Shadow's Curse (19 page)

“It’s the most horrendous noise imaginable. I wake afraid I’m about to be devoured by wild animals,” Lettice complained as she pulled another shirt from her pile of mending.

“You’re the magician. Can’t you just cast a spell on him?” Sally had joined them, her tone insolent, her manner sinuously attractive.

“I’m the magician’s
assistant
, and no, I can’t,” Lettice sniffed, simultaneously threading a needle and shooting Sally dirty looks.

“Seems to me wives do nothing but complain,” Sally said, dripping contempt. “If they were smart, they’d not wed in the first place. It’s the first step to utter boredom.”

“And what do you suggest? As if I didn’t know.”

Sally’s sloe-black eyes snapped. “Criticize me all you like, but I make them pay for the privilege. A man appreciates what he has to lay out good coin to have.”

By now Lettice looked ready to shove her needle into Sally rather than the shirt. “And when that beauty of yours turns to dross? You won’t be young forever.”

“I won’t be spreading my legs for drunken fair-going culls forever, either. I’ve got plans. I’m going to find me a wealthy man, one who’ll set me up in a house and buy me a fine carriage and fancy clothes. He’ll give me whatever I want for the pleasure of my
cunt. And when he’s ready to move on, I’ll make sure he pays for that pleasure too. When I’m tired of doing for myself, I’ll start up my own house, have girls who work for me. I’ll be a grand lady then.”

“You’re mad. It’ll never happen.”

Sally squared her shoulders as if preparing to challenge Lettice to pistols at dawn. “You don’t think so? I’ll wager you’re wrong and I’ll back it up with a night’s till.”

Shirt finished, Lettice pulled out a pair of breeches with a hole in the seat. “That’s nonsense. Am I supposed to wait twenty years to see if you find yourself some fancy protector who’ll lavish gifts on you?”

“You don’t have to wait. Cally can tell us. She’s the fortune-teller.” Sally swung an arch gaze toward Callista. “So, little runaway, will I find a wealthy handsome man and be treated like a queen forever after?”

Sally shot a hungry look toward David, who lurked just beyond the firelight, tinkering with the wagons, checking the mules, always moving, always apart. Callista had not been alone with him since their conversation in the wagon. If she didn’t know better, she’d say he was avoiding her.

“It’s the spirits that see the future, not I,” she answered.

Sally sank down on the ground beside them. She even sat gracefully, her long legs folding, her blond hair gleaming in the firelight. “Spirits? You mean like spooks?”

“They show me things if I ask them, but it’s not always the future. It can be the past or the present. And sometimes they only show me glimpses of their life; a snippet of memory they’ve clung to even in the afterlife.”

“Yes, yes.” Sally rolled her eyes. “I didn’t ask for a lecture. Can you or can you not tell me my fortune?”

“I don’t—”

“Go on, Cally,” Lettice urged. “Show her. I could use a new gown with all that money she’s bringing in.”

Cornered, Callista had no choice. “All right. I suppose I can. Come into the wagon.”

Sally made a brisk motion with her hand. “No, we can do it here. I want everyone to hear my glamorous future.”

From the corner of her eye, Callista caught David giving her a searching look, but before she could give in to the urge to go to him, he had already turned away. “Very well. I’ll just be a moment.”

Retrieving her box from the wagon, she tried not to hear Sally’s excited comments as she roused the others to the game. There was a grumbling murmur from Sam, a few interested side wagers between Edmund and Big Knox, and by the time she returned, the group had gathered and a crate had been upended for her use.

Opening the mahogany box with a set of the tumblers, she removed and placed each bell in order from largest to smallest; Key, Summoner, Blade. Then, taking a steadying breath, she traced a pattern on the crate, all just as her mother had taught her. The symbols swam in her head, the power behind them pushing out from her heart with every calm beat and every rise and fall of her lungs. She picked up Key, swinging it in a slow circle, the clapper’s strikes vibrating along her bones and pushing the symbols ever outward, until her body buzzed with the strength of her mage energy. Frost chilled her skin. It glittered on her
arms and steamed her breath while a numbing cold cramped her lungs.

She took up Summoner, the bell’s metal glowing softly blue, the carvings within the bone handle smoothed with years. This she rang once, tracing the same symbols in the air. Her heart sped up, and she shifted on her seat to return feeling to her legs. Replacing Summoner, she took up her smallest and most powerful bell, Blade. She’d never had a problem, but caution had been drilled into her along with the stories of past necromancers who’d not walked the paths well armed or well prepared and paid the price for their arrogance.

By now the world had faded away like mist hitting the sun. Ahead, a path of tidy brick lay spread out before her, unrolling toward a far gray horizon. She stepped out boldly, feeling the moment she passed from life into death as an uncomfortable buzzing up her spine into her brain, where it prickled behind her eyes and made her teeth ache.

Trees lined the brick path, straight, sturdy limes like parade ground soldiers marching onward into Annwn. They wore summer’s leaves, though steam curled from her mouth with every breath and her hands cramped with cold, the knife holding a patina of frost in just the few moments since she’d passed through the door.

Between each tree stood a statue of black stone, creatures grotesque and beautiful, horrifying and breathtaking. On and on they ran as the path continued for what seemed like miles. A house stood off in the distance, a great stone structure as gray and unwelcoming as the empty garden and the cold path. But
no matter how far she walked, it remained always out of reach, a promise that was never fulfilled.

A glimmer of light flashed at the edge of her vision, all the more conspicuous within this gray world. She rang Summoner, its peal high and clear. The glimmer erupted into a burst of crimson and gold, purple and green, as the spirit responded to the bell’s call. Trapped by the echo, its presence beat against Callista’s mind, seeking escape.

“Who have I called?” she asked, tracing a third pattern in the air.

The glimmer lengthened and stretched until it touched the path, its form flickering and wavering but coalescing before her eyes. A female’s form. Tall and slender and dressed in the hooped petticoat and bustle of a hundred years ago. “You speak to Violeta who was,” she answered. “A spirit who is.” The voice was as shimmery as the figure, sounding like the dying chime of a cymbal. “What would you have of me, walker of the paths, summoner of the dead?”

“I wish to see what you see.”

The spirit glistened like beaten gold, the light impressing itself on Callista’s eyelids so that even when she blinked, the figure of the dead woman shone bright as the sun.

“I see only death,” the spirit answered, gliding forward until she overlapped Callista, hand over hand, heart over heart, two perfect puzzle pieces fitting one in the other. Locked in this twinship of spirit and flesh, Callista saw through Violeta’s dead eyes, felt with her dead fingers, ached with a horrible empty pain that seemed to be constant with these restless spirits, as if their insides were nothing but yearning for the life they had lost.

Images flickered past like beads upon a string; a woman holding a fan of black lace across her mouth, her face round and pink-cheeked; a man with dark curls dancing in a room ablaze with candles; a bed surrounded by worried faces and hushed whispers, screams as if someone were being cleaved in two and then the piteous weak cries of a blue-faced child.

“Your past you have shown me. Now I wish to see a future. I wish to see what lies in the years beyond your living.”

Callista opened wide her eyes as the ache blossomed in her chest to an agony and the world tipped and spun in a silver wash of stars. Her vision settled. A woman knelt, head bowed, hair a dark ripple down her back. A man approached her from behind, his face lost in the encroaching shadows, but the knife he gripped in a white-knuckled fist flashed silver. He reached for the woman as if he meant to embrace her, the knife sliding across her throat in a gleaming arc.

Callista gasped and lurched free of the spirit’s aura, breaking the connection, dissolving the vision.

“I see only death,” the spirit of Violeta repeated.

Shaken, Callista rang Summoner again, freeing the spirit from her prison. It hovered for a moment still in the form of a woman before shrinking down to a diffuse glimmer of light and flitting off across the gray lawn toward the dark house.

Callista watched the spirit glide away, wanting to chase it down, force it to show her a different future, a different vision. But a sound brought her head up in a swift catch of cold breath.

It came again, a lone, fearful howl that chilled her already frozen skin.

She retraced her steps, the tidy brick path of her arrival now a tangled, root-strewn track of beaten earth through dense briars and across shallow streams of sluggish gray water. Only the statues remained, their faces twisted in agonies, their bodies ripped and slaughtered. She sensed the buzzing, spine-snarling magic of the door, traced the final pattern in the air with hurried strokes of her tired arm, and she was through.

A warm spring breeze melted the frost upon her shoulders and in her hair, the fire snapped and crackled, throwing a rosy glow over the faces around her, and the raucous sounds of fiddle, squeeze-box, and drum from somewhere in the fair grated on her ears. She stared into the dancing flames. Took a sip from the cup someone had placed at her elbow, the burn of gin sizzling its way into her belly.

“You can’t be finished already,” Sally whined. “You just sat down.”

Callista’s fist wrapped round the handle of the bell, her fingers numb. “Time is . . . different in death.”

“Whatever you say,” Sally answered with an impatient flick of her fingers, “but what did you see? Am I covered in jewels and riding in a fine carriage? Does Lettice lose our wager?”

“You are . . .” Callista shivered. “That is, I saw . . .” She closed her eyes, trying to re-create the vision in her mind, to see it clearly, the hair—“an expensive carriage”—the way she knelt—“a fine house”—the way she cupped her outstretched hands—“and a man as rich as Croesus.” Her voice shook. “I saw all of it.”

Sally crowed her delight, but Callista barely heard her over the drumming of her heart as she sought David out. He had to be here. She needed to speak to
him. Instead her eyes took in Lettice’s miffed disappointment, Big Knox’s wide-mouthed laughter, and Sam’s always hungry stare, but David had vanished.

With trembling hands, she placed her bells back in their box, rolled the tumblers shut, and rose, hoping her legs held her upright. It couldn’t be. She’d made a mistake.

“Are you all right, Cally?” Nancy asked softly. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

She had seen one. And it had shown her, not Sally’s future, but her own.

*  *  *

David reclined against a log, short stubby branch in one hand, knife in the other, no real purpose to his whittling but a way to pass the time and relax the knots squirreling his gut. The fire had long since burned down to a few glowing embers, but it was more than enough light for him to see by.

Callista slept a few steps away. He pictured her soft lips and soft skin. Every cell in his body burned with the image. He’d thought Beskin’s sadistic methods had been agonizing, but the rat bastard had nothing on Miss Callista Hawthorne. Mother of All, but Gray couldn’t reach them fast enough.

He slid the knife forward, shaving off a long peel of wood in a tight curl that fell on the crumpled map at his side; a map he despised with every fiber of his being. By its reckoning, they were still a good hundred miles from Addershiels. They’d been lucky so far, but luck was a fickle friend. Soon or late, she’d turn her face against them and danger would strike. The only real question in his mind was, who would find them first?

Another slide of the knife against the wood. Another moment to gather his thoughts and make his plans. Another moment he didn’t have to be cooped up beside Callista with her hair tickling his chest and her body’s curves melded against his own. He drew the blade toward him with a flick of his wrist and a brace of his thumb and swore silently at the first stirring of hairs at the back of his neck and the quickening of his pulse. He adjusted his grip on the knife, ready to spring before turning the move into a stretch, as Sam Oakham plopped himself down across from him with a drunken belch and a black stare.

“That’s a good way to get yourself killed,” David commented, itching for a fight to ease the tension crackling along every nerve.

The man grunted, drizzling the last of his flask into the fire in a burst of alcoholic flames. “By you, pretty boy? Not bloody likely.”

“Throw a punch. I dare you,” David challenged, a wild recklessness twitching his muscles and firing his brain. “Hell, I’m begging you to do it. Just one. That’s all I’m asking.”

Oakham snorted, his dark eyes boring into David. “I don’t know who you think you are, but if I didn’t fear being strung up for murder, I’d put a bullet in your brain and be done with it.”

David refused to be intimidated. Instead he gave a bark of humorless laughter, his expression hard. “I’m sorry for Nancy’s predicament, but don’t confuse me with the horse’s ass that abandoned your sister.”

Oakham jerked, his great bulk almost coming off the ground and across the fire in a wrestler’s throttling move. “Don’t even speak of my sister, you poncy son
of a bitch. You’re not good enough to wipe the muck from her boots.”

Here was his perfect excuse to be offended, to beat the crap out of a man who’d made his life miserable for over a week, and to work off his edgy nerves at the same time. Not that it would solve anything. He’d be as trapped, frustrated, and cheesed off as ever. And Oakham would hate him even more—if that were humanly possible. Instead, David drew his knife in another long slow peel of the branch, letting his fury run off him like water. “Nancy’s a woman grown, Sam. She made her choice.”