Codespell, p.3
Codespell, page 3
part #3 of Ravirn Series
“Don’t even think it, eyeball.” Her voice was quiet and almost sweet, and that made it even scarier. “If they ever found your body, they’d develop drinking problems over the missing bits.”
The cyclops stepped aside and waved us in, looking more than a little pale as he did so. Once more we followed the satyr, this time threading our way through a milling crowd heavy on his goatish cousins, nymphs, and booze, on our way to the largest of the tents.
As we stepped inside, he loudly announced, “Raven and consort.”
“That’s Ravirn,” I said.
“And Cerice,” she added.
“It’s not like anyone’s listening,” replied the satyr before he ducked back out of the tent.
He had a point. The party had clearly started without me, and his bellow probably didn’t carry more than a couple of yards. Hundreds of figures crowded the pavilion, filling the place with noise and movement so wild I had a hard time making sense of it. If anyone noticed our entry, they didn’t show it.
“Now what?” I asked Cerice.
“Mingle and look for Zeus, I guess. We can’t leave until that’s out of the way, and even if we decide to stay, it’s the polite thing to do.”
I nodded. “Sounds good.” I hoped to find Morpheus in there somewhere as well, but I had my doubts. “Let’s see if we can’t get a couple of drinks on the way.” Taking Cerice’s hand, I plunged into the crowd.
Snapshots from a divine madhouse.
Eris, Goddess of Discord, playing cards with her half brother Ares and Hephaestus, the smith who hammered out Zeus’s lightning bolts. The boys were losing. I’d been there and didn’t need to add to Discord’s wins tonight, so I kept going.
A half dozen satyrs stood by a bar where Dionysus poured drinks from a jug that never emptied.
I got Cerice and me a couple of glasses. It was wine, clear and golden and sweet and tart and hot and cold all at the same time.
I sipped at it as we passed the head table, a crescent of white marble slabs enfolding a grotesquerie of a fountain— all little cupids and spouting tritons with dark wine pouring from the tips of their weapons. Zeus’s golden throne stood empty in the center of the tableau, so we moved on.
In the corner of another tent, a lamia, a sphinx, and a chimera sat around a small table swapping hero recipes.
At some point, Cerice left me to find us more drinks. While I was waiting, I saw a familiar face with an unfamiliar expression. My cousin Dairn, smiling. When he saw me, he waved, as so many others had.
I waved back unthinkingly, then froze. Dairn is a grandchild of Atropos, who wants me dead, and one of the greatest archers ever to live. He has tried to kill me on three separate occasions. The scar had not survived my rebirth, but he once put an arrow through my left forearm.
The last time I’d seen him, I’d pushed his unconscious and hamstrung body into a faerie ring, more than half-hoping he’d lose his soul in that magical maelstrom as so many had before. It seemed fair payment for the arrow that had cost my friend Shara her life. I hadn’t heard from or about him from then till now, and I’d assumed he was dead.
As he headed toward me, I opened my bag and pulled out Melchior, quickly flipping up his lid.
Run Melchior, I typed. Please.
I set the laptop down as it began to shift into Melchior’s webgoblin form. I wanted my hands free, and I wanted the backup. As Dairn got closer, I did a double take. Rather than the tights and tunic I would have expected from a child of House Atropos in good standing, he wore motorcycle leathers that mirrored mine. Nor were they in his traditional colors—a mixture of browns. His ruffled shirt was a rusty red, the leathers dark and silvery, almost like a blackened mirror.
“Raven,” he said, raising an empty hand. “I’ve been looking for you.”
I nodded a greeting but didn’t take his hand. I didn’t want to get that close to him. Something wasn’t right, and it was more than a change of clothes and colors. After a moment, he dropped his hand, though he didn’t look put out. In fact, he smiled and his eyes seemed almost to twinkle.
“It’s that way is it, Raven?”
“Ravirn,” I corrected him. “I don’t see how it could be any other way. Not after our last meeting.”
“Are you thinking of the part where your toy computer hamstrung me, the bit where you stole my webpixie, or the end, when you pushed me into a faerie ring bound and unconscious and left me to die?”
He said it all with a grin that set a chill to the back of my neck. His voice was light, almost teasing, like nothing unusual had happened between us. Like I’d done him some sort of favor, even. It was much more frightening than the rage or indignation I’d have expected from someone like Dairn and deeply out of character, more the kind of thing Eris or Athena would have used to throw an enemy off-balance. I’d known Dairn most of my life, and he simply wasn’t that sharp.
“Actually,” I said, being careful to keep my tone as light and friendly as his, “it’s before that, where you helped to take my girlfriend hostage and murdered her familiar. You do remember that, right?”
He waved a hand dismissively. “I served my House, and besides, decommissioning a webgoblin hardly counts as murder. You don’t really believe all that rot about them being people, do you?”
Somewhere down around my knees Melchior began whistling a string of angry binary. It was too fast for me to parse, but I could tell the end result wasn’t going to be healthy for Dairn. Since that would have violated Zeus’s party rules, I reached down and caught the scruff of Mel’s neck—too late. By the time I’d lifted him into the air, he was already finishing whatever spell he’d started, though it sounded very strange at the end.
At that point havoc should have ruled the field. It didn’t, and it took me a moment—and a mental replay of what had just happened—to figure out why. That’s when my exchange with Dairn went from moderately disturbing to downright frightening.
Melchior’s spell hadn’t failed. Dairn had canceled it by whistling one of his own, and not a general nullification charm either. He’d matched his own whistle to Mel’s for a bar, then shifted to a harmony, and finally a self-harmonized counterpoint that turned the original spell on its head.
He shouldn’t have been able to do that. It was the kind of magic that only webtroll supercomputers and a few of the powers, myself not included, could use. It took a great deal of effort to stand my ground. Effort I probably should have spent on running, but I really hated to run blind.
“Who are you?” I asked, still holding Melchior in the crook of my arm. It felt as though he might be trembling.
Dairn smiled, and his eyes flashed again. “Dairn, whom you abandoned to the faerie rings.”
I recognized the flash this time, a tiny spark of pure Primal Chaos within his pupils, and my own grew wide. At that, his spark grew brighter, and I recognized something else. The spark was a reflection of my own, not an internal light. His pupils were dark mirrors, like smoked glass over quicksilver.
“What are you?”
"Ahh, now that’s a better question. I am what you made me. I am your enemy.”
CHAPTER TWO
Dairn grinned and reached toward the breast of his jacket, as though he were going for a gun. Before he could complete the gesture, I heard someone call my name.
Dairn’s smile changed into a frown as he looked over my shoulder. Then he whistled something very fast and vanished.
I turned around and saw Tisiphone walking toward me.
Tisiphone. The Fury. Fire-haired, fire-winged, and beautiful. As always, she was naked, with the blue veins showing through her pale redhead’s skin. More fire blossomed in the hair where her long athletic legs met, and her high small breasts were also tipped with flame.
Her lips burn, too, or at least that was how I remembered them from our one brief kiss, hot and wild and vivid. I pushed those thoughts aside. I couldn’t have them. Not as long as I was with Cerice. Not as long as we were an us. But Cerice loved Ravirn, not chaos-eyed Raven, who frightened her, and Tisiphone . . . why, Tisiphone wasn’t afraid of anything.
“Ravirn?” she said again. She looked puzzled. “I wanted to talk with you. I’m glad to find you alone. You are alone, aren’t you? When I first saw you I thought you were standing by a mirror, but then . . . Did I see what I think I saw? If so, who was that?”
“My cousin Dairn, who hates me, but that’s not important. He’s gone now. How are you? How’s Necessity? Have you seen Shara?”
“What is this? An interrogation?” Tisiphone smiled. “Not so frightened of me as you once were, are you? That’s good. I don’t want you scared.” She reached up and touched my cheek.
I blushed. The first time I met Tisiphone, she’d come to kill me. That wasn’t the only time we’d clashed. She’d saved my life more than once as well. Our relationship had grown complex. She wanted me, and I wanted . . . I don’t know. Sometimes I wanted things to be the way they never had been—Cerice and me together without anything hanging over our heads. Sometimes I wanted something else entirely.
“Ravirn.” The voice was low, husky, hurt.
“Cerice,” I turned away from Tisiphone and took my glass from Cerice’s hand, “you’re back.”
“I am. Should I have bothered?”
“It’s not like that,” I said. “Tisiphone just arrived, too. She wanted to say hello.”
“Oh really.” Cerice sounded almost as icy as she had with the rent-a-clops.
“Dairn is here,” said Melchior.
Cerice’s expression went from cold to hot in an instant. Shara is Cerice’s familiar, a webgoblin every bit as precious to her as Melchior is to me. On top of that, at the time Dairn had shot Shara, his brother Hwyl had been in the process of clubbing Cerice unconscious. She’s had a rough couple of years, largely because she’d decided to save my neck once upon a time.
“Where is he?” she asked, draining her wine in a single long draft and dropping the glass. “I’ll kill him.”
I had no doubt she meant that literally.
“As much as I appreciate the sentiment,” I said, catching her wrist, “this might not be the best place for it.”
Cerice glared at me but didn’t try to pull away. That was good. I didn’t think that trying to kill Dairn would be a great idea right now, even if we could find him, but I wouldn’t have tried to restrain her beyond that first impulse.
“Is this a private moment, or can anyone join?” The woman’s voice was diamonds in the snow—frozen elegance—and all too familiar.
If I’d been paying attention to anything other than Cerice and Tisiphone, I might have seen her coming and had a ready answer or a dodge. As it was, my brain kind of shortcircuited for a few seconds as a third woman stepped into view.
“Hello, Raven.” Beautiful and regal, she nodded at me before turning. “Cerice, still slumming I see. I don’t know what you see in him. Tisiphone, don’t you have something better to do? Places to go? People to kill?”
She was tall and pale, with dark hair and dark eyes slit like a cat’s. She wore a long Elizabethan gown of green and gold. She was a thousand years old and as cold and cruel as a queen of faerie. Her House was Lachesis and her loyalty to my great-to-the-Nth-degree-grandmother was absolute. As with so many members of the Houses of Fate, Ravirn had died for her on the day Lachesis cast me out.
I forced a smile. “Hello, Phoebe.” Damned if I was going to call her mother.
What do you say to the woman who birthed you when she sees you as a walking corpse? If we’d ever been truly close, it might have been easier. I could have raged or cried or done something else equally dramatic. But for reasons structural, historical, and familial, we had little in common beyond blood and a few years in a shared house.
My mother’s sensibilities were formed around the time Charlemagne ruled France. She’d had more than a thousand years of living without a child before she had my sister and me, and only a score of years living with us. To expect her to feel for me as might a human mother who’d spent a fifth of her short life with her child would be profoundly foolish. Add to that the intergenerational warfare of my ancestors and my grandmother’s need to have all loyalty in her House flow first, last, and always to her, and our estrangement was no surprise. Despite that, seeing her hurt me. My usually glib tongue seemed to have found someplace else to be.
“Did you have something you wanted to say?” I finally asked.
She canted her head to one side and gave me her best disapproving stare. That was it.
“Look, Mom—I can still call you Mom, can’t I?—I don’t have all night. Make your point or get out of the way. I’ve played the hard-looks game with all three Fates, Hades, Eris, Cerberus, and”—I nodded at Tisiphone—“the Furies. On that scale you don’t even register.”
“You may not call me mom, mother, mater, or any other version of the term. When Lachesis disowned you, so did I.”
“Great. Then I’ll be going.” I moved to step around her, but she held up a hand.
“What you have done to our House is inex—”
“Your House, Phoebe. Not mine. Mine is House Raven, or didn’t you read the invite?”
“I’m not done,” she said, putting out a hand.
I stuck my untouched drink in it. “I am.” This time I went right on past her. It was that or punch her in the face.
“I blame your father’s blood for this!” she yelled after me.
“That was fun,” said Cerice, catching up to me as I ducked through the door to a nearby tent.
She sounded a little shaky, and after a quick look around revealed that Tisiphone hadn’t followed, I turned to take her hand.
“You OK?” I asked.
“Yeah, I guess so.” She looked down, away from my face. “I’m sorry. It’s just, that she’s so . . .”
“Difficult? Yeah, my mother could teach Ares a thing or two about starting fights.”
“Ravirn!” She glared at me.
“Oh, you mean Tisiphone. Sorry. I tend to forget she exists when we’re alone.”
“You’re impossible,” she said, but the tension was broken, and she smiled wistfully at me. “And we’re a long way from alone.” Her gesture took in the crowd in the new tent.
I caught her in my arms. “I really am sorry. She found me, not the other way around, rather like my mother.”
“All right,” said Cerice, relaxing into my arms and resting her chin on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, too.”
We stayed that way for a long time, clinging to each other despite the wild crowd around us, like an eye of calm in the heart of a divine hurricane. I treasured the moment. But it cut me as well, because when we finally broke apart, I caught the tiny flinch she couldn’t quite suppress as her gaze met the chaos in my eyes.
“About time.” Melchior was tugging on my pant leg. “Give me a boost.” He reached his hands up, and I lifted him into the bag. “I’d forgotten what a royal pain your mother can be,” he said before he went back to laptop shape.
“I hadn’t.”
Cerice let out a bitter little laugh, and I raised an eyebrow at her.
“Sorry. The whole thing just made me wonder how my mother’s taking my resignation.”
“Hard to say. Clotho’s not as tightly wound as Lachesis, and that’s reflected in her children. Besides, as I recall, you only quit the job, not the family. I was cast out fully and formally.”
“Not to mention unjustly,” she said.
