Bloodstone

by Johannes, Helen C.

  Her face shut down, the animation gone like the flicker of a firefly, vanished before the viewer realizes what he’s seen. “Forget I said anything.” Scooping up her scroll, she swept from the room...

  She never broached the subject with him again but buried her nose in the scrolls stuffed into chests and stored in the crannies of chambers deep beneath Drakkonwehr. At some point she must have uncovered the Dragon Chant, deciphered it, and realized its significance. And then she’d sought out the mage. Or Syryk had sought her. Sinking down onto a fallen granite block, Durren ground bits of rubble under his heel. Who had sought whom didn’t matter. Either way, she’d betrayed them all: her heritage, her very own brother, even Errek—the lovesick fool!

  Pain twisted in Durren’s chest, as sharp and breath-stealing as the first time—every time!—he relived his best friend’s death at his own hand. With a shuddering effort, he bundled up the misery and flung it at his sister. Why did you do it, Ayliss? To ‘ride the Dragon’? What in Beggeth did you mean by that? The Dragon was the tool of evil, of the Black Mages. She knew as well as he that it had to stay buried or the world would come to ruin.

  The ache always concentrated itself just below the arch of his ribs, and he pushed there against it, holding it in so it couldn’t rip him apart. But his memories refused to be contained. Whatever it was Ayliss wanted, she hadn’t succeeded because she’d died when she closed her hand on the bloodstones. With his own eyes Durren had seen her die.

  Hadn’t he?

  Illusion.

  The idea seared like acid through his consciousness, burning holes in what he’d thought to be truth, shredding great gaps in what he’d believed for all these years to be reality, dissolving—at last—the fundamental belief he’d been stubbornly clinging to despite the jarring events of the past few days. His hand fell into his lap, and the pain in his chest rushed out, firing along all of his nerves. He could barely breathe, but the pain was secondary to what swept through him on its heels, the shock of letting go, of seeing—now—how he just might have been...wrong.

  If Ayliss didn’t die...if she were in fact still alive...still living...then that changed...everything.

  Durren reeled, staggered by the earthquake-like shift in what he knew, what he thought, what he thought he knew. If Ayliss didn’t die, if he’d been wrong about that, what else had he been wrong about? Was it possible...could it be...was her betrayal some kind of...illusion?

  He gripped his head while questions buzzed like a nest of stirred wasps inside it. He tried to hold them in before they overwhelmed him, but they squeezed out in a rush. If Ayliss didn’t die, what had happened to her after he interrupted the Dragon Chant and broke the mage’s crystal column? The blast of spell energy had thrown him leagues away and rendered him what he was now. Had it thrust her into the form of a lion? Was she now trapped in the body of the beast? And why hadn’t she appeared to him before? Fourteen years had passed—why the demon hadn’t she appeared? Why had he been left all alone for so damned long!

  He must have made some sound, for the boy sat up and yawned. With a mighty effort, Durren tamped down his frustration and misery. “Feel ready to work, Gareth?” he said when he could control his voice.

  “Oh yes, sir.” The boy grabbed his staff, and Durren let him struggle to his feet.

  “The horses need grooming. Can you manage that?”

  “If you’ll show me the gear, I’ll get right to it, sir.”

  While he led the boy to the packs beside the wall, Durren shoved the maelstrom of his thoughts about his sister to the back of his mind and forced himself to assess the boy’s condition. Gareth looked rested, not so pale, and the gash on his forehead seemed to be healing. The woman had done well to feed him and dose him with the herbs.

  She’s resourceful. You should trust her.

  Ignoring the voice in his head, he wondered instead if he should ask the boy about the lion, whether Gareth knew the beast had been practically cradling him all afternoon. Since the boy’s face seemed unconcerned, Durren decided not to disturb his equanimity. If the lion were truly Ayliss, she would be back. This was her home, after all.

  And if the lion isn’t Ayliss?

  The idea raised chills along his backbone. He wanted to believe she was alive, that she had returned, that—by Koronolan!—she wasn’t the traitor he’d believed she was, but the skeptic in him had been wary too long of illusions, however appealing.

  He stared at the gate through which the lion had vanished, seeing nothing there but shadows. If she were not Ayliss, she would most likely be back, too—whatever her reason might be.

  ****

  Tired as she was, Mirianna couldn’t sleep. Even though her throat caught every time she thought of her father—and she thought of him hourly—she refused to worry about him. He was with Pumble and Rees, who were pledged to bring him and the gems safely to the Master of Nolar. Besides, if they failed, what could she do? How could she even know? He could be lying in a bramble thicket right now and—

  She choked back a sob, then turned on her pallet and listened to see if she’d disturbed Gareth. Although the boy insisted he wasn’t tired, he’d fallen asleep almost instantly. She didn’t begrudge him the rest, knowing he would heal faster the more he slept, but in the confines of the room, she could hear the precise moment when the boy’s breathing pattern shifted and she knew he was dreaming. He wasn’t dreaming now, but breathing regularly.

  Nonetheless, she decided she couldn’t sleep until she’d dealt with at least some of the concerns milling in her mind. Throwing off her blanket, she pulled on her boots and slipped out into the night.

  Near the dark peaks soaring above the fortress, the stars looked as if a giant hand had sown them there like fine seed. Mirianna had never seen so many, nor felt so close to them. If she climbed up to the tower, she fancied she could reach out and pick them like a handful of ripe berries. But she hadn’t come out to admire the stars. Drawing her cloak about her shoulders, she told her eyes to look for something blacker than the sky, darker than the night itself. Did the Shadow Man sleep? She thought he must, but she suspected he would be no more able to rest this night than she.

  She found him on the wall, looking down into the valley, his braced arms spreading his cloak like the wings of a great bat. She’d come up the tower stairs with care, knowing the steps would be broken in places. Still, her boots crunched enough rubble he must have heard her although he made no sign when she stepped onto the rampart. Wondering what so absorbed him about the view, she glanced over the side.

  The rocky outcrop underpinning the fortress plunged so precipitously that, when her heart beat again, Mirianna realized she’d hooked her fingers like talons into the stone. She had no fear of falling, rather an unsettling sense that if she weren’t anchored, she might simply float off over the narrow valley whose depths were as black as spilled ink.

  While she searched for a glimmer of something, anything that would mark the limits of the plunge, out of the impenetrable gloom rose wisps of sulfurous mist. They drifted toward one another, forming pale yellow ribbons that wove themselves snake-like among the treetops visible below. One lifted like a thread of smoke and she watched it dance, curling in and upon itself, until she realized the thin fingertip, ever rising, had come inexorably closer to where she stood on the wall. With a shudder, she tore her gaze from the view and stared at her hands, at the starlight glinting from the pitted granite where her fingernails had scored it.

  She shivered again, trying to cast off a gathering sense of dread, and turned her gaze into the courtyard from which she’d climbed. Whatever inner rail had prevented guardsmen from falling off the rampart was long gone, and the rubble piles below seemed knife-edged as they stretched upward. She’d crossed that courtyard moments ago and thought nothing of the darkness, but from here it looked black as pitch. Feeling as if she teetered on the brink of something menacing no matter which way she stepped, Mirianna pulled her hand inside her cloak and forced herself to tur
n toward the Shadow Man.

  “What do you intend to do with us?” She’d meant to speak with confidence, but in the stillness her voice sounded shrill.

  He leaned farther over the wall as if he meant to take flight and soar over the spear-pointed pines and spruces piercing the darkness below. At the last moment his head lowered, his shoulders hunched, and his hood seemed to press itself into the very stone between his hands. “Do you have any idea how it feels to be alone? Completely and thoroughly alone?”

  His response startled her, not for the question alone, but because of how the words sounded ripped from his soul—if a being like the Shadow Man had a soul. Mirianna put out her hand again, seeking the support of the wall. If this was truly Durren of Drakkonwehr, and he’d lived in this place since the fall of the Stone Dam at Herrok-Eneth, he had indeed been alone for a very long time. “I—”

  “Do you have any idea what it’s like to know everyone is terrified of you? That they deal with you only because they have to? To know that if you dare show yourself to anyone, you’ll kill that person?”

  She sought something to say that would offer comfort to a being clearly in misery, but before she could form words, he pushed away from the wall and turned so sharply she thought his cloak slapped her even though Gareth could have laid his length between the Shadow Man’s body and hers.

  “Isn’t it enough that I can’t show my face? Why must everyone else refuse to show me theirs? You with your glorious hair and shining eyes men can’t stop staring at—you can’t possibly know how that feels.”

  Mirianna flushed, heat rushing from her face through her torso to her toes. That a creature as dark as he, with the powers she’d witnessed, could suffer such apparent misery had taken her by surprise. Nonetheless, her heart had been reaching out to him, seeking some way to ease his pain, until he had said that. Too many gazes in Nolar—and since—had been directed at her in ways he couldn’t possibly imagine for her to let his comment go without reproach.

  She drew herself up and faced him, trying not to blink while she fixed her gaze on the blank hood. “I know how it feels to be looked on with lust, if that’s what you mean. And I know how it feels to be looked on with eyes that covet me like an object to be collected.” Her voice shook, but she forced herself to finish, to confront the core of her fear. “Isn’t that exactly how you look at me from behind that mask?”

  She sensed an alteration in the Shadow Man’s posture. Where before she’d felt barraged by his emotions, now she perceived he’d regained control although his energy still sizzled in the air around her.

  “Yesterday,” he said, his voice faintly hoarse, “when I drove off the Krad, you were my prize. I admit it. But understand me when I say this—much of me is still a warrior. And a man. And you are...beautiful.”

  Mirianna shivered. At least he was being honest—somehow she was sure of that—even if his reply confirmed her worst fears. Which part of him coveted her—the man or the fiend? She drew her cloak tighter around her body with fingers that shook and wondered if the gesture was futile. He’d seen her body already—part of it—if he were indeed the shadowy figure in her dreams. That waking dream in the chamber that had been his in Ar-Deneth, she’d let him touch her and—

  She flushed to the roots of her hair. He couldn’t possibly be her dream lover. He was a nightmare, a creature of dark magic. Biting her lip, she shoved those thoughts out of her head and focused on what had brought her up broken stone steps in the middle of the night.

  “And now? I believe you didn’t plan to waylay us and carry me off, that what you did was an impulse and that...now...you may be wondering if you may have made a mistake.” She glanced at the stretch of stone beneath her feet and tried to draw strength from it before she made her final plea. “As for me, what I said—what I promised...”

  “Was prompted by fear—I know.”

  His voice sounded so gentle, so human, she looked up with a fluttering heart. “Then, can you release me from it?”

  “No.”

  She should have expected his answer, but the finality of the single syllable left her stunned, especially after the barely perceptible pause preceding it. “I—” She took a step back, crunched pebbles under her heel, and ought not to have lost her balance, but the rampart swayed under her feet and she stumbled dangerously close to a gap in the wall. All around her, the night groaned like a great birthing beast. A shower of mortar rained from the lintel of the tower door and she stared at it before she realized everything was silent and still again, but for a rapid, heavy thudding against her shoulder.

  The Shadow Man’s cloak enveloped her, as did his arm about her ribs. She’d dug fingers into his sleeve, fingers that didn’t immediately obey her order to uncurl from a solid, bunched bicep. “Wait,” he said when she stirred in his grasp. “There’s often a second tremor.”

  His breath brushed the hood against her forehead, each puff a separate caress that tingled along the nerves at the side of her face. “What—what was that?” A delicious languor stole through her limbs, holding her still. She ought not to be enjoying this. She was terrified. He was a fiend. Something was shaking the very rocks she stood upon.

  Mirianna gasped. Something was indeed shaking the wall, and the fortress around her, making the stones grind and groan while the Shadow Man held her tight, his free hand locked onto a huge iron ring set into the wall.

  “Is it over?” she said when the earth stilled again.

  “For now.” He relinquished his grip on the iron ring. His arm remained, and her breasts prickled against the pressure of his muscles compressing them.

  She bit her lip and trembled, as much from the shock of the strange motion as from the continued contact. “I—what about Gareth?” She pushed at his arm. “He’s probably terrified. I should check—”

  “I suspect he’s slept through it. The shaking is more pronounced up here, and the noise echoes in the valley.”

  “But the chamber—”

  “It’s held up this long. It won’t collapse when the Dragon makes a turn.”

  “The Dragon?” She pushed at his arm, and this time he let her go so she could spin and face him. “You mean, it really is alive?”

  “Sleeping.”

  Mirianna’s legs quivered. She needed to sit down, but nothing seemed handy on the open rampart, so she turned toward the tower, intending to sit on a stair, but the Shadow Man caught her before she could move two steps and pulled her back against his chest.

  “You dream of me, don’t you?” he said as her breath hitched in her throat and that strange languor that contact with his body seemed to induce spread through her limbs.

  She nodded, and from somewhere deep inside rose the question her conscious mind had been too terrified to ask. “And you dream of me, too,...don’t you?”

  “For ages, it seems.” His hood caressed her cheek like a warm breath. “Have I touched you?”

  Touched me? Her womanly core clenched, shooting little pulses of fire along all the nerves hidden there. By the Dragon, you know you have. All her bones dissolved, and she melted into him, her flesh spreading across the heated solidity of the body that supported her. Her ribs merged with muscle-corded ribs, her head pressed into sinew-wrapped collarbones, her thighs spread themselves across rock-hard legs, her hips molded themselves around a solid shaft of aroused manhood.

  Heart pounding, she tried to turn in his arms, to open her cloak, to offer her throat, her shoulders, even her breasts to his caress, but his free hand on her abdomen held her firmly in place. She moaned in protest until his gloved fingers spread across her belly, scorching her skin beneath layers of skirt and tunic. The fingertips kneaded gently, mere inches from the apex of her thighs. Mirianna breathed with thready gasps, her body an aching, throbbing mass of sensation focused on five pinpoints of delicious pressure moving slowly, deliberately closer to the recesses of her body that yearned, pleaded for their touch.

  “Please...” she whispered.

  He st
illed.

  She held her breath, waiting for the delicious sensations to resume, yet sensing a change in him. Finally, she reached for his hand—to do what, she had no idea—but he spun her out of his arms and she stood, swaying like a sapling in the wind, beside the door to the tower steps while he strode—leagues, it seemed—away from her. When he turned, he said, “Go back to the boy.”

  “But—”

  “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  As the night air chilled her skin, it came to Mirianna very clearly just what she’d been asking. Mortified, she backed against the tower wall and sat down with a thud on the step she’d been seeking moments—hours?—ago. The dead, dry, bone-deep cold of the stone drove the fire-flush from her body, leaving her quaking almost as wildly as the stones had done only moments—hours?—ago.

  When she gathered enough wit to stand, she rushed down the tower stairs and didn’t stop running until she closed the chamber door behind her and barred it with as many of the rickety pieces of furniture she could lay her hands on in the dark. Panting, she dove under her blankets, knowing full well her barricade was useless. If the Shadow Man wanted to come to her, he had only to enter her dreams.

  ****

  Durren strode along broken ramparts, leaping gaps and clambering across rubble. By Kiros, he would traverse the entire wall ten times—a thousand!—if it would cool the fire in his blood. Dear Koronolan, he could have had her right there on the crumbling rampart, on the cold stone, up against the tower wall if he’d chosen. She’d lain against his body not like a sacrificial victim but like a woman offering herself to her lover. Freely.

  But he’d known full well her offer was not truly free. This was magic, this linked dreaming. She was awake now—finally—and so was he, and neither of them needed to act while entranced. If she were to give herself, he wanted her awake, aware, and willing—not spellbound or even—damn it all!—obligated.