Kushiel's Justice - Jacqueline Carey [119]
I liked Dorelei. At least I'd allowed myself to learn that much. I liked her a great deal. She was quiet and thoughtful, but she liked to laugh, too. She was an easy person to be with, and exactly the person in private she seemed in public, steady and unchanging. There was no malice in her, and a good deal of kindness.
Did I love her? No. There was none of the obsessive passion I'd felt for Sidonie, soaring, searing, and absurd. I never felt my heart swell within my breast at the thought of her, never felt her name stitching an endless pattern through my thoughts. With the ollamh's bindings on me, I wasn't sure I could feel that way for anyone. But I wasn't miserable, either; racked with longing, struggling against the adamant shackles of unwanted love.
Anyway, all that seemed like a dream, now.
And it might be that love would grow between us yet, Dorelei and I. It wouldn't be the same. It would be a gentler thing, an easy fondness growing slowly into somewhat deeper. As Amarante had said, love wasn't always a raging tempest. It could be a safe harbor, too.
As we crossed Alba, I began to think mayhap that wouldn't be so bad. Every safe harbor I'd known had been stolen from me. My childhood home, my very sense of identity, my scholar's retreat in Tiberium. Even Phèdre and Joscelin's love had become a place fraught with dark undercurrents when I'd grown from a boy to a young man. There were worse things in the world than finding a lasting peace as Imriel, Prince of Alba, husband of Dorelei. Paradoxically, the very binding placed upon me had freed me to find that peace.
Things are not always what they seem, Berlik had said.
Truth was a riddle.
We arrived at the Stormkeep on a hot, sweltering day. Although it was only a day's ride from Bryn Gorrydum, it was an isolated place, perched on a high crag overlooking the sea. It had been a Tarbh Cró holding, once, but Drustan had granted it to Hyacinthe and Sibeal some years ago.
"Not the most welcoming place, is it?" Joscelin observed, gazing up at it.
"No," Phèdre murmured. "He found a taste for solitude.”
It had always been hard for me to reconcile the high-spirited, half-breed Tsingano lad of their memory with the man I'd met. But for ten long years, Hyacinthe had labored under a geas, apprenticed to the old Master of the Straits, studying the secrets of wind and wave written in pages of the lost Book of Raziel. When the old Master had died, his power and his curse had passed to Hyacinthe, binding him to an isle in the midst of the Straits; binding him to a life of eternal aging.
Phèdre had freed him from the curse, or I daresay he'd still be there. But there was no way to remove the burden of power, to restore the years of carefree youth he'd lost.
"Have you met him?" I asked Dorelei.
"Oh, yes." She nodded. "He's …imposing.”
The approach to the castle was a winding path up the crag. There had been defensive fortifications once, but the ditches were crumbling and silted and the drawbridges hadn't been raised for years. A man who could call thunderbolts down on his enemies had little fear of attack.
"Should we bring our escort or have them make camp here?" I asked Joscelin, uncertain what protocol dictated. "Is Hyacinthe even expecting us?”
"Phèdre sent a message," Joscelin said absently, shading his eyes and staring at the Stormkeep. He let out a laugh and pointed. "I'd say he is.”
I squinted. There were banners fluttering from three corners of the keep's single turret. Two were familiar: the Black Boar of the Cullach Gorrym and the lily and stars of Terre d'Ange. The third, I'd seen only once: a black field with a ragged crimson circle, pierced by a barbed golden dart. Kushiel's Dart. It had flown from Admiral Rousse's flagship when we'd sailed to rescue Hyacinthe.
"Damned