“What would you have me say?”
If she could keep him talking, she had a chance. He loved the sound of his own voice. If she could get him to carry on, pontificating, he’d say something that would enable her to answer any question he might ask.
“Did you lie with Chase Noble? Is that why you were abed in my keep?”
Her heart stopped. “Why would you ask me such a—”
“No!” he hissed, grabbing her elbow to jerk her toward him. “No twists upon yer words, sister. Yes or no. Did you sleep with him?”
His breath came in great heaving pants, buffeting her face with each exhale.
“This is no the sort of question—”
“Yes! Or! No!” he yelled, and it felt as if the very walls of her tower shook.
“Yes.”
She had no way to restrain herself from speaking the truth. It was the curse of her gift.
“Did he force yer favors or did you give yerself to him freely?” His fingers bit into her skin as he ground out the question, his voice quiet with deadly intent.
“Freely.” It mattered not now. All her secrets were revealed. “I offered myself to him freely.”
He reached to her neck and fastened his fingers around the cord hanging there to rip the bag from her. The cord sliced into her skin before it gave way and he held it aloft, baring his teeth.
“And these paltry bits of wood? They’re to represent the two of you together, are they no?”
“One for each of us, yes.”
“Yer but a Tinkler whore.” He spat the epithet, and threw the bag to the floor before shoving her to her knees. “After all the years I’ve denied myself what I wanted, you tainted yer purity by giving yerself to that commoner. Yer no better than yer mother.”
She glared up at him, no longer making any attempt to disguise her hatred and loathing. “Given the choice, brother, I’d rather be a Tinkler whore than a wastrel who murdered his own father. I ken what you did to our father. I saw with my own eyes when I traveled the Visions of Urd’s world.”
She’d seen it all. Seen him prepare the potion and slip it into their father’s ale. Seen him wait, watching over Alfor’s final moments.
His expression changed as she spoke, as if calm determination had replaced whatever he’d felt before.
“Perhaps you’ll beg for Alfor’s fate before I’ve done with you, Christiana.” He dropped to his knees in front of her as he spoke, a vile grin curving his lips. “When Ulfr and Artur return with Noble’s severed head, I’ll present it to you as payment for the gift yer about to give to me.”
“What gift?”
“The only one that’s fair. The only one I want. The commoner sampled yer pleasures, and now so shall I.”
Surely he only sought to frighten her.
“But yer my brother,” she denied, attempting to scramble back from his grasp. “My own blood. Even you canna consider such an abomination.”
He laughed. “I am Torquil of Katanes, heir to Odin. I can do anything that pleases me. And right now . . .” He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her face to within inches of his. “Right now nothing will please me so much as having you.”
She swung her cup at his head but he deflected her attack with his shoulder, shoving her to her back, banging her head to the floor and knocking the wind from her lungs before he crawled on top of her.
His knee pressed down, forcing her legs apart as she struggled to catch her breath.
She wasn’t strong enough to fight him like this. She needed a weapon.
The pot! It was small but heavy, and the iron would still hold the heat of the fire.
She stretched out her arm and her fingers closed around the handle, waiting for her chance.
When he lifted his hand from her shoulder, she swung the iron pot up and around with all her strength.
The pot caught him in the center of his back and he yelled out in pain, arching away from her.
As his weight shifted she kicked for all she was worth, shoving him, the blankets, everything toward the fireplace as she scrambled to her feet and ran for the door.
He roared in anger, recovering much faster than she had hoped.
His hand tangled in her hair, jolting her to a stop and dragging her back to him, slamming her against his chest.
“Nothing worth having is worth having without a fight, is it, little sister?” he panted into her ear as he wrapped one arm around her midsection and slammed her face-first onto the table.
She lifted her arms just in time to shield her face but the table edge caught her across her stomach, forcing the wind from her lungs. Before she could move, Torquil’s weight was on top of her, his arms pinning hers above her head, his mouth hot next to her ear.
“You canna escape me, little sister. I’m as willing to take you from behind as from the front.” With his free hand, he lifted the skirt of her nightgown to trace his hand up her bare leg. “At least the first time.”
“No, no, no!” she screamed, bucking her head back toward his, rejoicing when she hit his face and he grunted in pain.
Her short-lived joy evaporated when he laughed, a humorless, vindictive sound, as he twisted one of her arms up behind her to immobilize her by leaning his weight against it. She gasped for air, feeling as if her arm would rip from her shoulder, and choked as her lungs filled with the acrid taste of smoke.
She couldn’t move. She couldn’t catch her breath to scream. Her only escape was to plunge headlong into the rage-filled chasm within her mind.
Thirty-seven
FOUR OF THEM follow us.”
Chase nodded in acknowledgment as Halldor pulled up beside him. They’d almost reached the gates of Tordenet.
“Five. Sorry,” the big man corrected with an embarrassed grin. “Two of them canter in unison. It’s an easy enough mistake.”
The guy must have the most sensitive ears of anyone ever born.
“How much time before they get here?”
Chase wasn’t concerned about dealing with five men; he and Hall could make a quick enough business of them. But once Ulfr’s men arrived, Chase had little doubt they’d put up a call of alarm—and fighting his way through an entire garrison while he hunted for Christiana would slow his efforts considerably.
“Not long. I say we head for the keep once we’re through the gates. I’ll take the laird’s tower. I’ve an interest there of my own.”
“Fine,” Chase agreed. “I’ll take his solar—and his bedchamber. And I swear to God, if that’s where I find her, there won’t be enough left of that son of a bitch to fill a piss pot.”
“Best you hold off on confronting Torquil until after I’ve been to his tower, aye?”
They’d reached the gates, leaving Chase no opportunity to pursue Hall’s odd piece of advice.
“Open!” Hall’s command boomed up to the guard on the wall walk and the chains rattled in response.
As soon as the metal grate rose high enough, Chase urged his horse forward quickly, Hall at his side matching his pace. They rode straight to the keep, and at the base of the stairs, he leapt from the horse’s back, hitting the steps at a run. Hall’s feet hammered behind him as he reached the top landing and fastened his hand upon the door.
“Go on,” the big man urged. “I’ll slow them down for you.”
Chase turned and saw five riders galloping toward them, their horses covered in lather.
“Go!” Hall yelled over his shoulder.
With one last scan of the courtyard, Chase pushed on the heavy door and slipped inside. Once the door swung shut, no sound but his racing steps echoed off the stone walls. In the quiet seconds, a tiny spark of discord stirred in the back of his brain, as if he’d seen a picture with something out of place. But no time to worry about that now. Whatever he’d seen out there would have to be Hall’s problem to deal with.
He pushed all thought away to concentrate on his anger as he hit the door to the laird’s solar at a full run, drawing his sword as he entered.
He skidded to a stop just inside the room, where the grisliest of blood-spattered horrors greeted him.
Chase had experienced gruesome on multiple levels in his life. He doubted anyone could pull two tours in a war zone and avoid it. But to stumble into a scene this grotesque when he’d expected something so totally different shook his resolve and rattled his momentum.
Or perhaps it was just the fear that if this could happen to whomever that head had belonged to, it could as easily happen to Christiana.
His stomach roiled at the thought and he backed out of the room, tamping down all emotions. What was left in there was somebody else’s problem, not his. Christiana’s safety was his only consideration now.
She filled every corner of his thoughts as he ran to the stairs and started up them. Scenes of her flitted through his memory like a movie trailer on fast-forward. Her eyes as she lay beneath him in the room upstairs. Her laughter as she sat on the bench in Orabilis’s animal shed. Her smile as she stood at the door of her tower.
As if a computer inside his head finally loaded the site it had searched for, the discord eating at the back of his mind blossomed fully, and he stumbled to a stop midway up the great staircase.
The last glimpse of her tower, when he’d quickly scanned the courtyard, replayed in his mind. He’d spotted smoke wisping out through the ground-level window.
She was in her tower—and in danger. He knew it as if he could hear her calls for help.
He raced down the stairs, leaping from the third step to hit the floor running, and flung open the massive entry door. Hall held his ground on the top stair with his sword, fending off the two men on the steps below him, holding them back as he’d promised.
Chase could either join in the fray, hacking his way through the four men blocking the stairs, slowing his progress to Christiana, or he could find an alternative route.
“Her tower!” Chase called to Hall, sheathing his weapon as he chose to follow the alternative.
Bracing his hands on the wall surrounding the landing, he hefted himself up to balance upon the top ledge, and then, after a quick scan below, he jumped, aiming for a hay-filled wagon off to one side.
The impact of the landing jolted up his legs, but he had to keep moving. Across the courtyard, the dark tendril of smoke curling from Christiana’s window had grown.
He rolled from the wagon and ran, drawing his sword once again and losing it just as quickly when Ulfr tackled him from the side, driving him to the ground.
There had been four on the stairs with Hall. He should have remembered to check for the fifth.
“The tower burns,” he managed as Ulfr’s knee crashed down on his chest.
Above him, Ulfr lifted his arm, drawing back the knife he held with a scream. Grabbing Ulfr’s shirt at the shoulders, he jerked the man forward, smashing his head into his opponent’s face. Blood spurted from Ulfr’s nose and he fell back, but only for a moment.
A moment, as it happened, was all Chase needed to scoop up his sword and have it at the ready as Ulfr attacked, with the single-minded ferocity of a maddened animal. Chase’s blade slid into the other man’s chest, slicing a path through muscle and organ, and Ulfr dropped to his knees, surprise blanketing his expression. Chase withdrew his weapon, already running toward the tower before Ulfr’s body hit the ground.
At the tower he stopped, drawing in a deep breath before kicking the door open to the sound of splintering wood. Smoke billowed out around him as he burst into the room. Flames licked up around a pile of blankets, their unburned ends trailing out onto the hearth.
Torquil held Christiana facedown on the table, where the bastard bent over her with obviously only one thing on his mind.
HALL CUT HIS eyes toward the tower, but only for a second. The blades flashing in his direction required his full attention.
The sight of smoke curling from the tower explained his little brother’s leap from the railing.
“Godspeed,” he huffed in Chase’s direction, though he knew the other was too far on his way to hear it.
He hoped the lad hadn’t broken his legs upon landing, just as he hoped Chase would make it to his lady in time. But if Torquil waited in Christiana’s tower, no amount of good intentions would enable his fine Faerie friend to destroy that monster unless Hall was successful in his part of their siege.
With a roar that had weakened the knees of far better men than these, he lifted his leg and kicked, his foot landing solidly in the center of the lead man’s chest. Like a row of shoddily stacked peat staves, they all toppled backward, each tumbling onto the man behind him as they scrambled to break their fall.
Freed of them, Hall slipped through the door and headed for the back stairs. The object of his search would be found in the laird’s tower, behind a stone above the fireplace, if Bridget MacCulloch was to be believed.
A glance into the open door of the solar revealed evidence of his worst fears. Hugo the minstrel had met a fearsome end indeed, his head torn from his body. No man could have done such as that, lending credence to his suspicion that Fenrir himself had joined with Torquil. Which made finding what he now sought that much more imperative.
He hurried on, nearing the narrow staircase before he was set upon. Artur pounced on him, wrapping one arm around Hall’s neck to cling there like a fetid tick upon a dog’s ear as he plunged his knife into Hall’s right shoulder.
Pain radiated out from the wound, slowing Hall’s movements as he took stock of his injury. Nothing vital. No important organs involved, just a clean slicing of meat and sinew.
Then the little bastard withdrew the weapon and, with a madman’s scream, plunged it down again.
Like a horse under attack by a bloodsucking fly, Hall flung himself backward, smashing his attacker into the wall behind him, taking them both down in a heap.
The hilt of the knife protruded from Hall’s shoulder, twisted at an ugly angle. It was higher than the first wound, making it difficult to reach his sword when Artur came at him a third time with his sword drawn.
“I guess we’ll see whose arse ends up on the pointy end of a sword now, won’t we?” Artur sneered, slowly moving in for the kill.
Hall pushed himself up the side of the wall to stand, waiting, watching the other man’s eyes. When Artur circled his wrist, taunting with the motion of his blade, Hall threw himself forward, knocking aside the smaller man’s blade as he jerked the protective token from around his neck with his left hand. He brought it slamming down, feetfirst, into Artur’s throat as they fell back.
It took a moment for the man to stop his twitching. A moment that Hall used to catch his breath and gather his strength before pushing up to stand again.
Leaning heavily against the wall, he followed the narrow, curving stairs up to the little guardroom and into the laird’s private chamber.
There he found the hiding place under the mantel already open and the box he sought sitting out on the table.
At least he presumed it was the same box, though the jewels Bridget had claimed adorned the lid were gone. Deep scratches marred the wood, as if someone had dug the jewels out of their resting place.
But the loss of the jewels wasn’t the worst of it.
The box was empty.
FURY FILLED CHASE so completely, nothing remained but the bright, blistering need to cut Torquil into a million tiny pieces.
He launched himself across the room, but his prey was faster. Torquil danced away, Christiana held in front of him like a shield. A shield whose head lolled to the side while coughs wracked her body.
“You came for this?” Torquil taunted, dragging her head back by a handful of hair, revealing a swollen red welt on the side of her face.
“No,” Chase answered, his vision tunneling on the man in front of him. “I came for you.”
Torquil laughed and continued to move away, placing the table between the two of them. Chase kept his back to the door, the only means of escape from the tower.
A pop and
poof sounded to his left as the fire leapt to the bags of herbs piled there. Flames shot into the air, reaching the edges of the tapestries covering the walls—but Chase’s quarry was more important.
“Think fast, warrior,” Torquil shouted, shoving Christiana toward the fire as he lunged for the opening to the stairs leading up to the top of the tower.
Chase dove to grab Christiana, reaching her as the flames licked up the sleeve of her gown. She scrabbled away from him, breathlessly pleading for him to stop, to wait.
There was no time to stop and wait. The whole damn place would be a blazing fire pit in a matter of minutes. He pulled her close and rolled over her to smother the flames eating away at her gown. Then he scooped her up in his arms and ran for the door and fresh air. Let that evil bastard Torquil burn.
“WHERE, WHERE, WHERE are you?” Torquil demanded, his back against the door of Christiana’s tower bed-chamber.
That the beast should desert him now was simply wrong.
“I would have given you free rein,” he railed, rushing to the window to gasp in great gulps of fresh air. “I would have allowed you to destroy them both, as you did the minstrel.”
Perhaps that was why the beast slumbered. His thirst for blood already had been well slaked today.
Below his feet, smoke slithered up between the floorboards.
If ever he had needed the Magic to work for him, now was that time. If ever he had needed to marshal every scrap of his concentration, now was that time.
His gaze landed on the clay pot at the end of the mantel. The clay pot holding the elixir that was the means to his sister’s Visions.
Perhaps it would work for him as well.
He lifted it from the mantel and tossed the stopper to floor. Tilting back his head, he drained the contents of the bottle and threw it toward the fireplace.
Now was the time.
CHAOS HAD ERUPTED in the courtyard, with people scrambling everywhere to move their possessions as far from the burning tower as possible. The entire company of soldiers busily raced from the well to their barracks, wetting down what they could to prevent the fire’s spread.
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