Page 103 of Disillusioned
Myrddin’s defensiveness shifted to anger, his blond beard quaking. “I would have been a dead man to tell him no, Your Majesty. He would have tortured me until he got his way. I might have my pitfalls, butIam the reason Rennes is not steeped in blood tonight.” His eyes flitted to Bastion, who glared at them both. “Indeed, one of my powers is clairvoyance, but I am bound by the laws of the Old Faith from telling anyone of the future. I am only allowed to advise and direct, but that hasn’t stopped the great kings I’ve been indebted to from trying to extract the information from me, however they see fit.”
“So your great advice was to trap them together until she ended up dead or enthralled,” Bastion spat.
Lilac said nothing, shivering against the sudden cold.
“I did what I had to. As did Lilac and Garin. I can tell you things about events passed, and possible outcomes that are no longer. What I can tell you is that Garin would not have stopped here. He would’ve stayed a few more hours, drank his fill. Then, as he slowly realized the blood he spilled did not fill him, he would’ve fled into the night, killing as he went, diverting to your castle at the end. He would have struck your army down until you had nothing left to fortify yourself against France. Then, their country would be theleastof your concerns.”
“He wanted my blood.”
“He wanted,” he corrected, “with an uncontrollable desperation and hunger, to simply find you. It seems you both were driven by the same urges.” He craned his head, contemplating. “You broke through his entrancement, did you not?”
She thought of Garin’s words. Those tonight, and the threat she’d thoughtwas empty, meant to scare her when he’d cornered her in his grotto. She was unable to help herself from imagining it.
She closed her eyes, only to discover a vision?—
Garin, striding up to the chateau gate, unarmed, asking to see her. He’d ask once. A glint of blades in the moonlight as the guards refused, laughed, and in a flash of black, him tearing through their flesh with his teeth and hands before they got close enough to see the red of his irises.
Lilac tried to open her eyes, but the vision remained.
He was in the corridor before the Grand Hall, veering right for the throne room, where her parents often entertained their closest guests.
“Stop,” Lilac begged Myrddin, as Garin—the ghoul of him—stalked toward the stone doors. “I understand.”
The vision eased. Bastion stood next to her, looking just as unsettled.
“Better here than there. And through all that chasing, his bloodlust would have grown so great that when he finally cornered you, he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself. The urge to complete the bond drove his endless hunger, but your death would’ve been another solution to free him, wouldn’t it?” The warlock’s question hung in the night grown silent.
“We both had the Dragondew Mead tonight,” she added. “I, no more than a few drops, him, possibly more. Two guests who’d tried to seduce him put it in his drink.”
“Ah,” said Myrddin, understanding immediately. “That certainly would have complicated things. The effects of the plant were likely made more potent. But it probably saved you time, if not your life. His lust for you would have recentered him from his hunger, but not for long.”
There were shouts for water in the background, and she thought the blaze dimmed slightly, the hiss of a suffocating fire and billowing smoke sounding above them. But she couldn’t look away from the warlock, both intrigued and terrified at the unyielding magic that had befallen them tonight.
“Why was there the urge to complete the thrall bond in the first place?” Lilac said, her voice barely audible.
,“There usually exists some form of yearning for one another’s company once a first level bond is initiated, thus the need to watch and keep the potential thrall and regnant apart,” he explained, stroking his beard. “Butan instant bond like this is rare, if it has ever existed before. Either way, it was better you found him early.”
She steeled herself against the mixture of emotions that followed, even as the weight of being Garin’s thrall bowed her shoulders. The memory of his control over her upstairs made her insides clench with both fury and longing. A shard of pain spiked at the right side of her throat, where Piper and Garin had sunk their teeth into her—where Kestrel had dug his inch-long claws into the bloodied meat there and held her windpipe shut at Cinderfell.
She looked down at herself, distantly wishing she’d worn one of Garin’s self-cleaning kirtles. She wascoveredin blood, hers and his.
Myrddin’s outstretched arm appeared in her periphery; she blinked the tears away and looked at him questioningly.
“May I?” he asked, holding his hand out.
“Don’t do anything to hurt her,” Bastion warned. “You’ve already signed our names in blood by staking Garin in the fucking kidney.”
“Don’t remind me.” He gave a curt nod to Lilac. “Your Majesty, would I steer you wrong?”
She refused to answer his irony, but waited for further instruction.
Myrddin waved his hand in the air, first in a circular motion, then what looked like half a square before he pushed his palm toward her. She flinched as a tingling sensation enveloped her feet, then began climbing up her legs.
Lilac gasped; before her very eyes, her shoes and skirts were clean, perhaps even more neatly laid and freed of wrinkles than they’d been when she’d left the castle. The sensation continued up her torso, her arms, chest, all the way to the top of her head, until not a speck of dirt, sweat, or blood was felt upon her body.
She spun, regarding herself. “That is quite impressive, Myrddin.”
“It’s only an illusion. Nearly the same type derived by Adelaide’s tonic. The same disenchantment rules apply—the moment you ingest food or drink, it wears off. This is to get you home without needing to answer questions.”
