Is this what the blind suffer when they can finally see, he wondered. Terror and exultation?

As if she heard his thoughts, Imogen raised her head from his chest and laughed. It was a sound of unadulterated joy. Her eyes blazed in a face flushed with excitement. “I can hear your heart, Sire. It still beats, even now.” Her pale hands continued to stroke him as if he were made of the costliest silks instead of a body that should have turned to dust long before the stars changed their place in the heavens. “You live. I’ve touched you, yet you live.”

Cededa remained silent, letting her darkness surge through him and her hands flutter over him, light as moth wings. He’d give her this moment, this time to bask in the wonder of his unique resistance to her curse. And he’d drink the black tide and pray to dead gods that her fatal touch would somehow release him from his bondage.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Controlled mayhem swirled and eddied around Dradus as the men who accompanied him from Castagher set up camp on the edge of the forest not far from the deep chasm that separated them from the land on the other side.

Dradus sat his horse and stared at the wall of trees across the gorge. They were no different than those at his back, yet something hid in their concealing depths, vague silhouettes that were more than the slant of the sun through the trees. The odd hum that had flickered across his senses when he stood at Niamh’s grave sang a continuous melody in his head now, a tuneless canting without words that had grown stronger the closer he got to the gorge.

The girl remained out of reach. His scouts should have easily tracked her, following signs such as footprints, broken branches and crushed leaves. Nothing. There was nothing to mark her passage through the forest. She might as well have been a ghost.

She wasn’t, and it had taken the words of one to guide him here. The men who dug up Niamh’s grave fled the moment they shoveled away the last pile of dirt to reveal the blanket-wrapped body. The reek of decay made Dradus’s stomach heave but didn’t deter him from his task. Dark spells muttered in fading daylight dropped the air’s temperature from chilly to frigid. His breath steamed from his mouth in wispy clouds as he spoke the words that made Niamh’s body sit up, stand and shake off the blanket.

The horror that faced him made him stutter the words for a moment, but he completed the incantation and asked the all-important question. “Where is the daughter of Varn of Berberi and Selene of Castagher?”

Silence reigned long enough for Dradus to fear the spell hadn’t worked. He could hardly look at the rotting wreck of Niamh’s body as it stood just below him in the grave’s shallow pit. Her mouth didn’t move, but a woman’s voice finally answered him in dull tones.