by Daria Vernon
A terrible, meaty crunch deadened the air, but it was Beth’s assailant who was falling, after she struck a blow so fast and heavy that it spun her. Rhys dodged the falling man and reached for Beth.
Before his arms could wrap around her, he was met with a harsh pain cracking across the ridge of his cheekbone.
The iron tongs clanged noisily to the floor.
“Rhys!”
He pushed Beth away, thinking her still in danger, but looked down and saw that she’d felled the man completely. The man. Rhys swayed on his heels—the pain in his face was one thing, but the shock of seeing the other man’s face was quite another. Lionel. How?
Beth still stood where he’d pushed her. She panted. She hunched. The frothy voile of her skirts was marred by a spray of singes. Her features, smudged with ash.
Every bit his witch.
He must have smiled.
“Rhys, that’s very unnerving.”
“What is?”
“Your smile. Did I hit you very hard?”
She approached him, one hand already lifting tentatively to his cheek. “God, what have I done? I thought you were some awful henchman, I thought—”
“It’s fine,” he said, not really sure how fine it was. He’d not been hit hard, but he didn’t know how bad the burn might be. “I’m reminded of having a fire iron at my throat. You’ve a fondness for fiery, improvised armaments, don’t you?” He made a strange expression to test the pain in his cheek.
“I could have blinded you—”
“But you didn’t.”
“I could have killed you—”
“But you didn’t.” Rhys looked down at Lionel, still not really believing his eyes. “I’m not even sure you’ve killed him, thankfully. You don’t want that on your conscience.”
Something in what he said seemed to make her eyes go distant. It was a cold expression. It reminded him too much of the night before, when she’d broken from their embrace at the ball and left him wondering.
This time he pulled her into his arms and said nothing.
For one brief, sweet moment, she sank into him before pulling away. Her eyes were unlit. Darkened. Full of purpose.
“We’re not yet finished.”
Chapter 24
“I know.” Rhys wanted nothing more than to return to a certain pavilion with her and demonstrate his gratefulness that she was alive. But she was right. The night would not be over until Allison was safe. “I saw the note. Do you know where she is?”
Beth was already moving away from him, stepping over the stinking lump of man on the floor and moving from stall to stall . . . searching for something.
“She’s with Sol. He is alive. He’s taken her in a cart.” Beth pulled a bridle down from its hook and let herself into the nearest stall.
Rhys followed, curious. “We shouldn’t waste any time.”
“Then let’s get on with it.” She waved him closer and Rhys angled himself to see what she was doing. She couldn’t possibly mean to—
“You can’t just steal a horse, Beth.”
“Says the once-horse-thief. Besides, I stole yours that time, did I not?”
“And I never saw it again.”
“This will be different, we’ll return these.”
“Says the woman who was over-nervous to trespass in a tent.”
Beth cocked her head at him seriously. “Allison’s life is more crucial a thing than us getting our loins licked, Rhys.”
Touché.
Beth pointed to a stall that she had a good view into. “That one. Try him.”
But before Rhys took to horseback, there was something else that needed being done. Taking a length of rope from a hook, he walked to Lionel. The man had begun to moan and snarl in his skull-bruised sleep. Rhys wrapped the goblin tightly before dragging him to a spike in the blacksmithing area that he could be secured to.
Looking now at Lionel’s wretched face—which reflected the quality of his soul in every measure—Rhys couldn’t remember what had once possessed him to protect such a man. He patted him on the shoulder. “You’re under arrest.” Another moan. That would have to suffice for now.
When Rhys joined Beth outside, she was facing down the road that ran alongside the village. He turned his horse in the other direction, where the road stretched to the horizon. “This way,” he said. “No wise person would drive a captive back through town.”
“Are we counting Sol a wise person?”
Rhys sighed. Sol wasn’t like Lionel. He’d once been a better man, a smarter man, but he’d never quite recovered from the sour lifestyle of prison. “He may be quiet, but he was never a simpleton.”
Beth resettled herself, her skirts riding nearly to her knees while astride. “Well Rhys, we’ve a cart to catch up to. It seems time that you show me how to be a proper highwayman.”
Beth’s stomach twisted at the reality that her dear cousin, practically a sister, was out of sight. A victim to the swirling unknown.
She stole a glance at her riding partner. Eyes forward. Mouth firm. Stray hairs whipping at his cheek. A paragon of intent. Was this how Rhys had looked when riding toward her carriage three years ago?
The long, rolling strides of her horse brought with them the small thrills of times past. Memories of youth. Memories of Rhys. Memories of every time that she’d ever done something secret or bold.
Guilt reached out for her, to scold her for the fond feelings that suffused her furiously rushing blood in such a dire time. But it was just such feelings that were her armor against fear. Guilt and fear—dash them both to hell. Her horse surged into a faster run, as if it, too, felt freshly unburdened.
The road grew rougher. The leas opened up before them, bleeding indiscernibly into a nighttime sky that cloaked the stars in clouds. Allison was out here somewhere, in what suddenly seemed a very dark and large world. But Beth had been out there once too, and had found her way home.
“We’ll find her.”
Beth turned at Rhys’ voice. He’d read her thoughts and now she had a glimpse into his. His eyes were shadowed, but she knew that he held her gaze there, before looking back to the road.
“Ho!” He brought his horse up, nearly sliding to a stop.
Beth pulled up ahead of him, her heart pounding. Why stop? There isn’t time to stop. But she tried to trust him as he studied the dark road silently. Then she saw what he saw, the hint of a fork in the road.
She walked her horse up to his, to get a closer look at the split from the main road. An overgrown trail. Nothing but muddy ruts separated by the width of an axle—a dark mass of weeds and wildflowers flourishing between.
“I see it. Do you suppose—”
A gentle hand on her wrist stopped her speech. Rhys raised a finger to his lips. He craned his neck, lending an ear to the darkness.
Beth did the same, holding her breath to hear the air—the skitter of some vermin in the gravel, the resettling of her horse’s weight on its hooves, a light whistle of wind, and—
There.
The distant jangle of a cart’s wheels on uneven terrain.
The two of them flew off of the main road without any discussion. We’re coming, Allison.
The clouds shifted to bless their mission with more moonlight. The creaking complaints of the old rig grew louder until they spotted its boxy rear. A canvas sheet in the back glowed in the gray night.
A bald head looked over a hunched shoulder, and the cart lurched to gain speed. Its back end began to dance like a devil on coals, unable to withstand the old road.
Beth pulled ahead until the bed of the cart was just beside her knee. Allison was under that sheet. She had to be.
“Beth, don’t!” Rhys called out to her—the call of a man that now seemed to know her thoughts before she did. A man that probably knew she was going to jump anyway�
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Beth fell against the canvas and was mostly met by the plank beneath it. But to her side, a squirming mass of bony elbows struck out at her. Like a kitten beneath a counterpane. Allison.
The rough ride rattled Beth’s every bone as her fingers searched for a corner of the canvas. Whipping it aside, she was met with Allison’s saucer eyes. Beth tore a cloth from her cousin’s mouth.
“Oh, Beth—” Allison’s features crumpled as she rolled into Beth’s arms.
Beth spotted Rhys over the lip of the cart. He was reaching out for Sol’s collar. The men painted the night with curses that they flung at one another over the din of the wheels.
The planks beneath Beth suddenly bucked, and a groan turned into a CRACK—the cart’s reckoning was at hand. The whole thing jerked from the road, and Beth hugged Allison to her chest, wrapping every limb around the tied girl.
Another fierce sound—and then an eternity spent in motion after everything else stopped hard . . .
Rhys stared into his old shipmate’s gray eye.
Sol swatted at him and missed. “Off me! Ya cursed bastard—”
“It’s over. Lionel is done!”
Sol’s features went slack. For a fleeting moment, Rhys felt the harsh weave of Sol’s collar, but his fingers never had a chance to close around it—
CRACK.
The cart bucked harshly and peeled away, out of control, off the road.
Beth.
Every moment seemed to happen on top of the last, and Rhys felt as though he were miles away when the cart struck a tree and tipped halfway into it, surely ejecting its contents, one and all. The ground felt as molasses as he rode to catch up, as his eyes searched the scene ahead for the spills of silk and voile that he prayed would still be rippling with movement and breath.
Sol be damned, wherever he’d landed.
Rhys frantically dismounted. The cart was empty. He looked in every direction, and there, beyond the tree, caught sight of it. Pink and white and yellow, hair both dark and blonde, tangled together. Beth was curled around her precious cousin like a seedpod.
As he knelt beside them, Allison’s eyes flickered open. Rhys stretched a trembling hand toward Beth’s shoulder. Would it rise and fall with her breath? He squeezed it, unsure. He couldn’t sense anything past the miserable, pounding swell of his own pulse.
Allison’s eyes flitted between his concerned gaze and Beth’s sealed lashes.
“Beth?” she squeaked. She rocked in her cousin’s arms, as though to rouse her, but her arms were still bound. Rhys freed her hands from their ties. The girl looked over her shoulder at him, and he knew her question would be unbearable, “Is she . . . ?”
Rhys had no response. He didn’t know.
Allison held her cousin’s face. “Beth?”
Rhys squeezed Beth’s arm again, more tightly. The sliver of her old scar gleamed silver in the moonlight. The sight of it usually made him guilt-ridden and ill, but now it was a different sort of reminder—
You’re too strong for this, Beth. Too legendary.
A cool wind whisked past them all. The early quakes of sobs began to work their way up Allison’s body. When the first whimpers of those sobs broke into the air, they dragged Rhys into the same purgatory. The wound on his cheek burned as a salty bead slipped past it.
Rhys traced the scar at Beth’s collarbone, moving upward to her neck. It still felt warm and vital, but Rhys knew his mind wanted—needed—things to be a certain way, and he couldn’t tell if it was real. Couldn’t tell if—
Her neck tensed beneath his fingers, and the faint rumble of a groan travelled up her delicate throat. Then Beth tugged her cousin into an even tighter embrace, were it possible.
Rhys’ relief was so blunt a force that he nearly choked on his own gasp.
“Beth!” Allison’s eyes squeezed out the hovering tears as they clutched at one another.
Beth’s eye caught Rhys’ for a moment, a look injected with so much meaning that it dizzied him.
The women began to touch one another’s faces and hands frantically, checking that they were safe and intact as tears of joy began to spill from each of them. Rhys stood, feeling like an interloper yet unable to look away from their reunion.
“You came for me, Beth,” cried Allison, through her copious tears of relief.
“Of course, sister.”
“Did you hit your head? We aren’t sisters.”
“But we are,” said Beth, certainty ringing through her voice. “We are. You are as near to me as any sister.”
Rhys marveled at the moment. He felt his heart being pulled toward it—pulled toward Beth and her love. He was a ship on a forbidden sea, and her love was a maelstrom that would pull him to the depths. She was his center. And there was no escape.
He wanted her, and a life, and a family that felt like this.
Somehow, he tore himself away, leaving them to their glad reunion on the grass.
Rhys spotted another mass on the ground. Old Sol. His fate required no assessment beyond the first glance. This was the sort of family Rhys was accustomed to. Cold and wicked and deserving of such ends.
The tarpaulin that had concealed Allison in the cart was still crumpled nearby. Rhys dragged it over Sol.
“I’m sorry that our mutiny has ended here.”
A hand slipped into the crook of his elbow.
“You aren’t responsible for the choices he’s made.” Beth looked up at him from her place at his side. Her hair was tangled and littered with nature, just as he liked it. “He chose everything that led him here. It isn’t your fault. And he wasn’t yours to save.”
Some part of him knew it, but the fates of the other men had been his only excuse when he’d turned to highway robbery. His excuse for stopping Beth’s carriage that night, for haunting her—stripped of such excuses, what sort of blackguard was he?
With a warm palm against his sore cheek, all of his thoughts stilled at once.
“Everything happened as it had to.”
And he believed her.
He faced her, his hands traveling up and down her arms and shoulders, checking.
“Are you hurt?”
“Yes. My ribs could not sufficiently cage a bird right now, but I’ll be fine.”
She said it with as little gravity as tossing forth an offer of afternoon tea. He knew it might risk a painfully deep breath against those aching ribs, but—
He lowered his lips to hers and she floated up to meet him. To accept him.
The pain was nothing. Nothing at all compared to how it felt be alive and in his arms. Nothing compared to knowing Allison was safe—safe and still very much herself.
“Well, I suppose I must write off this new caraco as a loss.” Beth turned to see her dearest friend fruitlessly dusting her yellow frock. Allison looked up, too, and cocked her head fondly at their embrace. “You see, this is what I’d like someday. A man like this.”
Beth put her face in her palm, as proud of Allison’s boldness as she was wincing at it. Yet the man she leaned on began to tremble with laughter.
“If you secure a man like this,” said Beth, “you’ll have to make yourself more accustomed to the constant ruin of your wardrobe.” Allison gazed at Rhys almost reverently, and it sent a spark of pride through Beth as she leaned into the man beside her.
Allison suddenly gasped. “You really did kill a wolf, then, didn’t you?”
“She did,” said Rhys.
“I didn’t always believe it, but you came to my rescue and I’ll never doubt another word you say for so long as I live.” Allison caught a glimpse then of the substantial lump beneath the canvas. “My God! You didn’t also—”
“No. She did not,” said Rhys.
“Your abductor didn’t fair as well in our accident, Allison.” Beth stroked a hair from her cousin’s face
. “Did he hurt you at all?”
Allison shook her head, and her voice fell, weary. “May we go back now?”
Beth decided it best that they walk the horses back to town. She may have cast her reputation to the four winds, but perhaps some shred of Allison’s good name could still be spared, provided they not ride into town astride, with Allison in one of their laps.
Allison walked lightly ahead, seemingly unbruised from the massive toss they’d experienced. The benefits of being a decade younger, perhaps. Beth bit her lip as another inhale pressed against her battered ribs.
Rhys walked ahead too, only occasionally throwing a look over his shoulder to pull Beth along with his eyes.
If any other man left any other lady behind him on the road like this, he might expect to find himself swatted by a fan. For Beth, it was perfect. He didn’t fuss over her simply for the sake of her sex. They were instead like two children. Equals in fort building and footraces. Like she and Dyckson once were, before the realities of adulthood had intruded.
And reality would intrude here too, wouldn’t it? After all, there was a dead man in the brush.
Rhys cut a tempting figure from behind. Beth wished to pull herself toward him, to join him at his side, yet the more she desired it, the more her footfalls seemed to drag. Why did he always feel so distant, even when right there?
He looked over his shoulder again. This time he stopped and waited for her.
“Are you certain you’re well?” He extended a hand to her as she inched his way. She nodded and her loosened hair flopped in front of her face. He brushed it aside for her.
“Rhys?”
He waited. Eyes full of unbearable patience.
She recognized what she felt now, and it felt hardly any different from fear—
She loved him.
“I haven’t told you yet.” She swallowed and placed a hand on his arm.
“Told me what?”
That I love you. “That I’m leaving.”