Unbinding (13 page)

“Sure, sometimes. But when I look back I can usually see that something was there, tipping me off, even if I couldn’t see it at the time.”

She nodded. “Nathan’s instinct is like that, only whatever triggers it may be so small it’s invisible to anyone else even when he explains. But it’s accurate. When he says he
knows
Dyffaya wanted to grab me, I take that as fact.”

He looked down, scowling at his feet as he thought that over. Finally he gave a nod and straightened. “I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks for the explanation.”

Kai wasn’t sure he believed her, but it was probably enough that he wasn’t dismissing Nathan’s instincts completely. She told him good night, but instead of going back inside right away, she let her feet meander down the road.

She ought to go in. She needed sleep. It was the last, sticky end of a long and twisty day, one that had pivoted over and over until she wasn’t sure which direction she faced, much less what lay ahead. But all that twisting about had left her mind too crowded for sleep to elbow its way in. As she moved, she began picking at the logjam of thoughts, and found them hung up on the same one that had kept intruding earlier.

Nathan was on a Hunt.

There were hunts and there were Hunts. That’s how Kai thought of the difference, at least—a typographic shorthand for what she saw in his thoughts. During his long years of exile, Nathan had learned to hunt when there would be no death at the end of the chase. He’d hunted criminals and arrested them. He’d hunted children, too—lost or stolen children—and restored them to their families. Those were lowercase hunts. However satisfying he found it to recover a kidnapped child, it didn’t wake his deepest instincts.

What she thought of as a Hunt, Nathan called a true hunt. A true hunt ended in his quarry’s death. Always. She’d seen that this was a true hunt in the amethyst glow that sharpened every curl and swirl of his thoughts, but she would have known even without her Gift. Even Benedict had sensed the change. Nathan was on a Hunt, and his instincts were true.

But how could he Hunt and kill a god—one he couldn’t even reach? One whose body had died three thousand years ago?

W
IND
whispered through the darkness, carrying messages and mystery. Among the messages were sage and dust, the distant howl of a wolf, and the nearby sound of a car starting.

That would be Ackleford leaving, Nathan thought as another wolf answered the first one. He leaned on the railing at one end of the deck behind Isen Turner’s home, absorbing the wind’s messages and thinking about the mystery.

Memory was a capricious bugger, wasn’t it?

Nathan had come to Earth on a Hunt. His Queen had set him to find and kill a renegade mage who’d thought to evade her justice by hiding here, outside her realms. It had been a long Hunt. By the time his quarry lay dead, the magic here had grown so weak he couldn’t leave. He’d been trapped—trapped on Earth, trapped in the man’s body his Queen had imposed on him for the Hunt.

For years he’d dreamed of being a hound again. In those dreams he’d run on four legs with the wind streaming past, filled with the joy and power of the body he’d been born with. For years he’d hated those dreams, hated them bitterly, for he always woke to the knowledge that never would he feel that, be that, again. But time performed its healing. Eventually he’d come to treasure such dreams for the beautiful memories they were . . . although by then, they’d come only rarely.

How long had it been since he dreamed his way into his birth form?

Long and long, he thought, though he couldn’t put a number on it. Yet here was memory pressing on him as if blown in by the wind. Memory of another night, one so far in the past it should have picked up all sorts of lint and fuzz over the years.

It hadn’t. On the long-ago night he’d been a hellhound—a young one, less than a century old. He’d left his first master, the Huntsman, because he knew he belonged to Winter. The Huntsman had been willing to release him, but it had taken Nathan some time to convince Winter of the obvious. In the end, she’d accepted him into her service and her household. On this night he’d lain stretched out on the warm stone floor before her hearth. He remembered the precise blend of scents in her chamber, the way the wood popped as the fire burned, and the bitter weeping of the woman with him.

Funny how often even those who should know better forgot that Winter was Queen, not just of snow and ice, but also of the blazing hearth, the heart’s home during the days of darkness. The fire in Winter’s chamber that night had burned hot and bright, but in the memory-moment that visited him now, it had begun to die down. She’d wept, his Queen, wept over the loss of one dear to her . . . he frowned, trying to recall the name. Gwyfellyth, that was it, and he’d been a strong and wily fellow, both friend and lover to Winter.

Who or what had killed him? Nathan couldn’t remember now. He remembered his Queen’s grief, though. She’d paced and wept until both wore her out, then settled beside him on the fire-warmed stone, playing with his ears. After a time, she’d begun to talk as she sometimes did, telling him things no one else would ever hear. Even as a young hound he’d known many languages, though of course he could speak none of them. Back then, he’d prized his silence for the gift that it was. It had made him safe for her in a way even his love could not.

She’d spoken of Gwyfellyth, of his life and his death, then sighed. “Ah, Nadrellian, it hurts. It hurts more because I didn’t realize how much I cared until he was gone. Why did I let myself care so much? Damn him anyway for dying, and damn me for being silly enough to damn him for it. There’s folly, isn’t it? Winter’s Queen, railing against death!” She’d laughed in a way he hadn’t understood, but the pain in it had been clear enough, so he’d licked her face, trying to comfort.

Maybe it had helped. She’d curled up against him—he’d been larger than her, so his body made a comfortable backrest—and stared into the dying fire for a long time. Some internal process continued, though, because all at once she’d sat up, looked him in the eyes, and stroked both hands along his muzzle. “What I said about not letting myself care—that was the pain talking, and a false lesson. Forget I said it.”

He’d cocked his head, being rather literal in his thinking at the time. Forgetting wasn’t one of his gifts.

She’d smiled briefly, perhaps reading his thought—sometimes she did—and scratched behind one of his ears. “Let me tell you the true lesson, then, to supplant the false one. You will live a long time, my beautiful Nadrellian. Not as long as I, but long enough to grow weary, as many of my people do. Remember this: the only way to live is to
live—
and death is always, always, part of living. We die over and over. Oh, the big death comes but once, but a thousand deaths arrive with every turn of the seasons—the death of a day or a lover, of a friend or a dream, death piled upon death. The slow sundering of years parts us even from who we once were and from the memories which parented us.
Live anyway.”

She’d straightened, suddenly regal, the mantle of her power falling over her—Winter in full truth. “With those thousand deaths come a thousand births. Ten thousand, if we’re alive enough to notice. Drink whatever comes to you, death or life or both together, drink it down, whether the draught be sweet or bitter. If you refuse the one, you won’t be able to taste the other.”

With that, she’d spoken a
word.
Power washed the room with silence. True silence, lacking the thinnest hush of noise, as if even the meaning of sound had drained out of the world. Regality vanished along with sound and she’d grinned like a pixie, delighted with her own mischief, leaned forward, and whispered in his ear. Whispered a string of syllables that rolled and reverberated through him, shocking him to his core. Whispered her name. Her full, true name.

She’d sat up, dismissed the silence with a gesture, and said in quite a normal voice, “There. I’ve placed a burden on you, one you didn’t ask for, but—oh, don’t shake your head at me. You understand very well what such knowledge means, and that you’d willingly take on any burden for me doesn’t make it less of one. But now you can call me to you, should your need be great, and the way I placed it in you means you needn’t speak it aloud. And now . . . now I am wholly known to you.” She’d sighed again, this time with relief, and smiled an easy smile with peace at its heart. “There’s your last lesson for tonight, or perhaps it’s my own.” She’d chuckled. “Oh, yes, it’s my lesson. For you already know, don’t you? True connection, deep connection, is as rare as it is precious. When it happens in spite of all we can do to hide from it—you must have noticed how you terrified me at first?—when it happens anyway, hold nothing back.”

Some twenty feet away and centuries later, the door onto the deck opened and Kai stepped outside. Nathan’s heart lifted. So did another part of his body. He chuckled. Little Brother was ever the optimist.

No mystery after all about why that particular memory had visited him tonight. The future smelled bitter indeed. Death drew near, though he didn’t know if it would be one of the many deaths any life holds or the final one. It depended, he thought, on where Dyffaya’s revenge was truly aimed: at himself or at the Queen who’d sent him here . . . the Queen who, with her sister, had killed Dyffaya áv Eni over three millennia ago.

Looked at that way, the answer seemed clear. It was likely the final death Dyffaya had in mind for Nathan, for that would hurt Winter the most. Nathan was hard to kill, but a god—even a half-dead one—ought to be able to manage it. But in elvish, “Dyffaya áv Eni” meant “beautiful madness.” The god was irrational on the deepest level, for that was the nature of chaos. Nathan couldn’t assume he knew Dyffaya’s priorities . . . and the best way for the god to hurt Nathan was to hurt Kai.

“There you are,” Kai said, having spotted him in the shadows.

There you are
, his heart sang back. Right here and right now, she was with him, whole and healthy, if somewhat anxious. And he smiled all over.

*   *   *

A
MAZING
what clarity a little walking and a fair dose of mad could bring. Kai felt quite clear-headed as she made for Nathan. Stars and moon provided the only light, but it was enough. “Stop smiling at me like that.”

He did not obey her. “You’d like me to smile another way?”

“I’d like you to level with me. So far, you haven’t.”

That did the trick. His smile faded away—which, perversely, did not make her happy at all. “I don’t lie to you.”

“There’s a difference between lying and telling the whole truth. You’ve got something in mind you haven’t told me about.” Her breath huffed out. “You’re on a true hunt. Did you think I couldn’t tell? And yet the only plans you’ve talked about involve shutting Dyffaya out of this realm, which means shutting you away from your quarry.”

He rubbed a hand over his head. “I was afraid you’d notice that.”

“
Can
you get to him?” she demanded. “Is that what you aren’t telling me? Can you use your ability to cross realms to enter his godhead?”

“No. No, it’s not enough of a place for me to get there that way.”

Which didn’t make a great deal of sense to her, but then, she didn’t understand what a godhead was, not at all. “Then you’ve got some screwy plan to let him grab you.”

“It’s much more mushy than a plan,” he assured her. “More like a possibility I’m keeping in mind.”

“I want to shake you. Hard.” She took a calm-me-down breath. “Killing him has been
tried.
It only halfway worked. How are you going to kill someone who doesn’t have a body?”

“In my hands,” he said with perfect certainty, “Claw can kill anything.”

“That’s assuming that your blade will go with you if he snatches you—”

“It’s not precisely with me now.”

No, Claw was in the little fold in reality the Queen had made to hide it. And that was beside the point. “Don’t quibble. You know what I mean.”

“I believe Claw will go with me. My Queen said the link could only be severed by my death. It’s possible she’s wrong, but I think it unlikely.”

“When she said that, she wasn’t considering that you might go chasing a halfway dead god into his godhead! If that’s even where you’d end up. It’s supposed to be impossible.”

Wry humor flickered through his thoughts, the color of old gold. “I try not to assume I know what Winter has considered and what she hasn’t. As for what’s possible . . .” He moved close and laid his hands on her shoulders. “I know it’s possible for me to kill Dyffaya. I don’t know how or why, or if he will snatch me, or where I’d end up if he did. That’s all guessing on my part. But I know I have a shot at killing Dyffaya.” More softly he said, “You’re scared, Kai. I am, too, and we’ve reason to be. But I won’t be setting myself up as bait, if that’s what’s worrying you. No sticking my tongue out at Dyffaya and double-daring him to come after me. And yet he may do that, so I have to think about what my options would be.”

She stared at him a moment. “You’re such a damn adult.” When he cocked his head, puzzled, she sighed. “You’re being so reasonable. It makes me want to have a temper tantrum, and that makes me feel about five years old.”

He tucked a loose strand of her hair behind her ear. “You’d rather I got mad along with you?”

“Sometimes.” But maybe not this time. Maybe she didn’t want to fight with him, after all. Kai tucked herself up against him and his arms went around her, easy as breathing and just as natural. They were almost of a height, and she loved that, loved the way their bodies fit. He rubbed his cheek along her hair, soothing both of them. After a moment she confessed on a wisp of breath, “I don’t know how to stop being scared.”

He tightened his arms to tell her that he was here with her now, that they were both okay. Then he chuckled.

“What?” She raised her head.

“Little Brother has a suggestion. I’m not sure it’s a valid one, mind, but he hopes you’ll consider it.”

“You are such a guy.” She shook her head. “I’m guessing it’s the same suggestion he offers when I’m cold or bored or happy or just breathing.”

“Oh, yes.” He bent and nuzzled her neck. “Bit of a Johnny One Note, isn’t he?”

“Sure is.” Her arms tightened around him. “Just as well that it’s such a good suggestion, then, isn’t it?”