Free Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) by Christian A. Brown Page B

to quiver in her seat as if she were receiving a current and stare through him as though he were made of air.
    By the kings, there is something wrong with her. Something is very, very wrong
, he thought. He had lost a wife, a daughter, and Mifanwae. He’d be damned if he would allow Morigan’s health to slip away as well. Thule shuffled out of his chair and clapped his hands to get her attention.
    “Morigan! What’s the matter with you?”
    He rushed over and took her hands, which were vibrating and humming like struck metal. Suddenly, she seemed to focus on him, her pupils as sharp as two silver spears. Her gaze skewered him to silence—peering, peeling, piercing his head. Thule had the sense of the room fading away, fringed in gray mist, and that was the last he knew before blinking into elsewhere.
    Now, when Thule appeared before her, Morigan came out of her fugue a bit. On his face, written in wrinkles deeper than his skin, she saw his desperation. She felt his fear rolling off him in a stagnant black cloud. A terror of losing her.
Why so much sorrow?
she thought, and wanted to understand. In her head, the bees buzzed louder, and the cogs of her brain slowed on one flash, a single window in her mind. Only this was not a window that she had ever looked through, not a memory that she knew, not one of her own.
    She fell into it anyway.
    She is in the tumbledown stone cottage. A place comfortable with its disrepair; its small bird-pecked holes in the roof that let in strands of sunlight and the songs of their makers, its grass-patched walls stuffed with an errant flower or two. All day the hearth crackles here, and it warms the stones and fills the air with the aroma of meat and peppery herbs of a meal that boils in a pot over the coals. Every sign of tender maintenance tells that the folks who live here care not for material things, that love is their wealth. Through a corner of the window, she can spy the tangled thicket, the spidery trees, andbeyond that, the shadows of a forest like a black mountain range. Beyond the safety of these walls lies the Untamed, Alabion, where all wicked and evil things dwell
.
    She recognizes that this is her home. But she has never seen Alabion. She knows it only from the tales her mother used to read to her. And yet, she knows it is Alabion that she sees outside the window
.
    A door behind her opens. She looks, and there is a woman as beautiful and earthy as a spirit of the woods, with chestnut hair, the eyes of a doe, and a trim figure. She is carrying a basket filled with roots, berries, flowers, and seasonings, all cleverly harvested from the safest, thinnest reaches of Alabion. At the sight of this woman, a flush takes her chest and loins, and she feels the faintest tug of meat between her legs
.
    (“Who am I?” thinks Morigan.)
    “Come help, Thackery,” says the woman
.
    (“Now I see.”)
    Thackery moves to join the woman at the hearth. She is unpacking her basket in a stone sink beside the hearth, and Thackery slips behind her, whispering, “Theadora is asleep, Bethany. Dinner can wait.”
    (A memory within a memory then, and Morigan sees Thackery’s young hands and lean arms tucking a dark-haired, blue-eyed darling of a child under woolen sheets. She is no older than a handful of years, this child, and with the gentle beauty—and nature, she feels—of Bethany.)
    Thackery kisses his wife (the sword between her legs rises). She returns the kiss with passion and then unexpectedly pulls away
.
    “My handsome Whitehawk,” she says
.
    (Bethany’s name for the man who has helped many of Menos’s caged birds fly to safety—including his wife. Morigan understands this without reason.)
    “Did you ever think you could be so happy with me? I was blessed once to find freedom. Blessed twice with your love. And blessed thrice with our child. I worry that the world will take away this dream that I have no right in living.”
    (Bethany has feared this before, remembers Morigan, and