“Stay like this until I return for you.”
I could not move. Not one single muscle of my body. I could only speak, and the dread that welled up within me spilled out into my voice. “Where are you going?”
He lowered his face down to me like a lover. Spoke to me in the soft, whispering tones of one. “To kill all who belong to you here in this castle. Your men, your women.”
Everything in me shouted no. I gathered everything I could to break free. Called upon the abundant power that had always been innate—and found myself utterly helpless.
With my eyes wild upon his implacable face, I drew on my last reserve, upon the pearly moles in my palm, the Goddess’s visible favor upon me. With blessed relief, I felt them begin to tingle, to answer my call.
His sword came swinging down in a graceful arc. One cut with almost negligent force. I felt the reverberation of the blade bite into the wooden bench as my severed hands fell to the ground in a spurting fountain of blood, chopped off just above the manacles. The metal restraints fell to the ground with a heavy clunk, still attached to my dismembered limbs.
I didn’t scream. Not aloud. Just in my mind. A scream that went on and on and on interminably. I opened my mouth and words spilled out. “I beg of you, don’t kill them. Do what you will with me, but my people are innocent.”
He looked down at me, his eyes pale burning flames. “No one in this war is innocent,” he said in a gentle tone.
Panic choked my voice, fear twisting it ruthlessly. “Your father…your father was honorable. He would not have slain innocents.”
“I am not my father.”
“Don’t. Please, don’t. Just me,” I begged with tears spilling down my face. With my blood spreading like an echoing sea of sorrow around me.
“Vengeance is mine, and it is terrible. Hush.” And with that soft-spoken command, I could no longer speak. Could only scream in my mind as I watched him turn and walk out the door, go up the stairs. A moment of terrible silence, and the screams began. The cries of horror, the shrieks of pain that echoed and rang in the fortress. Cries that filled my mind and did not stop, even when all sound faded away and all heartbeats ended until I heard only mine and that of one other. His.
When he finally returned, I was light-headed and weak from blood loss, and from the pain that consumed my body, ravaged my heart, my soul. He released me from his mental control, freed my legs of the silver shackles. And a sick, almost mindless fury filled me. Swelled me with a hate so strong that it possessed me, expanding within me with a terrible, powerful pressure, even as I lay there physically helpless before him.
“I curse you,” I said in a voice that was mine and not mine. In a voice that was deeper, more resonant, filled with a power that came not from me alone, but was channeled through my Goddess’s Tears. They glowed from my amputated hands. “I curse you to a life that will never end. To deaths that are not true deaths. You will live again and again to die unceasingly, returning to an ever-diminishing seed until only you alone remain. May your soul be cursed in endless torment for what you have done today.”
“It already is,” Damian, the son of Barrabus, said. He raised his sword. “Know this before you go, witch Queen. I will lay waste to all that you hold dear. Anything and everything that you ever loved, I will destroy.” And with that last promise, the sword, drenched red with my blood, my people’s blood, came swinging down…
I AWOKE WITH a scream. With tears streaming down my face, sobs choking my chest. Arms held me, and I viciously fought against them.
“It’s a dream. Just a dream, Mona Lisa.”
My name and a face—Dontaine’s—brought me to startling awareness of him and all the others who had come running at my cry: Thaddeus, the worried faces of Jamie and Tersa, Rosemary, Chami, Aquila, and Tomas. Everyone in the household.
“Oh God,” I whispered. My people now, I thought, while the shrilling screams of my dead and dying people from the past echoed in my mind.
“You had a nightmare,” Dontaine soothed.
No, not a nightmare, I thought. Something much worse than that.
Memory.
TWENTY
I REMEMBERED HOW I died.
But it was the other memory, the memory of how all my people had died, that utterly devastated me. And the memory of the tool of their destruction. Damian…and myself.
Dante came to me as he had come all the nights before at the gloaming of the day. I studied him as he entered the sitting room where I had sat and waited for him for over two long hours, and gazed at him with memories both old and new. I saw him as he was now—young, easy, relaxed. Happy, even. And over that reality, I saw the monster in my dreams, the cold, burning eyes, the merciless face. I saw the bloody swing of the sword, heard the shrieks, the wails of my people as they died. It was as if ghostly images of the past clung and superimposed themselves over the slimmer body and younger face of the man before me.
I had not known that the curse Dante bore had come from me.
I’d cursed him. And I wondered if I had cursed myself as well. You could not invoke such a thing without some of it coming back upon yourself.
I searched that face, looking for evil. But could not find it in him unless I saw it in myself also. He had killed, as I had killed. Sought vengeance, as I had sought vengeance in the end. We had simply used different means. Was his choice any better or worse than mine? I did not know. Both things that we had done were horrendous. I could see that, understand that in my mind. I’d reached that fair and logical conclusion after two hours of careful thought, deciding how to proceed. But my body was less logically governed. Coldness pervaded my body when he stepped through the door, and an almost wild, wrenching fear seized me. It was a reaction not governed by reason or will.
A riptide of primitive instinct sent my control splintering away, and I overset my chair, sent it crashing to the floor as I hastily stood and backed away from him like a wild animal trapped.
He stopped. Froze still. And that easy, happy light that had filled his eyes upon seeing me died away. All the warmth seeped out, leaving his eyes like pale, glimmering ice.
Seconds ticked by. A long, suspended moment of silence and ghosts, of life and death and everlasting rebirth.
“You remembered,” he said. Two words that sounded the death knell of everything that might have been.
I nodded, feeling everything I had resolved die away beneath the primitive scream of horror and rage, of sorrow and pain choking my throat, trying to claw its way out of me.
I could not forgive. I could not forget.
I could not bear to be in his presence.
My body was equally torn between fleeing him, and attacking him. Tearing him apart.
Something closed in him like the audible shutting of a door. His eyes dropped away from mine, and his head lowered.
“We go to High Queen’s Court tomorrow,” he said in a low, quiet voice. “Can you bear my presence for one more day, or would you have me leave now?”
He was asking whether I was banishing him as a rogue, or if I would allow him to re-enter our society legitimately. Asking as if it did not really matter to him what I chose to do.
Now. I want you gone now! my body screamed. But the words that came out of my mouth in a hoarse, strained whisper were, “Tomorrow. You can stay until tomorrow.”
He bowed and left.
For a long time afterward my body continued to tremble.
THE NEXT NIGHT we went to High Court. The private jet took us there swiftly. I knew that logically, but those several hours locked together with Dante in the plane seemed endlessly long. When we landed, I practically leaped outside. Only when in the open space was I able to feel calmer.