Belladonna

Chapter Eighteen

Boredom gave birth to bravery.

The True Enemy had not found It. The male Enemy had not pursued It. The voices of the haunting dead entertained It, but no living humans had sailed into Its watery landscape recently, so there had been no minds to play with, no fear to savor. As It explored the borders of this landscape, trying to sense the presence of either Enemy, It remembered the delight of being among so many minds that did not know the Eater of the World, that were unaware of the source of the whispers that floated through the twilight of waking dreams, urging humans to make choices that would dim the Light a little more. Most of the humans It had encountered in the seaport called Kendall enjoyed the shiver produced by scary stories but no longer truly believed in the things that moved in the dark, ready to hunt them.

It would go back to Kendall and help them remember, give them a reason to believe.

And then It would feast.

The carnal carnival. The Den of Iniquity certainly was that—and more than a girl who had spent her life in Raven’s Hill could imagine.

The colored lights that gave everything a festive, make-believe quality. The people strolling down the streets—or performing in the streets. And the music! Oh, Michael played his tunes, and she liked the music of her own country well enough, but this! Hot and edgy, pumping through the blood and making the heart pound with the need to move with the rhythm.

And Teaser, all cocky and full of fun, teaching her how to dance while Michael got all stony-faced. Until Glorianna started dancing, too. That had changed the man’s tune fast enough. And did her prissy-prig—how she loved that word!—brother think no one had seen him kissing Glorianna after the dancing? Ha! So when Teaser…

“You’ve never been kissed?” Teaser had asked.

Caitlin shook her head.

Glancing around, he nudged her into the alley next to Philo’s place.

“It’s just a bit of fun, you know that?” he asked. “I don’t want to get into trouble for a little kiss.”

“In trouble with my brother?”

“No, with Sebastian’s auntie.”

The fact that Nadia could worry him tickled something inside her—and also made her feel safe. “Just a bit of fun,” she agreed.

Oh, it was more than a bit of fun, that first kiss. It started out sweet and gentle—and ended as hot and edgy as the music. Might not have ended at all if Michael hadn’t walked into that alley with Glorianna in tow.

Probably just as well that they had all spent the rest of the visit within sight of Sebastian’s auntie.

Caitlin stood at the end of Nadia’s personal gardens and breathed in the crisp morning air. Across a little stone bridge—which Lee had assured her was nothing more than an ordinary bridge—was the walled garden that protected Nadia’s landscapes.

Landscapes! According to Nadia, the world was made up of lots of broken pieces fitted together but not necessarily in a tidy way of one village fitting with the next if you kept following a road. Oh, no. Nothing as simple as that. And them—Nadia and Glorianna—sitting at a table with her last night and asking, as calmly as you please, what landscapes, what parts of her country, were held in her garden. How was she to know? And why was Glorianna so sure they would be able to reach the White Isle? How was she planning to reach it? Was she figuring to have Lee cart them around on his little bit of an island?

“Like a magic carpet with trees,” she muttered.

“Talking to yourself, Caitlin Marie?” Michael asked as he came up the garden path to stand beside her.

She stiffened. She’d missed him so much, had wanted to see him so much—and now he seemed like just another bully, the way he had yelled at her yesterday and acted like a surly dog when they all went to the Den last evening.

Thinking about the Den made her think about Teaser and that made her think about…

“You’re blushing,” Michael said.

“You had no right to be so mean to Teaser,” she replied, giving him her coolest tone. Not cold, because he was her brother and she wouldn’t be cold to him, but chilly enough to warn him off. “We weren’t doing anything wrong.” At least, not by the Den’s standards. Even Nadia had said as much, hadn’t she?

“Can we not talk about Teaser? I don’t need a sour belly so early in the morning. Here. I brought a peace offering. Will you accept?” He held out a mug of rapidly cooling koffee.

She took the mug of koffee but wasn’t sure if she was ready to warm to him. “Teaser was nice to me. The boys in the village were never nice to me.”

“He’s an incubus. There were things he was wanting from you that you wouldn’t be knowing anything about.”

“I’m not a child, Michael,” Caitlin snapped. “What he wanted was no different from what the boys back home wanted, but at least Teaser was showing me a good time, and he didn’t expect me to go down on my back!”

She saw pain slash across Michael’s face before he looked away, focusing on that walled garden that led to other parts of the world.

“The world has disappeared right out from under me, Caitie, and I’ve lost my balance,” he said quietly.

He hadn’t called her “Caitie” since she was a little girl. She hadn’t allowed him to call her “Caitie,” not since he’d taken up the wandering life. That had been his punishment for leaving her. But she didn’t have the heart to slap at him for it. Not when she was feeling lost too.

“I thought I knew my life,” he continued. “I thought I was resigned to the bitterness of it and the hardship of it and the fear that I’d enter a village just as I’d done for years but this would be the time the people would turn against me because I was a Magician, and all their troubles would be laid on my shoulders. I thought I was resigned to the things I couldn’t have because of what I was, and I had found a kind of contentment, even joy, when my being in a place made a difference to someone. But the world is so much more than I thought it was—and I’m not sure of who or what I am anymore. I’m scared for myself, and I’m scared for you. I’ve seen the monster, Caitlin Marie. I’ve seen the thing that wants to chew up the Light and leave us all in the Dark. And may the Lady of Light have mercy on us, because I don’t know how we’re going to stop that thing.”

Caitlin looked back toward the house and saw Glorianna and Lee heading toward her and Michael. There was still enough distance between them not to be overheard, but she lowered her voice just the same. “Do you think they know how to fight the monster?”

“I’m thinking if they knew, they would already be standing on the battleground. It’s clear from the things that were said—and not said—last night that they all think Glorianna is the key to fighting this battle.”

Caitlin’s breath rushed out of her, leaving her light-headed for a moment. As clearly as if she’d done it yesterday, she could feel herself as a girl sitting near the attic window, looking at an old storybook she’d found in a finely made wooden box, puzzling out the words with her newly acquired reading skills.

“The Warrior of Light,” she whispered, staring at Glorianna.

No.

Michael denied the words with all his will, but the truth of it clanged through him like alarm bells shattering a peaceful morning.

No, he thought, struggling to breathe. Glorianna is the key to finding the Warrior of Light, but she isn’t the Warrior.

“I remember now,” Caitlin said loudly. “The Warrior of Light must drink from the Dark Cup.”

Michael flinched, remembering the day he’d gone searching for Caitlin and found her sitting in the attic with the book open in her lap, crying for the woman in the story. Had she been old enough to understand the full tragedy of the tale?

My heart’s hope lies with Belladonna. She can’t be the Warrior of Light. Can’t be. Lady of Light, please let it be someone else.

“What did you say?” Glorianna asked sharply, hurrying those last steps to reach them. She stared at Caitlin. “The Warrior of Light must drink from the Dark Cup. Isn’t that what you said?”

Michael felt a wind blow through him. Felt Caitlin shudder in response to the force of it. Saw Lee tense and lean as if to bend with it. And saw Glorianna Belladonna standing before him—face cold, green eyes wild, a flame in the Dark.

A flame that would destroy everything in its path.

Then the moment passed, and he wondered if he’d just imagined that wind blowing through him—until he looked at Caitlin and saw the same conflict in her face.

He had imagined nothing. Something had happened. The world had changed, and nothing would be the same for any of them because he was standing in a garden in a part of the world he hadn’t known existed, looking at a woman who was the living version of an ancient tale that was part of his family’s legacy.

On his ninth birthday, his father, Devyn, had taken him up to the attic and showed him the box of books that held the old stories.

“I’ve little enough to give you, Michael,” Devyn said, resting a hand on the box he’d taken out of a specially made cupboard. “There’s this cottage, but it’s usually passed on through the female side of our family line. Since it came to me, I guess there are no others anymore who can lay claim to it. But this is just a place, boy. Just wood and stone. And if you have to leave it, let it go without regrets. But this…” He stroked the wood. “What’s in here is your real heritage.”

Devyn opened the box and took out a book. He set it on Michael’s lap, then opened it.

After turning a few pages to try to understand why this book was so important, Michael looked up at his father, puzzled. “They’re just stories.”

“Aye. To most of the world, they’re just stories, and you’ve heard them told here and there, since they’ve been spread across the land over the years. But the stories in that book you’re holding and the ones still in the box…Our family’s history is hidden in those stories. The heart of it, anyway, if not the ordinary truth of it. Do you know the story about the Door of Locks? Well, it’s like that, you see.” Devyn tapped a finger on the book. “We’ve got all the locks, but somewhere along the way we lost the key that would show us how they work.”

Michael took a long swallow of koffee to ease the sudden dryness in his throat. He had found a key of sorts, because he had the feeling that Glorianna would understand his family stories better than he did. But he wasn’t sure he wanted her to know those stories. He wasn’t sure he wanted her to be anything other than the woman he’d seen in the Den last night—vibrant, alive, and smoldering with sexual energy.

If he didn’t give her the stories, he might be able to keep the woman who was Glorianna.

In order to survive, the world would need the warrior called Belladonna.

Michael looked at Glorianna and knew she would never forgive him if he withheld the answers that would help her fight the Destroyer of Light. Even so, he would hide one story for as long as he could. But the other…

He cleared his throat to catch the attention of the people around him. “Before we get on with this journey, I’d like to tell you a story that’s been in my family for a good many years.”

Glorianna stepped off Lee’s island and took a half-dozen steps toward her garden before she spun around and headed for her house instead. They needed to be gone; there were things to do. But she couldn’t guide them to the White Isle while she felt so unsettled.

“I’m sorry it upset you,” Michael said as he caught up to her, “and I won’t pretend to know why it did. It was just a story, Glorianna.”

She stopped and faced him. Conflicts smashed inside her, like a stormy battle between sea and shore, revealing things she hadn’t known she was feeling until Michael had told them that story.

“You don’t know!” she shouted.

“Women have been saying that to men since the beginning of time, so is there something in particular that I should be knowing?”

She heard amusement in his voice, but it was the sadness in his eyes that made her bite her tongue to hold the words back, to hold the feelings back just long enough to shape a command. Ephemera, hear me. Thesewords, these feelings, are just storms passing through the hearts that are present. They change nothing.

Having done that much to protect her island, she flung at Michael all the turmoil inside her. “You tell me a story that’s been handed down in your family, but you have no sense of what it means.”

“That’s right. I don’t know what it means. I don’t have the answer.”

“You are the answer! Luck-bringer. Ill-wisher. Magician. You dress it up as a story with spirits and magic hills—which, considering the lineage of the Guardians and Guides, isn’t dressing things up so much. But you’re the spirit in the story, Michael.” She saw the shock in his eyes and knew she’d hit him with a big enough bit of truth, but she couldn’t stop. “You’re the one who helps people use the key inside themselves to open the Door of Locks—to take the next step in their life journey. To cross over to another landscape.”

“How?” he demanded. “How can I help them cross over to something I didn’t know existed?”

“I don’t know! Your landscapes aren’t broken!” She rammed her fingers into her hair, pushing and pushing as if she intended to shove her fingers through her skull and pull out the thoughts that plagued her now. Especially the one that made her hurt inside so much.

“Your landscapes aren’t broken,” she said again, feeling something squeezing her heart at the same time it was pushing at her ribs so hard she wouldn’t be surprised to feel bone break. “When the Eater of the World attacked the Landscapers’ school and killed all the Landscapers who were there, Mother and I were afraid we were the only ones left. And we could only tend the landscapes that resonated with us, so that left so much of the world unprotected. But we hoped there would be others like us in parts of the world that had been less shattered—and there are. You. Caitlin. There must be others as well, not just in Elandar but in other pieces of the world. But you don’t remember what you are. You don’t remember why you’re needed. And—” A sob broke through her punishing effort to hold it back.

Michael moved closer. “Say it,” he said quietly. “Get the rest of it out.”

“Your world isn’t broken.” The tears fell now, hot and fierce. “The Guides of the Heart shattered the world—broke it and broke it and broke it again until they were able to isolate the Eater of the World in one of those broken pieces and build a cage that would contain It. But they couldn’t leave that place unprotected, not with the Dark Guides hiding somewhere, and the power within them changed, got divided between the men and women somehow. They couldn’t leave that place. They couldn’t go home.” Her voice changed to a harsh whisper. “I have lived on that battleground my whole life. Lee, my mother, all of us here have lived on the s-scars of a war, and we’re reminded every day of what it cost to stop the Eater of the World.”

“And the rest of us only know it as a story,” Michael said.

She fisted her hands in his shirt, desperate to make him understand. “They broke the world, and they broke something in themselves by doing it. But your part of the world is whole and your gift is whole, and I don’t know how your part of Ephemera works. The Eater of the World is out there, Michael. It’s out there with no boundaries to stop It and no one who will recognize the signs of Its presence and It can go where I can’t follow because my world is bound by my landscapes and if I can’t stop It the Eater will change the world into a dark and terrible place and It can go anywhere now and I’m tired of living on a battleground and I’m tired of being alone and I—”

A storm of feelings broke inside her, and all the words were swept away.

There were some kinds of tears a man could accept easily enough, even be amused by in an affectionate way, but when a strong woman broke enough to reveal her pain, those tears were a fearsome thing to behold. And seeing the shock and confusion on Lee’s face was enough confirmation that the woman weeping in his arms rarely broke enough to cry, even in private.

A look at Caitlin was all it took to have the girl linking arms with Lee to draw him away.

“Cry it out, darling,” Michael said as he shifted slightly to settle Glorianna more firmly against him. “Just cry it out. You’ll feel better for it.”

I have lived on that battleground my whole life.

What must it be like to grow up in such a place, where you and everyone you loved was dependent on the caprice of the world? But it wasn’t the world, was it? It was the heart that made things, changed things.

“I’ve got you, darling,” he murmured as one hand moved over her back in comforting circles. “We’ll learn from each other, Glorianna Belladonna, and we’ll find a way to do right by the world.” And you don’t have to be alone now.

He felt her body tighten, felt her pushing against his chest in order to step away, get away, escape from the knowledge that she had shown a man she barely knew emotions she had kept hidden from her family.

“I have to wash my face,” she said, sniffling. “I can’t go to a landscape looking like this.”

He let her go, watched her run to the house. Even with her brother here, she wouldn’t leave without them. He didn’t think she would leave anyone, even kin, alone on this island. Not when that walled garden held the lives of so many.

“I’ve never heard her cry like that,” Lee said, coming up beside him. “I don’t think she has cried like that.”

“She’s cried like that before,” Michael said quietly. “But I’m thinking it’s the first time she’s let anyone witness the tears.”

“Maybe.” Lee stared at Michael, and the bewilderment of dealing with Glorianna’s tears gave way to a steely resolve. “She’s not like the other Landscapers. She’s more, and she was declared rogue because of it. Even now, with the world crashing down around us, the other Landscapers who survived won’t acknowledge her.”

“And you’re saying that if Caitlin and I learn from Glorianna, we’ll be tarred with the same brush?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

Michael looked at Caitlin, who was hovering nearby, and thought about a young girl shunned by the other children, a young girl who had found something far more wondrous than she knew when she had discovered Darling’s Garden. And he thought about himself and his desire to hear the music in one woman’s heart rather than experience the bodies of many.

“Well, then,” he said. “Since I’ve never enjoyed dealing with fools, it’s lucky for me that I met up with you first.” He hesitated, remembering what Nathan had told him just before that monster rose from the sea. “Lee, if it can be done, I’m thinking it would be better to go to Raven’s Hill first. I’d like to check on my aunt, who was injured in a fire, and see the cottage to find out if anything remains.” Like a box of books that might provide some answers.

“Does your village have a beach?”

“Aye. Nothing grand, mind you, but enough of one for those who want to wade in the sea or look for shells.”

Lee nodded and looked at Caitlin. “Then I think we have a way to get to your village.”