Lord of Shadows Read online

  The door burst open on the flustered face of Sister Anne. “Ard-siúr, Sabrina’s needed in the infirmary right away. A man’s been brought in. Found half drowned on the beach below the village.”

  “May I go?” Sabrina cast beseeching eyes in Ard-siúr’s direction.

  Sister Brigh looked as though she chewed nails, but the head of the order dismissed Sabrina with an imperious wave of her hand. “Go. Sister Ainnir needs your skills. The letter will await your return.”

  Plucking up her skirts, Sabrina dashed from the room in Sister Anne’s wake. She could kiss the unlucky fisherman who’d rescued her. Saved in the nick of time.

  It was only fair to return the favor.

  “Guide the mage energy as you would a surgical instrument. Precise. Focused,” Sister Ainnir advised quietly over the still form of the man lying between them.

  Sabrina fought to check the magic simmering in her blood, humming along her bones. Less the accuracy of a stiletto than the bluntness of a battle-axe. Release the power now, she’d char the poor unfortunate man to cinders.

  “Pay attention, Sabrina. Your mind is not on your work.”

  No, it was still seething with resentment at Sister Brigh’s accusations. Lack of dedication. Above the rules. Frittering. If Sabrina wasn’t careful, the head of novices would have her on a coach to Belfoyle before the year was out. Nasty cow.

  “Sabrina! Careful.”

  The mage energy surged in a dramatic arc of red and gold and coral and the palest green. Lit up her insides until she felt the buzzing in her ears, the zing of it lifting the hairs on her arms, squeezing her chest like a pair of whalebone stays.

  The man spasmed, gasping for a breath he could not catch. Animal rage boiled off him in waves. Desperation. Terror. Panic.

  The emotions raked the inside of Sabrina’s skull like caged animals. She staggered against the instant throbbing behind her eyes. Spots and pinwheels bursting across her vision like Guy Fawkes fireworks.

  His throat constricted as he vomited a trickle of seawater from lungs full and useless. He flung out a fist, sending Sabrina leaping backward.

  Frustration. Disappointment. Fury.

  Stark and immediate and enough to make Sabrina dizzy. She threw up every mental barricade, yet still the echoes of his pain battled through to sink razored claws into her brain.

  “Don’t stop,” Sister Ainnir urged. “Don’t break your concentration. It’s too soon.”

  The Fey threads of Sabrina’s magic danced along her skin like an increasing storm charge. A shimmering will-o’-the-wisp at the corners of her sight. Whispering in her head like a breeze or an echo or a rush of water over rocks.

  She wrapped herself in the sensations, the empathic crush of overpowering emotion lessening to a bearable degree. No longer in danger of passing out, at any rate.

  Gathering the healing fire, she renewed her lost focus. Used her lingering anger to hone her determination to scalpel brilliance. Returned to his bedside, bringing her powers to the assistance of Sister Ainnir, whose strength waned after hours of fighting the underworld for possession of this lost sailor’s soul.

  “That’s it. Feel the way it bends to your will. Careful. Don’t force it.” The infirmarian took Sabrina’s hand, moving it to a spot just above his right lung. His flesh was icy cold, the palest milky blue but for the crisscross web of silver scars. “There now. See? Do you feel the way the life wavers just there?”

  Sabrina let the rise and fall of his faltering breaths bear her along. In and out and in and out, winding her healing magic into the pattern. Steady. Unerring. But wait . . . something not quite right. Not as it should be. Instead, unfamiliar strands tangled and knotted and bound themselves without her aid or her powers. A new pattern. A strange weaving of life and mage energy, unfaltering darkness at its core. A rippling, slithering brush against her mind as she worked.

  Then nothing. The unidentified magic vanishing as subtly as it appeared.

  She delved deeper, but a jerk of the man’s head and unconsciousness became sleep. Death receded.

  “Sister Ainnir, did you feel that?” she asked, stealing a long, frowning look at the patient.

  He breathed. Already his color returned, a dusky golden bronze where he’d recently been fish-belly white. But had it been their healing that had done it? For the merest fraction of a moment, she’d almost thought . . .

  “That is life, Sabrina.” Sister Ainnir sagged into a chair, her face as waxen as the dripping tapers behind them. “Annwn will have to wait for this one.”

  Sabrina’s feeling of not-quite-rightness disappeared in the afterglow that always followed a success. This man had arrived at the convent unresponsive, given up for dead. And through her efforts he held to life. Her skills had saved him. This was something she, Sabrina, was good at. A prowess no lack of wealth or beauty or elegant Society airs could diminish.

  She pulled the blanket up over the stranger. Let her eyes loiter for a moment over the harsh angles and grim lines of his face. Even asleep he looked prepared to do murder. Lips pressed in a thin slash of anger. Jaw clamped.

  What misfortunes had landed him on a rocky beach, lungs full of ocean?

  His emotions spoke of violence and combat. His body bore this out. The hardened muscles, the web of scarring, the frightening intensity of expression.

  She pushed against his mind, barely connecting. A mere glancing caress. Hoping to transmit peace, safety, the warmth of a soft bed, the security of a quiet room. Yet even that lightest of touches brought back a ricochet pound of emotions. No more the cyclone’s angry devastation. Instead there was grief and torment and a crushing anguish that stung her eyes with hot, unbidden tears.

  She gasped, falling back into herself with a swipe of her sleeve over her burning cheeks. Forced her gaze and mind away from him, though she felt his knifing presence at her back, the looming silence of him like an approaching line of thunderheads in a yellow sky.

  And yes, she read far too many novels if she was spinning such melodramatic notions from a half-drowned pirate.

  She shook off her fancy to focus on Sister Ainnir, who returned her gaze with one of dazed exhaustion. Good heavens. Here she was dream-spinning when she should have been concerning herself with Sister Ainnir.

  They’d been here for hours, dinner come and gone. Afternoon’s heavy dusk deepening to night. Had it been too much for the aged priestess? Had she offered more of her strength than she could easily give?

  “Let me help you back to your quarters.” Sabrina offered the old woman an arm to lean against as she struggled to her feet.

  “And the gentleman?” Sister Ainnir sighed. “Perhaps one of us should remain.”

  “It’s my night to stay,” Sabrina said, glancing back at the stranger with an unconscious shudder and, no, it was not excitement. “Sister Noreen is here now. I can have you settled and be back before she goes off duty.”

  “Then I accept your assistance with gratitude. This old body isn’t as spry as it once was. And I’ve found I enjoy my bed far more than I used to.”

  The two of them made their painfully slow way through the passage into the main ward. “You’ve a great gift, my child,” Sister Ainnir said. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

  The earlier bitterness resurfaced now that the emergency had passed. “Sister Brigh doesn’t think so. I’m a grown woman, yet she treats me like a child.”

  Sister Ainnir paused, turning to face Sabrina. “Sister Brigh fears anything that would topple the delicate balance of the world we Other have created for ourselves. She believes our survival lies in remaining apart from the Duinedon. Not bringing attention to ourselves. Your family—your father—believed just the opposite. Rightly or wrongly, in her mind, that makes you a threat.”

  “If that’s the case, how will I ever get her to see past my father’s sins? She’ll never agree to my taking final rites.”

  Sister Ainnir started walking, drawing Sabrina after. “Brigh is not the only one w
ho matters in such things. You’ve many allies within the community who recognize your potential.” She chuckled. “Look around you. Don’t think I don’t know who it is who keeps this place running. I’m too old for wrestling death.”

  “You’re not old, Sister,” Sabrina countered diplomatically.

  “And you’re a horrid liar, young lady. I know exactly how old I am. I feel every year, especially on nights like this. No, it’s up to you to take over here.”

  Up to her? Was Sister Ainnir saying what Sabrina thought she was saying? “I’m not a full priestess yet.”

  “Not yet, but who could deny your readiness after tonight’s work?”

  She was saying what she thought she was saying. Joy bubbled up through Sabrina’s chest. She clamped on the whoop that threatened to spill out of her. A whoop was not an appropriate reaction for a dignified bandraoi priestess. Besides, she could heal the sick, raise the dead, and cure the common cold and Sister Brigh would still find a reason to hold up the final rites. Probably accuse Sabrina of showing off on top of all her other crimes.

  Leaving the ward, they crossed through the hall and out into the night, the wind tugging at their skirts, clouds scudding silver-edged across the sky. A moon shining high and pale above, reflected in the scummy puddles of the courtyard.

  “You possess an innate talent and have learned to use it as well as any fully promoted infirmarian.” Sister Ainnir’s words trembled thin and strained in the damp cold. “What can Ard-siúr say to that?”

  “She can say, ‘Thank you very much, but don’t count on it.’ I’m a Douglas, remember?”

  “Aye, I do. And that in itself should seal your destiny as bandraoi. For the Douglases have all been known to bear a Fey strength above the ordinary.”

  “And my family’s accursedness?” She tried and failed to keep the resentment from her voice.

  “Bah! Accursedness! Talk like that makes us sound like a gaggle of old superstitious crones.”

  Their bodies bent close, Sabrina noted Sister Ainnir’s infirmity, the bony, liver-spotted hand, the weakness of her grip. Had this day’s work been too much? Or had she always been this frail and Sabrina refused to notice?

  “We make our own fate, child.”

  She sounded so certain. So confident. And why shouldn’t she? Sister Ainnir had probably been here when they’d laid the first stone, or at least she gave that impression. Unfathomable wisdom. Indefatigable strength. She’d always been. Would always be. Like everything here. The buildings. The gray-robed sisters. The chapel. The toll of slow, sonorous bells.

  It was what Sabrina loved about the order. The sense of forever in every mortared stone. The unaltering eternity as if time stopped within its walls. As if nothing could penetrate the sanctity and protection of this place. It was that very permanence that had attracted her to a life as a bandraoi priestess.

  When change had battered Sabrina’s well-ordered world like a hurricane tide and all she’d known and everyone she’d loved had vanished in a fury of blood and tears, the sisters of High Danu had become a harbor from the storm. Serene. Steady. Safe.

  Only recently had she occasionally found monotony in the steady tread of passing time. Frustration in the rigid order. But these moments were rare and stamped out as soon as they surfaced. She knew where she belonged. And it was here.

  They climbed the stairs to Sister Ainnir’s chambers. Opened the door to a breath of perfumed air and the warmth of a fire recently stirred to cheerful life.

  “I can manage from here. You go back now. Try to get some rest. There’s naught more we can do for him tonight, but watch,” Sister Ainnir said.

  Sabrina smiled. “Thank you. For everything.”

  The priestess covered Sabrina’s hand with her own. The clarity in her clear gray eyes revealing nothing of her body’s weakness. Instead they bore a steady unflagging strength that seeped through Sabrina’s skin into her bones, her tendons, her muscles. A gift of renewal when all her body craved was sleep.

  “Your reasons for coming to us may have originated in a need to escape a painful past, but have you not found a home here?” Sister Ainnir asked. “A sisterhood in all but title?”

  “I have. This life is all I’ve ever wanted. I’ve always been more comfortable here than among the airs and graces of Society’s elite. I can be myself. I don’t need to try to fit into someone’s else’s mold.”

  “Then the Sister Brighs of this world be damned.”

  Sabrina laughed. “You make it sound so easy.”

  The old woman chucked Sabrina’s chin as she might a child’s. “If it were easy, we’d have young women beating down our doors to get in. It’s the difficulty keeps the riffraff out.”

  Where was Lazarus? A missed meeting. No follow-up letters. Not one telltale clue.

  Máelodor reached with his mind as far as he dared, yet no answering touch met his seeking fingers of thought. Only an empty echoing silence, a frozen, endless abyss spiraling always downward until his very skull flexed against the pressure. He surrendered to his body’s frailty. He would eat. Rest. Begin the search for his mage-born Domnuathi again in the morning. He might feel death at the other end of their tenuous connection, but that was misleading. As long as Máelodor lived, Lazarus lived.

  And Máelodor would find him. It was only a matter of time.

  Which was all on his side.

  He heaved himself from his chair to hobble painfully to the window. His prosthesis ground against the stumped remains of his leg, and the cold gnawed at bones grown brittle and twisted, but he refused to remain in his chair another moment.

  Dusk fell early in the mountains, but the moon’s reflection against the snow shone ghostly across the forested hillside. Furnished light enough to see by. To measure the man about to appear before him for instructions.

  Across the valley, lights flickered from a few scattered homesteads. Strung out across the Cambrian Mountains like glimmering jewels set against the primitive isolation of the Welsh highlands.

  The ancestors of these people had fought with a ferocity and a cleverness that kept them free for ages. Romans. Vikings. Saxons. Normans. They’d all tried to tame the wild Celtic nature. All had broken upon their shore and been turned aside.

  But in all the eons of kings and warlords and princes who’d passed into and out of history, only one was remembered with the passion of the devoted. One stood higher. Burned brighter. Gathered followers long after there was naught left of their hero but bones.

  Arthur.

  Those who held the full knowledge hadn’t let his demise hinder their dreams. The Nine and those devoted to them understood that death was temporary. Power was forever. And if Arthur returned, there would always be men and women who chose to follow his banner. With Máelodor to guide him and his own charismatic aura, the High King would march at the head of an army, and a world once again dominated by Other would be in reach. No longer the ignominy for the Fey-born of the cart’s tail or a pitch-soaked scaffold. Instead, control. Command. Supremacy.

  A new golden age.

  Arthur was the key to success.

  And Arthur was one step closer to being reborn.

  Behind Máelodor, on the desk, lay his first victory. The Kilronan diary was in his possession. Its mysteries revealed after months of patient decoding. The only failure among so much success lay in the survival of Kilronan’s pathetic whelp of an heir, Aidan Douglas.

  Lazarus had paid dearly for allowing the man to live.

  The Domnuathi wouldn’t allow such scruples to surface again. Not now that he’d been reminded just who held the whip hand.

  Not that it mattered overmuch. Máelodor had managed to defuse the threat posed by Douglas. He’d been deemed unhinged and as discredited as his executed father. His claims of Máelodor’s existence as the head of a reconstituted network of disaffected Other termed the ravings of a man desperate to clear his power-mad younger brother.

  Brendan Douglas remained at large seven years after the rest o
f the Nine had been exterminated. But not for long. The Amhas-draoi, guardians of the divide between mortal and Fey, tracked him with unceasing determination. And they weren’t the only ones hunting the rogue Other. When Máelodor finally captured the youngest heir to Kilronan, he’d beg for death before the end.

  A knock broke him from his more violent fantasies.

  “Come.”

  A man bowed himself in. Slick. Smiling. Dark as a villain. “You summoned me?”

  Máelodor straightened, throwing his crooked shoulders back. “Lazarus is missing. He was to contact a man in Cork. Their meeting never took place.”

  The man lounged against a table. Insolently picked through a bowl of fruit as if he were in the company of his mates and not his superior. “Mayhap he found himself a bit of something. Decided to dally a bit.”

  Máelodor’s walking stick splintered beneath his increasing stranglehold. “A soldier of Domnu, a creature born of my magic and bound to my will, does not dally. He does as I order. Without question. Without thought.”

  The man straightened. “So what’s the job? You want me to track your wayward slave down? Tell him Mummy’s worried?”

  Máelodor let his curse fly with a flick of his fingers. Felt a rush of satisfaction at the instant graying of the man’s face. The widening of his terrified eyes as the air was squeezed from his throat. The lurching stumble against the table before he dropped to his knees, the pilfered apple rolling across the floor.

  Máelodor shuffled to stand over this paltry excuse for a human. “You are new among us, so I shall make it simple. You will assume Lazarus’s mission. Retrieve the Rywlkoth Tapestry. Bring it to me.”

  The man nodded, blue lips blubbering as he clawed at his throat.

  Máelodor dissolved the curse with a second flick of his fingers. Allowed the man a moment of silent weeping before hooking one bony finger in his cravat and drawing him up. “You don’t ask where you’re being sent?”