by Nora Roberts
prisoner slamming back against the wall, along with the chair he was chained to.
“For every thirty seconds of silence, I’ll give you pain.”
“I’m not afraid of pain.”
“Oh, you will be.” Cian jerked the chair and the man upright, kept his face close. “Do you know what I am?”
“I know what you are.” The man used his bloodied mouth to sneer. “Traitor.”
“That’s one viewpoint. But the important thing to remember is that I can give you pain beyond what even such as you can stand. I can keep you alive for days, weeks, come to that. And in constant agony.” He lowered his voice to a hiss. “I’d enjoy it. So let’s begin again.”
He didn’t bother to ask the question, as he’d warned he wouldn’t repeat it.
“Could use a spoon,” he said conversationally. “That left eye looks painful. If I had a spoon handy, I could scoop it right out of its socket for you. Of course, I could use my fingers,” he continued when that eye wheeled wildly. “But then I’d have a mess on my hands, wouldn’t I?”
“Do your worst,” the man spat out—but he’d begun to tremble a little. “I’ll never betray my queen.”
“Bollocks.” The shudders and sweat told him this one would be easily and quickly broken. “You’ll not only betray her before I’m done with you, you’ll do it dancing the hornpipe if I tell you to. But let’s just be quick and direct as we’ve all better things to do.”
The man’s head jerked back as Cian moved. But instead of going for the face as his quarry anticipated, Cian reached down, gripped the man’s cock. And squeezed until there was nothing but screams.
“There’s no one else! I’m alone, I’m alone!”
“Be sure.” Cian only increased the pressure. “If you lie, I’ll find out. And then I’ll begin to cut this piece of you off, one inch at a time.”
“She sent only me.” He was weeping now, tears and snot running down his face. “Only me.”
Cian eased the pressure a few fractions. “Why?”
The only answer was raw, rough gasps, and Cian tightened the vise of his fingers again. “Why?”
“One could slip through easily, unnoticed. Un…unremarked.”
“The logic of that has spared you, at least for the moment, from becoming a eunuch.” Cian strolled over, got himself a chair. After placing it in front of the prisoner, he straddled it. And spoke in conversational tones even as the man whimpered. “Now, this is better, isn’t it? Civilized. When we’re done here, we’ll see to those injuries.”
“I want water.”
“I’m sure you do. We’ll get you some—after. So for now, let’s talk a bit about Lilith.”
It took thirty minutes—and two more sessions of pain—before he was satisfied he knew all the man could tell him. Cian got to his feet again.
The would-be assassin was weeping uncontrollably now. Perhaps from the pain, Cian thought. Perhaps from the belief it was ended.
“What were you before she took you?”
“A teacher.”
“Did you have a wife, a family?”
“They were no use but food. I was poor and weak, but the queen saw more in me. She gave me strength and purpose. And when she slaughters you, and these…ants who crawl with you, I’ll be rewarded. I’ll have a fine house, and women of my choosing, wealth and power.”
“Promised you all that, did she?”
“That and more. You said I could have water.”
“Yes, I did. Let me explain something to you about Lilith.” He moved behind the man, whose name he’d never asked, and spoke quietly in his ear. “She lies. And so do I.”
He clamped his hands on the man’s head and in one fast move, broke his neck.
“What have you done?” Shocked to the pit of her belly, Moira rushed forward. “What have you done?”
“What needed doing. She sent only one—this time. If it upsets your sensibilities, you might want to have your guards take that out of here before I brief you.”
“You had no right. No right.” Her belly wanted to revolt as it had constantly since he’d begun the torturous interrogation. “You murdered him. What makes you any different from him that you would kill him without trial, without sentence?”
“The difference?” Coolly, Cian lifted his brows. “He was still mostly human.”
“Is it so little to you? Life? Is it so little?”
“On the contrary.”
“Moira. He’s right.” Blair moved between them. “He did what had to be done.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because I’d have done the same. He was Lilith’s dog, and if he’d escaped, he’d have tried again. If he couldn’t get to you, he’d kill whoever he could.”
“A prisoner of war—” Moira began.
“There are no prisoners in this,” Blair interrupted. “On either side. If you’d locked him up, you’d take men out of training, off patrol, to guard him. He was an assassin, a spy sent behind lines during wartime. And mostly human is generous,” she added with a glance at Cian. “He’d never be human again. If it had been a vampire in that chair, you’d have staked him without thought or hesitation. This isn’t any different.”
A vampire didn’t leave its body broken on the floor, Moira thought, still chained to a chair.
Moira turned to one of the guards. “Tynan, remove the prisoner’s body. See that it’s buried.”
“Majesty.”
She saw Tynan’s quick glance at Cian—and recognized the steely approval in the look.
“We’ll go back to the parlor,” she continued. “No one has eaten. You can…brief us while we do.”
“Lone gunman,” Cian said, and wished almost wistfully for coffee.
“Makes sense.” Blair helped herself to eggs and a thick slice of fried ham.
“Why?” Moira addressed the question to Blair.
“Okay, they’ve got some half-vamps trained for combat.” She nodded at Larkin. “Like the ones Larkin and I dealt with that day at the caves, but it takes time and effort. And it takes a lot of work and will to keep one in thrall.”
“And if the thrall is broken?”
“Insanity,” Blair said briefly. “Total breakdown. I’ve heard stories of half-vamps gnawing off their own hand to get free and back to their maker.”
“He was doomed before he came here,” Moira murmured.
“From the minute Lilith got her hands on him, yeah. My take on this was it was supposed to be a quick hit, suicide mission. Why waste more than one? Things go right, you only need one.”
“Yes, one man, one arrow.” Moira considered it. “If he’s skilled enough and fortunate enough, the circle is broken, Geall is without a ruler only moments, really, after it regains one. It would have been a good and efficient strike.”
“There you go.”
“But why did he wait until we were back? Why not try for me at the stone?”
“He didn’t get there in time,” Cian said simply. “He misjudged the distance he had to travel, and arrived after it was done. You were closed in by people on your way back, and he wasn’t able to get a clear shot. So he joined the parade, so to speak, and bided his time.”
“Eat something.” Hoyt dished food onto Moira’s plate himself. “So Lilith knew that Moira would go to the stone today.”
“She has her ear to the ground,” Cian confirmed. “Whether or not she’d planned to send someone to try to disrupt the ritual, and the result before Blair tangled with Lora is debatable. She was pissed,” he said. “Wild, according to our late, unlamented archer. As I’ve said before, her relationship with Lora is strange and complicated, but very deep, very sincere. She ordered an archer chosen for this while she was still half-crazed. Sent him on horseback for speed—and they have only a limited number of horses.”
“And how is the little French pastry?” Blair wondered.
“Scarred and screaming when the man left, and being tended to by Lilith personally.”
“Our informant, while handy with a bow, wasn’t particularly observant or astute. The best I could get puts Lilith’s main base a few miles from the battlefield. He described what seems to be a small settlement, overlooked by a good-sized farm with several cottages and a large stone manor house, where I’d say the gentry who owned the land lived. She’s in the manor house.”
“Ballycloon.” Larkin looked at Moira, saw her face was very pale, her eyes very dark. “It must be Ballycloon, and the O Neills’s land. The family we helped the day Blair and I were checking the traps, the day Lora ambushed her, they were coming from near Drombeg, and that’s just a bit west of Ballycloon. We would have gone farther east, to check the last trap, but…”
“I was hurt,” Blair finished. “We went as far as we could. And lucky for us. If she’d already made her base when we dropped in, we’d have been seriously outnumbered.”
“And seriously dead,” Cian added. “They moved in the night before your altercation with Lora.”
“There would have been people there still, or on the road.” It knotted Larkin’s stomach to think of it. “And the O Neills themselves. I don’t know if they’ve reached safety. How can we know how many…”
“We can’t,” Blair said flatly.
“You, you and Cian, you thought we should move everyone out, force them out if necessary, from all the villages and farms around the battleground. Burn the houses and cottages behind them so Lilith and her army would have no shelter. I thought it was cold and cruel of her. Heartless. And now…
“It can’t be changed. And I couldn’t, wouldn’t,” Moira corrected, “have ordered homes burned. Perhaps it would have been wiser, and stronger, to do just that. But those whose homes we destroyed would have lost the heart they need to fight. So it’s done this way.”
She had no appetite for the food on her plate, but she picked up her tea to warm her hands. “Blair and Cian know strategy, as Hoyt and Glenna know magic. But you and I, Larkin, we know Geall and its people. We would have broken their hearts and their spirits.”
“They’ll burn what they don’t need or want,” Cian told her.
“Aye, but it won’t be our hands that light the torch. That will matter. So we believe we know where they are. Do we know how many?”
“He started out with multitudes, but he was lying. He didn’t know,” Cian said. “However much Lilith may use mortals, she wouldn’t count them in her inner circle, or trust any with salient information. They’re food, they’re servants, they’re entertainment.”
“We can look.” Glenna spoke for the first time. “Hoyt and I, now that we have a general area, can do a locator spell. We should be able to get harder data. Some idea of the numbers. We know from Larkin’s trip to the caves and his look at their arsenal they were armed for a thousand or more.”
“We’ll look.” Hoyt laid his hand over Glenna’s. “But what I think Cian isn’t saying is whatever the numbers they have, whatever we have, in the end they’ll have more. Whatever weapons they have will be more. Lilith has had decades, perhaps centuries, to plan this moment. We’ve had months.”
“And still we’ll win.”
Cian lifted a brow at Moira’s statement. “Because you’re good and they’re evil?”
“No, and there’s nothing so simple as that. You yourself are proof of that, for you’re neither like her nor like us, but something else altogether. We’ll win because we’ll be smarter, and we’ll be stronger. And because she has no one like the six of us standing with her.”
She turned from him to his brother. “Hoyt, you are the first of us. You brought us together.”
“Morrigan chose us.”
“She, or fate, selected us,” Moira agreed. “But it was you who began the work. It’s you who believed, who had the power and the strength to forge this circle. So do I believe it. I rule Geall, but I don’t rule this company.”
“Nor do I.”
“No, none of us do. We must be as one, for all our differences. So we look to each other for what we need. I’m far from the strongest warrior here, and my magic is but a shadow. I don’t have Larkin’s skills, nor the steeliness of mind to kill in cold blood. What I have is knowledge and authority, so I offer those.”
“You have more,” Glenna told her. “A great deal more.”
“I will have more, before it’s done. There are things I must do.” She got to her feet. “I’ll return to work on whatever is necessary as soon as I’m able.”
“Pretty royal,” Blair commented after Moira left the room.
“Carrying a lot of weight with it.” Glenna turned to Hoyt. “Agenda?”
“Best to see what we can of the enemy. Then I’m thinking fire. It’s still one of our most formidable weapons, so we should charm more swords.”
“Risky enough to put swords in some of the hands we’re training,” Blair put in. “Much less flaming ones.”
“You’d be right.” Hoyt considered, nodded. “It will be up to us then, won’t it, to decide who’ll be—what is it?—issued that sort of weapon. Good men should be placed in positions as close to Lilith’s base as we can manage. They’d need shelter that’s safe after sunset.”
“It’s barracks you’re meaning. There are cottages and cabins, of course.” Larkin narrowed his eyes in thought. “Other shelters can be built in the daylight hours if need be. There’s an inn as well, between her base and the next settlement.”
“Why don’t we go take a look?” Blair shoved her plate aside. “You and Glenna can look your way, and Larkin and I can do a fly-by. You up for the dragon?”
“I am.” He smiled at her. “Especially when you’re doing the riding.”
“Sex, sex, sex. The guy’s a machine.”
“On that note,” Cian said dryly, “I’m going to bed.”
With a quick squeeze of Glenna’s hand, Hoyt murmured, “A moment,” then followed his brother.
“I need a word with you.”
Cian flicked him a glance. “I’ve had my quota of words this morning.”
“You’ll have to swallow a few more. My rooms are closer, if you would. I’d prefer this private.”
“Since you’d just dog me to my room and pester me until I want to rip your tongue out, your rooms will do.”
Servants bustled on the route between the parlor and bedchambers. Preparations for the feasting, Cian thought, and wondered if it was Hoyt’s talk of fire that put him in mind of Nero and his fiddle.
Hoyt stepped into a chamber, then immediately threw out an arm to block Cian from entering. “The sun,” was all he said, then moved quickly to pull the coverings over the windows.
The room plunged into gloom. Without thinking, Hoyt gestured toward a brace of candles. They flared into light.
“Handy bit of business that,” Cian commented. “I’m out of practice lighting tinderboxes.”
“It’s a basic skill, and one you’d have yourself if you’d ever put your mind and time into honing your power.”
“Too tedious. Is that whiskey?” Cian moved straight to a decanter, and poured. “Oh, such sobriety and disapproval.” He read his brother’s expression clearly as he took the first warm sip. “I’ll remind you that it’s the end of my day—well past it, come to that.”
He glanced around, began to wander. “Smells female. Women like Glenna always leave something of themselves behind to remind a man.” Then he dropped down into a chair, slouching, stretching out his legs. “Now, what is it you’re bound and determined to bore me with?”
“There was a time you enjoyed, even sought my company.”
Cian’s shoulders moved in something too lazy to be called a shrug. “I suppose that means nine hundred years of absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder.”
Regret showed on Hoyt’s face before he turned away to add turf to the fire. “Are you and I to be at odds again?”
“You tell me.”<
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“I wanted to speak with you alone about what you did with the prisoner.”
“More humanity heard from. Yes, yes, I should have patted his head so he could stand trial, or before the tribunal, whatever goes for the name of justice in this place. I should’ve invoked the sodding Geneva Convention. Well, bollocks.”
“I don’t know this convention, but there could be no trial, no tribunal on such a matter at such a time. That’s what I’m saying, you great irritating idiot. You executed an assassin, as I would have done—but with more tact and, well, stealth.”
“Ah, so you’d have slithered down to whatever cage they put him in and put a knife between his ribs.” Cian raised his eyebrows. “That’s all right then.”
“It’s not. None of it’s all right. It’s a bloody nightmare is what it is, and we’re all having it. I’m saying you did the necessary. And that for his trying to kill Moira, whom I love as I did my own sisters, and for putting an arrow in you, I’d have done for him. I’ve never killed a man, for these things we’ve ended these past weeks haven’t been men, but demon. But I’d have killed this one if you hadn’t been there ahead of me.”
Hoyt paused, caught his breath if not his composure. “I wanted to say as much to you so you’d know my feelings on it. But it seems I waste both our time as you couldn’t give a damn in hell what my feelings are.”
Cian didn’t move. His only change was to shift his gaze from his brother’s furious face down to the whiskey in his hand. “I do, as it happens, give several damns in hell what your feelings are. I wish I didn’t. You’ve stirred things in me I’d calmed too long ago to remember. You’ve slapped family in my face, Hoyt, when I’d buried it.”
Crossing over, Hoyt took the chair that faced his brother’s. “You’re mine.”
Now when Cian lifted his eyes to his brother’s they were empty. “I’m no one’s.”
“Maybe you weren’t, from the time you died until the time I found you. But it’s no longer true. So if you give those damns, I’m saying to you I’m proud of what you’re doing. I’m saying I know it’s harder for you to do this thing than any of us.”
“Obviously, as demonstrated, killing vampires or humans isn’t difficult for me.”
“Do you think I don’t see how some of the servants melt away when you’re near? That I didn’t see Sinann rush to take her child, as if you might have snapped its neck as you did the assassin’s? These insults to you don’t go unnoticed.”
“Some aren’t insulted to be feared. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t,” he insisted when Hoyt’s face closed up. “This is a fingersnap of time for me. Less. When it’s done, unless I get a lucky stake through the heart, I’ll go my way.”
“I hope your way will bring you, from time to time, to see me and Glenna.”
“It may. I like to look at her.” Cian’s grin spread, slow and easy. “And who knows, she may eventually come to her senses and realize she chose the wrong brother. I’ve nothing but time.”
“She’s mad for me.” His tone easy again, Hoyt reached over, took Cian’s glass of whiskey and had a sip himself.
“Mad is what she’d have to be to put her lot in with you, but women are odd creatures. You’re fortunate in her, Hoyt, if I’ve failed to mention it before.”
“She’s the magic now.” He passed the glass back. “I’d have none that mattered without her. My world turned when she came into it. I wish you had…”
“That isn’t written in the book of fate for me. The poet’s may say love’s eternal, but I can tell you it’s a different matter when you’ve got eternity, and the woman doesn’t.”
“Have you ever loved a woman?”
Cian studied his whiskey again, and thought of the centuries. “Not in the way you mean. Not in the way you have with Glenna. But I’ve cared enough to know it’s not a choice I can make.”
“Love is a choice?”
“Everything is.” Cian tossed back the last of the whiskey, then set the empty glass aside. “Now, I choose to go to bed.”
“You chose to take that arrow for Moira today,” Hoyt said as Cian started for the door.
Cian stopped, and when he turned his eyes were wary. “I did.”
“I find that a very human sort of choice.”
“Do you?” And the words were a shrug. “I find it merely an impulsive—and painful—one.”