter tears, choking on them until my throat grew raw and the world around me darkened and my body tightened its thorned embrace around me. My thoughts broke apart, bled into black places, left me blind and screaming in that smothered silence.
Small and gentle hands lit then on my shoulders, turned me, gathered me against a warm side. Around me the softness of fur and musk settled and curled, pushing back some of the pain.
“I c-can’t do this anymore,” I whispered. “I can’t.”
“Take a breath,” he whispered.
“I can’t, it’s not worth it,” I said. “There’s nothing left. There’s no way out.”
“Just breathe,” he said, his voice a low vibration beneath my face where I huddled against him. “Just for a little while longer.”
I didn’t know if I could, but I had no energy to protest, could only lie against him and leak my hopelessness and tremble. I saw only the abyss in my own mind, heard nothing but his voice and the howl of negation in my heart, felt nothing but the nauseating pain of the magic killing me from the bone out. My attention focused on these things with the single-minded intensity of a predator: there was nothing else. No world. No life. No reason.
And then that focus drifted. It caught on the chirp of a frog and grew diffuse, rising enough to hear the melody of a thousand frogs, singing in the vespertine dark. I could smell the distant perfume of grape vines; the air had grown soft with moisture. The pressure at my back and against my hips and thighs, soft and hot and tickling... that was comprised of the pelts of breathing genets, coiled into little balls of fluff and musk. And against my side—
—the sense of the world, of the pattern—
“It’s you,” I murmured, my voice ragged.
“I thought you should look out a little,” he said. When I tried to rise, he tightened his grip on my shoulder. “No. Not yet. The communion needs touch, the more touch the better.”
“Communion?” I knew I should feel alarm, but I couldn’t. I had been firmly seated in the world, on this soil beneath these trees cradled in the cup of these genets and this elf. I could not move: I had become part of everything, and everything flowed through me unobstructed. There was no violence in it. No pain. Only a vast tranquility.
“There are an assortment of magical gifts,” Amhric said. His hand relaxed when I ceased to pull against it. “Only two will be strong enough to bring forth a king and prince, but all of them are necessary in a generation for the king and his helpmeets to serve as stewards to the land and its people. Thus the communion.”
“This thing you’re sharing with me, then,” I said, hesitant.
“Is actually yours,” he replied. “But you have no access to it, or to any of your gifts. So in a very peculiar form of communion, I am giving back to you what you cannot touch yourself, but what I can sense.”
“This is... this is beyond my admittedly under-developed understanding of magic.”
“I have a great deal to explain to you, if you were raised on the mainland without knowledge of your heritage,” he said. “But it can wait. Breathe. Rest. You are too near the end of your strength. I don’t want to lose you.”
I glanced up at the wedge of his jaw and cheek and the single eye I could see from where I rested. “Why?”
“Why?” he asked, bemused.
“Why do you care?” I asked. “You barely know me. I barely know you.” I made a noise. “I can’t explain any of it. I have no lost love for kings. Quite the contrary.”
“And brothers?” he asked with a trace of humor.
“I didn’t even know I had one until very recently!”
He laughed. “And you were raised among humans. You don’t understand, then, how rare and precious it is to have kin.”
I said, “Ah... the lack of fertility.”
“Yes.”
“So you care because—”
He smiled at me. “Does it matter?”
I fell silent, wondering. Did it? “I like my world to make sense.”
“And it doesn’t make sense that two brothers, united after growing to adulthood in isolation, should know and love one another on sight?” he asked with gentle humor.
“Only in folklore,” I said.
“So truth is different in stories than it is in reality.”
I began to speak and fell silent.
“It is only another pattern,” he said.
“And that—” I halted as the hum in my head changed tenor, vibrated, grew angry. Someone had stepped into my sphere of feeling, distant but ranging closer, impinging on my sense of the world. “Someone’s followed us.”
Amhric set a hand on my shoulder and the blossom of that sense of the world wilted, leaving me with only my body’s poor faculties to gather the evidence of reality. “Quietly,” he murmured. “We are so dim to magic’s eyes that he may pass us entirely.”
I nodded and hunkered into the shadows of the ditch. Around us the lamp-like eyes of the genets had opened, but they remained still.
Without the magic I did not know how far our pursuer was, nor how long we should wait. I thought with longing of the staff hooked to the drake’s saddle; in the future, if there was a future, I would sleep with it at my side. Not that I knew what to do with a staff—flash of Kemses in motion, stained silver hair sweeping in a wave around his hips as he impaled one of his opponents by the ruddy light of the bonfire—but it was better than having no weapon to hand at all. If I survived... if there was a future, I would ask Kemses to teach me.
“The frogs,” Seven whispered. They had fallen silent.
Three cats burst from the underbrush and leaped for us. I shoved Amhric out of their way and ducked, and in my mind I executed a perfect roll that put me at the feet of the drake where I could jump to my feet and unhook the staff in a single, graceful motion.
Instead, my knees dumped me to an unceremonious halt. I counted myself fortunate that the cats had apparently been bred to hunt but not to kill; one of them, in fact, leaned down and scraped my cheek with its rough tongue. I thought to push its face away, but my arm refused to lift.
In the wake of these spotted hunters came our elven scout, flowing past the leaves so that they did not even sigh at his passage. He wore his arrogance like divine raiment, square chin held high so that he gazed down the plumb line of his nose at everything around him. I had become accustomed to the glimmer-glory of the elves, but not inured to it; my eyes caught on his hair, an unlikely shade of twilight blue that rippled like a wind-stroked lake.
“Ah, our escapee,” he said in a tenor that would have been mellifluous had it not been poisoned by disdain. “The port is in the opposite direction.”
“We would never have guessed,” I said.
The metal head of the arrow nocked on his bow threw off a wet gleam as he pointed it at me, which was when I realized he was armed. “Well, then. And a fled servant to boot. Were you the one who freed him? Did you think he’d treat you any better for it? Fool.”
The genets and Amhric did not move. We outnumbered our opponent and his hunting animals, but that presumed any of us were in a condition to fight, or even knew how. Somehow I couldn’t imagine the genets taking on an elf. Which left the king, who had become very very still... and me, against someone armed with a ranged weapon.
And then I remembered that I could not die.
Just one leap, I promised my aching, screaming body... and I vaulted.
The arrow sliced open my shoulder as I bowled into the elf’s knees, knocking him down. He flung the bow away and the light ran the length of a curved edge just before he plunged it into my side. A knife? A sword? Wildly I felt as if he’d pinned me to the earth with it. My miscalculation almost dragged a laugh from me—I couldn’t die but God, oh God, I could hurt!
“What did you hope to accomplish?” the elf asked as he rolled to his feet, almost conversationally. He put a foot on the hilt of whatever he’d stabbed me with and drove it through my side until it struck the ground. “Were you really so eager to die?”
I forced my eyes up to look at him, licking my lips. They had become bloody.
“One less human,” the elf said. “No loss there.” He turned away.
—and his head ripped from his neck in a spray of blood and viscera. The suddenness of it was such a shock that I disbelieved it until his body crumpled, smacking the ground with a wet, dull sound. One giant foot spread on the elf’s back, pressing until blood welled up from its talons, and over that body the drake extended its bloody face and nuzzled my cheek, painting it with gore.
I wanted to speak, but when I parted my lips a bubble of blood broke and skidded down my skin to the earth.
“Morgan!” Amhric exclaimed. I did not see so much as sense the warmth of him over me, for my vision had grown spotted and strange. “Fetch water.” Thick fabric ripped near me in long, regular strips, the sounds confident and quick. I heard a distant female voice, garbled and sweet, and in response: “No... ah. The drake is... taking care of that for us.” Another melody line, wistful. The king said softly, “If you must.”
Then his hands lit on the locus of the fire and cruelty in my side and I thought to brace myself for what he did but his touch, oh God! Was like the goodness of an autumn sun, of the first breath in morning after a refreshing sleep, like a lullaby. I wept as he tended me, and it was not for pain.
“Brother mine,” he said after an eternity of his ministrations that lasted only for a single squeeze of my heart. “Are you with me again?”
I licked my lips and found I could speak, though everything ached. “That was not... one of the smarter things I’ve done.”
“On the contrary, Prince of Elves,” he said, “you did very well indeed.”
“What... happened to... him? We have to... burn him, something!”
“Sssh,” Amhric said, touching my shoulder to keep me from a vain attempt to rise. “That particular scout won’t trouble us again.”
“Don’t... see a fire....”
“The drake ate him,” Kelu said from near my feet.
My eyes widened.
“A loyal beast,” Amhric said, his voice gentle. “When the scout demonstrated that he was unquestionably your enemy, it defended you.”
My gorge rose. With difficulty I reined in my nausea and said, “I’m glad we managed to dispatch him.” I looked with exhaustion toward the king but my eyes had not cleared enough to see him. “You don’t fight, do you.”
“No.”
“I haven’t learned either,” I said. “My body has never been healthy enough for any manner of exertion.”
“I imagine not,” Amhric said, swabbing the blood from my back.
Something in his manner... “But you, it’s not about never having learned, is it.”
“No,” he said. “I can’t.”
“Can’t is a strong word,” I said. “Are you using it precisely?”
“The king-gifts make it impossible for me to destroy anyone,” he said. “The ability to balance the magics of a nation would be tyrannical if I could also kill with it.”
“But without magic...?”
“I can’t,” he said. “Not with my hands and not with my magic.”
“And that’s why you ended up in the hands of Suleris,” I said. “You let them take you.”
“Yes,” he said.
Appalled, I exclaimed, “Then you are defenseless! Anyone’s to destroy! I can’t imagine that the removal of your capacity for even the barest of self-defense is in the best interests of your nation... or else any citizen with the smallest of complaints could incapacitate the government by attacking you! It makes no sense!”
“The king,” he said quietly, “was not meant to rule alone.”
“A queen?” I asked. And then it struck me. “Me. You were missing me. I’m your sword.”
He met my eyes, grave. “Yes.”
“God!” I said with a bitter, disbelieving laugh. “Me? I am your defense? With this wreck of a body? I can barely lift a staff!”
“You seemed to do very well indeed just now,” Amhric said, voice still quiet.
“Only because my cannibalistic mount decided it was in need of a meal!”
“Do you think a warrior always fights hand-to-hand with every enemy?” Amhric asked. “Sometimes you must command others to fight for you.”
“This was not a war,” I said. “This was a single scout armed with a bow and a dirk that I am now sure was the length of a polearm.”
“And your loyalty commanded an army of one,” Amhric said. “Who saved us from another turn in Suleris’s breeding compound.”
“God and all His saints,” I said again. “This is insane. It makes no sense, no sense at all. What kind of government would charge the heir to power with the safety of the current ruler? It is an invitation to regicide!”
“Tell me,” Amhric said. “In a dichotomy of responsibility where one individual sits apart, doing nothing but assessing and recalibrating the flow of magic across the world... and the other sits on a throne in a palace, surrounded in light and laughter and people, making critical decisions and dictating laws that shape society... where do you believe the true power lies?”
“I... I don’t know,” I said. “I have so little knowledge of magic and what a society is like that relies on it.”
“But the latter life sounds more appealing, yes?”
“To most,” I said. And then quietly, “But not to you.”
“No,” he said. “And that is why the king-gifts rose in me.”
“So that I have the prince-gifts, does this make me a lover of power, parties and the trappings of a monarchy?” I asked, arch.
“No,” he said. “Only that you are suited to the defense of what you believe rightful.”
I closed my eyes and struggled for breath; where the elf had impaled me I felt only a numb restriction that made it difficult to expand my ribs, but that restriction was nothing, nothing compared to the desperation I felt at the thought of having sole responsibility for the safety of the man sitting at my side, holding rags stained with my blood in his small and gentle hands. I thought of Chester’s sword, taken from me with such contempt by that roadside inn. I had not been worthy of it; I could not have used it to defend myself from my attackers then. And yet the fate of a kingdom depended on my ability to become a warrior.
Didn’t it?
I turned my face just enough to look up at him. “Is it solely because of my absence that you have not been crowned?”
He shook his head, copper hair gathering the star-gleam in every strand like beads. “It has been long and long again since our people have been led by a king. Not since we were exiled from human lands and human arms. And the king of elves cannot rule without consent of his people, to make the pact work. We have become besotted with the dream of unfettered power and forgotten that we never had it—have forgotten our responsibilities. There is a council that will support no king, and a people divided over whether to allow a monarchy to return after the disaster of the last. There was a reason Amoret was able to sell me to my enemies... because I inherited them with the blood-gifts.”
“Did you say—” I heaved myself onto an elbow, reaching for his arm to steady myself. Some vague memory of my first meeting with the genets surfaced. She was supposed to marry the King, but he vanished…. “Did you say Amoret? Amoret was your betrothed?”
“Was, yes,” he said, bemused.
“Amoret with the yellow hair and blue eyes?” I asked.
“Yes...?”
“God!” I said. “Why—her—you were engaged to her?”
He watched the emotions traveling my face and from them divined I knew not what. “It seemed like a good idea to our parents.”
I could hardly imagine two people more poorly suited to one another, but that mattered less to me than, “But the genets said that she believed you to have vanished, and this was why was she searching for me.”
He hesitated. “She said this?”
“The genets reported it so. She had been sending them out for...” I glanced at Kelu. “How long now?”
“Ten years,” Kelu said.
“Ten years she’s been hunting the human mainland for me,” I said. “After betraying you! Why? Because having been rejected by one elf with royal gifts, she felt the need to procure herself another? Is it that she wanted power?”
“It’s possible,” he said. “I didn’t know you lived, and even had you lived you might not have had the gifts. They do not always follow bloodlines.”
“Then why...?”
“Master,” Almond whispered at my elbow.
I looked down at her, found her quivering with terror to have interrupted us. I did not have the strength to touch her face, so I put all my gentleness into my voice. “Yes, Almond?”
“The lady wanted a baby.”
“She... what?” I asked.
“She wanted a baby,” Almond whispered. “And the royal gifts are powerful.”
I looked then at my brother, who said, “She’s right. With our gifts come virility.”
Everything in me grew still. “In this world where children are impossibly rare and a woman can become famous and powerful merely for having one, you refused her?”
“Yes,” he said slowly. And then, eyes closed. “I took a vow.”
“Of what?” I exclaimed. “Celibacy?”
“It is part of the path of the king-reclusive,” he said. “It heightens our ability to handle the energies of the world.”
“What in the name of hell is so important about handling the energies of the world that you would make an everlasting enemy of a woman—admittedly a hag of a woman, but a powerful one nonetheless—your mortal foe?”
“Because if the energies of the world are out of balance and cruelty and sorrow and grief have sway,” Amhric said, honey-yellow eyes meeting mine, “then the demons come.”
Their howls rose suddenly, piercing, and I fell forward onto my chest, half-twisted. You will open the way for us, they whispered, jeering. Needle-teeth scraping in sensuous abandon against my side beneath the bandage, raising fire and screams beneath my skin. The first tremors of a seizure ran the length of my side, rippling over my body like a wave against the strand. Red Prince! The Prince lives! And he will betray his people!
“No!” Amhric said. His small hands had grasped my shoulders. “Morgan! Look at me!”
I was beyond sight, could barely feel his fingers. The shaking had grown violent. The shadow of their wings fell over me, leather and bone, shrouding me in night.
“No,” his voice said from a great distance. A sliver of light swelled there and burst free, bright as dawn, chasing back the bleak shadows, the pain, and the convulsions. I found myself sitting across from him, his hands holding me steady and his eyes on mine, implacable.
“No,” he said again, more gently.
I looked at my hands, my lap, back up at him. I was still human, but... “You drove it away.”
“You bar the way to war,” he said. “I bar the way to suffering.”
“Sedetnet sent me to fetch you,” I said suddenly, compelled. “To free you. In return for the unraveling of the enchantment.”
He sat back.
“But it’s not worth it,” I said. “I can’t do it.”
His gaze was somber.
“I...” A shiver ran my length, but it was not sickness. “I don’t know if there’ll be any other way. To fix this thing that was done to me. And he says it’s killing me. But... I can’t do it. I can’t.”
“He may not hurt me,” Amhric said, voice gentle.
I thought of the dice rolling across the carpet, felt the hand pressing me down, thought of pleasure too close to shame and ecstasies too close to tears. “I don’t want to take that chance,” I said. I looked up at him. “You said yourself. He’s mad.”
“Yes,” Amhric said. He pulled one of the packs over, which was how I realized he’d been holding me up all this time. I wanted to protest when he guided my head to it, but he shook his head and touched a finger to my mouth. “No. You are exhausted, and so am I. We rest for the night’s remainder.”
“What are we going to do with the cats?” I asked, wearily.
“We’ll decide when we wake.”
His hand lit on my forehead. The warmth of his palm was the last thing I felt before falling asleep.