The Destined Queen Page 2

  A few moments later, the flutter of wings and an insistent squawk stirred them from their kiss.

  Rath glanced back to see a large brown and white bird perched on the lip of the carved wooden font into which he and Maura had gazed last night.

  “Go find your own nestmate, noisy one!” he called. “Leave us to kiss in peace.”

  But when his lips sought Maura’s again, she squirmed out of his embrace and moved toward the font. “This is a messenger bird. It looks just like the one that brought Langbard word it was time for me to begin my quest.”

  “What word?” He hung back as she approached the bird with steady, deliberate steps so as not to frighten it. “From where?”

  “The Vestan Islands, Langbard said.” Maura brought her hand to rest upon the bird’s back in a touch that might have been meant to reassure it, or to grab the creature if it tried to fly away. “He told me scholars there had studied the writings of the Elderways and reckoned the time was right.”

  The bird seemed accustomed to being handled by people, for it made no effort to fly away. Not even when Maura peeled a strip of parchment from around its leg.

  Rath’s curiosity battled his apprehension and won…but just barely. He moved toward Maura, peering over her shoulder. “What does this message say?”

  She unrolled the slender strip of parchment. An anxious frown creased her features as she deciphered the words written there. “It says, ‘Come at once.’”

  “Come?” Rath stared hard at the message, as if willing the strange letters to have some meaning different than the one Maura had gleaned. “Come where? And how?”

  “To the Vestan Islands, I suppose. And there’s more. It says, ‘Captain Gull of Duskport will convey you.’”

  “Duskport.” Rath seized on the one part he understood. “I’ve been there. It’s a fishing town on the Dusk Coast. A rough place.”

  Perhaps satisfied that it had fulfilled its task, the bird gave another raucous cry. Then it launched itself from the lip of the font, its wings moving in strong, rapid strokes to bear it skyward. As Rath and Maura watched, it circled the glade, then headed off in the opposite direction from the rising sun.

  Maura glanced down at the message again, then lifted her gaze to meet Rath’s with a look of apology. “I reckon this answers our question, doesn’t it?”

  “What question?” asked Rath, his tone gruffer than he meant it to sound.

  “The one you read in my thoughts when we woke. The one about what we should do next.”

  “Oh, that.” The question he’d been eager to delay answering for as long as possible. “I reckon so. Does the message say anything else? Anything to prove it was meant for you and me?”

  Maura shook her head. “Who else could it be meant for?”

  “How should I know?” Rath half wished some hunter’s arrow had struck down that cursed bird before it reached here. “Not a fancy scholar of the Elderways, am I—living free and easy on their safe island paradise?”

  The few tales he’d heard of the Vestan Islands had long made him burn with resentment. Why had they never come to Umbria’s aid during the long, bleak years the mainland had suffered under Hanish tyranny?

  “Rath…”

  “Does it not gall you that they summon us like this? Taking for granted you’ll have reached here and done what needed doing—as if it was some dance through a garden, rather than a near-impossible trek that might have killed you a dozen times over?”

  “I’m sure they did not mean it to sound that way.” Maura entreated him with her soft, green gaze that might have moved the heart of a death mage…if such creatures had hearts.

  There’d been times Rath wished he had no heart. The cursed thing was a weakness he could ill afford.

  “I know it sounded rather…curt.” Maura held out the strip of parchment to him. “There is hardly room to write a long, courteous letter on something small enough to wrap around a bird’s leg.”

  Rath gave a grunt of grudging agreement. For all he loved Maura, he hated it when she was right.

  “I doubt the Vestan wizards take it for granted I have accomplished my task. This message is a sign of their faith that I would prevail. Now they will be waiting and watching for us to come, perhaps fearing we will not.”

  Rath pointed skyward, to where the messenger bird had disappeared from sight. “When that fellow returns with his leg band removed, it should give them reason to hope.”

  “True.” Maura reached for his hand with the air of a weary laborer once again shouldering a burden from which she had hoped to rest. “All the more reason we must not tarry.”

  “Why should we not?” Rath demanded. “You were all but dead a few days ago, and I am not long out of the mines. Who has the right to deny us a little well-earned rest and a chance for some quiet time together? Umbria has waited a thousand years for its Waiting King. Can it not wait a few days more?”

  An even more defiant notion followed on the heels of that one. “Why must we do this at all, Maura? Any half-wit would know better than to think the two of us can liberate an entire kingdom. If those oracles and wizards on the islands have done nothing about it in all these years, who are they to lay an impossible burden upon our shoulders. Slag them all, I say!”

  When he would not let her lead him away quietly to do the wizards’ bidding, like some tame dog, Maura headed off on her own. “You do not mean that.”

  “I do mean it.” Rath had little choice but to follow her. “What makes you think I don’t?”

  Maura whirled about to face him. That soft green gaze had turned as hard and fierce as glittering poison gems. Rath had not seen that look since the day he’d taunted her into crossing Raynor’s Rift. He had missed it—daft as that seemed.

  “Where is the man who brought me to this glade last night?” She peered around Rath, pretending to look for someone else. “The man who offered himself as my champion? The man who promised to go wherever I bid him and do anything in my service?”

  Rath growled. The only thing he hated worse than Maura being right was when she managed to turn his own words back against him. “That was different!”

  “How? Was your pledge of homage just empty talk?” Beneath the scornful challenge of her questions, Rath heard a bitter edge of disappointment.

  “I did mean it—every word!” Could he put into words all that had changed between then and now, in a way that would make sense to himself, let alone her? “Like you, I expected to find some powerful warrior king of legend. I would gladly have served him, and you, playing my small part in the certain success of his battle against the Han.”

  A sigh welled up from the depths of his bowels. “But there is no magical warrior king. There is only me and you. Whether something went amiss, or this whole Waiting King business is only an ancient joke, there is no way I can do what people expect of King Elzaban.”

  The sharp angle of Maura’s brows slackened and a flicker of doubt muted the righteous anger of her gaze. Perhaps she was remembering the dread of certain failure with which she’d first faced her own impossible quest.

  Rath had done enough dirty fighting in his life to know he must strike hard while her resolve was weakened.

  “What good will our deaths do anyone? A failed uprising will only make the Han clamp down harder and serve to discourage more able rebels who might come after us.”

  Maura caught her full lower lip between her teeth and a troubled look crept into her eyes, like an ominous shadow. Rath knew how she would shrink from the prospect of bringing harm to others. Part of him felt ashamed to exploit such a noble vulnerability, but he told himself it was for her own good.

  If it were only his life at stake, he might have risked it. But he had felt the helpless, gnawing torment of seeing Maura in peril. It weakened him in a way he could not abide. Let the rest of Umbria perish—he must keep her safe at any cost.

  “We will do a sight more good going back to Windleford, once all this fuss has settled down.” His tone m
ellowed as he spoke of his modest dreams. “Rebuild Langbard’s cottage, make a peaceful living, raise a family in the Elderways.”

  That kind of life would be enough of a challenge for a man who’d lived as he had, but Rath felt confident he could succeed, with Maura’s love and support to anchor him.

  A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as he pictured the two of them sitting at a cozy supper table surrounded by several ruddy-haired, merry-eyed younglings.

  He could tell Maura was imagining it, too, for a brooding look softened her features and her arms angled, as if cradling a phantom child. He prepared to take her in his arms again and kiss away any dangerous ideas of Vestan wizards or Waiting Kings.

  But before he could enfold her, a tremor vibrated through Maura’s slender body. Her eyes misted with tears, even as they flashed with indignant fury.

  “Damn you, Rath Talward!” she cried, shattering his fragile fancy of a safe, peaceful future. “Damn you!”

  Then she turned and fled from the pristine enchantment of the Secret Glade into the tangled peril of the ancient forest that surrounded it.

  There was nothing Rath could do but mutter a curse…and go after her.

  As she fled toward the soothing sound of the waterfall they had passed the previous night on their search for the Secret Glade, Maura heard the pounding of Rath’s footfall behind her.

  Contrary urges battled within her. A powerful one tempted her back to the seductive haven of his arms, and his dreams for their future. Another, less strong but all the more desperate, made her run from him as if a pack of Hanish hounds were baying for her blood.

  “Maura, stop!” he gasped, catching her by the full sleeve of her tunic. “How can we…decide anything…if you will not…stay and listen to me?”

  “I dare not listen!” She twisted the cloth out of his grip and ran on.

  It would be as foolhardy as stopping to face a Hanish warrior in armed combat. Rath had shown he was armed with potent weapons of persuasion—weapons she had forged for him.

  “I mean you no harm!” His breathless words held a plaintive plea. One she was powerless to ignore.

  “That is what—” she stumbled to a halt, wilting onto a fallen tree trunk “—makes you so…dangerous.”

  “Me, dangerous to you?” Rath dropped to the ground at her feet, his chest heaving beneath his padded leather vest. “What daft talk is that?”

  He reached for her hand, raising it to graze the backs of her fingers against his stubbled cheek. “I want nothing more in the world than to keep you safe.”

  She had no doubt of that. He had proven it again and again on their journey. Should she not feel the same way about him?

  “Dangerous,” she repeated, “because you tempt me worse than that Echtroi with his nightmare wand.”

  During the few days they’d spent recovering their strength for the last leg of their journey, she and Rath had avoided speaking of their terrifying battles with the death mage.

  “He made the mistake of offering me the last thing in the world I desire—power. But you lure me with visions of something I want with all my heart—peace.”

  Rath clasped her hand tighter. “If it is what you want, why should you not have it, love? After all you have done and all you have risked, you deserve every scrap of peace and happiness I can wrest from life for you!”

  “But don’t you see, Rath, my task is only half done. What does anything I have ventured thus far matter if I cannot persuade the Waiting King to fight for the freedom of his people? I want what you offer me, so badly my bones ache for it and my heart feels like it will tear itself in two. But I know it is an illusion.”

  “You doubt I could protect you and provide for you?”

  Maura shook her head. “I believe you could give me everything you promise. But how could I breathe fresh air and savor the sunshine on my face when I know there are men forced to labor in the stifling darkness of the mines, breathing that foul slag? How could I watch my children play in the yard or eat their supper, knowing hordes of young beggars run the countryside, one step ahead of the Hanish soldiers, with no one to care for them?”

  Rath flinched from the harsh truth—something Maura had never seen him do before. “You are a dreamer if you think all Umbria’s problems will be solved by ousting the Han from our shores!”

  “Dreamer? Is that another way of saying fool?” Perhaps she was both, for believing she would find a long-dead hero sleeping in this forest, waiting to be wakened by her.

  “No!” Rath dragged a hand down his face. “I told you of my dreams. They may not be as grand and noble as yours, but they are good and they are possible.”

  His arguments were sensible and sincere…and too convincing by half! Part of her wanted to forget about the mine slaves, the bedgirls and slaggies and think only of herself and her beloved. But another part clung to the beliefs in which her wise guardian Langbard had raised her. Somehow, it felt as if she was fighting for her very soul…and for Rath’s.

  “Can you be so certain my dreams are not?” Her voice fell to a whisper. “That night at the inn in Prum, when I first told you of my quest to find the Secret Glade and the Waiting King, you thought that would be impossible. Yet here we are.”

  Rath made a sudden movement toward her, his mouth opened, as if pouncing to contradict her. But his words seemed to stick in his throat. He looked around at the swaths of lacy fern, the ancient, towering trees and the misty beauty of the waterfall, as though seeing it all for the first time.

  “Yet here we are,” he murmured.

  “How many times did my quest appear doomed, only to be saved at the last moment? Little by little I began to believe this was my destiny.” She held out her hand to him. “Our destiny. If we have faith in it, I trust that whatever we risk to fulfill it may be difficult, but not impossible. I must answer this summons. Will you go with me?”

  Rath stared at her hand for a long, anxious moment. What would she do, Maura wondered, if he refused? Did she truly have the resolve to go on without him?

  At last a sigh shuddered through his powerful frame and he reached for her hand with a shrug of surrender. “Stubborn wench. If I could not let you go back in Prum, do you reckon I can now?”

  The force of her relief sapped every ounce of strength from Maura’s body. She pitched toward Rath, throwing her arms around his neck. “It will be well, aira.” She used the ancient Umbrian word for dearest or beloved. “I know it will! Think how we dreaded coming here last night and the parting it would mean for us. Instead, the Giver blessed our union.”

  At length Rath drew back. “If the Giver had offered me a choice last night, between following the Waiting King to certain victory with you lost to me as his queen, or risking almost certain defeat with you by my side—this would have been my choice. Do not expect me always to behave in noble ways, just because you saw a crown of stars on my head. I am still an outlaw at heart, whose first instinct is to save his own hide and fill his own belly.”

  She would hear no ill of him, not even from his own lips. “Even when you were an outlaw, there was more of a king in your heart than you ever guessed, Rath Talward. The first time I saw you, you were rallying others to escape a Hanish ambush. If they had trusted in you and held together, instead of scattering…”

  Rath leaped to his feet, brushing away some bits of bracken that clung to his breeches. “Let us go, before my doubts get the better of me. Perhaps if we travel fast enough, we may outstrip them.”

  Before he had a change of heart—or she did—Maura rose and took his arm to begin their new journey. She only hoped they would not be rushing into an ambush of fate.

  2

  A s Rath and Maura picked their way down the narrow stone step beside the waterfall, he strove to quench the memory her words had kindled in his mind. Of that day in Betchwood when he had failed to keep his outlaw band together long enough to gain the relative safety of the forest.

  He told himself he had done all he could. Those
men had each thought and acted for themselves. When a few had taken fright and bolted, splintering the strength of their cluster, it had doomed the rest. That was why he preferred to act alone. He could always count on himself.

  But one man alone could not hope to defeat the Hanish army that occupied Umbria, any more than a single drop of rain could quench a wildfire.

  Spying a hollowed stone filled with water at the base of the rock staircase, he asked Maura, “May we stop long enough for a drink, at least?”

  She nodded, then stooped and gathered the clear water into her cupped palms. “A wise outlaw once taught me I should always eat, drink and rest when I have the chance. Otherwise I might find myself hungry, thirsty and tired at a time when I dare not stop.”

  In spite of all the worries that weighed on him, Rath could feel an impudent grin rippling across his lips. “If you want good advice about staying alive, ask an outlaw.”

  A musical chuckle bubbled from the depths of Maura’s throat, in perfect harmony with the splash of the waterfall. “So I shall, outlaw.”

  As she sipped the water from her hands, Rath bent to drink.

  He had never tasted anything like this! If Maura’s life magic had a flavor, it would taste just so—clean and wholesome, with a wild, vital tang that quenched more than thirst. For a moment at least, it seemed to ease his foreboding and self-doubt, nourishing fragile seedlings of hope and confidence.

  “This is better than ale!” He drank until he could hold no more, then he filled his drink skin and bid Maura do likewise.

  Then he jerked his thumb toward the waterfall and the pool at its base. “Do you reckon we have time for a washup before we head off to Duskport?”

  “The message said ‘Come at once,’” Maura reminded him with an air of apology. “Besides, I fear the longer we tarry here, the harder it will be to make ourselves go. Who knows but we may already have been here longer than we think. Did you not tell me the local folk claim time runs slow in Everwood, and what feels like only a few hours may be months or years in the outside world?”