Radiance (Wraith Kings Book 1) (4 page)

Ildiko continued her exploration of the contours of his face.  “There’s a lot to be said for a spare.”  She drew a circle on his chin with her fingertip.  “Your skin color reminds me of a dead eel I once saw on the beach.”

Brishen arched an eyebrow.  “Flattering, I’m sure.  I thought yours looked like a mollusk we boil to make amaranthine dye.”

She paused in touching him and stared at her hand.  “I am very pink compared to you.”

“Just so, since I’m not pink at all.”

Ildiko’s eyebrows drew together.  “Do you eat those mollusks?”

“No.  They’ve a bitter taste, and their dye is too valuable to waste them in the kitchens.”

Her relieved exhalation caressed his throat.  “That’s good to know.  I’m not sure I’d like to be compared to something you ate for dinner.”

Brishen opened his mouth to retort but changed his mind.  He hadn’t been completely truthful with her when he told her his people weren’t interested in eating the Gauri.  The Kai were an ancient race; the humans a young one.  Long ago, on the edges of ancestral memory, when the Kai were more feral and humans less savage, his kind had once hunted hers for food.

He hurried to change the subject.  “Why are your eyes bloodied?”

Ildiko started and pressed her hands to her eyes.  When her fingers came away unstained with blood, she frowned, obviously puzzled.  Her expression cleared.  “I think most humans suffer that when they first wake up.  Our eyes feel dry and scratchy.  It’s temporary.”

She cocked her head.  “You and your people are bothered most by human eyes, aren’t you?  I can see it in the way you react to some of our expressions.  It’s equal to how frightening the Gauri find your teeth.”

No one could accuse his new wife of not being observant.  Brishen carefully traced the outline of her cheekbone just below her left eye.  “It’s the white part that makes them ghastly.  It’s as if they’re attached on strings plucked by unseen hands or some kind of strange leeches that live as pairs inside your skulls.”

Ildiko’s expression pinched in disgust.  “That’s horrible!  No wonder no Kai will meet my gaze for more than a moment.”

“I meet it all the time.  I’m meeting it now,” Brishen countered.

She acceded his point.  “True, but I bet it takes the same effort it takes me not to jump every time you smile.”

“We’re growing used to each other.  My kin will grow used to you and you to them as well.”

Ildiko sighed.  “I hope so.  An ugly stranger in a far land with people not of my blood or my kind.”  She wrapped a strand of his hair around her finger and tugged gently.  “I’ll need your guidance, husband.”

Brishen cupped one side of her face.  “You have it, Ildiko.  Along with my protection and my patience.  I didn’t lie when I said we would manage together.”

Ildiko pressed her cheek into his palm for a moment.  She pulled away, and her smile turned impish.  “It’ll be hard not to tease your folk sometimes.”

Brishen couldn’t imagine how she might go about such a thing.  He had no idea if the Kai and the Gauri even knew the same jokes or found the same things funny.  “What do you mean?”

He almost leapt out of his skin when Ildiko stared at him as both of her eyes drifted slowly down and over until they seemed to meet together, separated only by the elegant bridge of her nose.

“Lover of thorns and holy gods!” he yelped and clapped one hand across her eyes to shut out the sight.  “Stop that,” he ordered.

Ildiko laughed and pushed his hand away.  She laughed even harder when she caught sight of his expression.  “Wait,” she gasped on a giggle.  “I can do better.  Want to see me make one eye cross and have the other stay still?”

Brishen reared back.  “No!”  He grimaced.  “Nightmarish.  I’ll thank you to keep that particular talent to yourself, wife.”

She was still chuckling when he helped her rise from her pallet and left the tent to give her privacy to change and ready herself.

It was dark, and the moon hung low when he exited the tent and discovered several Kai staring curiously at him from their places around camp fires.  No doubt they wondered how he’d found the courage to bed his hideous wife.  No doubt bets had been placed and wagers exchanged over whether he took the easy way and bedded her when the sun was high and the light blinding or the more challenging and swived her as the gloaming rose.

They could wonder until they rotted.  Brishen had no intention of revealing anything between him and Ildiko.  Theirs was an agreement based on the beginnings of friendship, respect and an intuitive understanding of each other that still left him slack-jawed with amazement.  He refused to taint that accord by inviting vulgar conjecture.

He made arrangements to have the travel rations packed by a Gauri cook delivered to the tent and met with Anhuset and Mertok to discuss the upcoming consecrative.

Ildiko found him a half hour later.  She’d changed her clothes and tamed her hair into a braid.  Anhuset’s breastplate hung across one arm.  “Can you help me buckle this on again?”

He took it from her and set it against a nearby tree.  “We’re not riding out just yet.  We have three of our dead to attend to.”

Her features saddened.  “I’m sorry for your loss, Brishen.”

Brishen squeezed her hand.  “As am I.  We’ll cleanse the bodies during the consecrative and return their mortem lights to their families to store in a sacred house.”

“What is a mortem light?  And a consecrative?”

He stilled, wondering how best to explain Kai funerary rites or that to properly honor their fallen comrades, he and two other Kai would literally breathe in the memories of the dead to carry them home—hosts themselves to other entities.

With that realization, Brishen no longer saw Ildiko’s eyes as before, otherworldly and separate from her.  They were human and still strange, but just eyes.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The physical differences between human and Kai were obvious and in some ways, extreme.  Ildiko had accepted that fact before she married Brishen.  Her acceptance helped her look beyond his startling appearance to the man himself.  She’d held tight to that philosophy:  see past the surface to the tides below.  In her very short time amongst his people, she observed many similarities to hers—a love of family, comradeship, loyalty to each other, grief over lost friends.  Ildiko had no doubt there were many more she’d discover as she took her place amongst the Kai as wife to one of their princes.

The Gauri might share several of the same behaviors as the Kai when it came to the living, but in the matter of the dead, the two parted company.

Brishen retrieved a flask of wine and a blanket from their tent and made a place for her to sit at the entrance.  He sat down beside her and passed the flask.  “With every generation, the Kai lose a little of their magic.  We are an Elder race, but we are fading.  We hoard the sorcery we still possess until forced to use it.  Though I’m as knowledgeable as my father in family spells and protections, his power is greater than mine and my brother’s.  And my brother’s is greater than his children’s.  However, the Kai are old, with long memories.  The spirits of our dead leave this world but gift the living with their memories—what we call mortem lights.  We keep those memories alive in a place called Emlek.  They are our history, what defines us beyond how we look or the sorcery we’re losing.”

 “Is Emlek a temple?”  She passed him the flask after taking a swallow of sweet wine.

Brishen drank as well and let the flask dangle from his fingers.  “Not really.  It’s sacred, but we don’t worship there.  Those who visit come to gain knowledge of past days or to find comfort in revisiting memories of those they lost.”

Ildiko’s heart contracted in her chest.  Oh, what she would have given to have her parents’ memories with her.  She refused his second offer of the flask.  “I wish the Gauri had something like that.”

Brishen wrapped an arm around her shoulder and squeezed.  “It’s a comfort to the living, especially when death is sudden, as for those who die in battle or childbirth, which I’m told is its own hard-fought war.”  He kept his arm around her, and Ildiko savored his strength.  “A dead Kai’s mortem light is a last gift to their loved ones.”

She envied this gift with a fervor that made her wish she’d been born Kai, teeth and all.  “How do you bring them home?  The mortem lights?”

Brishen took another drink from the flask.  Ildiko was still learning the flickers of expression on his features, their nuances harder to capture without the ability to read his eyes, but she sensed an odd hesitation.  He stiffened a little next to her and removed his arm from her shoulder.  She missed its weight.

He paused for so long; Ildiko didn’t think he’d answer her.  “Tonight we’ll perform a consecrative—a ritual to release the spirit and spark the mortem light.”    He lifted one of her hands and laced his fingers through hers.  The contrast of gray skin and black nails against hers emphasized their physical differences, yet sorrow was sorrow.  The grief in his voice was the same as any Gauri who’d ever knelt at a grave and mourned.  “I can explain the ritual and how we transport the mortem lights, but you’ll better understand it when you witness it.”

“May I participate?”

Brishen’s mouth curved upward.  In a gesture growing more familiar to her and one she liked, he kissed her knuckles before rising to his feet and helping her stand.  “I wish you could, but a consecrative can only be performed by the Kai.  You’re welcome to watch; I’d be honored if you did.”

They spent the early part of the evening holding ad hoc court in a forest clearing.  Ildiko had been too exhausted the dawn before to meet the new members of their entourage.  That, and the aftermath of the bloody skirmish between the Kai and Beladine raiders had precluded any social introductions.  Securing a safe camp and clearing the dead had taken up everyone’s time.

Brishen informed her they wouldn’t break camp until the next night.  Tonight would be devoted to the funerals of the three Kai who had perished in the attack.

“What of the dead raiders?”  Ildiko tried not to look too often at the corpses piled near the road.

His lambent eyes narrowed to slits.  “We’ll burn them before we leave and return their ashes to Belawat.  Message received.”  His voice was cold, flat.

Ildiko shivered, not because of Brishen’s sudden icy demeanor but because they’d both been targets for revenge.  Marriage obviously had many more pitfalls to beware of besides sharing a bed and a household with a stranger.  She didn’t fool herself into thinking the man who tried to drag her from beneath the wagon had only meant to scare her.  He would have butchered her on the spot and smiled while he did it.  Ildiko was glad he was dead and equally glad it had been Brishen who killed him.

Some might wonder at her lack of fear regarding her new husband.  Dreadful in appearance, lethal in combat, Brishen was all that was cordiality and dignified royalty in every interaction with her.

When their camp had settled in, he took the time to introduce her to the Kai cavalry who’d come to their rescue, and his Master of the Horse, Mertok.  As she expected, the Kai soldiers were formal, polite and refused to meet her gaze.  They had no problem gawking at her when they thought she wasn’t looking, and Ildiko had been tempted more than a few times to cross her eyes and watch their reaction.

As perceptive as he was affable, Brishen squeezed her waist in warning and bent to whisper in her ear.  “Don’t even think about it, wife.  You’ll notice half of them are sharpening or cleaning their weapons.  All I need is for someone to inadvertently slice themselves open because you startled them.”

Ildiko stifled a laugh behind her hand.  Brishen’s answering predator grin made the hairs on her arms stand up in warning, but she patted the hand at her waist and remained unafraid.

The moon glimmered directly above them—a Kai noon—when all their party, except those on guard, gathered in the clearing and formed a circle around the three fallen Kai.  They looked no different from when they were alive except for a change in their skin tone.  Instead of the slate gray with its undertones of teal and lavender, the flesh had paled to the color of cold ash.  Their bodies were laid out side by side, dressed in their armor.  They held their arms crossed over their chests, favorite weapons beside them.  Ildiko stood outside the circle on a tree stump tall enough that she could see over the mourners’ shoulders and into the circle.

Anhuset entered the circle with a small amphora.  From it she poured a glistening stream of oil over her fingers and crouched to draw a mysterious symbol on the forehead of each of the dead soldiers.  Like the other female Kai, she shone cold and elegant beneath the moon’s pale rays, her silver hair shimmering.  She opened the consecrative with a chant in the Kai tongue, a sing-song cant answered in chorus by the surrounding Kai.  Ildiko only knew a smattering of bast-Kai words, but she easily recognized a lamentation when she heard one.

The dirge continued, rising and falling in volume.  The Kai swayed with its undulating rhythm, their glowing eyes bright in the woodland darkness.  From her vantage point, Ildiko clearly saw Brishen.  He stood on the opposite side of the circle from her, his lips moving as he sang with his comrades.

Ildiko’s eyes widened, and she gasped when a soft light suddenly suffused the dead Kai, creating a nimbus that washed like spiller waves over their bodies.  The light broke, stretching into sinuous threads until they coalesced into three spectral forms, vaguely human—or Kai—in shape.

The living Kai continued the lamentation, the higher female voices melding with the lower male registers.  A single bright light, no bigger than a butterfly,  ignited within each of the three specters hovering over the bodies.  The memory spark.  The mortem light.

Brishen and two others broke from the circle and approached the dead.  The phantoms swirled around them, seeming to dance in time with the dirge.  Tears filled Ildiko’s eyes as Brishen and his companions opened their arms and were embraced by the dead whose spirits twirled and swayed before enveloping the living completely, sending tendrils of radiance into their mouths and nostrils.

Ildiko’s wonder battled with horror as the spirits of the fallen Kai possessed their willing hosts.  Brishen had told her his were a people of night.  They avoided the sun when possible and rejected the day for their hours of activity.  Yet seeing her princely husband and his two subjects lit from within by the resplendent dead, she couldn’t imagine any who embraced light more than the tenebrous Kai.

Brishen burned like a torch within the circle, his glowing eyes sulfurous instead of their usual nacreous shade.  The two soldiers standing with him bore the same look.  One staggered with the force of the possession, and the mortem lights pulsed under their clothing—candles lit inside living lanterns.

The possession lasted only a moment before the spectral entities abandoned their worldly anchors on a mournful exhalation and faded into the vast night, leaving their mortem lights behind with their hosts.  Their physical bodies collapsed inside their armor, desiccating into a fine dust until they melded with the earth beneath them.

The dirge faded as well until the Kai stood silent together, serenaded only by a cool wind.  Ildiko leapt off her tree stump and hurried to Brishen.  He leaned weakly on Anhuset, his features as colorless as the dead Talumey who’d gifted his life memories to him for safekeeping.  His fellow vessels looked just as weary and stood with the help of others, as if holding a mortem light sucked out all their strength.  Brishen’s eyes were twin suns in his face, and he reached for Ildiko with a hand that trembled.

She clasped it and drew him to her, leaving Anhuset to hover close by.  “Anhuset, help me get him to our tent.”

The Kai woman nodded and signaled with one hand.  Two more soldiers appeared.  Brishen sagged between them as they carried him to the tent and laid him carefully on his pallet.  Ildiko knelt by her husband’s side and curled her hand around his.  His eyes were closed, but the mortem light inside him still glowed through his eyelids.

Anhuset settled on the floor on Brishen’s other side.  “He and the others be like this for a few hours and then suffer mortem fever.”

Ildiko’s stomach flipped.  “Mortem fever?  He’d said nothing of a fever.”

The other woman pulled a blanket over Brishen’s still body.  “A light vessel drowns in the memories of the dead until they become accustomed to them.  It’s temporary but painful while it lasts.”

“Bursin’s wings!  Do all the Kai go through this?”  Ildiko was rapidly reconsidering her envy of such a gift.  She stroked the back of Brishen’s hand with her thumb.

Anhuset shrugged.  “Only those who volunteer.  Brishen volunteered to act as light vessel for Talumey until we reach Haradis.  He’ll turn Talumey’s mortem light over to his mother once we’ve arrived.  I’ll stay here with you until he adjusts and overcomes the fever.”  She leaned back against one of the tent supports in a pose that lacked any tension.

Ildiko wasn’t fooled.  She’d observed the interaction between Brishen and his cousin.  Anhuset was worried.  “I’m harmless, Anhuset.  You don’t have to protect him from me,” she joked gently.

Anhuset stared at her, mouth unsmiling.  “Mortem fever can make a Kai go mad.  I’m not protecting him from you, Your Highness, but you from him.”