For only the second time, the Lady Cymrian addressed the seneschal directly.
“So do you, Michael. I’m sure your men would appreciate the entertainment.”
The light in the blue eyes grew more excited. “Indeed. You recall how I used to take you before the eyes of my men in the old land, don’t you, Rhapsody? My favorite was having you on the breakfast table, or on horseback while giving morning orders. What fun it will be to do it again now, here, in the forest, surrounded by the dead bodies of your guards.”
Rhapsody smirked. “Well, for them, at least,” she said haughtily, nodding at the seven men. “I’m sure these ruffians are no different than your other lackeys, and would derive sincere enjoyment out of seeing their leader so compromised, so unable to sustain the act for more than a few seconds, so pathetic, so–so small. I have no doubt they would get as much amusement as the others did privately at your expense in the old world.”
The seneschal stopped, his hand in his trousers, his skeletal face slack with shock.
“Amusement?” he demanded. “Lies. My men would never have dared to joke at my expense.”
The Lady Cymrian laughed harshly. “Perhaps not to your face, Michael, ‘the Wind of Death.’ But it was your own soldiers who coined your nickname — Michael, the Waste of Breath. Not your adversaries, though of course they made copious use of it, and coined many of their own.”
“You are a liar,” he said coldly.
Rhapsody smiled with equal frost in her expression. “You don’t remember me as well as you think, Michael,” she said. “I don’t lie. Not even when forced anymore.”
The expression on his face blackened, and when he spoke, the harsh tone of the demon was in his voice.
“You lied to me,” he said, the words resonating palpable hatred. “You pledged your faith to me. And how did you live up to that oath?”
“I swore to love ‘no other man until this world comes to an end,’” Rhapsody said quietly. “I never said that I loved you, only that I would love no other than the man who had my heart then, and still does. And in case you do not know, that world did come to an end, a rather horrifying one, in volcanic fire. I misled you, because you would have raped and murdered a tiny child if I didn’t. But I did not lie to you. Your injured feelings will earn no remorse from me.”
Like a storm building, the seneschal’s body tensed, and his face hardened into a terrifying aspect.
“Hold her down,” he said again to his guards. “We will see who is injured, and whether or not you feel remorse.”
Fergus looked uncomfortably at the fire spreading to the outer canopy of the forest.
“M’lord, we must get back to the ship,” he said quietly, casting a glance through the tree line as the flames leapt skyward, filling the air above with thick smoke. “Most of our guards are dead, and Quinn said this was a holy wood. There must be foresters or nature priests who will respond when they see the smoke.”
More flame, the demon urged. More flame. Take the girl on your own time.
The seneschal rested a hand on his forehand, trying to press the voice into silence, but the F’dor spirit was too excited by the building inferno to be quelled.
More burnings! More flame!
“Disarm her, then,” he said viciously to Fergus. “Bind her hands and I will drag her by the hair to the promontory.”
Slowly Fergus and the other three swordsman began to circle Rhapsody.
“Lay the weapon down, lady,” the reeve said soothingly. “It’s far too big a sword for you, anyway. You will only succeed in hurting yourself. We mean you no harm.”
In response, Rhapsody raised the sword a slight bit higher, her grip unwavering. In her mind she remembered Achmed’s advice long ago, deep within the Earth, as Grunthor trained her for the first time in the weapon’s use.
First, however you initially grasp the sword, change your grip a little, so that you focus on how you’re holding it. Don’t take your weapon for granted. Second, and far more important: tuck your chin. You’re going to get hurt, so expect it and be ready. You may as well see it coming.
She inhaled deeply, trying to keep her distorted vision from being apparent to her captors, as she turned the grip of the sword ever so slightly.
You’re spending too much time trying to avoid the pain instead of minimizing it and taking out the source of what will injure you further or kill you. If Grunthor weren’t holding back you would have been dead in the first exchange of blows. You should accept that you will be injured and decide to pay him back in spades. Learn to hate; it will keep you alive.
Rhapsody could hear her own voice, naïve, innocent, in the darkness of the tunnel that ran along the roots of the World Tree.
I’d rather not live at all than live that way.
Well, if that’s your attitude, you won’t have to worry long.
No, she thought, her will steeling like ore tempered in the forges of Ylorc. No. I have too much to fight for. Too much to protect. Her eyes narrowed as hatred rose up in her soul, the righteous loathing of a woman long abused, a mother whose unborn child was in danger, a queen whose friend and protector lay comatose on the burning forest floor.
I am going to get hurt now, she thought; the realization did not terrify her. And I am about to lose here. I have to protect my abdomen, bide my time, and wait for the right moment.
Slowly the swordsman stepped closer.
But I will take as many of you with me as I can, she thought, glancing from the swordsmen to Michael, who was watching her in a state of agitation clear even through her hazy eyes. And I will not let you have me again, you piece of demonic filth. Not while I live.
The voice of Oelendra, her Lirin mentor and the last one to bear Daystar Clarion before her, echoed in her brain.
You’ve got a good start, but now we’re going to train you to fight like our people do.
Do you think that the Lirin way of fighting is better than that of the Firbolg?
Aye, at least for Lirin. The Bolg are big, strong, and clumsy, the Lirin are small, fast, and weak. You rely too much on your strength, not enough on agility and cunning; you just don’t have the body mass to fight like a brute.
Slowly she lowered the blade.
As soon as the sword was pointed to the ground, the swordsman behind her dashed forward, the flat of his sword aimed horizontally at her neck as the others moved nearer.
She gave no sign she had heard him, no indication she was aware of him, until the last second before his impact.
Then spun around, going low, and sliced his knees out from under him with Anborn’s bastard sword.
A geyser of blood shot forth, spraying her clothing and face. The forest seemed to erupt with a blast of wind knocking her off her feet; she could feel the other six of Michael’s men fall on her, tearing her weapon from her hands, ripping the cloth of her shirt; she curled like a ball to protect her child as she fell, numbing her mind against the pain of the bruising, the jerking of her legs, the slamming of her back against the ground again and again.
Spare my baby, she prayed to the One-God over the howls of pain from the man whose leg she had severed and the blows her own body was sustaining. If I live, spare my child.
For all that it seemed an eternity of torment, it was over in a few blinks of the eye.
Rhapsody lay on the burning ground, her face bruised and blooded, breathing in the dirt of the forest floor, feeling the heat all around her rising with Michael’s madness.
He strode across to where she lay–she could hear his footsteps approach, and struggled to keep her fear from consuming her — seized the ropes that bound her hands, and hauled her to her feet before him.
He stared down into her face, his eyes a swimmingly cruel blue light before her own; in that moment Rhapsody felt she was staring directly into the Vault of the Underworld where the race of demons had been imprisoned.
Then his lips were on hers, lips that stung with acidic fire, pressed heavily against her mouth har
d enough to bruise it.
All the horror of the past roared back in an instant. Rhapsody began to tremble violently, as agonizing memories flooded her mind, hideous moments from the past locked away deep with her nightmares. Against her will, she gasped aloud.
Michael pulled back from the kiss and stared at her, misreading her expression. He took her face in his hands and pressed his body, with its steel-like skeleton covered by a musculature that felt more dead than alive, against hers.
“Bite, and it will be the last thing you ever use your teeth for,” he said quietly as he ran his hands over her golden hair, loosing the ribbon and letting it fall to the ground. “They are only a hindrance for how I plan to make use of your mouth, anyway.”
Then he thrust his tongue harshly between her lips, stealing her breath.
Rhapsody tried to separate her mind from her body, as once she was able to do, but the revulsion was so strong, the overwhelming stench of human flesh in fire reeking from his skin as his excitement grew, that she could not block out what was happening. Her stomach rushed into her mouth and she vomited, the force of it driving Michael back a few steps, reeling in disgust.
She was bent over in the throes of nausea when he recovered and strode angrily back to her, slapping her full across the face with a force so violent it threw her backward onto the ground.
“Whore!” he screamed, the sound of it harsh with the tone of the demon. “Miserable, rutting whore! You endure the rancid juice of your husband’s loins, no doubt, but you are repulsed by me?”
As he reached down to grasp her again, the reeve called out to him.
“M’lord! We risk notice! I strongly suggest we get to the promontory and back to the ship. There you can have her, undisturbed, in the privacy of your cabin, and she will be unable to escape. And Faron is waiting.”
The seneschal stared down at Rhapsody, curled on the ground, blood coming out of her nose, then reached down and seized her hair, pulling her to her feet.
“Bring my horse,” he ordered one of the remaining swordsmen who had been futilely attempting to bind the wounds of the man with the severed leg; he stood, looking helplessly at his writhing comrade, then ran up the road to retrieve the mounts.
From behind the seneschal Caius’s voice spoke up nervously, weakly.
“M’lord, we must go back to the first ambush point and retrieve Clomyn. He is grievously injured, dying; I can feel it.” He passed a sweating hand over his gray face.
The seneschal turned and stared at him angrily.
“Are you blind?” he snarled, gesturing into the conflagration that was spreading like a meadow wildfire through the green forest to where the coach had first come under attack. “He is ashes by now.”
Caius was staring into the blistering wall of light and heat. “No, no, Your Honor, he’s alive, though barely. He’s my heart twin, sir; I can feel what he is feeling, hear what he hears, just as he hears me. Please, I know he is alive. We have to retrieve him before we go.”
The demonic host that was once Michael glared at the crossbowman. When he spoke, his voice dripped venom.
“Very well, Caius. By all means. Go get him.” He wrapped Rhapsody’s hair around his hand several times and dragged her to where the lackey had brought his horse to a halt, lifted her by the collar of her shirt and her belt and threw her across the animal’s back.
“But — m’lord — will you open a — a wall in the fire, as you did before?” Caius stammered.
Michael turned, his shoulders visibly tense beneath his cloak, and regarded the shaking crossbowman.
“Of course, Caius,” he said solicitously. “Here.” He gestured casually toward the wall of fire.
A slim passageway in the flames opened, leaving a blue slice of air.
Caius’s face relaxed somewhat, his color returning with the light that flickered off it.
“Thank you, m’lord,” he mumbled quickly as he dashed into the passageway.
As soon as the crossbowman had entered the flames, the seneschal gestured again, and the passageway disappeared.
Caius, swallowed in flame, screamed noiselessly, drowned in the sound of the inferno and the cracking of the burning trees.
He turned and bolted from the fire into the area where the others stood, still clear from flame but about to be engulfed. Two of the swordsmen seized him and rolled him in the loam of the forest floor, snuffing him amid the spreading sparks.
“The next time you question my decision, Caius, I will wait until you are deeper in to close the passage,” the seneschal said smugly. “Then you and your heart twin can be forever mixed in the same ashes.”
He mounted the horse behind Rhapsody’s supine body and pulled her up so that her back was lying against his chest. Her eyes were glassy, her breathing shallow, but her heartbeat was strong, he noted, as he pulled her shirt the rest of the way from the waistband of her torn, bloody trousers and slid his hands up under her camisole, allowing himself to revel in the soft skin of the breasts he had dreamed about across endless time.
Rhapsody merely slumped forward, too spent to keep her head up and her back erect.
I have to protect my abdomen, bide my time, and wait for the right moment.
She battled to keep a tenuous hold on consciousness as the marauders rode off, westward, toward the sea.
And lost that battle.
29
Anborn came slowly to consciousness on the forest floor, where already the fire had charred the trees, reducing much of the wild bushes and scrub to hot ash, and had moved on.
All around him, before and behind, the world was burning.
The General groaned as he raised his head up to look around him, then laid it down again, too heavy to sustain. The heat on his back was searing, so hot that he could not imagine that he was not already burning alive.
For the smallest of moments, he thought of closing his eyes again, laying his head down to rest, and letting the fire sweep over him, through him, take him into its maw and swallow him, chew him into ashes and spit him out into the wind, where he could float across the sea, all around the wide world, ebbing and flowing in an endless current of air, like the Kinsman he had been.
The thought shook him from his dying reverie as the memory of Rhapsody’s last words came back to him.
Live, live for me, Anborn. Get word to Ashe about what happened here; tell him, the children, and my Bolg friends that I love them. Remember that I love you as well.
Whether those words were the inescapable magic of a potent Namer, the command of his sovereign to whom he was sworn, the call of a fellow Kinsman, or the last request of the one woman in the world whose love and friendship he valued, they held power, a power great enough to make him lift his head and shake off the warm and peacefully endless sleep that glowed just beyond the edge of his awareness.
As his eyes cleared, he saw the destruction around him was far more widespread than he had even imagined. Every tree in the forest for as far as he could see was aflame, the fire growing in intensity as it spread north to the Tara’fel River.
He had to get out of the forest and back to where he could summon help.
Anborn braced his hands against the ground and lifted his upper body to look.
It was there still, smoldering quietly beneath him, drawing the destructive power of the flames into itself, sparing his hide from immolation.
Daystar Clarion.
For a moment the General lay and stared at the blade. Gone were the rippling waves of fire that rolled from hilt to tip in Rhapsody’s hand, a sign of the bond between element and Iliachenva’ar. A bright glow of starlight was still imbued in it, but the fire was stilled, taken away by the man that had borne the sword of air. Though he had never seen it, he had heard tales of the weapon, a blade wielded in the old world during the Seren War that preceded the Cymrian exodus.
Tysterisk.
Its power was unmistakable. He could feel it, sense the command that the figure at the end of the road held over t
he element.
Kinsmen were brothers of the wind; this man could command the wind itself.
Anborn’s mind raced, trapped in his unresponsive body. He thought of Rhapsody, how terrified he knew she must be, though she had put on a brave face for him. The thought of what might be happening to her, or that she might in fact already be dead, caused a surge of relentless rage to build in his heart until it overflowed in a seething flood of anger.
He rolled with great effort onto his side, then reached with hands that trembled with the strain for the elemental sword. He sheathed it with some effort across his back, then extended his arm as far as he could, feeling around on the ground for a root, a living bush, anything with which to gain purchase.
The blackened husk of what had once been a bramble of some kind was just beyond his reach; Anborn pushed forward, his hands in the burning loam, stretching the muscles of his upper body until he seized the husk and, finding it holding firm in the ground, dragged himself a few paces forward, knowing that the fire moved far more quickly than he could.
All conscious thought submerged; he had but one single-minded task, to crawl in any way he could, out of the burning forest and back to the Filidic Circle at the Great White Tree where they had been a few days before. Surely there would be help to send after her.
Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the General stretched and reached, dragging himself by vegetation when he could grasp any, by the strength of his fingers and elbows when he could not, hauling himself with almost imperceptible success through the smoking leaf matter and other burning detritus of the forest floor.
Time passed with a cruel sluggishness. The inferno around him grew hotter, brighter, at the outskirts of his vision, but Anborn paid it no heed, focusing instead on the few handsbreadths of ground before him, pulling himself arduously along, to find himself doing it all over again, and again, moment by brutally painful moment.
After what seemed like forever, he came across the body of the archer who had shot Shrike, a crossbowman with his stonebow still beside him. He took the opportunity to rest and catch his breath for a moment; he rolled onto his side, wincing at the crushing pain in his ribs, and tore off a rag from his shirt to stanch the bleeding in his hands, wrapping them in the makeshift bandage, then looked around again.
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