The Damning Deed
Half past the twenty second hour, Jaed entered her sleeping quarters, the weight of her divine duty sitting heavily on her shoulders. There, on the glossy claret colored throws of her bed, she found a neatly folded letter, beautifully stained in cloudy gray. She sat down on her bed's edge and tugged off her thigh-brimmed boots before she opened it. Her normally impersonal, icy leer abruptly thawed into anger, disbelief, and finally silent captivation as she read the script—a single phrase—over and over. An ache grew in her chest.
Seyv al'ver heits.
Bathe with me.
According to The Lady's Ordinal, the time by which Cymmerian Law, and therefore all of Grenadyne, operated, there were twenty three formal hours in the course of a day. There was one extra hour known as "Mother's Moratorium" in which practitioners prayed. (The Stygian Calendar detailed all ceremonies, holidays, and pertinent dates beyond that.) It was said, that for the twenty fourth hour, time would stop to allow Dark Mother to hear all of her children.
The most crucial part of being Magistrate: never acknowledge remorse or guilt for any kill.
Jaed had killed many in her lifetime, and not one victim, no matter how passionately he or she keened, had managed to appeal to her feelings.
But this… this highly dangerous letter… managed to do it in three words.
She slowly raised her celestial gray eyes to the looking glass across the room, trying not to shudder. Jaed was Ashen, the longest lived Everlivian race of their world apart from the Di-eminence. Her flat ironed hair, loosely twisting over her left shoulder and banded near the end, hung white as milk, a testament to her age. All Ashen had white hair from birth. She was seven and a quarter centuries old, but her face still shone with youth, as if taking lives suspended her permanently in the prime of her own.
She cut a figure of perfectly symmetrical lean muscle beneath pastel porcelain skin. She wore the Magistrate's traditional uniform of red and black, which suited her figure well. She had remarkably thick, muscular legs that bowed attractively outward. Standing a head shorter than Father Kreed and perhaps two full hand-spans under Zenith Devynn himself, what Jaed lacked in height she made up for in nerve.
The radiant beauty of the magistrate—the last sight for anyone led into the Killing Hollow.
Jaed only just returned from there, a place only she was allowed to enter with the accused. Death sentences, no matter how severe the crime, were always carried out in private in accordance with Cymmerian Law. After an execution, tradition had it that whatever blood could be salvaged from the corpse was drained into a tub and kept warm.
Seyv al'ver heits.
Bathe with me.
Jaed ate, slept, and breathed Cymmerian Law. Why would she feel the need to deviate now? Her devotion mirrored that of Grenadyne's cleric, Father Kreed himself.
Jaed was a vicious, vicious woman. She had to be.
She arose, breezed to her hearth, lit the logs, and cast the parchment into the flames. There, she watched it burn until only ash remained. But the ache, stubbornly present in spite of the note's destruction, still throbbed. She knew she should ignore it. She knew she should feign indifference and retire to sleep.
So why did her feet carry her back to her door?
Painstakingly careful to stay out of sight, Jaed used her ghoulish grace to her advantage. The hour was too late for anyone but the servants to be wandering the halls, especially with yuletyde's bleak, bitter cold weather. She paused at two soaring doors of charcoal gray coalwood at the end of the west corridor to still the trembling of her hands and watch white gusts of her breath disappear in the open air.
She filled her lungs, mustered her nerve, and seized one dragon's talon handle. The door swung open soundlessly. Shutting it hastily, she set the lock, her fidelity to Cymmerian Law shaken with every action.
She turned and let her eyes pan across the opulent chamber before her, its vaulted ceiling and lofty hearth aglow with firelight. The walls, cut from pure pitch-rose quartz, simmered midnight red. The floor, like the door, was coalwood. Furnished with burgunpine pieces, blacker than the walls, the room had a dresser, wardrobe, and full-length looking glass. The appropriately sumptuous four-poster bed nestled in the corner closest to the gigantic west-facing window lay under a silky black fur blanket—the coat of a sloe lynx.
Even with the heavy drapes drawn, Jaed knew it was snowing.
The floor before the fireplace wore a wide, intricate woven rug. A grand silver chandelier festooned with black candles hung down from the center of the ceiling. Beyond and to her right waited another room, outlined with scarlet curtains tied back with cords, glowing from within with a soft, flickering light.
The aroma of fresh blood and fire wafted through the air.
When she came within view of the adjoining chamber, she saw that the coalwood ended and a floor of glistening onyx ore began. Everything else had been carved from slate stone. A grandiose bathtub lay ahead, adorned with floating black and red candles. The back of it beyond the immediate ledge towered higher than the front, ascending to a point almost like the back of a throne.
There he sat, facing her with the great peak at his broad back, lounging in the tub with his titan-like arms draped over the ledge, submerged from the navel down in gleaming red.
He kept his curly black hair short beneath a smooth brow and a shadow of a beard over his chiseled jaw. His amber stare—strong and penetrating—made him an inarguable vision… and Jaed had thought so for two agonizing centuries, ever since he came into power at only fifty years old. More temptingly, he was unattached.
Hazardous words lurked in her thoughts - Father Kreed's words. The truly Cymmerian cannot love. Once they love, they cease to be Cymmerian.
Jaed had never let the depth of her treacherous feelings show. She remained ferociously devoted to Cymmerian Law, immersed in her work and duties as Magistrate, answering his occasionally suggestive leer with surly glares or ignoring him as a man—not as her king—entirely. In all aspects of her life outside of this, Jaed appeared the perfect example of a devoted practitioner.
Now, that formidable fortitude melted just as surely as the wax of those candles.
This was wrong, so desperately wrong. Not the physical act of course (pleasure considered an integral part of Cymmerian Law) but the feelings behind the physical. Feelings of this nature were strictly forbidden, the antithesis of everything in the Black Tome, feelings said to cloud the senses, corrupt the mind, and bewitch the heart—feelings that could alter the very core of any individual and drive them out of the placid dark into the blinding fray of madness.
But those feelings were there. As surely as she breathed, they were there. He, Jaed wanted to assume, merely desired pleasure. And the catch of the matter? Because of her damned feelings, she couldn't deny him.
A silent understanding passed between them and Jaed turned to shut the scarlet curtains.
She stood in front of the tub of crimson, locked in that alluring stare, and began to disrobe before wading into the warm, viscos fluid embracing her body.
His eyes bore into her, cutting through every barrier she had erected like butter. She lifted her hand and hesitantly touched the hairline over his temple. She tenderly brushed her pale digits through his hair. His eyes began to drift and dart along the telling path from eyes to lips. Her heart raced. Her reservations fled.
Jaed met her zenith, her king, in a passionate kiss. From there, the forbidden revelry quickly spiraled out of her control.