Veil of Shadows (27 page)

Cedric drove deeper into her, and then went still with a cry of his own. He bent and laid his head against her breast, his skin separated from hers by the soft fabric of her gown.

“One day,” she began, in a voice so calm that she found it comical, “I would like to do this in a more comfortable manner. Not against a tent post, or a table. And perhaps not quite so violently.”

He kissed her, then withdrew from her with a slight grimace and carefully put his robes back to order. “I did not tear your clothes, this time. That is progress.”

She rolled to her side and spotted her trencher, still sitting abandoned at the head of the table.

“I did not finish my dinner.”

“I did not get any.” He cheerfully offered her his hand. “This was a fair trade.”

She gripped the front of his robes, stopping him as he tried to turn away. “I must know,” she said, clinging to him so desperately that she was almost embarrassed. “You told me, once

before, but I must hear it again. If she had not put that spell on you…if she had not told you to do it, would you have told me that you loved me?”

His arms closed around her, and she pressed her face to his chest rather than look into his eyes. She could not bear it if his words did not match what she saw there. “Perhaps not that night, if things had gone differently,” he admitted, “but your tears, not her command, moved me to tell you.” He hooked his fingers under her chin, gently forced her to look up at him. “I would have told you, eventually. I could not have kept it secret for much longer,” he said, voice dying to a whisper before he pressed his mouth to hers.

It was not the romantic declaration of a Prince in a Story, but that mattered little to her heart.

They lay in what had once been Danae.s bedroom, though it had been stripped bare of everything but the bed and the oil lamps that lit it. Cedric had—foolishly, in hindsight—

asked Cerridwen why she would dispose of so many fine things. She had flown into a rage then, demanding why she should keep them when they reminded her of the traitor who had harmed them. Cedric wisely dropped the subject.

“What are you doing?” he asked, rousing himself from the half-sleep he had succumbed to.

Cerridwen lay in the crook of his arm, all her warm softness pressed against him, one arm braced against his chest as she leaned over him, tracing the edges of his Guild Mark with her fingertips. “This is so ugly,” she said, in the same tone that she might have used to describe a child as adorable. “I remember Mother always displaying her Guild Mark like a banner. It looked better on her.”

“Ugly?” He pushed himself up onto his elbows. “How so?”

She sat up, as well, stroking her hand down his neck where the mark covered his skin in black swirls. “I do not care for it. I do not think I will require my Assassins to wear it.”

“All of your Assassins already have it,” he reminded her, sinking back down on the pillows.

“There will be more.” She snuggled against him again, resting her head on his shoulder. “And I will not ask them to wear it.”

“Your Majesty does not understand the purpose of the mark, I think,” he teased, and at once knew that he should not have. She went stiff beside him, the air of content they had shared evaporating into tension once again.

“Do not call me that,” she said, pleading tingeing her words. “Not you.”

“I will not do it again, in private company,” he promised, kissing the top of her head. “Would you like to know then what the mark is for?”

She nodded, relaxing again. “It has been a long while since I have had a bedtime story.”

“Do not do that,” he warned her with a chuckle. “I do not need any reminders of your youth. The mark was given to me when I became an Assassin. Not when I had completed my training, and not after some long trial to prove my worth. It was given to me the very moment I pledged to serve as Assassin for my Queene.”

“Mabb?” Cerridwen asked, idly lacing her fingers with his, as though putting a possessive barrier between him and the ghosts of the past.

“No, not Mabb. Her mother.” He smoothed a few curls of her hair against her bare shoulder.

“I was not in love with Mabb, you know. I admired her.”

“You were lovers,” Cerridwen insisted. “Everyone at Court knew it.”

He shrugged. “We were. But I did not feel for her what I feel for you.” After a silent moment, he continued with his original purpose. “The Guild Mark displays to everyone who sees it that I have committed my life to eradicating the enemies of the Queene. After I became the Guild Master, it reminded me of the lives that I commanded, and my responsibility to them, as well as to the Queene.”

“But you are no longer an Assassin,” Cerridwen said, rolling to her side to face him. “Do you still wish to have this mark on you, if that is no longer a part of your life?”

“I will always be an Assassin. That training never leaves you.” He closed his eyes, feeling the lure of sleep again. “And you need more than six in your Guild.”

“I am still unconvinced,” she said, mocking a haughty tone. “But for now, I will bow to your experience.”

His lips twitched into a smile that he was almost too tired to see through to the end. “Thank you, that is very kind.”

The warm heaviness of sleep had sunk into his bones, the familiar feeling of drifting into deep blackness washed over him. He had thought Cerridwen asleep, but then she spoke, almost hesitantly. “There were Enforcers in the woods, near Trasa.s cabin.”

At once, sleep fled, eluding his tired body as his mind snapped to frantic attention. “What?”

“I should not have said anything.” She sat up and wound the bedclothes around her body, as though she would leave.

She seemed almost guilty, and Cedric could not fathom why she would blame herself. “Why did you not tell me?”

“You were with the healers, and I thought it best if you were allowed to fully recover….” She shook her head. “I did not trust you enough, yet.”

“Have I ever done anything that would make you not trust me with this?” he asked, then quickly amended that statement. “Anything while not under a spell?”

“I did not know if you would stay.” She would not meet his gaze. “I did not want to tell you and make you feel obligated to stay.”

“I would have been obligated to stay, anyway. I swore an oath to your mother that I would keep you safe. If nothing else existed between us to keep me here, I would have stayed, knowing this.”

“Exactly.” Her shoulders sagged. “It would not have been fair. And I did not want…”

He sat up, reached for her, but she held herself away from him. “What did you not want?”

“I did not want to spoil this night.” A tear rolled down her cheek when she faced him. “I have the most awful premonition, Cedric. I do not believe our time here will last any longer than my time lasted underground. I feel as though there will never be permanence. I will never have a home again. And for tonight, I wanted to ignore all of that, and ignore the Enforcers. I think that they are what will drive me from this place. And if I go, what will happen to the Fae here? What of the ones who followed us from the Underground? Who will lead them when I am…”

Her silence, and the heartbreak in her eyes, sent a chill of foreboding up his spine. “You have foreseen something?”

“No, not this. Not yet.” She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand and laughed through her tears. “I am probably imagining terrors that are not there.”

“It is understandable, after all that you have been through,” he soothed, pulling her back to lie down. “You are tired. We will sort out the problem of the Humans in the morning.”

“You are right,” she said, but it was clear that her fear was not dispelled by simply ignoring the problem.

The dread that gnawed at him all night proved that he could not put it from his mind, either.

The dawn brought the sun, and actual sunlight, into the clearing, rather than the misty gray that had plagued the forest since the Underworlders had arrived.

Cedric had not slept. The revelations of the night before were not solely to blame. The few times he had managed to drift off, he had woken with a start, terrified to look at his hands, sure that he would find a knife there. He could not rest easy until the sun had come up, and Cerridwen had opened her eyes to greet him with a sleepy smile.

He had taken her again, while her body was still warm and limp with sleep, thankful with every breath that the spell was truly gone, and the danger had passed. Though he would have preferred to stay in bed all day, limbs tangled with hers, it would have been irresponsible, no, plainly idiotic, to do so when Enforcers prowled the forest around them.

After taking their breakfast alone in their room, they faced the daunting task of rebuilding the governing body of the Court. It was not an easy task. Amergin and Trasa met with them and were kind enough not to mention what had taken place on the dining table they all sat around.

“Danae never had a traditional Council,” Amergin told them. “She started off with one, but each member fell away as they disagreed with her on one point or another…and she kicked them out.”

“That sounds like Danae,” Trasa said, her face pinched with annoyance. “If I did not know you, Your Majesty, I would say that all Faeries were the same. Selfish, cruel, thinking only to advance themselves, no matter the cost to anyone else.”

“And you would be right, for the most part,” Cedric agreed. “But this is something we hope to change. In the Underground, things were not much better, but at least there was a cohesive goal. We were united in our hatred of the Darklings below and the Humans above.”

“We wished, and still wish, to take the Earth back for the Fae,” Cerridwen clarified. “It would be unfair to expect you to aid us without knowing that, to help you in your decision.”

Cedric took a deep breath, not certain whether he should be proud of Cerridwen for her honesty, or dismayed by it. He had seen the way the people of the colony, Danae included, treated the women he had come to think of as crows. Cerridwen had told him of their devotion to the Morrigan, and the nickname had only seemed more apt. They were revered, almost as the representatives of the triple Goddess on Earth, and he did not wish to lose their support, especially if they could sway the colony.s Humans to follow them, as well.

But Cerridwen had a point. If they were to work toward the long-held goal of their race, dominion over the Earth in the absence of an Astral home, it would not be fair to expect the Humans to aid them in their own extinction.

Trasa regarded her Queene with a placid expression. “Is this what you will work to achieve, Your Majesty? The destruction of my people?”

“There is no way to peacefully share the Earth with Humans,” Cedric said, as respectfully as he could manage.

“There is no way to share it with those Humans who seek to destroy us,” Cerridwen corrected him. Any hint of the loving, unsure mate, who had been so eager to please him in private, had vanished in the presence of her subjects. It was as it should be, he supposed, but he could not help the protest from his wounded pride. It had been different with Mabb; he had not cared for her, not as he loved Cerridwen, and so her casual dismissals of his opinions and words had not stung quite as much.

Cerridwen rose from her seat, bracing her palms on the table in front of her. “If we are enemies with the Humans, why do they remain here? Danae treated them as slaves, but what kept them here?”

“A desire to be among magical creatures,” Amergin supplied. “Many of them do not care that they are little more than slaves, so long as they are enslaved to a magical creature. The

Enforcers have, in their strict forbiddance of any magic, made it a much more tempting plum.”

Cerridwen shook her head. “You are right, and wrong at the same time. It is not merely their desire to be near magic, but their desire to be away from the Humans who do not believe as they do. We have no quarrel with these Humans who walk among us, nor any other Human who worships the Old Gods. They lost the Astral Plane, as well, when the Veil rent. We are immortal—” her gaze flickered over Trasa, as if to say she were excluded, of course “—and so we do not truly have to fear death. Unless we are killed in accident, or by assassination, we go on. Humans become ill, they reach the ends of their normal lives and then they die. Where do they go then? To nothingness?

“I cannot condemn an entire species to that grim fate. So, I will no longer strive for a world free from Humans. We will protect ourselves, and the Humans who are loyal to us. We will kill the Enforcers, if we must. But I will not become involved in an all-out war against the Humans.” She took a breath. “Not when Human blood also runs in my veins.”

“My Queene!” Trasa exclaimed, her eyes filling with tears that seemed to surprise her as they surprised everyone else.

“This is true?” Amergin looked from Cerridwen to Cedric, and Cedric nodded in Cerridwen.s direction. It was for her to confirm it.

“My mother was half-Human. My father was a mortal, but not Human, not fully.” She stumbled over the words, confusion on her features. “He was a Darkling. But I do not know…”

“It is not important,” Cedric said quickly. “As far as your parentage, you must remember that Garret, brother of Mabb, was your mother.s mate, Your Majesty.”

She winced. “I should not have said that.”

“Your secret will remain safe with us,” Amergin assured her, and Trasa hurried to agree.

“There will be those who disagree with your choice to break from the old ways,” Cedric cautioned. “How will Your Majesty confront those who dissent?”

“I will tolerate no dissent,” she said firmly. “If they disagree, then they mean to take up arms against members of this Court, Human or Fae, and they will be branded traitors.”

“And banished?” Cedric pushed, cautious not to move her to anger. He did not wish to insult her, but to enlighten her to the challenges she would face. He was not sure if he supported her idea, himself. The Earth had been a paradise before the Humans had grown to such a number to cover it all, sending the Fae into hiding and, finally, to the Astral permanently. He would gladly return to the Astral, if that were an option, and he was not fond of the idea of an immortal life in the company of constantly dying mortals.