LEGEND

by Jude Deveraux

  With the photo in one hand, Kady picked up the watch and unfastened the lid so she could see the second photo of the woman. “Thank you very, very much,” Kady said, smiling at the whole family. “Thank you, Mrs. Jordan.”

  As Kady held the two objects, and as she said the name Jordan, she suddenly felt dizzy. “Must be the corset,” she said as she sat down heavily on the sofa, the photo and watch falling to her lap. “I should get out of this dress. I should . . .”

  Trailing off, she felt her energy leave her, as though she were falling asleep, but at the same time her weakness felt different. She felt that this dizziness was something she didn’t want to give herself up to. At all costs, she thought, she must fight this. She must open her eyes!

  “I say, let’s hang the bastard,” she heard a man say.

  “Yeah. Get rid of him once and for all.”

  “Hear that, Jordan? Make peace with your Maker, ’cause these are your last moments alive.”

  “No,” Kady whispered weakly. “Don’t hurt a Jordan. Such a nice dress. You shouldn’t hurt one of them.” For a moment she almost succeeded in opening her eyes and sitting up, but then she heard another voice, a man’s voice.

  “Help me, Kady. Help me.”

  Kady could see only blackness inside her closed eyelids, but she knew that if her Arabian prince, the man she had seen in her dreams a thousand times, had spoken, his voice would sound like this man’s.

  “Yes,” she said and quit struggling to sit up. “Yes, I will help you.”

  In the next second Kady collapsed against the sofa, unaware of where she was or even who she was. Limply, her hand fell to her side as she gave herself up to the deep swirling sensation that overtook her.

  Chapter 3

  KADY OPENED HER EYES TO DAZZLING SUNLIGHT, THEN caught herself to keep from falling as a wave of dizziness overtook her.

  “Ow!” she said, covering her eyes against the glare, then looked at her palm, scraped bloody from where she’d fallen against a rock covered with a thorny bush. Feeling dizzy and weak, she leaned back against what she thought was a couch only to meet more rock.

  It was several minutes before she could stop her head and body from spinning and squint against the sunlight to try to see where she was. Moments before, it had been night and she had been in her apartment, but now she seemed to be standing in front of a pile of enormous boulders, with scruffy little oak trees trying to grow in the cracks, and it was the height of the day.

  With the back of her hand to her forehead, Kady stepped back into the shade, then sat down on the smallest rock.

  “If I close my eyes and count to ten, I will wake up,” she said, then proceeded to count. But when she opened her eyes, the rocks were still there, as well as the sunlight, and she was still not in her apartment.

  There were aspen trees around her, blocking her from a long view of her surroundings, but a rocky, narrow path led down what could possibly be a mountain. It didn’t take a degree in botany to know that this was not the lush greenery of Virginia. This was high mountain desert. Her head came up when in the distance she heard the high-pitched cry of a bird as it flew overhead.

  “I have been working too hard,” Kady said, smoothing out the skirt of the wedding dress she was still wearing. “Working too much, and now I’m dreaming.”

  When she tried to stand, she was again dizzy and had to steady herself against a boulder. The rock certainly felt as though it was real!

  “Very real,” she said aloud. “Yes, indeed, this is the most vivid, most realistic dream anyone has ever had, and if I have any sense at all, I’ll enjoy it. I’ll . . .” She looked about her. “Yes, I’ll observe everything, then I’ll have a wonderful story to tell Gregory.”

  It wasn’t easy to concentrate because the dizziness kept coming over her in waves, and it was difficult to take deep breaths while fastened in the corset. Kady thought of loosening her stays, but she feared that if she did, she’d never be able to stand upright. At the moment, whalebone was the only spine she seemed to have.

  “I will not be frightened,” she said to herself sternly. “This is a dream, and as such, I cannot be hurt. Not really, actually, truly hurt,” she clarified.

  As she looked at the rocks, she saw something under a sparse little vine hanging down one sandstone side, so she pulled the vine aside. “Petroglyphs,” she said, running her lace-encased fingertip over the ancient symbols. Stick-figure men with bow and arrows hunted what looked to be elk. One man seemed to have fallen, while three others pursued more animals that were running away.

  As Kady touched the figures, suddenly it was as though, smack in the middle of the rocks, a doorway appeared, and through that open doorway, she could see her apartment.

  There was her couch, her jeans and chef’s coat flung across it, and on the floor was the old tin flour box the wedding dress had been in.

  Never in her life had Kady seen anything as enticing as the view of her own apartment. Without bothering to toss the train over her arm, she took the two steps toward the doorway.

  But as she reached the threshold, her foot paused in the air; she heard what sounded like a shot, loud and clear in the crisp air. Turning, she looked back toward the trees but could see nothing, so she turned again toward the doorway leading into her apartment.

  But this time he was there. Her Arabian man on the white horse, his face and body hidden in great swathes of black. Kady drew in her breath sharply. Since she’d repeatedly seen this man almost all her life, he should have been familiar to her, but each appearance was always a wonder. And the sight of him always made her yearn for something she couldn’t describe or explain.

  But this time seeing him was different, for this time he seemed clearer, more real, as though he were not a foggy dream but an actual man before her.

  “Who are you?” she whispered. “What do you want of me?”

  He looked at her over the dark scarf covering the lower half of his face, and his eyes seemed to be full of sadness. “I am waiting for you,” he whispered.

  It was the first time Kady had heard his voice, and it sent chills up her spine, made the hairs on her arms stand on end. “How?” she asked, leaning toward him, and her single word told it all. She was not hesitating about whether she would go to him or not, but asking only how she could find him.

  Raising his arm, he pointed with one long finger toward Kady, then raised his arm higher to point above her head. Quickly, she turned her head and once again looked toward the trees, but she saw nothing.

  When she looked back, he was still there, her empty apartment behind him, as though he were standing in front of a large photograph. It was in that moment that she knew he meant for her to go down that skinny little path and turn her back on all that her apartment represented. In that moment Gregory flashed before her eyes, and she thought of the way he smiled at her, of how she felt when he held her. She thought of Onions and her customers and Gregory’s mother. And she thought of her wedding and Debbie and Jane.

  “No,” she said without hesitation. “No thanks,” then took a step toward her apartment.

  In that split instant, everything disappeared, the apartment, the Arabian man on the horse, all of it. Instead, there was just a rough-surfaced rock, and Kady was jammed against it as though she’d tried to walk straight through the stone.

  “No, no, no, no!” she said as she turned her face away and leaned against the rock. This dream was too real, and if it was real, it was something that she did not want. “I want to go home,” she said, her mouth set in a firm line of stubbornness. “I’m not leaving here!” Crossing her arms over her corseted chest, she decided she wasn’t going to move, no matter what.

  But even as she said the words, something inside her made her want to go down that path. Once again, dizziness nearly overpowered her until she feared she’d lose consciousness. Bracing against a rock to steady herself, she waited for the compulsion to pass, but it merely lightened, refusing to leave her.

 
Her head came up when the wind carried what seemed to be the sound of male voices. Kady tried to fight the feeling, but there seemed to be a force outside of her telling her that she had to go down that path, that she could not stay where she was. And she had to go now.

  Still dizzy and seeming to grow dizzier by the second, Kady took a step toward the path, then halted as her foot encountered something. On the ground was the satin envelope, neatly retied, a lump showing that it contained the watch. When Kady bent to pick it up, she almost fainted and it took several moments before she could stand upright.

  Another shot came, and this time it was as though her feet had a will of their own as she started to stumble down the path. Twice the path branched, and even though her mind was disoriented and hazy, her feet seemed to know which way to go. Clutching the envelope tightly, her train thrown over her arm, she hurried forward. Twice she seemed to black out, and each time she opened her eyes again, she found herself still half running down the mountainside. Once she left the path altogether and stumbled across rocks and fallen timber before she found another path that led down the mountainside.

  Abruptly, she stumbled out of the shady woods and into brilliant sunlight. Swaying, she leaned against a boulder and tried to clear her vision. Several feet below her was a scene out of a movie. On a horse, his hands tied behind his back, his head listing to one side as though he were unconscious, was a man with a rope about his neck, and the rope was tied above to a large branch of a tree. The man was about ten seconds away from being hanged.

  Near him were three men on horses, guns strapped to their hips and smirks of delight on their faces. Kady didn’t know who was in the right, who were the good guys and who the bad, but she didn’t like the look on those men’s faces. Frantically, she looked about for some way to stop this awful event before the poor man on the horse was left dangling.

  A thousand thoughts ran through her head, but none of them seemed to be worth acting upon. Somehow, she doubted that she could walk up to the men and ask them to please stop. Nor did she think promises of cakes and chocolate pudding would make them cut the unconscious man down.

  She hesitated for a few seconds, then nearly jumped out of her corset when she heard a hateful little laugh below her to the left. Turning, she saw that a man was standing there, a rifle across his folded arms, and he was grinning in anticipation of the gory sight he was about to see.

  Maybe it was the thousands of television shows Kady had seen or all the violent movies, but she didn’t seem to think at all. It was pure instinct that made her creep up behind the man, pick up a big rock, and bring it down on his head.

  Silently, the man crumpled to the ground, and Kady grabbed his rifle. Now what? she thought, looking at the thing. How do I fire it? What should I—?

  She didn’t have any more thoughts because the rifle seemed to go off by itself and the kick of it sent Kady slamming back into a deep crevice between two rocks, the man she’d hit on the head at her feet.

  Still holding the rifle, her eyes wide in astonishment, she peered through the shrubs at the men on the horses several feet away. There was a tree between her and them, and because of the angle, she realized, the men couldn’t see her, but by the noise and confusion, she knew she had distracted them. Holding the rifle against her corseted belly, Kady pulled the trigger again, only to find that nothing happened. Cock it, came a voice into her head, and she remembered seeing TV shows where men pulled down a lever on the bottom of the rifle, then fired. After a bit of fumbling, she managed to do this, then fired again. This time there was a yell of pain, and she knew, to her horror, that she had hit someone.

  The sound of horses’ hooves, plus three shots directed toward her location, made her leap behind the rocks and crawl into a tiny cave formed by fallen trees and little bushes. With her breath held in fear, Kady listened as the horses came thundering her way.

  “What about him?” one of the men yelled when they were so near Kady she could feel the warmth of their horses. She could tell that “him” was the poor man they’d been about to hang.

  “Shoot the horse out from under him, and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  It was all Kady could do to keep from yelling “No!” but self-preservation made her stay where she was, trying to make herself as small as possible, holding the train of the wedding dress close to her body so they wouldn’t see her. There was another shot; then, to her horror, she saw the satin envelope on the path and prayed the men wouldn’t see it.

  But they were gone as fast as they could pull the man she’d bashed onto a horse; then all was quiet. Part of her wanted to run from her hiding place, but another part of her wanted to stay there until someone came to rescue her.

  But her concern for the man about to be hanged won over her own fear. After disentangling herself from the underbrush, she slung the train of her dress over her arm, grabbed the envelope, then took off running in his direction.

  As soon as she was in the sunlight, she saw that the man was still on his horse, still had the noose about his neck. The shot had obviously scared the animal as it had moved forward until the poor man in the saddle was stretched as far as his body could be.

  When Kady reached him, she knew that she could lose no time. Gently, she spoke to the horse, caressing its nose as she coaxed it to move backward a few steps and relieve some pressure on the man’s neck. Once the animal was back, she put her hand on the man’s leg and looked up at him. “Sir?” she said, but saw that he was unconscious, oblivious to everything.

  So how did she get him down? she wondered. The man was big, at least six feet tall and a couple of hundred pounds. His hands were tied, and he was dead to the world, and if that thick rope lashing his neck to a tree wasn’t removed, he’d be even more dead very soon.

  “Mister,” she called up, shaking him with her hand on his calf. There was no response from the man, but the horse turned its head and rolled its eyes at her, then moved one foot forward. If the horse became impatient and decided to walk away, he’d leave his passenger hanging, so Kady knew she had to act immediately.

  As quickly as she could, she divested herself of the heavy, trained skirt, all the half-slips, the lovely veil and the lace gloves, until she was wearing the long drawers, hose, and the nifty little boots, which easily slipped into the stirrup beside the man’s booted foot.

  With a great push, she propelled herself onto the back of the saddle behind the unconscious man.

  “Great,” she said as soon as she was in place. The rope was still a foot above her head, and even if she’d had a knife, the rope was so thick it would have taken her an hour to cut it. What she needed was a pair of bolt cutters. “Or a saw-blade bread knife,” she said, looking up at the rope.

  “You couldn’t wake up and help me with this, could you?” she said to the man, her head against his back, but she received no reply. Leaning around the broad back of him, she looked down at the horse. “Look, I’m going to have to climb up to stand in this saddle, so I want you to hold very, very still. Got that? I’m no circus performer, so I don’t want you chasing rabbits. Or whatever it is horses chase. Understand me?”

  The horse turned to look up at her in a way that made Kady quite nervous. Using the man’s body as though it were a ladder, she carefully and slowly climbed up until she was standing in the saddle behind him, leaning most of her body weight against his as she steadied herself as she reached for the rope.

  The horse shifted on its feet, and Kady would have fallen if she hadn’t caught herself by throwing her arms around the man’s neck. “Be still!” she hissed to the horse, and it had the good sense to obey her.

  It was not easy to loosen the treacherous hangman’s noose from around the man’s neck. The rope seemed to have embedded itself in the man’s skin, and only by much tugging and pulling was she finally able to free him.

  And the moment he was free, he collapsed back against Kady’s legs, almost causing her to fall from the horse. Crouching, she clutched him tightly
as he leaned into her and she bore what seemed to be half of his two hundred pounds on her own body. With great difficulty, somehow managing to keep herself as well as him from falling, she eased back down into the saddle so she was sitting behind him.

  His head was leaning back beside her own, his eyes closed, his breathing not detectable. “Wake up,” she said, then pulled one hand up to pat his cheek sharply. She didn’t have the heart to slap him, but truthfully she didn’t think any slap would revive him.

  “How do I get you to a doctor?” she asked the unconscious man in her arms; then, instead of trying to revive him, she stroked his thick hair from out of his eyes. His hair was dark blond, his skin was lightly tanned, and for the first time, Kady noticed that he was one gorgeous hunk.

  “Not in the same class as Gregory,” she said aloud, “but a woman could do worse.”

  “Stop it,” she reminded herself. “There are more important matters at hand than some guy who likes to spend his days playing cowboy.”

  With superhuman effort, Kady pushed the man forward until he was leaning over the horses’s neck; then she fiddled with the rope that was binding his hands. It took longer than it should have, but she had no knife, so she had to undo the tight knot.

  At last she had him untied; so, slowly, with her hands bracing him against falling, she got off the horse and onto the ground. But once she was down and looking up at him, he seemed as tall as a mountain and about the same breadth.

  Now all she had to do was get the rifle in case those horrible men returned, and the skirt of her dress, then get back onto the horse and ride to the nearest town and hospital. Simple.

  But the minute she reached for the rifle, she heard a sound behind her, then looked and saw, to her horror, that the big man was falling straight toward her.

  There wasn’t much time, but she did what she could to prepare herself for the impact. Spreading her feet wide apart, she braced herself. But no bracing could prepare her for the impact of his heavy body tumbling down onto hers. He fell against her hard, sending her sprawling onto a bed of leaves and gravel that cut into her lightly clad legs.