Crown of Shadows (44 page)

“You want to talk about it?” he asked.

It took her a minute to find her voice. “I don’t know what you mean.” The words sounded weak even to her, and Gresham shook his head gently.

“Don‘t, Nari.”

“What?”

“Keep it all pent up inside. It just eats at you worse that way.”

She turned back to her work and started buffing again. But his large hand reached out and took hers, and kept her from moving.

“It was polished long ago,” he said quietly. “See?” He turned the piece over; its surface was gleaming. Gently he took it from her and set it on the worktable. Then he took up her hand again, folding it carefully in his own. “Talk to me, Nari. Let me help.”

With a sound that was half-sigh, half-sob, she turned away from him. “You can’t help. Nobody can help.”

“Let me try.”

She shook her head stiffly. Tears were forming in her eyes.

“You miss him?”

“I’m afraid for him. Oh, Gresham ...” And then the walls broke down and the tears came, hot tears that had been days in the making. “What they’re doing to him ... nobody understands. They don’t even really care, as long as he does what they want. So what if there isn’t a whole man left when they’re finished? What does it matter to them if he goes crazy?” She lowered her head, and wiped her eyes with the back of her free hand. “I’ve been having nightmares,” she whispered. “I think they’re his. Is that possible?”

“If you care that much for him? Yes, of course it is. That’s how the fae works.”

“He’s so afraid, Gresh.”

He snorted. “Any sane man would be, going where he’s going.”

She shook her head. “It isn’t that. Nothing that simple. It’s because—” She stopped then, because the truth was too private a thing. She couldn’t even share it with Gresham.

He fears that this masquerade will really transform him. He’s afraid of losing his soul.
He had held her all that last night, barricaded in his apartment as if the enemy were at his door, and she had tasted the substance of his fear as if it were her own. She had felt the terror inherent in his masquerade, his gut fear that once the essence of Gerald Tarrant was invoked into his flesh he would never be free of it. To invite the substance of your enemy to take you over, to dim the flame of your own soul so that his might burn even brighter ... was there any greater terror than that? She had managed not to cry that night, but only because it would have made him more afraid. Now the tears flowed freely.

“He needs me,” she whispered.

He squeezed her hand, said nothing.

“I could help him.”

“You said they had their reasons for not letting you go with them,” he reminded her. “You said you’d try to accept that.”

Reasons. She shut her eyes and trembled as anger seeped into her veins, a rage that was days in the making. “Damn his faith!” she whispered fiercely. “They think they’ll have more control over the fae if I’m not there. Who’s to say if they’re right? Or even if they are, if it’s worth the price he’ll have to pay? What kind of a god is that, who rewards his people for suffering?”

He snorted. “No one I know has ever claimed to understand the One God.”

Oh, Andrys.
She reached out with all the power of her soul, wanting so badly to feel his presence, to know that he was still safe. But she lacked the kind of power it would take to establish such a link. Was he reaching out for her, too, with the same sense of desperation? Or was he beyond all that by now, subsumed by the essence of his masquerade? Shivering, she opened her eyes, blinking tears away.

“Look,” Gresham said gently. “You can’t go through all this and pretend it isn’t happening. I’ve seen what it’s doing to you these past few days, trying to work as if everything’s normal while your soul’s all tied up in knots. Why don’t you take a few days off? Go somewhere maybe, take a break. Try to relax. You need it, Nari. Trust me.”

She turned and looked into his eyes. For a long, long time she was silent, as his words echoed softly in her brain. “Yes,” she said at last. Her voice was a mere whisper. “You’re right.”

“You’re not alone, you know. In every war there are women left behind ... and men, of course, and children, friends and lovers and relatives who care ... sometimes you can lose yourself in work, and sometimes you can’t. It’s never easy, honey.” He touched the side of her face lightly, lovingly; his finger smeared a tear across her cheek. “I think maybe for you a change would be best. Go somewhere peaceful, cut out the stress. That way you won’t have to put on a show all the time, pretend that nothing’s wrong.”

She stared at him for a long time, then whispered—almost soundlessly—“Yes.” She nodded slowly, very slowly. “A change. Somewhere fresh.”

She leaned forward and kissed him gently on the cheek, trembling as she did so, loving him as much in that moment as she ever had her father. What would he say if she told him what his few words had inspired? How would he react if she told him right now what she was thinking?

She didn’t dare. He’d talk her out of it, surely.

“Thank you,” she whispered softly. “I’ll do that.”

As she gathered up her things, she wondered if she would ever see him or his shop again.

The apartment was just as Andrys had left it, and she stood in the doorway for a minute just drinking it in, remembering their short time together. In his weeks in Jaggonath he had trained housekeeping to come when he called, and at no other time. Now, with the apartment permanently silenced, the scattered glasses and rumpled bedding stood as a monument to the man who had lived here, and the few days she had shared with him.

Her lover.

How strange that word seemed. How odd to apply it in this case, where their time together seemed like a brief bout of passion between one tragedy and the next. They had not even made love in the traditional sense, although he’d known enough close variations to make the time pass pleasurably enough. Now, though, she ached for that shortcoming, and wished she had held him inside her once, just once, in that embrace which was so intimate that echoes of it lasted forever in one’s flesh. But he’d been terrified of making her pregnant, and though the intensity of that fear was incomprehensible to her—like so much else about him—she had indulged him, stifling all the arguments that she might otherwise have raised about the efficacy of birth control, the predictability of her fertility cycle, the availability of abortion should all other things fail ... those were things you said to other men, not him. His soul was too tender, too bruised, too vulnerable. If intercourse would increase his anxiety, then it would have to be avoided. There’d be time enough for it later, when his soul had a chance to heal.

If that time ever came.

She walked to the bed and sat down upon it, breathing in deeply; their scents were mixed together on the sheets, along with the sweat of love and the sharp tang of fear. Here he had trembled as she held him, shaking like a child lost in a storm as bloody memories enveloped him, images so horrible that he couldn’t even talk to her about them, could only whimper as they flooded his brain, overwhelming his fledgling defenses. He’d tried to pull away from her when it happened, to run away from her so that she wouldn’t see him fall apart; she hadn’t let him go. That was a bond even more intimate than their passion, now, that she had seen his fit of weakness and accepted him. She sensed that night, with poignant clarity, that no other woman had done that.

Closing her eyes now, breathing in the scent of his presence, she could almost see him as he rode northward, every beat of his horse’s hooves carrying him closer and closer to what he feared the most. How powerfully he must hate the Hunter, to commit himself to such a venture! They had never discussed his ancestor at length, partly because of her own mixed feelings about him. Now he was alone, headed toward a confrontation that only one of them would survive. If even one.

The Hunter wouldn’t hurt her, she knew that. His Forest was no threat to her. She didn’t know enough about Andrys’ demonic ally to predict what he would do, but the goddess Saris had promised to protect her in that arena. So she wouldn’t need an army to protect her if she went north. Hells, she wouldn’t even need weapons—although of course she would bring them, just in case—and she could make better time riding alone than the Church troops would be able to, with their wagons of supplies and their overladen horses slowing them down. If she played it right and made good enough time, she could follow them in secret, to be there when he needed her. . . . Or maybe even enter their camp openly and demand her proper place in it. And if their god didn’t like it, to hells with him. Let him protest the move in person if he cared so damned much, and explain to all concerned why the suffering of one man was so important to him that his precious war could not be waged without it.

Oh, Andri.
She shut her eyes and trembled, but not from fear this time. It was exhilaration coursing through her veins now, the sure high of certainty. This was right. This was what she was meant to do. And soon—within days, if all went well—she would be where she belonged, joining the man she loved in battle. Waging war not only for his Church, but for his very soul.

“Hang in there, my love,” she whispered. “I’m on my way.”

They Couldn’t
make it to shore before daybreak. Tarrant said that was just as well. At best they would have been rushed through a dangerous landing, with barely enough time left to find suitable shelter before the sun rendered him helpless. At worst their enemy would find a way to mobilize neighboring towns against them before they had a chance to lose themselves in the lands to the north. No, despite the risk of remaining at sea, this was surely the safest course.

Which was all well and good, Damien thought, but Tarrant wasn’t the one who had to sail the vulking boat alone for twelve hours, with enemies to the north and south and a damned ugly weather system taking shape on the horizon. By dawn’s cold light, and then by the mixed light of sun and Core, he watched as ominously dark clouds gathered to the west of him, and wrapped his jacket tightly about his chest as winds gusted heavily across the bow. Tarrant had raised a storm, all right; the only question was how long it would take to reach them, and whether Damien could ride out the fringes of the squall long enough to drown them both in the heart of it.

He dared to leave the wheel long enough to feed the horses from their store of special grain, not because he thought they couldn’t make it a day without food but because he was afraid that hunger might disrupt the Working that kept them calm. There was water in the galley, too, and he gave them some of that, although the motion of the ship on the waves turned that normally simple exercise into a test of both agility and nerves. He checked their wounds to see that they were clean and that the bleeding had stopped, but he could do no more to help them; the fae he would have used for Healing was hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the water, inaccessible. He stoked up the furnace anew and fed it as much fuel as it would hold, not wanting to think about what would happen if it went out while he was trapped at the helm. By the time he regained his post there was land clearly visible to the north of him, and he steered away from it as best he could. He tried to bear in mind what Tarrant had said about steering into the waves so that they wouldn’t capsize the boat, but exactly how that worked when the sea was going one way and you wanted to go the other was something the Hunter had failed to explain. It seemed to take forever to accomplish that minimal maneuver, and when the northern shore finally faded into a curtain of mist in the distance, his every muscle ached from doing battle in a world whose rules he didn’t really understand, and whose aspect was growing less friendly by the minute.

By noon a pattering of rain had begun to fall, and the waves that beat against the hull more than once sent a spray of saltwater up over the prow. It occurred to Damien that he probably should have tied down the loose items on deck, or at least brought them down into the cabin for protection, and that there was probably some special way the sails were supposed to be tied up in a storm—but when you were one man alone and the sea had turned against you, such distractions were luxuries you couldn’t afford. He did dare to leave the wheel once more, long enough to make sure that there was enough fuel burning to keep him in steam for a while, and by the time he came back, the sheer force of wind and current had brought the boat about into the trough of a wave. It took everything he had to keep it from going over, and when he had at last forced it back into position, his hands were shaking and a cold sweat had broken out across his brow. He felt a sudden sympathy for the captains of legend who tied themselves to their wheels when a storm closed in on them. No doubt (he mused) they had the intelligence to supply themselves with rope before the storm really got going; God knows you couldn’t go back for it later.