Flaming gods, Rain was never going to survive this courtship.
Lying on his back on the still-warm sands of Celieria’s Great Bay, he stared blindly at the sky as the salty, rolling surf of the Pereline Ocean washed over him. Every muscle in his body was still drawn tight in throbbing knots, desperate for the release he was beginning to doubt would ever come. Or if it did come, it would be too late to save him from insanity.
His need for Ellysetta was an intense, living, driving thing, a relentless torture that kept him near to screaming on the razor-sharp edge of his control.
Gods rot the soulless bastards who invented pinalle. Plague take the servant who kept pouring the bottled blue frustration into her glass. And Rain hoped to all the seven bitter hells that Dorian mated the very life’s essence out of Annoura tonight for her thrice-cursed, sowlet-stupid idea of plying Ellysetta with pinalle in the first place.
Because Ellysetta had not only roused Rain’s passion with her sensual, heavy-lidded glances and unguarded emotions. Oh, no, it went far, far beyond that. In her uninhibited, pinalle-induced and keflee-enhanced daze, she had woven a Spirit web of carnal hunger so subtle and yet so scorchingly strong that she had sent every breathing person in the banquet hall—mortal and Fey alike—spiraling into an abyss of driving sexual need before anyone knew what was happening. When last he’d seen his fellow dinner attendees, they were falling upon one another like ravening wolves,some couples staggering off to find privacy while others shed every last ounce of reserve they ever possessed on the very spot where they stood.
Bel and the rest of Ellie’s quintet had barely managed to make it to the Baristani home before pleading for Rain to release them from their duties. He did, of course. They would have been useless in the state they were in. They’d all five taken off walking towards Celieria’s brothel district, but by the time they reached the end of the block, they were running.
After leaving Ellysetta in Ravel’s care, he’d thrown himself into the sky and flown here, to the silver beaches of the southern coast, hoping to find some respite—or at the very least a lessening of the weave. He’d found none.
The gods alone knew how long the effect of her weave would last, but it was still going agonizingly strong three bells after its inception. Even with hundreds of miles separating himself and Ellysetta. Lying in the surf, Rain shrieked his fury to the open skies above and pounded his fists in the wet sand around him.
Torel paced restlessly as Sian attempted for the sixth time in the last two bells to contact Belliard vel Jelani and relate what they’d discovered.
“You still can’t reach him?” Torel asked in concern. He ran his hands through his dark hair and blew on his fingers. The woods seemed colder than they had just chimes ago.
Sian shook his head and dissolved his weaves.
“Try someone else.”
“I already have. I can’t reach Bel or any of the Feyreisa’s quintet, nor Dax, Lady Marissya, or any of her quintet. I even tried to contact the Feyreisen. None of them are answering me. They must still be at that palace dinner Bel mentioned earlier today. We dare not pass the information on to anyone else.”
Although Brind Paldwyn had steadfastly insisted he knew nothing about a redheaded child, Sian had woven Spirit betweenthem and retrieved the man’s memories. Those memories had contained exactly the information Sian and Torel had been sent to find, but not at all what they’d expected.
As a child of ten, Brind had seen his parents tortured and killed by an Elden Mage looking for an escaped slave and a flame-haired child. A child the Elden Mage had claimed was the stolen daughter of his master, the High Mage Vadim Maur.
Even now, Torel wanted to cry out that it wasn’t true, that it couldn’t be true. He’d seen the Feyreisa with his own eyes, seen her brightness. But Brind’s memories were so vivid, he couldn’t doubt they were real.
The Paldwyns had only offered a night’s shelter to the slave and the child, but afterwards, unbeknownst to his parents, Brind had agreed to hide the baby in the woods while the slave drew off her pursuers. That task had kept Brind from dying with his parents. The slave girl, he later discovered, had set her own body aflame and thrown herself off the cliffs of Norban’s quarry to avoid being tortured and questioned by the Mage. Brind had retrieved what little remained of her burned and broken body, and had buried it alongside his parents. As for the baby, Brind had followed a Celierian couple traveling through the woods and put the baby beneath a tree where they would find her. He’d stayed hidden until he was sure they would take the child, and then he’d spent the rest of his life trying to forget everything that had happened.
He’d been relatively successful, too, until recently. While searching Brind’s memories, Sian discovered another disturbing image of local villagers bringing treasured Fey-gifts passed down through generations into the town square to be destroyed in a huge bonfire, while a white-haired priest in a voluminous, hooded blue cloak stood by and collected shards of Tairen’s Eye crystal from the villagers. Brind had inquired about the bonfire later, but none of the villagers remembered anything about the Fey-gifts they’d thrown into the fire, or the Tairen’s Eye shards they’d given to theblue-cloaked priest. It was as if those memories had been wiped clean. But Brind, who’d watched from the woods rather than participating in the bonfire, remembered—and he’d suffered nightmares about his parents’ deaths ever since.
Sian had erased all memory of Mages, death and Ellysetta from Brind’s mind, then gave the poor man what he’d wanted his whole life: memories of a happy childhood, unmarred by tragedy, memories of parents who died happily in their sleep after a satisfying life. It wasn’t legal. It broke the Fey-Celierian treaty and several Fey laws, but Sian did it anyway and dared Torel to say a word.
Torel wouldn’t, of course. He’d still been young when the Mage Wars started. He hadn’t even completed his first level of the Dance of Knives. But he, too, had seen his parents slaughtered by the Eld, just as Sian and Brind had, and there were days Torel wished someone would weave Spirit to removehismemories of that horror.
“Come on, then,” Torel said, clapping his friend on the back. “With a little effort, we might just make Celieria City by moonset tomorrow.”
“Do you think it’s true?” Sian didn’t elaborate, but he didn’t have to.
Torel didn’t want to believe it, but Fey didn’t lie, so instead, he forced a chiding look on his face and said, “She made Bel’s heart weep again. Do you think she could have done that if even the smallest part of her were tainted by Elden evil?”
“Of course. You’re right.” Sian nodded and stared at his booted toes.
“Sillypacheeta.” Torel grabbed his friend around the throat and scrubbed his knuckles against Sian’s skull through his wavy brown hair. “Come on, then. All doubts are forgotten. Let’s get back to our brothers.”
They were still smiling when thesel’dorshrapnel ripped through them.
Sian and Torel staggered, fell, then leapt back to their feet withred Fey’cha steel bared, automatically assuming the slightly crouched battle stance of a Fey warrior. Only then did they detect the reek of Azrahn and see the red-black glow of it around them. Only then did they see the shadowed mob of attackers lying in wait for them.
There were fifty or more, Torel estimated. Too many to beat. He and Sian were already surrounded, so there was nowhere to run. It was a fight to the death, then, his and Sian’s.
“Where did they come from, Torel?” Hands moving at incredible speed, Sian fired red Fey’cha into the surrounding mob with deadly accuracy.
“Scorched if I know. Guard my back.” Torel cursed as a barbedsel’dorarrow pierced his thigh, then gritted his teeth and sent four of his own red Fey’cha whirling into the shadows that surrounded him. Muffled shrieks, quickly silenced as tairen venom did its job, made him grin with savage victory. He would take as many with him as he could before he died.
