A useless freak. A monster.
“Nonesuch!” The seneschal’s voice, low and guttural to avoid calling attention to himself, ground against his throat as if against shards of glass. “Faron is a beautiful creation, unique, with powers only beginning to be realized. And should either of us ever be in need of a vessel in which to seek refuge, Faron is perfect.”
Thank you, no. I have higher expectations of a host than that. I have no desire to share my life’s essence with what is essentially a human fish, blind in daylight, boneless, timid—
Violently the seneschal raked his nails down the sides of his head, gashing stripes of blood across his cheeks.
“Enough of this! If you wish to move to another host, do so now, or submit to my will! I will brook no more of this nonsense!” In his rage the seneschal closed his eyes, concentrating on the spiritual tethers that bound the demon to him, hooks in the core of his essence that he had untied the night before, to allow their combined spirits to inhabit Faron. All thought of self-preservation vanished; he quickly found one metaphysical tie and in his mind seized upon it, preparing to cast off from the demon as the ship soon would from the dock.
Stop. The scathing voice quavered.
Silence returned to his mind. The clouds that had blanketed the sun as it rose thinned and broke open, causing the morning light to shimmer in dusty streams across the water. The seneschal held his breath, waiting for the demon’s reply, longing for the cool darkness belowdecks where Faron waited. He wondered whether the monster he had carried voluntarily, its metaphysical talons embedded in his soul, would make good on its threats. There was nothing he could do but wait.
Finally, when the voice spoke again, it was subdued.
Tell me of this woman, and why this is so important to you.
The seneschal inhaled, allowing the salty air to fill his lungs to their depths. He allowed his mind to wander back over ancient fields of summer grass, the Wide Meadows of the Island of Serendair, now nothing more than seagrass in the sand beneath the boiling waves of the sea. He concentrated on the memories he had made there.
“Her name is Rhapsody,” he whispered, struggling to keep the word light on the air, reverent, like a psalm, a holy laud, though he knew it was far past impossible for his profane mouth to ever utter such a prayer. “I knew her in Serendair, before the cataclysm. She is beautiful; eyes green as the emerald forest, hair of gold like ripened sheaves of wheat. But that is not why.”
Then why?
The seneschal tried to form thoughts, words around the memory. “She is spirited, alive; passionate.” The thought of the disdain he had routinely seen in her eyes many centuries before rose up like bile in his throat, stung his pride all over again now as it had then. “Stubborn, surly, defiant, argumentative. Foolish.” And she loved me, he thought, allowing himself a fraction of a second to bask in the rumination, then driving it from his mind before the demon could seize upon it.
The knowledge that she had sworn her fealty to him had salved many a difficult moment, had kept him warm through a thousand dark nights in the time before the demon, when he was a mortal man in the vanguard of a coming war. He could still summon up the memory of the oath she swore to him before he had left her for the last time, a memory he had consigned to the dark vault of loss long before, too painful to think about without going mad.
I swear by the Star that my heart will love no other man until this world comes to an end.
The fact that he had forced her into the pledge, had made her promise it, knowing that she was unable to lie, as he held the life of a young girl in his hands before her eyes, had dissipated in his recollection long ago. She had given her word, and Lirin had rules about such things inbred in their blood.
If she had said she loved him, it must have been the truth.
The loss he felt when the word had come to him as he was embroiled in the early battles of the Seren War that she had vanished, when he was within a hairsbreadth of reclaiming her, had almost killed him. She had been stolen by the Brother, the Dhracian assassin known as the most proficient killer the Island had ever seen, even more proficient than he himself had been. There was no trace of her to be found, and so he had assumed that the Brother had killed her and tossed her body into the sea, as the Dhracian’s disinterest in temptations of the flesh was renowned. He had wept, for the first time in his memory, tears that rained like acid and had driven him into even greater fits of destruction, sacking villages and torching the Wide Meadows in the vain hope that the wildfires he ignited would help purge his soul of the despair he felt at her loss.
And now he had come to find that she was alive, had survived the destruction of the Island just as he had, had undoubtedly sailed away before the cataclysm with the other Cymrian refugees who had made their way across the world to the Wyrmlands and had taken shelter there. She, like he, had cheated Time, had robbed Death of a conquest, had obtained the same immortality that the other Cymrians and their descendants had obtained.
And she had married. Word had come via the shipping lanes of a royal marriage in Roland, but he had paid it no mind, until the name Rhapsody had come to his ears again, after sixteen centuries of silence.
It was then that the jealousy had begun to brew. He took to walking the docks at night, passing by dock wenches and drunken sailors that otherwise would have been easy prey, wondering if the Rhapsody he had known and this new queen that he had heard tell of could possibly be one and the same. When the curiosity turned to obsession he had summoned Quinn, one of the sailors who was his unwitting thrall, and sent him on a mission to discover if by the smallest stroke of Fate it might be the woman who had pledged herself to him. Until last night, it had seemed almost impossible to believe that it might be true.
And then Quinn returned, confirming his greatest hope, and his greatest dread.
She was alive.
After all these centuries, the death of the Island in volcanic fire, a journey that had taken the lives of many of the refugees, and the war that followed, she was still alive, half a world away. Still wearing the locket she had worn when he knew her. She was alive. And married. And happy.
His thoughts blackened as the rage returned. She had lied to him. She had broken her oath.
She needed to be taught the consequences of such actions. “Why?” he said aloud, his voice beginning to shake in the effort to suppress his fury. “Because she is the single best knob I have ever experienced; a bed-wench of limitless charms. A talented slut, a rutting whore who broke an oath to me. I seek to reclaim what I lost when that happened.”
The voice of the demon was weak, like the graying ash of a long-burning fire that had expended much of its fuel.
Not again. Let us not do this again. Remember the consequences: remember how weak we were left the last time you gave in to the desire to knob a woman. Each child you father breaks of my essence, our essence, leaving us diminished. Sate your lust in blood and fire, not between a woman’s legs. What you leave behind there—“I will leave no seed behind this time,” the seneschal retorted, gripping the railing as the light from the rising sun flattened over the sea. “When Faron was conceived I was still human, my blood only slightly tainted by your essence, because you were still so weak from the transfer of hosts. Now I am F’dor, having carried you for sixteen hundred years. There is very little, if any, human blood left in me. And F’dor, like all other Firstborn races, choose whether or not to break open their souls in the act of procreation. Believe me, I have no intention of doing that again; I want nothing between Rhapsody’s legs but me. I plan to spend a goodly amount of time there, making up for all the time she owes me. So rest easy; your power is safe.”