Chapter One #4
Ravel gestured with a graceful sweep of his hand back towards the icebox in the kitchen.
“The little cat is not happy with the stronger weaves we put around the house,” he murmured.
“She’s been hiding beneath that small chest all night and refuses to come out.
Kieran will not be pleased. He and Bel warned us to take care with our magic around her. ”
Ellie smothered a smile. There was something very endearing about lethal warriors living in fear of ruffling a tiny kitten’s fur.
“Let me take a look.” Ellie stepped into the kitchen and crouched down to look under the icebox.
Beneath it, huddled against the back wall, was a tiny ball of white fur dominated by a pair of big, gleaming blue eyes.
The kitten opened her mouth to hiss and display needle-sharp fangs.
“Poor little Love,” Ellie crooned. “I’ll bet last night was even more frightening for you than me.” As the Fey had discovered last week, Lillis and Lorelle’s kitten could sense magic woven nearby—and to say she hated it was an understatement.
“Come here, sweetling. Come here, kit, kit, kit.” Ellie reached under the icebox, hoping to scoop the little kitten out, but when her fingers were close enough to brush against soft white fur, Love gave a loud hiss and swatted out with razor-sharp claws.
Ellie yelped and yanked back her bleeding hand.
Like a bolt of furry white lightning, Love shot out from under the icebox, raced across the main room, and leapt up the stairs towards the relative safety of Lillis and Lorelle’s bedroom.
Ravel stepped towards Ellysetta, green Earth and lavender Spirit already spinning out from his fingertips to stop the bleeding and steal away the sting of the deep furrows scored across the back of her hand. “Shall I summon Marissya to heal it?”
Ellie gave a small laugh of disbelief. “For a cat scratch? No, I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
Ravel frowned at her, black brows drawing close over remarkable violet eyes. “I will inform the Feyreisen,” he insisted. “He will make certain Marissya’s schedule permits her to attend you.”
Ellie caught herself before rolling her eyes.
She’d been wounded under Ravel’s care, and both his masculine Fey instinct and his strong warrior’s code of honor compelled him to see her healed.
He couldn’t do it himself. Though masters of extraordinary magic, Fey warriors could not heal wounds as their women could.
They could only staunch the flow of blood and temporarily seal rent flesh.
“Thank you, Ser Ravel,” she said, “but please, make sure they know it’s only a scratch. Poor Love. I shouldn’t have reached for her, I suppose, but usually even when she’s frightened she lets us hold her.”
“Perhaps she has reason to be more frightened than usual,” a grim voice announced.
Ellysetta gave a start of surprise and turned to find her adoptive mother standing in the kitchen doorway. “Good morning, Mama. I didn’t hear you come down.”
Lauriana Baristani was already fully dressed, her mink-brown hair tamed in a bun at the back of her neck, her body covered from ankle to neck in a practical burgundy dress.
She raked Ellie from head to toe with a penetrating gaze, hazel eyes sharp and probing.
“How are you feeling this morning, Ellysetta?”
Ellie’s heart sank. She knew that intense, scrutinizing look.
Mama was looking for some remnant of last night’s terrible nightmare, some visible sign of the dread affliction that had no doubt prompted Ellysetta’s natural parents—whoever they were—to abandon her in the forests of Norban when she was but a babe.
An old, familiar tension coiled inside Ellie. “I’m fine, Mama.”
“Are you?” Her mother’s eyes had always seen too much, too clearly. It was one reason Ellie had grown up such a scrupulously obedient daughter. “Last night you were nowhere near fine. You haven’t had such a terrible . . . event . . . since Hartslea.”
Silence fell between them. They never mentioned Hartslea, the northern city where they’d lived years ago, the city they’d fled after Ellie’s childhood exorcism.
Ellie had only been eight at the time, but she still remembered the smell of sago flowers and incense, the malevolent gleam of long needles in the flickering candlelight, the deep scarlet of the exorcists’ robes and the dark fervency in their eyes.
“I’m fine, Mama,” she insisted, shoving those old terrors to the back of her mind. She would not think of those awful days.
“Ellysetta . . .” Her mother reached out to take her arm, then stopped as Ellysetta drew back.
A hurt look crossed Lauriana’s face but she suppressed it quickly.
“I’m concerned, Ellysetta, and you know why.
You also know I’d do anything in my power to help you.
” Her voice softened. “I love you, kitling. I only want what’s best for you. ”
Guilt stung Ellysetta. Her rigid shoulders slumped. “I know you do, Mama, and I love you too. But, please, don’t worry. If there’s any way to stop my nightmares, Rain has sworn he and the Fey will find it.”
“That’s all well and good, Ellie, but what if he can’t? Magic is more likely the root of your troubles, not the solution.”
Ellie bit back a sharp remark. Mama was as fierce in her loathing of magic as Rain was in his loathing of the Eld. There was no talking to either of them when those subjects came up.
Before Ellie could think of a response, her father’s voice called out, “Good morning, Ellie-girl. I hope you’re cooking a feast. I’ve a belly so empty, I could eat a dragon.
” Entering the kitchen, Sol Baristani greeted his daughter with a warm, broad smile and a casual joviality that didn’t extend to his bespectacled brown eyes.
“Good morning, Papa.” Grateful for his timely interruption, Ellie wound her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek.
He smelled of soap and freshly laundered clothes rather than the scents of wood shavings and pipe smoke she loved so well, but the unfettered welcome of his embrace made her heart brim with love as it always did.
He didn’t ask her about last night, and she loved him even more for that.
She would go to him as she always had when she was ready to talk, and he was patient enough to wait.
Besides, unlike Mama, he actually liked the Fey.
Despite their strange and magical ways, he’d welcomed them into his home because he knew Rain Tairen Soul was the man Ellie had dreamed of all her life.
“I was just about to get breakfast started,” Ellie said. “Will three eggs be enough to fill a dragon-sized hole, do you think?”
“Hmm, make it four—and fry up some sausages and a dozen of those corncakes of yours while you’re at it. I’m going to be working late again today.” Sol bent to curl an arm around his wife’s waist and kiss her until the tight clench of her jaw relaxed.
“Papa! Papa!” Heralded by the sound of clattering feet, Lillis and Lorelle tumbled downstairs, raced across the small home’s main room, and leapt into their father’s arms. Mink-brown curls hung in unbrushed tangles down the backs of the twins’ matching white cotton nightgowns.
Sol hugged them both and bussed their soft cheeks.
“Good morning, my sweet kitlings. Aren’t you both the prettiest sight a papa could ever wake up to?
” He set the twins back on their feet and smiled down at them.
“Go put on your frocks, and have Mama brush your hair, then you two can help me set the table while Ellie cooks.”
“Yes, Papa,” the girls chorused.
Ellysetta gave her father a grateful smile when Mama herded the twins back upstairs, thankful for the reprieve even though she knew this wasn’t the end of her mother’s interrogation.
Whatever had happened last night—whether a Mage had attacked her as Rain suspected, or a demon had possessed her as Mama feared—one thing she knew for certain: The Shadow Man, who’d haunted her dreams all her life, stalking her, calling her night after night as she slept, had finally found her.
Who he was and what he wanted with her, she didn’t know, but she couldn’t shake the fear that the real danger was only just beginning and that things were about to get much, much worse.
A thousand miles to the north, hidden deep beneath the dark forested surface of Eld in the subterranean fortress of Boura Fell, the High Mage Vadim Maur, leader of the secretly reconstituted Mage Council, walked down a long, wide, sconce-lighted corridor.
Here, the raw, dark earth was richly veined with sel’dor, the black metal of Eld, one of the few elements capable of disrupting Fey magic.
That earth had been carved to smoothness, the floors, walls, and ceilings of the corridors covered with sel’dor plating seven inches thick, then finished with mosaic tiles set in continuous, intricate patterns of power.
This was one of three levels in Boura Fell designed to house Vadim’s most dangerous and magically gifted guests.
He stopped before one of the many sel’dor-clad doors, inserted a heavy black key into the lock, and whispered a Feraz witchspell.
Magic rippled across the door. He turned the key in the lock and waited as the series of tumblers inside the door clicked open, retracting a dozen heavy sel’dor bars that penetrated two full handspans into the surrounding rock wall.
The door swung inward, and Vadim stepped into an impenetrable magical prison disguised as a noblewoman’s luxurious bedroom.
Furniture, delicate and beautiful, was arranged in comfortable groupings—a library filled with books in one corner, cushioned divans in another, and in the far corner of the room, a wide bed draped with swaths of brightly colored silk that hid the sel’dor manacles he rarely used anymore except when cruelty suited his mood.
Beneath the outward beauty of the furnishings, every inch of wood, metal, paper, and cloth in the room was threaded with sel’dor.
A woman lay on the bed. She sat up as Vadim entered. Long, spiraling coils of flame-red hair tumbled down over slender shoulders and across the thin silk covering her breasts. Large, heavily lashed golden eyes, the elongated pupils lengthening to catlike slits, regarded him without expression.
Despite the sel’dor infused in every item in the room, despite the ten sel’dor rings piercing her ears and the barbed manacles piercing her ankles and upper arms, even despite his own vast powers, Vadim could feel the draw of her magic tugging at him.
She was enchantingly beautiful. Just the sight of her unveiled face could send kings to their knees, begging to do her bidding—and that even before she wove the first hint of her formidable magic.
He took a step towards her. She flinched and inched back before she caught herself.
As if to make up for that brief show of fear, her chin lifted.
“You had a bad night, Mage?” Her eyes flicked contemptuously over the seared skin on the side of his face.
Ellysetta Baristani’s magic had proved so powerful last night that the burst of Fire she’d woven in her dreams had actually scorched him in the physical world.
“On the contrary, my dear, it was a very good night. Though I doubt you would agree.” Vadim smiled. Coldly. The temperature in the room dove towards freezing. He took a step towards the woman, and his smile widened as her spurt of mocking defiance faded and her already pale face lost all color.
“Elfeya, my pet, you’ve been keeping secrets.”