Veil of Shadows (25 page)

“By the Gods,” Amergin said with a laugh. “Look at that!”

The white bull loped down the hill, as though it would bowl them over. It came to a halt before them, lowing impatiently.

“I saw this creature in my dreams,” Trasa said, eyes aglow with wonder.

“As did I.” Cerridwen approached it confidently and gripped the ring in its snout. It followed her as she turned back toward the forest. “I saw it yesterday, as well, though no one believed me.”

She clucked to the animal as she lead it over the gap in the fence, and looked back, with no small amount of satisfaction, at her two companions, who stared, openmouthed, after her.

Regarding the last war between the Humans and the Fae, Mabb had often remarked at how bloodthirsty the enemy mortals were, how very primitive and foul their desire for destruction was.

As Cedric listened to the cheering of the Faeries gathered outside the Palace, the ones calling for his blood and eagerly anticipating the sight of it being spilled, he regretted not arguing with her then. The Fae, Humans, all living beings, contained a seed of cruel destruction within them.

The night had fallen, and the old crow had not brought him water or food. He would go to his death on an empty stomach, which seemed fitting, going from one emptiness to another. Danae had not come to him to gloat, either. He assumed she saved that for the moment he laid his head on the block. It would add the dramatic touch she craved.

The flap in the fabric wall moved back, and a guard entered. One of their former Underworld guards, he realized with a shock, dressed in the rough uniform of Danae.s soldiers. “It is time, Cedric.”

“I never thought to see you change your allegiance so quickly.” He did not condemn him for it. How could he, now?

The guard shrugged. “I never thought to see you executed for treason against our Queene. But here we stand.”

“Here we stand,” Cedric echoed, struggling to his feet, hands still bound behind him.

The guard came forward and cut the ropes, helped Cedric get his footing.

“This is embarrassing,” he said, to himself, though the guard could undoubtedly hear. “I will not have the dignity of walking unassisted to my own death.”

His feet came out from beneath him, pushed by the ankle of the guard who stood over him, fists clenched. He struggled to keep his hard expression, but it faltered, assailed by unmistakable sadness. “Why should you have dignity?” the guard asked through tightly clenched teeth. “Did she die with dignity, alone in the forest?”

“You cared for her.” Cedric.s heart clenched in a grief he had thought long since burned out.

The guard gripped him by the arm, pulled him to his feet roughly. “No. I did not know her. She was not a Queene. She was a kind Faery. That is a rarity, I have come to find.”

Cedric agreed, but he did not say so. It was not what the guard wished to hear. He let the guard have the moment for himself, to assuage his own grief. The pain of loss made them kindred, though the guard would not believe it, and that comforted Cedric as he was led out of the tent, into the angry throng in the clearing.

The scaffold had been erected over the central cooking pit. The fire had been buried, but the heat of it wafted up through the cracks between the boards. Cedric had listened to them building all through the day. Each hammer strike had been a blessing, bringing him closer and closer still to the end of existence. When the ax fell, he would be free from the pain of what he had done, free of the prison of Danae.s spell.

The witch herself waited at the top of the scaffold steps, beside the burly Human who wielded the delicate silver ax that would sever him.

The pitying look on Danae.s face was not meant for him, but for the crowd that pressed forward as he mounted the steps. She played her role so convincingly, he could not fault them for falling under her sway.

Danae said nothing to him, but turned and walked to the front of the scaffold, standing just slightly left of the block, so that she would not block the view. “As you know,” she began, as Cedric was made to kneel on the straw behind the oak block, “I have struggled with myself over the decision to see this traitor put to death. It is not an easy thing, to take a life. I recognize how precious it is, and how very tragic the consequences of a death in these times are, when we are not certain of an Afterworld. But our Queene, may she rest easy in the Summerland now, believed in vengeance. She put the traitors Bauchan and Flidais to death, as she had every right to. I do not make a judgment now on whether that was wrong or right. I merely do what I believe she would have wanted, were she here to consult on this decision.”

Cedric shook his head. Each time he thought he.d seen the very limit of Danae.s treachery, she had set the bar surprisingly higher.

She paused, turned to him, her annoyance flickering briefly over her face before she could compose a hurt expression. “Even now, you mock her? Does your cruelty know no bounds?”

The crowd cried out with its disapproval, and it took a long moment for Danae to calm them again. While she did, guards looped rope around Cedric.s wrists and tethered him by the arms to iron rings affixed to the floor.

“The sentence I have passed gives me no pleasure. As the mate of the Queene, the sacred line of our Faery rulers passes from him to his next mate, and then to their children. But he has so tainted that bloodline that I fear it might never recover. And so, Cedric, mate to Queene Cerridwen, I sentence you to death. Your head will be struck from your body, and both parts burned, and the ashes scattered to the wind. Have you anything to say, before the sentence is carried out?”

She expected him to beg, or to try to denounce her, to struggle against the spell and ultimately fail in despair. He almost laughed at her. She had no notion of what he felt, how it pained him every moment that passed without Cerridwen.

Instead of speaking, he merely shook his head again and held her gaze.

Fury built up in her eyes, and he felt a stab of satisfaction that she was the one struggling between what she wished to do and what she was able to. Though there was no spell on her, she was not free to act as she wished. She was not free to strike him and rage aloud.

“Executioner,” she called out, moving past him with a haughty flick of her skirts. She had worn black, he noticed, the same gown that she had used to make her pretend mourning over Cerridwen seem genuine.

The guards pressed him forward, until his chin fitted over the groove in the block. He closed his eyes, saw Cerridwen.s face in his memory, the wonder in it as she looked out over the sea and the wind lashed her porcelain face with her copper hair.

“When you are ready,” the executioner said, awfully solicitous of the condemned, in Cedric.s opinion.

“I am ready now,” he told him, joy welling in his chest as he remembered the feel of Cerridwen.s soft curves against him, her eyes fluttering beneath their lids as she slept.

The executioner.s boots crushed the straw on the scaffold floor, and the ax scraped on wood when he lifted it.

In Cedric.s mind, he saw the beautiful white curve of his mate.s neck, the sweat-damp hair at her temple as he had leaned over—

“Stop!”

The familiar voice jolted him from his imaginings, and for a moment he thought that the deed had already been done, that the blade had fallen and he had not noticed its strike. He opened his eyes, struggled to lift his head, as the awed whispers of the crowd rose to a frenzy of shouting voices.

Cerridwen, alive and whole, rode into the clearing on the back of an enormous white bull. The light from the torches in the trees gilded her copper hair, matted against her head where it had been pinned up for the feast, the curls that had cascaded down her back then twisted to tangled ropes. A crow led her. The same that had brought him his supper all those days. Amergin followed behind, dressed in ridiculous Human clothes, but somehow still possessing an air of dignity.

But Cerridwen. It was not possible. He pulled against the ropes that held him, no longer content to die there. “Let me up,” he called out. “Let me up!”

“Release him,” Cerridwen shouted, gesturing to the guards. When they did not move, Amergin raced forward, but was held back.

Danae came back to stand at the front of the scaffold. “Your Majesty,” she called out, sounding as though she would choke on every word. “You are alive. Thank the Gods!”

“I am alive, yes.” Cerridwen.s cold eyes fixed on Danae as though she could turn the harpy to ice. Was it possible that she knew what had occurred? The breath seized in Cedric.s lungs at the mere hope of it. “I am alive,” she repeated. “So you do not have any reason to put my mate to death.”

Danae swallowed audibly, spread her hands and then twisted them together again, wringing her sleeve between them. “Your Majesty, I only thought to avenge you, the way I believed that you wished—”

“You thought to kill me, to kill my mate, and take the crown back for yourself!” Cerridwen shouted.

Silence fell over the clearing, as though all of the murmurs and whispers of the crowd had been wiped away.

“Your Majesty—” Danae began again, but Cerridwen interrupted her with a shout that echoed to the treetops.

“Silence!

“Release my mate,” she ordered, and the guards finally moved to do her bidding. The moment his ropes were cut, they hauled Cedric to his feet, and he thanked the Gods that he did not have the strength to run to her. He was still under the spell of the Corpse Water, still compelled to end her life.

Cerridwen was alive. Though she was there, right there, he could scarcely believe it. The gory wounds on her fair arms mocked him, and his pain at causing them flared to new life. He lunged at Danae—that, he could not help—and Faeries and Humans alike gasped. The guards held him, and he sagged back, body feeble from weeks of captivity and immobility.

“Tell her,” Cerridwen calmly instructed the crow. “It is you who must order her to reveal her secrets, yes? I think now would be an excellent time.”

“What are you talking about?” Danae, no longer able to conceal her fury, turned her fiery gaze to her handmaiden. “Trasa, you will tell me the meaning of this, immediately!”

“I will do no such thing.” The woman straightened, arms folded in the wide sleeves of her black robe. “Danae, we of the Order have long looked down on your deceit and underhanded trickery. We have served you, because in the past you were a great warrior. Your greed and your villainy has grown, like a fetid canker, all of these years. You gave this Faery Corpse Water, and forced him to make an attempt on the Queene.s life, didn.t you?”

Danae laughed, and shook her head, but when she spoke, all that came out was, “Yes.” Her eyes widened, her laughter died. She cleared her throat. “I did not mean…Yes. Yes, I did.”

“Tell them, then,” Trasa commanded. “Tell them your plan to kill the Queene.”

Though she struggled to hold back her words, they broke free, cascading from her lips like water over a damn. “I poisoned Cedric with Corpse Water. At the feast. I instructed him to take the Queene back to her camp. To make love to her. To tell her that he loved her. And to kill her before first light.”

Cedric closed his eyes. He had lived the moment once, and he could not stand to endure it again.

“Why did you do this?” Trasa asked, in the voice of a parent scolding a child, pulling out the answer that was already plain, but that needed to spoken aloud by the guilty party.

“Because I hated her.” Danae.s shoulders sagged in defeat. “She killed Bauchan. I loved him, and she killed him. She ruined my Queenedom here. She ruined…” Her voice broke and died into a whisper. “She ruined everything.”

Cerridwen climbed down from the animal.s back and left him standing there, placidly chewing what little green he could find on the trampled ground. As she came forward, Cedric saw that she wore the same dress she had the morning of her disappearance. She did not look at him as she passed, but he saw more clearly the damage he had done her.

Cerridwen stood in front of Danae, emotionless and still, contemplating her for a long, silent moment. Then her face contorted and her hand came up, landing with a resounding crack against Danae.s cheek.

“I woke to find my mate kneeling over me in my bed, a dagger in his hands!” she screamed, her face turning red with the exertion of rage. “I flew into the forest, bleeding and terrified, and I lay in the rain and prayed for death! I would have died…had Amergin not found me.”

She slapped Danae again, a wordless cry accompanying the action. “And this makes you happy, does it? Answer me!”

“Answer her,” Trasa echoed, and Danae was forced to nod.

“Kill her!” someone shouted in the crowd, and a ripple of approval followed. They would tear Danae apart, Cedric realized, and he felt no horror at the thought.

“I will not kill her!” Cerridwen called over the crowd. “I will not! I would be no better than she is, if I did. Only a coward seeks to remove their enemies in such a way. I do not fear her. What can she do to further harm me? Nothing. I am Queene. She is nothing but a viper. I will send her away, banish her from her kind. Let her see then if her tricks can help her survive on her own.”

“Before she goes,” Cedric said quickly, “she must remove her spell. Else I will still be obligated to kill you.”

Cerridwen flinched, and he ached to take her into his arms and comfort her. He could not, he knew; her trust would be long in coming, if he ever gained it again.

“Remove your spell,” Cerridwen told Danae.

The stubborn witch did not act until Trasa repeated the command.

“From this day forth, Danae is forbidden from contact with anyone in this encampment. If a member of this colony is caught supplying her with food or comforts, they will be branded as a traitor and banished, as well,” Cerridwen pronounced, appearing so much like her mother that it took Cedric.s breath away. “You will go now, and take with you only the clothes you stand up in.”

Danae looked out to the assembly, her chin quivering. “I have kept you safe all of these centuries,” she cried. “I have kept the Enforcers out, and welcomed you Humans into our world. I have built the very colony that you live in! How can you turn me out?”