“You’re going to be OK,” another voice said soothingly. She thought it might have been Fred.
She became aware that a cold slick of perspiration covered her skin, causing her to shiver. Somebody had placed an arm around her shoulder and was guiding her back into Stefan’s sitting room. It was Erik. In an uncharacteristically gentle voice, he said, “Just sit down here for a while and rest. I’ll get you a glass of water.”
She collapsed in a heap on the couch and concentrated on breathing in and out. Even her lungs hurt. When she finally blinked her eyes open, she could see four solemn faces peering down at her. The effect was almost comical. She chuckled weakly. “Guys, don’t worry. Really. I survived.”
Erik sat down beside her and handed her a glass of water. “Here, drink this.”
The water helped wash the awful taste of blood and bile out of her mouth. The blood of all those people the knife butchered had oozed into her own veins. She’d been psychically poisoned if there was such a thing, and her physical reaction was just the same as if she’d swallowed something toxic. Her body acted decisively to purge away all that foulness. She wished her mind could purge the memories away that easily.
Erik scowled at Stefan in reproach. “That artifact wasn’t just tainted. It was the granddaddy of all contaminated artifacts.”
Stefan looked sheepish. “I am so sorry, Miss Cassie. I did not know.”
She waved her hand weakly to reassure him. “Don’t worry about it. Comes with the territory. What doesn’t kill me makes me strong, right?” She gave a wan smile.
Griffin was standing over her looking skeptical. “A cold comfort that,” he observed dryly. “You appear far from well.”
She drank the rest of the water. Her head began to clear, and she sat upright.
“You’re still cold.” Erik had noticed her trembling hands. He hastened to the closet to retrieve an extra blanket. “Here, put this around your shoulders.”
Cassie accepted the wrap and bundled herself into it like a cocoon before speaking again. “There’s a lot to cover.” She rubbed her temples.
“You can’t possibly want to go over all of that now,” Griffin objected.
“Oh, yes I do. I can’t carry this bad energy around in my head. Better to get it out tonight so I can leave it behind.”
The scrivener didn’t argue the point. He settled himself on the arm of the couch while Erik seated himself on her other side. Fred and Stefan drew up two chairs. They waited in silence for her to choose her time to begin.
Cassie leaned her head back against the couch cushions. “This wasn’t like any trance I’ve ever been in before. Blips and flashes of events, of people. Most of them dying on the sharp end of that thing.” Her gaze traveled toward the table where the obsidian dagger rested so quietly. “I was being dragged backwards through its history, so I had to piece together a sense of what it all meant. It was like the knife itself had an emotion associated with it. Mainly anger and the only thing that quieted the anger was spilling somebody’s blood. And then the emotion in the dagger got transferred to everybody who possessed it. It was used for rituals by this Kurgan tribe. Whoever wanted to be the leader of the tribe had to use that dagger to kill the competition.”
“Although it’s an appalling practice, such trial by combat is not uncommon in patriarchal cultures,” Griffin commented. “Remember the Ottoman sultans who killed their own brothers to claim the throne?”
“But it wasn’t only men,” Cassie replied. “I don’t think they were all that patriarchal at the time when this dagger was in play. Not all the leaders of this particular Kurgan tribe were males. Everybody had an equal chance to be vicious.”
She laughed bitterly. “Once a leader died, the successor would be the one who was handiest with the dagger. The tribe passed it on from one generation to the next like some kind of unholy grail. It was a symbol to them. I guess you would call it a talisman. They believed that as long as they had that knife, it made them invincible.”
“Excuse me, please,” Stefan interrupted. “But this knife was found in a grave. It would not have been passed forward to anybody.”
“That’s because the last guy who had it ended up getting stabbed with it himself. Then all of a sudden, it was bad juju.”
“Bad juju?” the trove keeper repeated doubtfully. “I do not understand this expression.”
“Allow me to interpret,” Griffin said. “I think I’m becoming proficient in Cassie-speak.”
The pythia rolled her eyes.
“I believe she means it came to be regarded as unlucky. Its magic was broken. Better to bury it with its last owner than to pass it on.”
“You know that female body you found in the grave with the chieftain and the dagger?” Cassie looked inquiringly at Stefan.
“Yes,” he replied uncertainly. “She was most probably his wife.”
“She was more than that,” the pythia said. “She was also his killer.”
The men all looked startled.
“I only got flashes of what happened, but it seems that he had already been wounded in some big battle and was recuperating. She’d been captured during a raid and didn’t like being treated like prize livestock. While he was sleeping one night, she decided she would let him and his whole tribe know what she thought about the situation. She understood what a big deal the dagger was to them, so using it as the murder weapon was a way of giving them all a collective black eye. After she stabbed the chieftain, she ran off. Too bad she couldn’t outrun a horse. They caught up with her and dragged her back. Broke her legs so she couldn’t run away again. Then when they had the big funeral ceremony, they cut her throat
