Middle of the afternoon, and the bar of the up-market hotel was deserted but for a few wealthy-looking older women and their suspiciously young and handsome escorts. Every so often a pair of them would disappear in the direction of the rooms upstairs. The place was a shiny-fronted brothel, but Kett didn’t particularly care.
Her stomach churned with the knowledge of what she’d just done. Of how she’d been offered something wonderful and deliberately turned it into something horrible. The Curse of Kett had come upon them both.
It was better this way. Hurt him now and let him go on with his life.
But she couldn’t get his face out of her sight. The hurt, the anger, the betrayal on Bael’s face. She’d made him betray her, and now she couldn’t forgive herself.
“Another drink, signora?” asked the handsome bartender. His name was Giacomo and he had pronounced himself dedicated to cheering her up.
Kett pinched the bridge of her nose and blinked at the man, trying to focus. All she wanted to do was get incredibly drunk and forget what she’d just done-to Bael, and to herself.
Actually, all she really wanted to do was curl up somewhere and cry, but she’d never let herself do that before in her life and she wasn’t about to start now.
“Sure,” she said. “Keep ’em coming.”
Don’t tell her.
It was the first thought in Bael’s mind after Marisa had shut the door behind herself and fled, clutching her clothes. If he didn’t tell Kett, then she’d never know and she’d believe she was his mate-
He closed his eyes. She didn’t believe it now.
She’d never wanted to be his mate, she’d spent every second fighting him. And Kett fighting was damn hot, so he’d never minded, but now…
Now he’d be lying to her, and not just some small lie of omission but a huge, fundamental lie. How did you go from We were meant to be together to I shagged a barmaid?
He paced. He punched the wall. He turned himself into an eagle and went flying around the city, but it didn’t help. None of it helped.
He’d betrayed Kett. He wasn’t her mate, and she should know. Imagine twenty years down the line, he thought, she’s been with you, resenting being tied to you, hating you and all the time she could have been free.
Did he want her to be so unhappy?
At least give her the choice. Tell her you made a mistake, and let her decide whether or not to stay with you.
He turned himself human again and set out to track her across the city. He’d gotten halfway there when it occurred to him that Kett was almost certainly going to ask him how he knew he’d made a mistake, and sooner or later Marisa was going to come up in conversation. He cringed, automatically covering his groin. Well, maybe if he told it carefully…
She drugged me, right, and I woke up in bed and she was sucking my cock-
She’d still never believe it, even if it was the truth. Maybe if he took Kett back to the inn and introduced her to Marisa, then…then Kett could threaten Marisa and the truth would come out. Kett loved threatening people. Happy ending for everyone.
He found her at a brothel-which slightly confused him, but then she’d said she was on business for Chance, who had once been a courtesan-and followed his nose past the scents of sex, cigarettes and alcohol to a room on the upper floor. Squaring his shoulders, taking a deep breath and preparing to look as sorry as he damn well felt, he opened the door.
The place was filling up now, more and more beautiful men and women negotiating the price of their affection with a crowd who seemed to treat prostitution with the same casual attitude as an after-work drink.
Kett had been in the bar for several hours, her glass never emptying. Like Bael’s tankard, she thought miserably, only this time no one was pouring sleeping powder into it. Currently she was drinking a highly toxic local spirit that had once, apparently, been introduced to a lemon, and then corrupted it horribly into a drink so potently alcoholic that a single drop made the bar surface steam.
Kett knocked it back in one and rested her head on the bar. She still didn’t feel drunk enough yet. Depressed as hell, yes, but not actually drunk.
“Signora,” said the bartender, and she lifted her head. “Something else?”
She focused on him. “You’re not Giacomo,” she said.
“No, signora. He takes clients in the evenings. I am Rocco.”
“Fill ’er up, Rocco,” Kett said, holding out her glass. “Whatever’s next.”
What was next was a horribly sickly concoction, also apparently made from lemons (how did they do it? They were halfway up a mountain, it was freezing, how did they possibly grow lemons here?). Kett took a sip and made a face, but the bartender had already moved on to serve a large group of men in business wear, apparently fresh from work and ready to make trouble.
Time was, Kett might have joined them. The first thing she used to do on arriving in a new town was check out the bars, and who frequented them. She rarely went home alone. A different man every night.
She didn’t even know how many there’d been.
Now she looked at them with some revulsion. Loud, brash, rude. One of them pinched the backside of a waitress and they all guffawed. Kett rolled her eyes. They were in a fucking brothel, and pinching a woman’s butt made them giggle like schoolboys.
Turning her attention away, she saw Giacomo, shirtless and cool, sitting at a table with a composed older woman. Kett knew her type, the neglected wife looking for some thrills.
Standing up, Kett picked up the glass of vile sugary lemon and carried it to Giacomo’s table. Her footsteps were steady. She didn’t waver once. Kett didn’t know whether she’d inherited the ability to hold her drink from her father or whether it had just come of long practice, but she should have realized that even two hours of drinking spirits wouldn’t have gotten her drunk.
Setting down the small glass, she caught Giacomo’s eye then walked away. Five minutes later, Giacomo got up, let himself behind the bar and set out a bottle of wine and a large glass in front of Kett. He left, saying nothing.
Kett tried a glass of the wine. It was good, at least by her low standards. Probably not local.
She drank it all, watched Giacomo leave with the well-dressed woman then poured another large glass.
It warmed her in a way the spirits hadn’t. Maybe the Sisilians were on to something here. But it still didn’t make the hurt go away. Kett wasn’t a stranger to pain, but she’d never felt guilt like this before.
When the bartender caught her attention and said, “Signora, Signor Giacomo has finished with his client,” Kett nodded, gulped the rest of the wine and got up before she changed her mind.
Giacomo was waiting for her in a large, pleasantly decorated room upstairs. He was naked, handsome in the low lighting, and Kett wordlessly stripped as he stood still, watching her.
“Signora,” he began, as she moved to the bed.
“Kett,” she said.
“Kett.” He inclined his head formally. “Are you sure?”
She looked up into his dark eyes, calm and utterly foreign. He was nothing like Bael.
“Make it go away,” she said.
Giacomo nodded, joining her on the bed and taking her into his arms. He kissed her, stroking her arms and her back, making no comments about the thick scars he encountered. Kett supposed he must have seen much worse than a few scars.
His body was hot and hard, and smelled pleasantly of some woody scent. He touched her with strong, assured hands, stroking and caressing with expert skill. He kissed a hot, wet trail down her body, tongue tracing erotic patterns on her skin.
Kett had felt more aroused during medical exams.
She was just about to suggest he give it up as a lost cause when the door opened-and her eyes slammed open to see Bael standing there.
In about a second, his expression went from tortured and sorry, to disbelieving, to shocked, and then cycled up through the stages of anger until he got to absolute fury.
And Kett had nothing to say.
Bael didn’t shout. He didn’t fight. He didn’t even say a word. He just turned and walked away, the door slamming shut behind him, and Kett lay there with a stranger, tears burning her eyes like acid.
Night fell. Bael stormed back through the city, intending to find Marisa and beat the shit out of her, but she was nowhere to be found and no one at the tavern had even heard of her. Bael threatened the bartender for five minutes solid, but it didn’t help.
Even if he never found her, even if he’d just imagined it, he couldn’t possibly have imagined Kett and that-that man-whore, for gods’ sakes! She was fucking a damn whore! Shallow, meaningless sex; not even an affair, not even a relationship-no, she was paying for sex with someone else.
If that wasn’t a rejection, he didn’t know what was.
Bael flew west to his house in Galatea, intending to get very, very drunk.
He was gone when she got back to the tavern. She’d slunk in disguised as a cat, just in case, but the only trace of Bael in the room they’d shared was his faint, lingering scent.
A scent laced with tears and anger.
He’d left her things exactly as they were. Hadn’t thrown them around or torn them or even touched them. His scent was nowhere near them.
Kett wanted to cry, to scream, to howl. She needed to do something constructive or she’d end up doing something destructive instead. She’d go back to the cave in Nihon and look around, use some of her animal senses to see if she could figure out anything else. She’d talk to the local kelfs and see if they knew anything. She’d run all the way there, exhaust herself, because maybe if her body was aching and tired she wouldn’t notice the pain in her heart as much.
“My lord!”
The guard saluted and Bael snarled at him, understanding why Kett hated being called “my lady” so much. He wasn’t a lord, hadn’t done anything to deserve being a lord, and-
And he was thinking about Kett again.
He punched the guard in the face but it didn’t make him feel much better.
The courtyard was cold and damp, small drifts of dirty snow piled up in the corners. His house in Galatea on the other side of the mountains was at a high altitude and suffered from the cold during the winter months. In his absence, the staff clearly hadn’t bothered to do much about clearing the ice and snow from the stone courtyard. Someone would probably slip and fall and hurt themselves if it wasn’t done.
Bael was feeling so savagely angry that he hoped they would.
“Albhar!” he roared as he neared the crumbling stone edifice. “Old man! You there?”
A steward came dashing up, half-dressed, trying to fasten his sword belt as he ran. “My lord-”
“Can it,” Bael snarled. “I want a hot bath and a change of clothes. Now.”
“Yes, my lord. My lord-”
“I said don’t call me that.”
“Uh, yes sir. Lord Albhar isn’t here, sir. He’s in Vyiskagrad.”
Bael stared for a second, puzzled, since Albhar vastly preferred Euskara to Asiatica. “Right,” he said. “Didn’t I say I wanted a hot bath? I’m leaving as soon as I’ve had something to eat. Go cook something!” he snapped, and the man ran off.
The courtyard was suddenly full of people who recognized Bael’s mood and were desperate to avoid it. He ignored them and grabbed the scryer Kett’s stepmother had given him.
“Albhar? Where the hell are you?”
“Vyiskagrad.” The old man peered through the scryer at the buildings behind Bael. “Where are you? Galatea?”
“Yeah,” Bael said surveying the usual level of chaos as animals and people milled around the courtyard. “Not for long. I’m going west. Feel like killing something.”
“Not the house in the Bascano mountains? Bael, that’s the one that burned down last year.”
“Burned down?” Bael asked. “No one told me this.”
“I did, but you didn’t listen. I know you have a lot of houses, Bael, but really-”
“Look, I don’t care,” Bael said. No wonder Albhar thought he was an idiot. “I’ll stay here and hunt. I just need to kill something.”
He narrowed his eyes. Var could change into any one of several lethal creatures, but Bael liked firing weapons. He yelled to a page for his hunting bow.
“You’re going hunting? Wonderful!” Albhar said. “Take some of the knights with you. Bael,” he leaned in close, as if imparting a wonderful secret, “the shapeshifter is nearby.”
“Wow,” Bael said flatly.
“Aren’t you excited?”
“Sure. Maybe I’ll come to Vyiskagrad and eviscerate it,” Bael said. “Where’s my fucking bow? I want arrows too.”
“No, don’t kill it,” Albhar said. “We need it alive. You will be coming back, won’t you? To see the ritual?”
“The fabulous power one?” Bael asked, as the page scurried back with a hunting bow Bael didn’t recognize. “What the hell is this? This isn’t my bow. Bring me mine,” he snapped. “And my crossbow too. And get me some fucking knights too!” he yelled after the kid. “What does it look like?” he asked Albhar, who gave him a dead look. “I mean-does it have a base state? Does it look human? Male, female?”
“Female, we believe,” said Albhar. “I don’t know whether it will have aged, but your father said it appeared to be a woman of about forty.”
“That was twenty-odd years ago,” Bael said. “Do I go around shooting every old woman I see?”
“Bael, you’re a Mage,” Albhar scolded. “Use your senses.”
“I’m too fucking mad to use my senses,” Bael spat, because the anger, the rage, the hideous humiliation inside him was so murderously powerful he could barely see.
“Why?” Albhar asked curiously, as if he hadn’t noticed. Or as if Bael’s anger was an interesting research subject.
“A fucking woman.”
“Ah,” Albhar said, and Bael wondered if the old man had ever even had a fucking woman. “You should find a mate, Bael.” Bael looked at him sharply, but the man he regarded as his godfather went on, “A good woman, a wife. Children. Settle down.”
“It’s on my To Do list,” Bael said, as the page scurried back carrying so much weaponry he kept dropping bits of it. Snatching up his crossbow, he discovered he couldn’t load it with the scryer in one hand.
“Remember, if you see the shapeshifter, don’t kill it,” Albhar said as Bael started to sign off.
“I will if I fucking want to,” Bael replied, and cut the call dead.
Kett flew until she thought her wings would drop off, and came to land somewhere in the Vyishka mountains. The range was full of violent peaks, steep drops and gorges hundreds of feet deep. Kett turned herself into a mountain lion to cross the jagged collection of mountains, padding over rock and snow on weary paws.
It hurt, but not as much as the hurt inside her. You did the right thing, she told herself for the hundredth time. You don’t want a mate, you don’t need a mate. You’d have ended up being hurt by him, just like you have whenever you’ve become involved with anyone else.
If she’d never gotten married, he’d never have cheated on her and she’d never have gone to jail for nearly killing him. If she’d never joined the army and tried to channel her anger into something constructive, she’d never have come to the attention of Captain Cuntface and ended up getting flogged to within an inch of her life.
If she’d never met her father, she wouldn’t have tried to save him from that sorceress, and Kett wouldn’t have been killed. Neither would Tyrnan.
The Curse of Kett fell on everyone. Love caused pain and death and misery and anger. She was better off without it.
She was.
Bael flew, his dragon wings beating the air because the air itself offended him. His blood sang, every cell in his body screaming with rage.
He couldn’t remember ever being so angry but the worst part was, he didn’t know what he was really angry about. His own stupidity and humiliation? Or Kett’s hideous betrayal, at the same time carelessly impersonal and terribly, pointedly specific?
Howling with rage and misery, he incinerated a small wood and watched with feral enjoyment as the living trees crackled and burned. A village nestled in a valley nearby, and he considered it with detached cruelty. He could destroy the whole lot, burn houses, people and livestock. Let them fry in their own skin, watch flesh heat up until it boiled, bathe in their screams. He was miserable to the point of pain, why shouldn’t everyone else be?
The air full of screams, the scent of charred flesh, rivers of blood and pain and fear. He slaughtered them, he did it for fun, he massacred them…
With a jolt of revulsion, he shook himself out of it. Was this how Striker had become so terrible, so powerful and so dangerous? Was this why he’d rampaged through Euskara twenty years ago, murdering Magi and stealing their power, flattening cities, roasting people alive-just to mirror his own pain?
What the hell could have hurt such an inhuman man so badly?
He found himself on the ground, back in his human body, staring at the scryer in his palm. It glowed red then the face resolved into Striker’s visage.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked.
The same shock of fear and disgust ran through Bael, but far less powerfully than it had before. “Why did you do it?” he asked.
“Do what? Who are you?”
“Kett’s- I’m…a friend of Kett’s,” Bael said through the bad taste in his mouth.
“Oh yeah.” Striker’s mouth twisted cruelly. “You ran away.”
“You murdered hundreds of my people.”
Striker shrugged, as if he couldn’t see what the two things had to do with each other.
“Why did you do it? You flattened the city of Vaticano twenty years ago. You stole power and tortured innocent people. Why did you do it?”
Striker shrugged again. “What are you, a groupie? I did it ’cos I wanted to, kid. I enjoyed it. I’d do it again-”
“No, you bloody wouldn’t,” came a female voice, the voice of the brunette at Nuala’s house. Chalia. Chance’s mother…
Understanding stabbed Bael in the heart.
“You did it for her,” he said slowly. “Because she hurt you.” With every word he became more certain, the knowledge creeping into him like fog.
Striker’s face turned to granite.
“Because she did something to you,” Bael went on. “Because she hurt you so badly it screamed inside you, and all you wanted to do was make everyone else feel as much pain as you. To hurt and maim and burn and slash and kill, because that’s what she did to you. And she never stopped you. She stops you now but she didn’t then. And you went on sucking power out of people so you could destroy more and more, bigger and bigger, until you’d destroyed a city and killed thousands-”
A jolt of power suddenly surged through the scryer, like the shock from ungrounded metal, making Bael flinch and lose his thread.
The view on his scryer tilted, as if someone else had taken hold of the device, and Chalia’s face appeared, pale and shocked.
“It was you,” Bael said, and her lovely dark eyes swam with fear and guilt and pain.
“What did you do?” Bael asked her.
Her hand went to her throat, lovely and unlined even twenty years after Striker had burned and destroyed cities in her name.
“I got engaged to someone else,” she said distantly. “Who are you?”
“Baelvar.” The world had narrowed to the scryer in his hand and the anger pulsing through him.
Chalia regarded him through the scryer. “You’re Kett’s mate, yes? The Nasc. With power.”
Bael clenched his fist and looked away.
Striker laughed softly. “What did she do?”
“Someone else,” Bael said.
“Ah,” he said, but Chalia looked shocked.
“Kett? She’s not the cheating type. Is she? Why would she-you must have been mistaken,” she told Bael, who bristled.
“I saw her with him,” he said, “and unless she sat on a snake and he was sucking the poison out, then I don’t think I was mistaken about what they were doing.”
Striker started laughing.
“It’s not funny,” Bael said, and to his horror his throat swelled as if he was going to cry. “Look, she was just making a point. She doesn’t want to be mated to me. She never did.”
“Ain’t the sort of thing you can break, kid,” Striker said.
“Well, it is. She broke it,” Bael said. The tears were still threatening, so he added, “That’s all. I just wanted to know. Sorry to disturb you,” and let the scryer fall from his grasp, breaking the connection.
Striker’s laughter faded on the evening breeze.
All for the love of a woman. Striker had stolen power and killed thousands in anger because his woman had betrayed him. He’d become this vicious killer who gleefully committed genocide because he felt like it, and all because a woman had broken his heart.
Bael shook himself, trying to escape the specter of his own future, and flew on.