Curse of the Celts Page 6

The guard, noticing that I was no longer following him, returned and caught my arm. He marched me along the hall as I tried to process the scenes that were flooding my mind. Before I quite got a handle on it and was enough in my right mind to run back to Marcus, I was pushed into a room, and the door slammed behind me. I tried the latch but it wouldn’t budge.

  I needed to get back to Marcus. I looked around the room in which I was now locked. There was a decadent four-poster bed and a heavy brocade curtain on the other side of a room. There must be a window. Could I get out that way? I crossed the room quickly.

  “Cass.” A warm voice alerted me to the presence of another person in the room. I paused to take in the sight of Devyn Agrestis sitting in a large chair, his features highlighted by the play of the shadows cast by the fire. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  What was he doing here? Ignoring him, I crossed to the curtain and pulled it back to reveal a lead-lined window. I opened the antique catch and leaned out into the night. My stomach dipped. We were many storeys above the ground. I looked out across the glittering lights of the glass and steel towers, the multi-levels of the city to my left. The old wall, low and wide, ran along to the right, and beyond that was the teeming warren of the East End. I could also see the crenellated walls on the far side of the cobbled courtyard below. I appeared to be in the White Tower. I had never been inside before. The lack of building in the air above us confirmed it; only a few of the oldest buildings in the city were so privileged.

  I didn’t understand what was going on. I wrapped my arms about myself. They had brought me here after the Mete, I recalled. The Mete where I… I stepped back from the cold air coming in through the window. None of this made sense. My progress was halted by a warm body behind me. Startled, I turned into a wall of bare chest. I looked up and my lips were caught. My hands came up to push him away but ended up tangled in black curls. My head tilted back to allow him access to my neck and the décolletage on display as a result of my wondrous dress.

  His name was a sigh leaving my lips as his proximity worked its magic and reality returned. I turned into him. Kisses rained down on my bare flesh, my lips captured once more by his. It was like a spark catching on tinder, a kind of blue and red flickering passing across my skin, lighting me up from the inside out. He walked me backwards until I found myself folded onto a bed. A bed with a beautifully embroidered canopy. Devyn. Calchas. I was myself once again.

  “Devyn, wait.” I tried to catch my breath.

  His fingers found the catch at my waist and the silken dress unhooked and fell off my body, allowing Devyn greater access. His skin, his torso were against mine, warm velvet heating me in the darkness of the room which was lit only by the flickering open fire. By the fire sat the remains of the apple cake, the cake Calchas made certain only Devyn ate. I could taste its heavenly flavour on the lips that danced with mine.

  I tried to think. I needed to stop him, didn’t I? But did it matter now? Why stop? I felt what Devyn felt, the fire, the heat surging through him. I could practically feel how delicious my touch on his skin felt to him, the drugging pull to surrender entirely to sensation. Need. Want. Our connection was oxygen to the flames, our bodies the fuel. We were here together. That was all. That was everything.

  My fingers came back around to Devyn’s face, so exquisitely lit by the firelight, his dark eyes gleaming. The fire licked through me, the heat swooshing through my blood, stoked by the touch of his hands sweeping across my bare skin, touching my leg and following it up under the blue satin. I moaned at the blaze that swept through me. Deeper, deeper, I felt Devyn, his complete focus on me, on us, on this.

  Something wasn’t right. I arched back as Devyn kissed a trail down my skin. Our lives were in danger. I needed to think. I opened my eyes wide, trying to focus on something, anything, outside of my body and the maelstrom of sensation whirling within. The canopy… there was a canopy over our heads. Because we were in the White Tower, enjoying the hospitality of the praetor. We weren’t locked in a cell; surely the security was laxer here. We needed to escape, or tomorrow we would die. Tonight was our only chance. I attempted to pull away and Devyn swooped back up, skin sliding on warm skin.

  “Cass,” he murmured as he caught my lips in his, his kiss deep and possessive, fresh fuel on the fire sending sparks flickering through my body. I couldn’t breathe; I didn’t need to. Devyn was my breath. I fell into his kiss, the drugging sensation bringing me back down, stealing my consciousness. I was mesmerised by the flame towards which he was drawing me. I no longer wanted to see. My pupils felt dilated by the sheer magic he caused within me. I looked up into the midnight eyes above me. Devyn’s pupils were glazed, unfocused. I looked over to the blaze in the fireplace. My eye caught again the remains of food there.

  Calchas sent me in here after taking the protection of the triquetra charm from around my neck. Devyn’s kisses were mindless, fevered, as if passion were the only thing that drove him. The only thing that existed. Tonight of all nights. It made no sense. How could he be so singularly focused?

  The bridal tea. The concoction they gave us before and during the handfast to stoke our passions… He had given it to Devyn. But why? It made no sense. Was there some motivation that I was missing or was it just that he couldn’t resist manipulating us one last time?

  I swung away so that I was above Devyn. I sat up, allowing the fresh air wafting in from the open window to wash over me, cooling my heated skin. Devyn’s hand came up to pull me back down. I caught it in my own and held it to me. I adored his hands. I adored the strength in them, the slight calluses on his palm evidence of a physical past that gave away the truth of his childhood spent far from the city; I adored the sinews I could trace through his dark skin, the pulse of life at his wrist. I sucked in a breath. Think, I needed to think. Devyn’s other hand came up, and I took both and pinned them either side of his head. He looked up at me, perplexed, allowing it despite his heated blood and superior strength. I sent a pulse of the fear I felt for tomorrow through me and his eyes cooled.

  “Snap out of it,” I urged him.

  “What, Cass? Come here to me.” He lifted his head to try to kiss me once more. I so badly wanted to be kissed. I leaned in, my grip lessening, allowing Devyn to wrap his hands into my hair. I groaned, giving in to it. My mind and body were pure sensation.

  There was a commotion outside in the hallway. I sat up as the door burst open. Devyn pushed himself up and manoeuvred me behind him, his instinct to protect me always greater than anything else. I stared at the door, willing my foggy brain to clear. I pulled in a deep breath.

  Marcus stood in the doorway, his burning gaze fixed on me.

  “Get dressed,” he snapped, his nostrils flared, his body all tension. “We need to go.”

  I looked at him in confusion.

  “My father is helping us escape. Hurry.”

  Devyn was also slowly coming back to the real world. He shook his head as if to shake it off. The fire clearly still burnt within him, the embers hot ready to flare again.

  “Devyn?” I called tentatively. He turned to look at me, his dark gaze still smouldering. My eyes flicked to Marcus in the doorway. Praetorian Alvar’s second in command, Kasen, strode in behind Marcus. The normally diffident praetorian surveyed the room, taking in the scene, instantly understanding what I was still only starting to understand myself.

  “Get dressed,” he echoed Marcus, throwing a bundle at the bed. “Now.”

  I jumped out on the far side of the canopied four-poster, the curtain affording me a little belated privacy. My breath was still dragging through my lungs and my hands trembled as I pulled on the dark clothing Kasen had had the foresight to bring. My blue satin gown was not exactly the outfit of choice for a Codebreaker on the run.

  I took Devyn’s hand to pull him along with us as we followed Kasen, racing through the stone hallways, down winding stairs, and slowing to walk casually across the courtyard to the gate leading out to the river. Kasen and Marcus we
nt to the side of the gate where a heavily caped Matthias waited, the trellis slowly lifting to reveal a boat beyond.

  Devyn and Marcus leapt across the railing into the boat as I took Matthias’s hand to aid my undignified scramble across the railing into the bobbing hovercraft.

  I looked on in horror as the gate was lowered back down with Kasen on the other side watching as we pulled out onto the river.

  I looked at Matthias for an explanation.

  “He’ll be fine.” Matthias waved dismissively.

  “What? But they’ll know he helped us.”

  “No, they won’t. While the praetor likes to keep an eye on the city, there are no cameras in his own home,” Matthias explained. “Calchas will only blame me when he wakes up.”

  “When he wakes up?” I questioned.

  “I slipped a little something into his after-dinner drink.” Matthias nodded to his son. “All we had to do was wait until we were alone after dinner and servants were no longer coming in or out. And goodnight, Praetor Calchas.”

  “Why? How?” I asked Matthias, still slightly disbelieving that this was happening even as we swept through the night.

  “Why?” Matthias repeated haughtily. “Marcus is my son. As for you two, he will need help once he crosses the border. As for how, once you were in the tower it was almost too easy.”

  “But it was built to be a fortress.”

  “True. A fortress whose main purpose has always been to keep safe the most important members of our society. Council members used to have automatic access to a number of public buildings via a biometric setting for use in the event of an attack that breached the walls. The practice has been abandoned in peacetime, and of course the tower is practically a private dwelling these days. I’m sure Calchas hasn’t ever given it a thought. The thing with old biometric technology is that it was built not just for a single lifetime, but for the duration of that genetic line. He brought the key to get through the river gate inside with you.”

  “Marcus,” I identified, recalling the way Praetorian Kasen had grabbed Marcus’s hand to touch the lock when we arrived at the gate. His touch had released the catch.

  “Indeed.” Matthias nodded. “All chips were bet on the fact that Calchas wouldn’t be able to resist bringing you to his home to have a little play with the dolls he hadn’t been able to make dance to his tune.”

  “You knew he would bring us to the tower?”

  “I was relying on it, did what I could to seed the idea after I left you all last night. It fell on fertile soil. Nobody has ever circumvented the handfast before. Calchas was fascinated by the fact that you had done so; he was obsessed with it. What had tipped Marcus off that Devyn Agrestis was in Barts? How had you gone from being a good, compliant citizen firmly in the grip of the handfast to one who was clearly lying? What was it between you and Agrestis that managed to bypass a compulsion which has enabled the city to dictate and socially engineer the population for centuries? After Richmond, when Alvar brought in the pendant, he had the tapes reviewed and he knew you hadn’t been wearing it when Agrestis broke into the hospital,” he explained grimly as he casually navigated the river. “Calchas loves control; he is the ultimate puppet master. Everything and everyone in this city is on a string, and he makes us dance. You broke free, and he had limited time to figure it out. The temptation to dress you up and have a little private, scripted theatrical night once he had all three of you in his power would have been irresistible to him. I encouraged it; all I asked in return was the opportunity to speak to my son one last time. I’m just grateful he didn’t drug all three of you; I wouldn’t have put it past him. Though I suppose there was only one of you he couldn’t guarantee would play along, and after the events of the last months, he must have enjoyed ensuring he had control of your Briton. Speaking of which, there is a flask in that trunk over there. Give it to your Briton; it might help.”

  I retrieved the drink and handed it to Devyn. His dark eyes, a little glazed, still burning, were more interested in watching me than following the life-saving escape we were making across the city. Marcus appeared to have recovered more successfully, and he was far more interested in surveying the other traffic on the river as our hovercraft slipped silently through the night.

  My hand reached for the comfort of my pendant, the gesture changing as I anxiously rubbed at the bare skin of my neck.

  Matthias flashed his thin-lipped smile my way.

  “I’m afraid we couldn’t get the necklace back. We’ll have to rely on the handfast to keep you with Marcus and ensure you don’t try to make your way back to the city at your first opportunity, despite the fiery stake that awaits you,” Matthias warned.

  Even without the charmed pendant, I was confident I wouldn’t be relying on the handfast to keep me with my companions. Devyn’s presence was more than enough to negate the compulsion to comply with the wishes of my match and the city; as long as he was near I was operating under my own will. And that would never lead me back to the city. Marcus still wore the other charm and it seemed wiser to leave it in his possession in case the cuff did cloud his judgement and urge him to return to the city. As long as he had the charm, and I had Devyn, we would be fine.

  “The handfast is not just technology, it’s wrapped with magic and it will continue to work outside the walls.” Matthias misread my confidence that I would be able to resist the handfast compulsion beyond the walls.

  “I don’t understand. There’s magic in the cuff? But handfasting is codified.” Even though we had suspected this was the case, it still came as a shock. The city abhorred magic, had fought wars against the magic-wielding Britons for millennia, had eradicated every trace of it within the walls.

  “It was a joint venture between the Britons and us. The handfast was the glue that held the Treaty together,” Matthias offered cryptically.

  “What does it have to do with the Treaty?” Devyn had given me the short version of this but it couldn’t hurt to play dumb and see if there was more to be learned.

  “Without the Treaty, there would be no Marcus. Marcus’s existence is living proof of the Treaty.”

  Matthias had grown bored with my questions and slipped back into being the supercilious ass with whom I was more familiar. I frowned as if I didn’t follow.

  Marcus took his eyes off the river to look at me. His hand came up to trace the etchings on the cuff that sat on his upper arm.

  “They were created to ensure the Treaty would stick because the marriage that bound it together would itself be solid,” he elaborated. I shook my head as if still not understanding, and Marcus went on. “Think about it, Cassandra. The Empire had been at war with the Britons for ever. My great-great-great-grandfather would have hated everything about the York princess he had to marry. And she him. They had spent their lives shedding the blood of each other’s friends and families. Both sides were invested in that marriage holding, in them having children of mixed blood who would be living symbols to the city of the peace.”

  “Oh.” This was pretty much what Devyn had been able to discover, that the handfast cuffs were a legacy of the marriage that had sealed the Treaty just as much as Marcus was. The device was created to bind together a couple forced into a union that both of them must have hated, then used to manipulate generation after generation of the city’s sons and daughters. It was a band locked on your arm that instilled in you a desire to please your parents, to comply with the Code, to want to be with the partner your parents had arranged for you. It was diabolical. Our society was built upon lie after lie and it was a cycle that was repeated over and over. My chest tightened as I surveyed the banks of the river. The wall of towers constructed right up to the river’s edge seemed to loom more oppressively than ever. I lifted my face to the night sky, closing my eyes to my last sight of the city that had been my home. I allowed the wind to whip through me, cleansing me of the last traces of the controlling clutches of the people who ran it.

  We were already at the western wall,
and because the hovercraft was flying the council flag, we were waved on without further inspection by the sentinels guarding the western gate through which I had passed on my previous escape attempt. The policy about passage through the walls being forbidden after dark did not apply to the council as it did to regular citizens.

  Devyn had almost returned to himself and was listening keenly. He didn’t trust Matthias; even now, as he helped us escape, the overriding emotion from Devyn was wariness. Had the senator changed sides so completely? I had witnessed for myself his lack of affection towards Marcus. Why throw everything away now to help him escape? Yet that was what he had done.

  “Father!” Marcus’s alarmed cry cut across us. He pointed to a boat coming around the bend behind us. “That boat has stayed with us all the way from the tower. It’s following us. I’m sure of it.”

  “Let’s put a little speed on and see what they do.” Matthias pulled back on the throttle and the nose of the boat lifted, throwing us backwards. We watched to see whether the only other active craft on this part of the river responded. Because the river in the city was generally thick with traffic, citizens often joked that if you timed it right, you could walk across the Tamesis without ever needing a bridge. Around the docks was, of course, the busiest, but that traffic petered out as you went further inland. By the time you got to the inner wall on the east of the city there were no more great ships. There were plenty of barges delivering cargo to the warehouses, lots of little hackneys zipping about, but on the other side of the western wall, towards Richmond, boats were few and far between, especially at this time of night.

  Matthias eased off the throttle as we came into Richmond. There was a long stretch here and still no sign of the boat that had been trailing us. I allowed myself to relax a little.

  Devyn turned his attention back to Matthias, like a hawk hunting a mouse.

  “How did you find Cassandra?” Devyn asked out of nowhere. Calchas had taunted us that finding me and matching me to Marcus had not been a matter of chance. Matthias and Calchas had plotted together. This man had to know the truth of my abduction.