asked, and taking her hand, led her from the water across the soft sand into the tent.
Cadi immediately came forward with soft white robes. She tossed the first one in Lara’s direction, and it immediately enfolded itself about her beautiful mistress. She did the same with the garment she held for Kaliq. “There are refreshments on the table, mistress, master,” she said to them. “Dasras needs my attention if you do not require my services any further.” Then with a smile she hurried from their presence.
Lara flung herself among the multicolored pillows surrounding the low ebony table. Reaching for the decanter of frine she poured them each a goblet, handing her companion one. The brass bowl that always sat upon the table was filled with fresh fruits, and Cadi had added a small plate of tiny crisp honey cakes. Lara reached for one.
“What is the matter?” Kaliq repeated the question.
“I don’t know,” Lara told him. “But I am filled with a sudden awareness that something of great portent is about to happen. I have not felt like this at all in the last century. I suppose I have grown complacent like an ordinary mortal.”
“Have you sought for an answer?” he asked her. He, too, had been afflicted the same way as she had. Something was changing, and not necessarily for the better.
Lara shook her golden head. “Nay, my thoughts have been too confused, Kaliq. I very much needed to come here to Zeroun to clear my head and contemplate what I must do. Even Ethne has been strangely silent, my lord.” She touched the crystal star pendant that hung about her neck, and it glowed but briefly as her fingers caressed it.
“Your thoughts, I suspect, have been deliberately confounded, and until you realized it, you remained in Terah. Fortunately, you are a strong being, and came to understand that something was not right. Lara, you must not dwell among the mortals any longer. I say this not just for my sake, for our sake, but for yours,” Kaliq said. “You must be clearheaded and strong for what is coming.”
“What is coming?” she asked him.
He shook his dark head, and his blue eyes were concerned. “Even I cannot answer that, my love, but it is past time we began to look again more closely at Hetar’s world. Their inability to learn from their mistakes has been discouraging. Both you and I have avoided looking too closely in recent decades because if these mortals cannot learn from their own errors, what is to become of them? But now I suspect the time is coming for us to involve ourselves with them once more.”
“I seem to have no more influence with either the Terahns or the Hetarians,” Lara told him regretfully. “As the years have passed my appearance has disconcerted them more and more, for they grow old, and I do not. They seem to have lost their belief in magical beings and our world. They have rewritten the history of Hetar to suit themselves. And the New Outlands is no better. Vartan and his faerie wife have been relegated to fiction. And once Noss and my daughter were gone, there was no one who remembered me among them. They think they have always lived in Terah, and as their way of life has changed little over the centuries, who is to nay-say them? It is as if everything we have done was for naught, Kaliq. I have made a grave error in remaining among the mortals. I should have disappeared years ago, appearing only when I was needed. Now I have become little more to them than an oddity. They attempt to ignore me as much as they can for my very presence disturbs them. But, Kaliq, my love, I could not leave while Magnus’s son lived. That small part of me that is mortal would have felt it a betrayal.”
“Yet Taj has been dead lo these four years,” Kaliq said. “You had no real affinity with your grandson, Amren, and even less with your great-grandson, Dominus Cadarn. Yet you remain in Terah. You do not belong in Terah. You belong with me in Shunnar.”
“In Shunnar I do not hear the voices on the wind that I need to hear to know that all is right with our world,” Lara told him. She sipped at her goblet thoughtfully.
“And what have those voices told you of late?” he asked her.
“They are suddenly silent, Kaliq,” Lara answered him. “That is why I have come to Zeroun. To regain my equilibrium, to sharpen my senses. They have grown dull with boredom, and complacent with the unchanging pattern of my life.”
“Something is amiss in the magical worlds,” Kaliq replied. “The winds blow in Shunnar as they have never blown before. There is a chill to them, and my fellow Shadow Princes grow restless of late, for none of us can find answers to all the questions that are whispering about us.”
“It is the darkness,” Lara said suddenly and with perfect clarity, and she shivered.
“Then certainly your son is preparing an assault against the light once more,” Kaliq said, nodding.
Lara no longer denied her maternity where Kolgrim, the Twilight Lord, was concerned. Her mortal children had never known, of course, nor did Marzina. But the son she and Kaliq shared knew of his half brother. Lara was glad that Dillon ruled the kingdom of Belmair, that bright distant star that shone down on the world of Hetar.
She need only worry about her youngest child, her daughter Marzina.
Kolgrim’s father had forced his seed upon Lara while she was visiting the Dream Plain. For this outrage he had been imprisoned for all eternity in a windowless dungeon deep within his own castle. No one knew he was there now except his successor-who had entrapped his twin brother with their father-Lara, Kaliq and several other members of the magical community. Lara had been pregnant at the time with Magnus Hauk’s son.
When Lara birthed twins, a son and a daughter, her mother had remarked how like a faerie ancestress the infant girl looked. Marzina was pale of skin, with black hair and eyes that eventually became the color of violets, while her brother was a golden child like their father, and his older sister, Zagiri. Everyone had accepted the word of the Queen of the Forest Faeries, and nothing was ever thought of how different Marzina looked from all of her other siblings. And Lara had never told her daughter the truth of her birth.
“What wickedness is he now up to,” Lara wondered aloud. “Has he not enough to do ruling his own turbulent kingdom? Certainly Ciarda gave him his son, and he is kept busy teaching the little devil all manner of wickedness.”
“Ciarda failed. She was not the chosen bride,” Kaliq said. “He killed her.”
“
“I did not consider it important,” he replied.
“Oh, but it is! It is very important,” Lara exclaimed. “Kolgrim is preparing to take his chosen bride, my love. That is the change I have felt. He has consulted the Book of Rule and learned where to find the girl. If we can find her first, prevent him from mating with her, there will be no new Twilight Lord. We can defeat the darkness for good! If I had known that Ciarda was dead, I should have thought of this sooner.”
“We cannot defeat the darkness entirely,” Kaliq said. “There must always be a balance between the light and the dark, Lara.”
“Because there has always been a balance,” he replied.
“That is not an answer, my lord. Would not a world without avarice and cruelty be good? A world whose inhabitants actually cared for each other rather than were jealous of one another, and sought to do harm to each other.”
“Mortals have not yet reached that strata, nor have those of us in the magic kingdoms, though we are much further along,” Kaliq said. “If there were no temptations, no reasons for striving or improvement, what would be the point of it all, Lara? Even the magical kingdoms must have a balance of dark and light.”
“Are you saying we shouldn’t prevent Kolgrim from siring a son?” she asked him.
“Your son has kept the peace for more than a century, Lara, and yet do you see an improvement in either Hetar or Terah?” Kaliq queried cleverly. “Have the mortals inhabiting those kingdoms grown kinder or more thoughtful of each other?”
Lara shook her head in the negative. “I despair,” she said.
He laughed, wrapping an arm about her. “You are too serious, my love,” Kaliq told her, and then he pulled her close, his mouth taking hers in a soft and sensuous kiss. He smiled against her lips as his kiss drew the tension from her body, and with a sigh she relaxed against him. Pressing her back against the colorful pillows the Shadow Prince undid the row of tiny pearl buttons that held her caftan closed. His lips wandered down her slender pale throat to bury themselves in the valley between her breasts. His tongue plunged between the twin orbs, licking slowly as he inhaled the fragrance of freesia, which she now favored. He adored her. He always had.
Lara actually purred with delight as he began to make love to her. She had not been with him in several months, and she could not now remember why that was. Reaching out, she caressed his neck with her fingers,
