Bastien (5 page)

Firmin is in debtors’ prison. I am not allowed near him unless it is with a promissory note to pay off his debts. I leave him to his troubles. I have my own to straighten out.

Finally, there is only Louis left. I think long and hard about riding through Fauve to see him.

That a man would go to such lengths over a woman as to shun his friend for having slept with her baffles me. I don’t even know what Louis is so upset about—we shared women before.

Nevertheless, he is upset enough that I know there’s little chance he will tell me anything of what’s happened that night. No, I will not be going to Louis.

Which means I only have one option left. As the sun begins to set, I ride headlong to the wooden shack and the hag with her tarot deck.

Chapter Eight

The hag is expecting me. A stool is set before the barrel and she has her cards in hand. It looks exactly like the deck I have in my pocket. I take it out, frowning. The curtain door to the Faery court billows with a life of its own, drawing my eye. The cloth is darker than I remember it, more tattered, yet it still won’t show even a glimpse of what’s behind it. A soft, warm breeze wafts my way, and I could swear it sigh my name.

The hag waves me to sit and flips the top card of her deck. The King of Pentacles.

I shuffle my deck and place it on the barrel. My first card is The Hierophant. I half grin at this odd way of greeting. “I want to know what happened to my friends,” I say, already knowing she won’t tell me.

She turns the next card and it is The World. A vague answer that still somehow makes sense.

The world, the Faery court, did something to them. It certainly changed me, just as Louis said it would.

The curtain snaps and billows in a nonexistent wind, demanding my attention. The tarot deck will not tell me which of the Faery killed Liliane, or why Honorine suddenly felt the need to escape to the sea. To find that out I’ll need to ask someone who speaks. “Yes,” I say, finding the prospect of stepping foot in that strange land again is not as unwelcome as I expected. “I want to enter the Faery court again.”

The hag shakes her head. It’s not a refusal, more disbelief. She thinks I’m lying? “I want to know what happened,” I repeat.

The hag shakes her head again and points to my cards. I turn the next one. The Queen of Cups. Now the hag nods. The curtain settles, as if satisfied I’ve made a liar of myself. Even when I try to be noble my true motives betray me. I haven’t come all this way to have a tarot conversation with the hag about my companions—who cares? If Louis, my oldest and closest friend is so quick to shun me over a female, then what good are the rest of them?

The hag turns her card. The Fool.

Without a word, I turn mine. The Wheel of Fortune. I suppose I’ll have to take my chances, whatever they may be.

The hag turns The Hermit and swivels it around to face me as if to say, “Remember this?”

I do. The monster hiding under a cloak. My card counters it—Strength. There is the rose and the phantom woman who haunts my dreams. I falter as I place the card on the barrel. The hag, too, seems momentarily distracted. She touches the card, tracing its edges with something akin to reverence. This is what I really came here for.

She turns the next card slower. Death.

A chill runs through me and pain blooms in my chest, as though I’ve been shot. Another warning. I should heed it this time, pick up my deck and go back home. Instead my hand reaches for the next card.

The hag slams her hand down on top of mine. She half bows her head in what might be ascent or defeat and pushes my turned cards back toward me, spreading her deck across the barrel, face down. She picks one of the lot and turns it without pause. The Two of Pentacles.

I grin when she holds out her hand for the payment. Her fee has doubled since the first time.

I pay her and collect my cards. As I am rising from my seat and she is pulling back the curtain to allow me entrance, some morbid curiosity compels me to look at the card she didn’t want me to see. I turn it on top of the deck. The Lovers.

The hag hisses, the first sound I have heard her make. She knocks the deck from my hands before I can get a good look at the card and pulls the curtain wider open. Enter or go. But leave the deck.

There is nothing waiting for me in my castle except stone walls and bad dreams. I enter.

The Faery court is not as I remember it. There are trees around me now, with bark of unbroken white and leaves so bright green it hurts to look at them. There is no sun in the sky.

Rather, it is the sky itself which shines down to illuminate everything. The creatures I saw before are gone. I am alone in the clearing. “Hello?” I call. Only my echo answers me.

“Is anybody there?”

Nothing.

“Lilith!” I try.

A breeze makes the trees sway and their leaves knock together like delicate wind chimes.

“Lover,” the air whispers around me.

Lilith appears in a flash of light, draped in a gown made of mist. She smiles knowingly and opens her arms to me. “Welcome back.”

I swoop her up and kiss her hard, the familiar taste of her tongue in my mouth bringing back memories of euphoric pain. “How could I resist?”

She laughs. “Did you miss me, Bastien?” She asks this as though already anticipating the answer to be yes.

The truth would not please her, and I am not fool enough to voice it. Instead of answering, I grab her leg and loop it around my waist so she can feel me hard against her. “Where is that damned cup?”

Lilith laughs again. She closes my eyes with a kiss on each lid, and when I open them we are in her bower with its false mirrors. A black cup is waiting for me on a pedestal. I set her away and pick it up.

But I hesitate. I look at my own reflection. It’s matching me this time. There is the other me, a cup in his left hand when mine is in my right, that selfsame look of stubborn determination is there in his eyes. That same muscle twitches in his jaw. Our clothes melt away as Lilith comes up behind me and presses her mouth to the center of my spine.

My eyelids droop. My reflection’s do not. He shakes his head as though in warning, but Lilith already has her hands on my cock and I can’t think. I don’t want to think. I want to forget everything, lose myself in pleasure for as long as I can, and then sleep. The most vivid dream I had of the beauty from the card was in this bower after Lilith fucked me nearly to death. I need to see her again. Just once.

I drain the black cup with one swallow and give myself over to its burn.

It’s worse than before. I know exactly what the elixir is doing to me; feel every little sting, every stutter of my feeble human heart. But the pleasure is greater as well. It’s almost beyond bearing, an agony tearing through my body in bone breaking spasms. One cup, two, three... I lose count. I spent two weeks here last time. This time I know it will be longer.

But I will not die. Not before I see her.

When I collapse, broken and bleeding, still craving the hell bitch who has me in her thrall though I can no longer move to claim her, she takes pity on me and gives me the white cup to drink from. She makes me drink it on my own, and I leave bloody fingerprints on the white petals, spilling more out than into my mouth.

I close my eyes, eagerly awaiting my dreams.

But she does not appear. The now familiar painted world welcomes me, the lone wolf howling at the moon, the swirling cloak circling me and the rose blooming before me. The woman isn’t there. I pluck the rose from the ground, the thorns gouging holes in my hand. In its place a thorn bush sprouts at my feet, growing and growing until it’s taller than I am, the spikes as long as daggers.

I awake alone in the clearing. The sky is dark and the white trees glow like lanterns. There is the doorway and the curtain which shields this hellish place from the rest of the world, and I stumble out through it, seeking the hag.

She is not there.

On the barrel are my tarot cards and another blood red rose.

Chapter Nine

A grain merchant tells me I was in Faery for seventeen days.

A torrential rain accompanies me on the way home, and by the time I get there I am chilled to the bone. I spend the next two weeks battling a fever that has me chasing ghosts all around the castle. Jacques has to restrain me in the night to keep me from wandering out on the balcony after a hallucination.

When the fever breaks I curse the visions which will not return. She was here. I saw her running through the hallways of this castle and, though I never caught her, knowing I had her in my home brought me a sense of tranquility that stilled the fervor of Lilith’s influence.

Now she is gone again.

This little obsession is driving me to distraction, and I don’t even know why. There was nothing special about the woman I saw in my dreams. She could have been one among thousands, noble or peasant. Yet even among those thousands I know without a single doubt that I’d pick her out in an instant. I craved her when she haunted my fever delusions like a madman chasing after his sanity. Now that she’s gone, I half wish I was back in that state, just to see her again.

What spell did the hag put me under? Why torture me this way?

There is a new girl on my staff. Her name is Jocelyn. Pretty little thing. Shy, too. She never looks me in the eye and blushes every time she has to speak to me. I request her to bring me all my meals while I am forced to bed rest. Her flushing cheeks are the only amusement I have, and I take advantage of it at every opportunity with a sly remark here and a mild innuendo there. It doesn’t take much, really.

When I am strong enough again, I make my way down to the library. I instructed Jacques to have new books brought in and he delivered two hundred new volumes, which undoubtedly cost a fortune. Happily, I have several to spend and the expense is trifling. I peruse the newly filled shelves for something to catch my interest. There is the usual intellectual bore, the dense classics.

Then my gaze snatches on a volume of folk tales. It’s hand penned like a journal, by an author whose name I do not recognize. I take it with me to the settee and force my eyes to cooperate and read a few pages. Before long I have a splitting headache and my eyes are closing of their own accord. I curse and hurl the book.

I almost hit Jocelyn and her food tray. “I-I’m sorry, my Lord,” she stutters.

“What is the point of this fucking library if I can’t even read?” I snarl.

Jocelyn blushes fiercely at the profanity. She sets the tray down on a table and retrieves the book, smoothing the covers. Her eyes flit briefly to me before she drops her gaze again. This is interesting.

“Read it to me,” I command.

“I... I...”

“You can read, can’t you?”

“Y-yes, my Lord. A little.”

Frustrated beyond belief, I huff at her. “Raise your head, child. You’ll get a hump in your neck. I’m up here, not at your feet.”

“Yes, my Lord,” she says. Her gaze stays on the floor.

I roll my eyes. “Read.”

She opens the book. “H-han-sel and Gret-tel.” Jocelyn reads slowly, with the unease of one not familiar with the written word. I can see from the way she is near tears that her illiteracy embarrasses her.

“Stop,” I say, taking pity on the girl.

She falls silent with a sigh of relief.

“I want you to learn to read,” I tell her. When her wide, hopeful eyes lock with mine, I shift uncomfortably. “When you have free time, you will come here and read aloud until you can finish a sentence without stumbling over the words, understand?”

She nods jerkily. “Yes, my Lord.” She looks much too happy for a woman who hasn’t just climaxed.

“Take the book and go.” I’ve lost my taste for it. And her.

She curtsies and leaves.

It’s another week before I’m back to myself, and by then I am going out of my mind, trapped inside my own castle. Night after night I have to stop myself from riding out to that shack again. It’s not Lilith that pulls me there, but the hag. I need answers only she can give me.

But I know now the moment I am close to the Faery court, the black cup will be beckoning just like last time.

I’m not an idiot. Thinking back on that night I recognize what I hadn’t then. Lilith and her court are fly traps for humans. They lure us mortals into their world to amuse them, use their magics to make us think we have a choice.

We don’t. To the Faery folk we are no more than insects, and they ever delight in tearing off our wings and making us whole to do it all over again. A stronger, wiser man would stay far away from that place.

But there is something in those mystical woods I want, a question I need answered and before the week is out, I can no longer contain myself. I inform Jacques that I am leaving and not to expect me for a while. If he has an opinion, he keeps it to himself. I ride through the chill evening and arrive at the hag’s table just as the sun dips behind the mountains.

She lights a torch and turns a card. Judgment.

I don’t have my own deck with me. Instead, I reach for hers and take the top card. I don’t expect it to be relevant. To my surprise, it is The Moon. The same moon I see in my dreams each time I drink from the white cup. The same wolf on a cliff, howling at it.

She takes the next card. The Tower. I frown at the face of it. It looks uncannily like my castle, the balcony of my chambers lit from the inside and a shadowed figure standing at the balustrade. Is she telling me to go back?

I should. Already my attention is more on the curtained door behind her than on what she is telling me. There must be a compromise here, some middle ground. Perhaps I was too exhausted last time to dream of my Strength. If I just pace myself this time, maybe I can find her. I need to know who she is, whether she’s real or simply a figment of the hag’s meddlesome spell.

I turn my card without looking and the hag sighs. Temperance? I pulled Temperance?

As if she has given up on me, she fans the deck and pulls out the Five of Pentacles. I scowl as I hand over the coins. The woman is gouging me, I know it. “There,” I say. “Buy yourself a better cloak.”