Chapter 11 #3
“Ah, no, I’ll be going with Elloven,” Jesstin said when Ryquin blocked him from following her. Dividing people diffused their strength. Elloven might be too enamored to see it, but he wasn’t.
“She’ll be close enough,” Ryquin replied, unmoved. “Your bond won’t be affected.”
“Not the bond I’m worried about.” Jesstin watched her disappear, her arm looped through Estelar’s under a series of silver arches. Taven waited for them in the distance with a smirk Jesstin would enjoy punching again.
“About my father? He adores Aelloven.”
“He doesn’t know her.”
Ryquin started walking. Jesstin, accepting he’d lost the battle, had no choice but to come along.
“You’re wondering why she’s so easily falling into place here, but you wouldn’t need to wonder if you were of the blood.
Like recognizes like. Always. Kin is unmistakable.
She’s home, and a part of her knows this. ”
“This isn’t her home.” Jesstin glanced back, but Elloven was already gone. “And her name is Elloven now.”
“It is her home. It always will be.” Ryquin walked on, taking them past a long, tall wall that appeared to house the grounds of the circus.
Esguards were stationed at all openings, solid, tall doors of dark, carved wood that revealed nothing beyond them.
“But it’s you who interests me, Jesstin.
How long have your necromancer talents been active? ”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Your relationship with the dead.”
Oh. So there’s a word for this curse. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ryquin laughed. “Sure.”
The wall stretched on for a few more yards until it finally ended, opening into a garden encased by an iron cage on all sides.
They stepped beneath the gates, and Jesstin looked up, observing the evening sky through the curls and lines.
He wondered if the enclosure was purely aesthetic or had an actual purpose.
As soon as Jesstin’s boots crunched upon the frosted ground of the garden, the chorus of the dead returned. It was worse than before—there were more of them and they were louder—and in his panic, he dropped to his knees and clamped his hands over his ears, even though he knew it would do nothing.
“Remember what I told you.” Ryquin stood over him. “Do it now.”
Jesstin screamed at the desperate cries coming from all sides.
“Jesstin, say the words or suffer needlessly.”
“Hush... Hush now. I will hear your pleas later!” Jesstin fumbled the request, half whisper, half shout, but the sound stopped.
As he recovered, he glared up at Ryquin. “What the fuck is going on here?”
“Come. Sit.” Ryquin gestured toward a bench, which was beside a tiny pond filled with jagged rock formations and some large, colorful fish that seemed woefully out of place.
“Bloody hell is this place?”
“There are spots where the barrier is thin, and the dead are louder.” He gestured at the enclosure. “This protects that phenomenon from fading.”
Jesstin climbed to his feet and perched upon a rock instead. “You knew I could hear them. How?”
Ryquin’s mouth turned down. “I’ve known for a while.”
“And how long is ‘a while’?”
“I could tell you that,” Ryquin said, turning each word slowly, “or I could show you how to control it.”
“I should just trust whatever you say is true?”
“Was I wrong about how to silence them?”
Jesstin was familiar with the tactic. He’d seen Asterin perfect it over the years, doing business with criminals to secure rare documents for preservation and translation. He knew how to make himself useful to gain their trust.
So what did Ryquin need from Jesstin?
“They’ve shut up,” Jesstin said, palms up.
“For now, until you fail to hear their pleas and they move on to more aggressive tactics.”
“You don’t think that was aggressive?”
Ryquin shrugged.
“What could the dead possibly want from me?” Gennady’s torture was personal, but the dead in Rivenholde didn’t know him.
“What everyone wants.” Ryquin spread his arms along the back of the bench. “To be heard.”
“Hear them yourself,” Jesstin retorted.
“Oh, we do. We do. We have hundreds of necromancers who spend their entire lives entertaining the notions of the departed.” Ryquin’s head fell to the side. “But none are like you. Do you know, they only hear the voices when they ask for them?”
Jesstin’s curiosity got the best of him. “They don’t hear them all the time?”
“No. No, in fact, some can only hear occasionally. Others must stay in a constant state of focus, like the ones in our sept. You’re the first we’ve met who can hear them all at once, and without even trying. A rare gift indeed.”
Ryquin’s intentions remained a mystery, but even if Jesstin had met him in the best of circumstances, something in the man’s cool, guarded manner would have kept him from getting comfortable around him.
“I wouldn’t call it a gift,” Jesstin said.
Ryquin lifted his gaze to the hazy sky. “There are very few in the White Kingdom who share it. We know of them all. Most, like you, are plagued by this ‘gift,’ failing to see it for what it is.”
He’d referred to the White Kingdom as though it was a separate realm altogether. “And what is it, if not a thorn in my ass that I can’t quite reach?”
Ryquin grinned, more polite than natural.
He couldn’t even be sure Ryquin was a man at all.
Solitude had become a natural state in the past decade of Jesstin’s life, one he’d quenched through his antics in Mythgarde, but it put him at a potentially dangerous disadvantage now.
He wished Sesto were there. He’d know what Ryquin wasn’t saying.
All Jesstin had to offer was a clever wit and a chip on his shoulder deeper than the sea.
But he was also distracted. He couldn’t stop thinking about his last encounter with Elloven in the Night Soul.
All he wanted was to go back and feel as he’d felt right before he’d said the wrong thing.
He missed her, though he chalked it up to the consequence of the magic.
But she wasn’t the same Elloven as when the dream had faded. Estelar had charmed her somehow.
Ryquin didn’t answer the question directly. “I’m here to help you find out.”
“I’m here to break this bond and go home, so you’re wasting your time.”
“How do you intend to do that? You heard my father,” Ryquin said, keeping the same, pacifying tone he’d had since supper the evening before.
It reminded Jesstin of the hypnotists in Mythgarde who claimed to cure anyone of any ailment for a “mere” five hundred gold pieces. “So are you truly in such a hurry?”
Well, the shyster had him there. Elloven could do as she pleased, but there was no way he was letting her bond with the man who had introduced her to abuse by wrapping it in the deception of love.
As for Jesstin bonding with anyone, even the idea was laughable.
“Why are you so interested in me and what I can do?”
“Consider my interest in necromancy... a hobby.”
Jesstin snorted. “You need to get out of this place more, mate.”
“Are you so surprised a man of a curia that reveres death would be interested in a power that does the same?”
“How long have you known about me? I’ll keep asking until you tell me.”
Ryquin shrugged. “Since I started tracking necromancers.” A brilliant display of light followed an explosive boom. “Ah, the cirque begins soon!” He frowned. “Where... is she?”
Jesstin was still rattled from whatever had happened in the sky. He refused to ask who “she” was and give Ryquin even more of an advantage.
“Hello, Jesstin.” A sultry voice whispered the words.
Jesstin turned, and what happened next gave him no time to catch up. His mouth dropped, and his cock sprung so quickly to attention, he might have wondered if something was wrong with it, if he could have thought at all.
“It is so lovely to finally meet you.”
Jesstin couldn’t speak. All he could do was gape at the onyx-haired creature who had stolen his ability to self-govern.
Her dark lipstick was a shadow against her unnaturally pale face and lucent violet eyes.
She wasn’t even his type, but the only image in his mind was of him bending her over the bench and throwing away every last principle he still clung to.
“My sister, Lexsea. We call her Lex. Or, sometimes, Sex, for reasons I don’t quite think I need to explain to you.” Ryquin laughed halfway through his introduction.
“I...” Why was his mouth suddenly as dry as sand? He’d never reacted to anyone that way before. He didn’t actually want her, so why was he under a bewildering carnal assault?
“I know who you are. Don’t hurt yourself.” Lexsea leaned in and pressed a slender finger to his mouth. Her nearness made everything worse. The way she cast her eyes downward with another sly smile made it unbearable. “We’ve been waiting a long time for you.”
“Don’t look her in the eyes, Jesstin,” Gennady blurted. “Don’t look her in the eyes, you idiot!” He disappeared with a gasp, like he’d been torn away.
Jesstin tried to wet his mouth but ended up choking on his spittle instead. “So it was... the two of you sending all those...” He flicked his fingers, making a monumental effort to avoid the woman’s gaze. “Visions to the stable hand.”
“Some,” Ryquin said. “Most were sent by Aelloven’s brother. They lied to you about the bond, my father and mother. They need you to believe only a bond with another—Taven Considine—would sever yours. There’s another way, and we’ll help you, if you help us.”
All right, so he’d answered two questions. There was another way, and they needed him, but for what? And what did it have to do with Elloven?
“Infinita Mori, a waypoint for the dead souls before they move on...” Ryquin glanced at his sister.
She nodded.