Heart of Light
Authors: Sarah A. Hoyt
Tags: #General, #Fantasy, #Fiction, #Fantasy Fiction, #Magic, #Dragons, #Africa, #British, #SteamPunk, #Egypt, #Cairo (Egypt)
Sara A. Hoyt
Contents
Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgotten
The Secrets of His Heart—Unfathomable
Dawn in the Jungle: Natives and Others
Gentleman's Distress, Lady's Duty
A Broken Heart and a Plan for Revenge
To Alicia Lopez, Alyson Lee, Cindy Cannon,
Jennifer Prohaska, Rita Hasenauer, Sofie Skapski—
my e-daughters, aka “the Bennet girls”
—who believed in this book and supported it
when all hope seemed lost
MAIDEN IN DISTRESS
A scream split the warm, dark night.
A woman's scream, high and desperate, full of fear.
And the voice was, unmistakably, Emily's.
Nigel plunged headlong into the fifth-floor hallway and came to the door with the room number that had been assigned to Emily. He knocked for a second before reaching for the knob. The door sprang open. The room was deserted, but the door in the far corner—the door that presumably led to his own room—stood open. Scarcely pausing to draw breath, Nigel ran through it. And stopped.
The scene within was like a scene out of a fable.
Emily, young and innocent, like the fairy princess in a childhood tale, in her velvet dress, her dark hair spilling down her back, stood by the window struggling with a dark, insubstantial being, seemingly composed of shadow and black cloud.
The creature was twice as large as life and twice as dark. It roared and clawed at her with massive talons. Its mouth ripped into Emily's shoulder, and she screamed and writhed in pain, though her body looked unharmed. Her power, on the other hand, oozed a hazy halo of leaking magic clearly visible to Nigel's mage sense.
The attacker looked like a hyena, but a hyena woven of shadow or darkness. It was as though all the darkest nights of the world had coalesced and taken form. Emily's bright, shining power, which twined her physical form in light, was in a life-and-death struggle.
The beast attacking it hunched and reared and roared, and sought for the throat of Emily's magic. This thing, visible only to Nigel's mage sight, was as much a part of Emily as a heart or a brain. Without it, Emily would not survive. . . .
THE WEDDING NIGHT
“What is wrong?” Emily asked.
She sat, naked, on her bridal bed, the waves of her dark hair falling like a dusky veil over her golden shoulders and small breasts. Over it, wrapped around her, she clutched a multicolored flowered shawl, a legacy from her Indian grandmother.
Nigel, her husband of ten hours, stood at the foot of the bed, trying to arrange his blue dressing gown with shaking hands and only managing to twist it, so it hung askew and displayed a portion of his pale, muscular chest.
He had turned away from her, but she could see his face reflected in the full-length mirror. It showed a complexion splotched by sudden high color, pale blond hair on end where sweaty fingers had run through it again and again and gray-blue eyes animated with an odd passion and rimmed by red as if Nigel—Nigel!—were near tears.
Emily pulled her long legs up till her knees came right up to her pointed chin, and clutched her arms around them as she took a deep breath. It wasn't possible that Nigel would cry. Proper gentlemen didn't cry, and Nigel was as cool and collected as a gentleman could be.
“Have I done something?” Emily asked. Her voice wavered and trembled, sounding too childish in this sumptuous suite, all red velvet and heavy mahogany furniture. “Failed to do something?”
Nigel's back remained turned. He didn't seem to hear her. He was tying and untying his dressing gown as if it were the most important task in the world.
Emily wished to shout, to scream, to ask him what had happened and why. But proper young ladies didn't rail at their husbands. Instead, insecurity trembled in her voice as she said, “How did I fail you?”
“Fail?” Nigel's head jerked back at the word. He looked at her, startled, then quickly away.
“Mr. Oldhall,” Emily said, making her voice as formal as she dared.
The family name, which she hadn't used since they'd become engaged, made him give her a look of undisguised horror. Emily felt blood rush to her cheeks, though she knew the blush would show only the color of sunset against her golden skin. “Nigel . . .”
Nigel pulled a packet of tobacco from a dressing gown pocket and a pipe from the other. “Yes?”
“No one ever told me what should happen on our marriage night.” She paused. “My stepmother did tell me it was all worth it for the children, but . . .” Her voice floundered and she shook her head. “I have seen . . .” A deep breath to gather courage. “I was raised in my father's country house, Nigel. We had dogs and horses and . . .” desperately, trying to avoid being explicit, she said, “geese. And it seems to me the interaction between men and women cannot be all that different from what happens between . . . animals. Even horses and cats . . . and . . .” Deep breath. “Geese.”
She glanced up to see Nigel staring at her, his mouth half-open, his face an odd mix of shock and amusement. Slowly, he turned and drew a long breath that echoed noisily in the room. Turning his back on her, he fumbled. She smelled tobacco and saw him, in the mirror, pushing shreds of it into the bowl of his pipe. He struck the flint to light the wick of his lighter, then lit his pipe and inhaled deeply. The lighter clicked closed and Nigel exhaled, a breath like a tremulous sigh forming a gray, aromatic cloud in the air in front of him. He put the lighter back in his pocket.
“I . . . I understand your disappointment,” he said at last. He pulled a heavy draft from his pipe and expelled it in increasingly neater rings. “Emily, I do understand how in your innocence, you might believe something untoward has happened, or . . .” He cleared his throat, and a slight flush tinged his pale cheeks. “Or failed to happen, but . . . Emily, now that you are a wife, you should understand that marriage . . . isn't always perfect.” He cleared his throat again. “There are moments when the body will not . . . obey the mind.”