Glimmer in the Maelstrom: Shadow Through Time 3 (29 page)

‘P
ardon.’ Lae was sure she must have misunderstood.

‘I’ve come to Ennae for you,’ he repeated, and sat up on the couch. This time there was no mistaking the sensuality in his tone.

‘But I am The Dark … and a woman in mourning.’ Let alone that she thought of him as a son, Pagan’s son. Had he been awake while she’d been inspecting him? Perhaps he had misunderstood.

‘Not any more.’ He reached up and touched her tattoo, his fingers light on her face, but the tingling sensation that came from them worked its way down her cheeks to her lips which began to throb, as though aching to be kissed. Lae felt embarrassment and horror in equal portions. What was happening to her? His touch felt like the Guardian power she had experienced in healings, yet instead of quieting her agitation, it increased it. Lae’s chest rose and fell beneath her solemn robe as languorous feelings swept care from her mind and desire down through her body.

In that moment The Dark did not exist. There was no thought of protocol in Lae’s mind. She could only think of how much she wanted to lie on the couch with … ‘What is your name?’

‘Vandal.’ His fingers moved from her cheek, his palm sliding onto her forehead. Then he closed his eyes. ‘You are grieving your son,’ he said and Lae felt hesitation, a distance come between them. Lenid. She was grieving Lenid.

Lae tried to step back, to berate Pagan’s son for looking into her mind, yet before she could begin to, vibrant hues like the colours she had seen in the Sacred Pool splashed across her mind. She blinked, and her memories began racing through her mind. They were jumbled and mostly incomprehensible, but at last they settled and she was left wondering what had disturbed her so.

She looked back to her guest, and saw his hand fall away from her forehead.

‘I am Vandal,’ he said, ‘and you are …?’

‘Lae of Be’uccdha,’ she answered immediately. ‘Daughter of The Dark. Everyone knows that.’

‘Everyone who is not new to Ennae,’ he replied. Lae smiled, but the muscles of her face felt odd, as though she had not smiled recently and her cheeks did not know how to behave. Yet how could that be when she took such delight in jests? Particularly at the expense of Vandal’s own father. She lived to tease Pagan —

Vandal’s
father?

She frowned again, wondering how Pagan could have a son his own age. Then into her mind fell a memory of Pagan standing beside her at the Volcastle mouth. Twice her age. How had he come to be so old? She frowned at the mystery.

‘So you have no son?’ Vandal asked, distracting her.

Lae’s frown mocked him. The idea was ludicrous. ‘I am too young,’ she exclaimed.

‘And far too beautiful to be unhappy.’

Lae let the compliment buoy her confused mind. She could not remember why she had come to be receiving this young gentleman alone when he was clearly a suitor, but having avoided the constraints of chaperonage, Lae was intent on being daring.

‘Unhappy?’ she said, fluttering her eyelashes to draw attention to her eyes which she knew were her best feature. ‘I would never be so boring. I may be discontent and vexatious, but I am never unhappy,’ she assured him, knowing this was true. Her father often told her she was more changeable than the ocean.

‘Good,’ he replied, and gazed so deeply into her eyes that she suddenly felt giddy.

A kiss. Would he kiss her? Lae wondered if she would dare to sit on the couch beside him, to tempt him into a kiss. Her father would be furious. But when she moved to do just that, a sharp pain from her foot ran up her leg and she cried out, ‘My ankle!’ and snatched up the skirt from her sombre robe, unable to remember in that moment why she had donned it. It was worse than her father’s! Where were her pretty dresses?

‘Let me fix that,’ Vandal said, and Lae was just frowning at the misshapen lump on her ankle when his large hand closed over it. ‘You must have twisted it,’ he said.

She felt a wave of vibrating heat, quite unlike the tingling Guardian power she had felt from Talis’s healings, then Vandal’s hand was sliding away. Her ankle was pretty again. She flexed it, pointing the toe of her simple black slipper, wondering where her embroidered ones were.

‘You are a helpful man to have about,’ she said, glancing down at him through her hair, wondering if he thought her eyes were pretty. She pouted to plump her thin lips.

Vandal patted the couch beside himself and Lae blushed with pleasure. He was enamoured of her. She would have his kiss for true! Yet though she sought that, she knew her station demanded that she should be coy and offer counterfeit disinterest. Only, he was so maddeningly forthright, he might simply walk away from her, and she couldn’t bear that thought.

So she sat beside him facing the fire and fiddled with her hair at her bodice, hoping to draw his attention there. ‘I expect you’ll want to see your father soon,’ she said, wondering how long Vandal’s visit would be, and how much of his time she could commandeer to herself.

He shook his head. ‘Later.’

‘Very well then.’ Her smile grew smug. He was obviously far more interested in her charms. ‘Would you like to play a board of Sagea?’ she asked, then tilted her head and lowered her lashes to look at him sideways. ‘I will let you win.’

Again he shook his head, more slowly this time, and his eyes narrowed in a thrillingly dangerous way. ‘I don’t play games,’ he said.

Lae felt breathless. ‘Then what would you do?’ she asked, and raised an eyebrow, daring him to kiss her here, in her father’s reception room. Lae knew she wouldn’t be punished, and she hoped this young Guardian wouldn’t be either. At least not until she was bored with him.

He leant close, his eyes never leaving hers, and Lae had a moment’s panic. He was far taller than she and had a wildness to his eyes that excited her, even as it provoked her to recklessness.

‘I told you I came for you,’ he said, and, without even asking, he bent his head to press his lips to hers.

Lae was breathless with wanting his kiss, but his presumption was appalling. She was the daughter of The Dark! Did he think he could get away with kissing her in the first minutes of their conversation — never mind how much she wanted him to. There was so much more teasing, flirting and coquetry to be enjoyed.

Yet despite Lae’s shock, he did kiss her. One large hand ran into her hair beside her cheek and the other arm enveloped her, pulling her towards him as his lips moved confidently over hers. And then, having barely registered the delight of tasting him, his daring tongue slid across her lips to explore her mouth, sending sensation flooding through her body.

Lae went limp in his arms — a complete swoon — as she allowed him every wanton pleasure his mouth could find with hers. Other sensations barely registered: his hand sliding down to caress her breasts, then lower to close over —

She gasped and pulled away, but even as they stared at each other, and well before Lae could force herself to utter the command that he not touch her
there
, a tingling beneath his wicked hand turned into throbbing, and Lae gasped anew. Her ears buzzed and she could do nothing but stare at him in open-mouthed wonder as a whirlpool of sensation beneath his hand sucked her towards its frightening vortex.

Lae had no idea what that ending would be, but in the next moment her loins shuddered of their own accord and a pleasure as sharp as any pain swept up her body with a flushing of her skin and a sudden dryness of her mouth.

His hand fell away and Lae simply stared at him, too stunned by the sensations he had awoken to call him to account. Too … befuddled of body to move out of his grasp. Too desperately smitten to think of anything but his bed.

‘We must wed,’ she said softly.

‘So that was your first orgasm?’ he replied.

Lae did not understand his words, but she could see that he had deflected her demand. Admittedly it was unseemly for a woman to speak of such matters before they were broached. And had she not just been railing that their acquaintance was only minutes old? But as the daughter of The Dark, surely she could set her own conventions.

‘I will marry another if you do not secure my betrothal,’ she warned and rose from the couch, letting her unsteady legs carry her to another lounge at its side. ‘Your own father asks for my hand.’ That memory was clear, yet why she had refused Pagan when she loved him was a puzzle. Could it be that her father had predicted this meeting with Vandal? Had she been waiting for a greater love?

Vandal stretched an arm along the back of his couch and rested his head on it, gazing at her speculatively. ‘So you’re not married to him now?’ he asked.

‘I have rejected his advances, thus far,’ she replied, keeping the warning tone in her voice. ‘He speaks of true love but I …’ Lae frowned, still couldn’t remember. ‘He … he is too old,’ she said at last, remembering that Pagan had said those words to her. ‘I am yet young.’ Her chin rose. ‘And beautiful.’ Was that what she had been waiting for? A younger love?

Vandal nodded, his expression thoughtful. ‘You’ve rejected his advances? Not become his lover?’

She shook her head, frowning in distaste at the thought.

‘That must have disappointed him.’

Lae said nothing. She was unsure whether Pagan’s feelings in the matter would deter his son. In case they did, she prepared her arguments.

Yet Vandal only said, ‘So if I marry you, he’ll be insanely jealous?’

‘His feelings do not matter,’ she said, impatient with the discussion of the father when all she cared about was the son and his prowess at awakening her to the most violent of passions. ‘I only know that we are meant for each other.’

‘On the basis of one … kiss?’

She stared at him across the distance that separated them and knew then that she would not be able to wait the forty days of a Be’uccdha betrothal. In truth, she wanted to lie with him now on the couch he leant against. Was it his nonchalance? His diffidence that stirred her? Or the memory of the skilful way his hands and mouth had drawn her like a restless tide to crash onto the shores of pleasure’s atoll.

‘Will you be mine?’ she asked. ‘I will fight my own father to have you. Though it is likely he will let me choose —’

‘Your father is dead,’ Vandal said, and Lae’s babbling abruptly halted.

‘Dead?’

‘I saw it in your mind,’ he said. ‘You are The Dark.’

Lae was puzzled for a moment, then looked down at her robe, understanding now why she wore it. Again disjointed memories flickered through her mind, but this time she pushed them aside. The past was unimportant and her confusion was easily explained. It must have been Vandal’s arrival. Falling in love so quickly had dizzied her, pushing aside bitter memories to make room for a happier future.

‘Then I need no permission save your own marriage vow,’ she replied. In fact, there need be no betrothal. If Lae chose to, she could wed Vandal this very night. ‘You said you came for me,’ she said. ‘Show your father this is true.’

Vandal gazed into her eyes, no expression in his own, as though considering the implications of her words.

‘Do not fear that Pagan will disrupt our plans,’ Lae said, feeling the sting of desperation now and knowing she was humiliating herself. ‘If he is hurt by our marriage it is his own fault for wanting that which he cannot have.’

‘He should have stayed with my mother,’ Vandal said, his tone strangely hollow.

‘Just so,’ she agreed readily, hoping she was swaying him to her side. ‘Any pain he suffers out of our merger will be all his own making.’

Vandal looked at her appraisingly. ‘You
are
a bitch,’ he said, yet his tone was one of satisfaction, rather than derision.

‘Marry me tonight,’ Lae pleaded, taking his hands in her own.

He stared into her eyes, squeezed her fingers until the bones cracked, then raised her palms to his lips to kiss them, his tongue sliding between her fingers as he held her gaze. Lae thought she would faint from longing.

Finally, when she could bear no more, he said, ‘Why not?’

M
ooraz stood to the fore of the diminished Plainsmen tribe as they approached Fortress Sh’hale, his every footfall reluctant. A terrible downpouring from the sky had already caught them in the open. Mooraz, who had been raised at Be’uccdha by the Everlasting Ocean, had experienced a sprinkling of Ennaen rain in his childhood, but nothing like this deluge. For Noola’s people it had been worse. Water from the sky was unheard of on the Plains, and as it fell upon them in torrents they ran screaming in horror.

Huge cracks formed by the previous earth shake had luckily channelled the water away, or they would all have been swept off their feet. But alas the old woman, Magaru, had been dragged into a deep ravine by the rushing water as she’d struggled to keep hold of a child. Seven others, all sired by Mooraz, had likewise been washed away.

The two daughters he had snatched up yet lived and Mooraz tried to take consolation from that, reminding himself that, had they stayed in the caves they would all be dead now, crushed by the rock-fall of the earth shakes. Grief was a luxury he could ill afford in their current circumstances, and true to her Plainsman training, Noola’s grief for Hanjeel had been violent but short-lived. The loss of another two in the downpour, both by Mooraz, merely added another layer to her determination. She would not hear any argument against joining forces with the Northmen, and Mooraz knew they would all die anyway if they could not find shelter from the Maelstrom.

The surviving children, twenty in number, were thankfully all old enough to walk alone. The eldest, eight-year-old Raggat, had been appointed their new storyteller, and the others to first and second cook, sentries, food gatherers and shelter keepers, positions they would not normally attain until adulthood.

Mooraz did not need to glance back to know they were walking through the Plains mist behind him, each tribesman in his designated place, no lessening of their discipline out of tiredness or grief now that the horror of the rain was over. Silence was absolute while they were travelling, and the sentries would continue to turn their heads, scanning the area with their strange inherited Plainsman sense that was not sight or smell but which saw through the golden mists and bounced off objects, warning them of approaching enemies. The rain had cleared the mist briefly but the heat of the day had brought it back thicker than ever. Mooraz’s eyes ached from trying to see through it.

To avoid avalanches, Noola had taken them through the Plains, parallel to the border of the Echo Mountains, and only recently turned west when the sentries’ acute senses had detected the large straight-sided structure of the fortress that lay where mountains met Plains. The mist was still impenetrable at ground level, but for the last few minutes they had seen a thin light rising out of it directly ahead. Now that they drew closer Mooraz could see no ending to it, as though it rose into the very heavens themselves.

He felt a tap on his back and then Noola was at his side.
What is it?
she signed.

He shook his head, then nodded at the fortress taking form out of the mist before them. The thin light rose from its centre and Mooraz could only assume it was an anchor matching the one Hanjeel had seen The Catalyst construct at Be’uccdha.

A noise issued from the fortress then and Noola raised a hand. Though he could hear nothing from behind, Mooraz knew the Plainsmen would have stopped as one, waiting on her next command. Noola’s wrist fell forward and Mooraz quickly dropped to the ground, knowing the others would do likewise.

The flapping sound they had heard was drawing closer, and an approaching speck of darkness, previously unseen in front of the larger form of the fortress, could now be discerned. Mooraz slid his sword from the sheath at his back. The only creature he knew with the ability to move through the air was the Serpent of Haddash, and though cold terror filled his veins at the thought of confronting such a terrible foe, Mooraz would do what he must to protect Noola and her tribesmen.

Noola’s hand closed over his wrist, indicating that he must not attack unless she commanded it. Mooraz kept his eye on the approaching serpent even as his mind railed against her order. Noola knew nothing of the serpent and its penchant for destruction. Might she think it a likely ally? Her tribe would be scorched in an eye-blink.

He tried to breathe through his fear, preparing himself for whatever was to come. Yet while the Plainsmen lay camouflaged against the floor of the Plains in their tan rags, the beast sailed over their head. East. Towards the Volcastle.

Noola waited a moment then raised her arm. The troupe rose and shook off dust. Mooraz glanced at the fortress again, this time with marked trepidation. The Northmen were threat enough to overcome, but allied to the Serpent God of Haddash … And what if the serpent should return?

Noola cocked her head, her slanted eyes narrowing before she closed them to sniff the air. A dry roll of thunder rumbled across the Plains and her eyes snapped open.
Storm
, she signalled and pointed to the fortress.
We need shelter.

For once Mooraz agreed immediately. They had no choice.