by Janzen, Tara
“Aye, and good hunting then.”
“Good hunting.”
Dain waited for the Welshman to disappear down the wall-walk, before turning to his own task. He would search the upper bailey and the keep, but first he would kill Helebore. That one’s existence threatened Ceridwen more than any other’s. With the leech dead, there would be only Caradoc lusting for her death.
The fog was thickening and rising about him, spilling over the wall-walk and blanketing the castle green. Helebore was still to the northeast of him, ranting about his lost prize. A clear shot would be hard to come by with all the other people about, and more than two would give away his position. He checked the area, noting the timbered roof of the stable against the wall to the north and the location of the scaffolding that accessed the ramparts. There was no better place than where he was. He reached for his bow and nocked an arrow into the string—then stopped before he had the bow half drawn. The men on the wall were shouting and pointing down into the bailey. He followed the direction of their attention and felt his heart slow to a ponderous, heavy beat. ’Twas Ceridwen, running through the moonshadows and the fog, following a raggedy child, the both of them racing toward the keep. One of the faster guards was already clattering down the stairs, his sword drawn, heading to cut them off. Dain drew the bow taut, adjusted his aim, and skewered the man through his unmailed shoulder and out through his chest. He fell off the stairs into a crumpled heap in the mud.
Moving quickly, Dain jumped to the stable roof and notched another arrow. The next man down the stairs suffered the same fate as the first, though shot through the neck. Dain didn’t wait for the third, but lofted himself off the stable to the ground and took off at a dead run. More men were pouring off the walls. He dropped the bow and drew the Damascene and his sword. Meeting the leading phalanx of three men, he took one out with the first arc of his blade. He blocked a strike with Scyld and lunged beneath the crossed swords to cut the second man under his arm. The third nicked him on the shoulder and received a clean slice across his face for his effort. Blood spilled down the man’s cheeks and nose like a mask.
Breathing heavily, Dain turned and met the fourth man to come down the wall. The fifth was upon him before he could recover. Sword blade clanged against sword blade. Others were close behind, covering him from all sides. The last thing he saw before he went down was Ceridwen disappearing around a corner of the keep.
Chapter 24
Ceridwen sat alone in an area hollowed out of the rock somewhere below the keep. ’Twas barely big enough to hold her and Snit’s strange cache of booty. The light from the candle he’d left her revealed an assortment of broken pots and half-unraveled baskets, each holding its share of whatnot and “this and that.” String was a popular item, and smooth, shiny rocks. Most welcome was the return of her pack. He’d pulled it out from behind the largest basket upon their arrival and unrolled it to show her everything was still there: rihadin, unguent, red book, the mirror, the desiccated baby bat, everything except the one Quicken-tree riband she’d seen braided through his hair. She’d said nothing about that. ’Twas a small price to pay for freedom, even a precarious freedom.
She’d come with him through a tiny door on the side of the keep and ended up in a narrow tunnel that had led them there. Given the regular size of the guards, she wasn’t surprised that none had been able to follow. She’d heard them behind her, shouting and running, heard the clash of swords. The sound of their pursuit had put wings on her feet.
She still had the knife Snit had given her and the crossbow, though she had only two bolts and the most rudimentary knowledge of how to work it. Snit had gone to get food, hot pottage to warm her bones, but that had been ages ago, and naught but a tippet of wax remained of the taper. She kept her hands over the flame, taking the heat in through her fingers and imagining it flowing up her arms and into her chest, stealing the icy chill away. She didn’t know what to expect next, but had posted herself by the tunnel shaft they’d come down, having decided to make her way back up toward the bailey if Snit had not returned by the time the candle guttered itself in melted wax. She figured ’twas close to dawn, so any further attempt at escape would have to wait until evening fell again, though by then she would probably be crippled from being cramped and frozen in the small tunnel all day.
The candle flame moved with an unseen breeze, and she quickly cupped her hands around it. The flame steadied, much to her relief. Her odd ally was short in words as well as stature, giving her no clues as to why he’d rescued her. That he was familiar with Balor was beyond a doubt, and she hoped to use his knowledge to devise a way out. That he was the Domh-ringr faerie, called by her with Brochan’s Charm, was not beyond a doubt. In truth, the more she thought about it, the less likely it seemed. He was from Balor, not the spirit world. Yet, when she’d needed magic most, he’d seemed to be magical, and despite all, there was a hint of something fey about him.
She looked toward the far tunnel, the faint scent of barley frumenty bringing her head up. Snit was returning, and he had food, hot food. He came out of the darkened shaft, bowl in hand, muttering to himself about trouble, trouble, trouble.
“What trouble?” she asked, taking the bowl from him when he offered it. She immediately scooped the food into her mouth, sucking it off her fingers as there was no spoon.
“Master trouble,” he said, “and me master’s master trouble. Helebore and Caradoc have another below, one like you, not like the one above ye killed.” Piercing green eyes, thickly lashed yet older than the face that held them, shifted in her direction. He was more than a boy, yet not so. His skin was smooth, if dirty, without lines, but the crookedness of his body appeared painful and gave him an aged look. “Ye did kill him, didn’t ye?”
“Aye,” she admitted around a mouthful of warm barley.
“Ye shouldn’t have. He was meant to suffer. Caradoc wanted him punished for hurting you.”
“And now ’tis Caradoc who wants to hurt me, unless I can get out of Balor. Do you know the way?”
“There’s a thousand ways in and a thousand ways out, and nary a one o’ them without risk,” he told her, emphasizing his words with a narrowed gaze. “People get crushed, ye see, ifs they take a misstep.”
“Crushed by what?” She scooped up another dollop of frumenty and stuck her fingers in her mouth. She would escape, and she would find Dain and Mychael, and they would all leave this place called Wales.
“Crushed by hot walls moving in the deep dark,” the man-boy said mysteriously. He tossed his hair over one shoulder and carefully leaned across the candle, stroking a finger down the bat’s soft body. Next, he touched his finger in the unguent.
She didn’t like the sounds of his answer. None of the walls in the caves she remembered had ever moved and crushed, nor had they been hot. “Do we have to go through the deep dark to get out? Is there no way through the bailey?”
“Ach.” He dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand, sitting back down on his side of the flame. “Caradoc has the mesnie scouring the bailey for you and the keep too, but they’ll not find you in Snit’s hidey-hole. He tried to send small boys down the tunnels with knives, but I sent them all packing.” He sniffed the unguent, then smeared it across his cheeks in a pattern to match hers. “Helebore says to smoke you out with the screams of the other one, but me master’s master is too shy to mark the sorcerer with the leech’s hot irons. Strange, it is. Caradoc’s never been shy before to brand.”
Ceridwen had not heard a word past “sorcerer.” Dear God, Dain had come for her and been captured. She set her bowl of pottage aside. “Does the sorcerer have a name?”
“Helebore calls him Cursed Lavrans. Caradoc does naught but sit and stare at him, and brood.” Snit drew his eyebrows close together and tucked his chin into his chest, giving a fair imitation of a striped and brooding Boar of Balor.
“We must save him, Snit, as you saved me.” She tried to keep the panic out of her voice. “Take me to him, and I will sh
ow you the colors of fire.”
Snit cocked his head. “What colors?”
“Gold, red, blue,” she said, working quickly to roll her treasures back up in her pack. “Mayhaps I even have some green.”
“Green fire to save a sorcerer?”
“Aye, I think it will work.” She tied the pack and threw it over her shoulder. “Can we take him with us into the deep dark?”
“He’s big.” Snit sounded unsure, voicing her concern. She’d barely squeezed herself through his small passageway. “But the tunnels below Helebore’s chambers are bigger than the ones above, and in the deep dark, the size is ever shifting, yet always big enough to hold a man, unless the walls decide to crush him and grind his bones to dust inside his skin. A man thus rendered does not need much room.”
“No,” she agreed, horrified. “No, of course not.”
Before she’d even finished her sentence, the man-boy was disappearing down a dark shaft, leaving her to scramble behind and hope he was indeed taking her to Dain.
The way was long, seeming more so in the dark, and twice she thought she’d lost him, his sole source of guidance being a humming noise he made.
“Hmmm, hmm, hmm.” The sound bounced off the cold stone walls curving around them, growing softer whenever he made a turn. ’Twas her clue to listen closely so as not to wander in the wrong direction.
Finally, a lightening of the gloom and the barest hint of warmth told her they were nearing a chamber. Voices echoed up the shaft, one a mumbling, muttering thing, incomprehensible, the other low and deep.
“That we have come to this is surprising,” the low, deep voice said, and she knew ’twas Caradoc, his silent brooding past. He paused, and his voice took on an undercurrent of anger. “That we have come to this over your swiving my betrothed bride will be the death of you, old friend.”
Only silence greeted the pronouncement.
She tried to rush ahead, but Snit blocked her way and waved her back, forcing her to a crawl as the end of the tunnel came into view. The light was brighter there, flickering from a fire she could smell and hear.
“The irons are, Boar, ready and hot, so very hot.” ’Twas unmistakably Helebore, with too much eagerness jumbling his words. “Soon enough the maid will come running out of Snit’s rat holes, the ungrateful wretch. If Lavrans screams for her, she will come, and we must have her. Must.”
“Have you no eye for beauty at all, leech?” Caradoc sounded mildly disgusted by Helebore’s lack of appreciation. “For here is beauty.” A chair scraped across the floor, and Ceridwen feared she heard a pained gasp. “Look upon it, medicus, and remember that once you saw Jalal al-Kamam’s famed Swan, the bedzhaa, known throughout the desert for the pleasure he could inflict. And the pain, eh, Lavrans?” The chair scraped again, and Caradoc’s words grew softly menacing. “’Twas said you could give a man pain so exquisite he could see the angels coming for him, and pleasure so dark ’twas like falling into the abyss of hell.”
Strange, awful words—they made her heart race in fear. She and Snit stopped at the edge of the tunnel, high up on the wall, and looked down into the cavernous chamber. ’Twas all she could do to hold back a cry. Caradoc had his fist wound through Dain’s hair, holding his head back at a painful angle with a knife to his throat. Blood ran down the side of Dain’s face. His arms were tied to the chair.
Helebore stood to one side, impatient, sour-faced, his gauntleted hand holding a branding iron in a nest of red-hot coals. The place smelled like Dain’s alchemy chamber, sulfurous, with glass and earthenware containers stacked on tables and shelves. She recognized an athanor and the still. As far as she could see, there was no one in the room besides the bald leech, the Boar of Balor, and the man she would free.
“Do you remember the desert prison at Jaffa, Lavrans? The screams of men, the agonizing heat, and the bitter cold?” Caradoc leaned close, drawing the knife ever so carefully across Dain’s neck, leaving a thin red line in its wake. Ceridwen could not take her eyes from it. “I thought nothing could be worse, that I had truly reached the depths of depravity, fighting with old men for rotten dates.” He chuckled. “So young back then, so stupidly young.”
Dain seemed made of stone, or death. His eyes were closed, and not even breath seemed to move his body.
“I was proved wrong about depravity,” Caradoc went on, “as were you, I fear. Do you remember marking a man thus? With the bare tip of a watered steel blade? The trick of the pleasure, they told me, is to do it without drawing blood.” The knife wavered, and Ceridwen saw Dain’s fingers tighten into a white-knuckled grip around the chair arms.
He lived.
“I never did manage it without the blood,” Caradoc said. “I would cut them, no matter how carefully I wielded the knife, without breathing, without hardly moving it, trying so desperately to keep the edge and tip on the bare surface of the skin. Yet I always cut, and they would curse me and beat me and tell me of Jalal al-Kamam’s Swan from the far north. Ahh, they would sigh, silky chestnut hair like a woman’s, soft brown eyes like a camel’s, and the touch—Praise Allah!—the touch of a king’s mage.” Caradoc stopped and lowered his gaze down Dain’s body in a wickedly debauched visual caress that made Ceridwen’s stomach roll. “They say Jalal awaits you still.” He stroked Dain’s face with the blade, without leaving a mark. “Do you remember the first time your master sold you to a man?”
Dain did not speak, and Caradoc started a new cut on his neck below the last.
“Nor I. They had a drink the first time, sweet like ambrosia, more potent than wine, a simple mixed to steal a man’s mind. They were generous in the beginning, not so later.” He hesitated with the blade. “Surely you remember the ambrosia? Its sickly sweet scent, how they burned it to fill your nose and mouth with smoke when ’twasn’t in the wine. A person could kill for another taste of such heaven, eh, Lavrans?”
Ceridwen bit her lip and began easing the crossbow around into her lap, being careful not to scrape it against the tunnel walls.
“What say you, Lavrans?” Caradoc inquired softly, tightening his hand in Dain’s hair and pulling his prisoner’s head back an extra degree. “What of the worst comes upon you in the night and makes you sweat? Which nightmare haunts you more than the others?”
Still Dain said nothing. The Boar swore, and in a lightning-quick move, the knife went up and down, cutting Dain on the face and slicing through the bonds holding his right arm to the chair. Two cuts, one bloody, the other rash.
Caradoc shoved his face into his captive’s, holding Dain’s free hand in a fierce grip. “I heard the whispers that you’d been sold the same as me,” he hissed, “and I wondered—is Lavrans holding out, is he stronger, braver, more of a man than I turned out to be?” He turned Dain’s hand into the light and traced a shallow path with his knife, making a red line to cover the white scar already there.
“Not in the end, it seems. For what besides utter weakness could have brought you to this, bedzhaa?”
Ceridwen knew what the scar meant. Dear God. How had she not seen it before? The mirror had spoken true; there was boundless pain in his wisdom, and he had seen the darkness on men’s souls. A desolate novice had once damned herself to everlasting hell by cutting such a line upon her wrist. That Dain had faced such desperation for the strange deeds Caradoc talked about tore at her heart.
“Did you gag in your dreams and wake to the same foul stench as I?” Caradoc demanded. “Did you?”
“I did not dream.” Dain’s first words were spoken with dead calm, and she prayed ’twas true; that he had not dreamed. She was not so naive that she didn’t understand what Caradoc was talking about. The images made her hands shake and her face flush. A pain pressed deep in her chest, a hurtful, dark pain.
With the bow free, she gestured to Snit to help her span it. ’Twas more difficult than she’d imagined, taking their combined strength. There would be time for only one shot.
She heard Caradoc speak again. “Tell me you were no be
tter than I, and I will let you live.”
“Like Ragnor and your father? I think not.”
“Father?” Caradoc snorted in disgust. “Gwrnach tithed me to Saladin,, and I tithed him to hell. ’Twas a fair trade for father and son. As for Ragnor, the chit put a blade to his throat and he no longer lives to give me pleasure. Mayhaps you should take his place.” There was a menacing pause, then a guttural sound that could have come only from Dain. Ceridwen swiped at a tear with her knuckles. “Aye, Dain, think on it. I could cut on you for a sennight, before you would need the support of a wooden cross.”
The bow was finally loaded. Snit laid in the bolt along the groove, and she raised the whole of it to her cheek to peer down the sight. There was no room for error, yet her hands still shook. Dain was bleeding from a new cut.
Snit looked once to the pair below and back to the bow. Then, with a confidence she found encouraging, he changed the angle of the crossbow stock, pushing it a few degrees away from himself and the ceiling. At his nod, she pulled the trigger, and Caradoc went down screaming, shot through the thigh. She looked to Snit, and he shrugged. Dain leaped up and used his right hand to swing the chair around, smashing it into the wall and breaking himself free.
By the time Helebore snapped out of his stupor, she had tossed rihadin and aqua ardens into his coals. The instantaneous flash of flame and burst of color sent him diving for the floor.
“Dain!” she yelled. His head came up. After he sighted her, he reached for his knives and a sword that had lain by the chair. Then he climbed to the top of the table and jumped up to catch a beam. Guards were shouting and pounding on the door, their noise adding to the confusion of fire bursts and screams.
Dain reached the opening of the tunnel, breathless and bleeding, and as the guards broke through the door, she and Snit grabbed him by his gambeson and pulled him into the shaft.
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