“And sapphires. You will take the utmost care of it, I have no doubt. Lady Dawn would not care to know her Nightingale was being abused.”
I tried to remember the history of Wales that I had learned a long time before, but I didn’t remember anything about a woman named Dawn.
“Absolutely,” I said, making an experimental slash or two in the air. The sunlight flashed and glittered on the sword, the gems adding brief bursts of color. I’d never so much as picked up a sword before, but this one pleased me on a primal level. It felt good in my hand. It felt right. “I’ll take very good care of it. So, what exactly do I do when I get to the battlefield? Join up with the other people?”
Colorado took me by the arm and steered me toward the far edges of the camp. “Oh, you won’t be fighting with others. Each soldier fights his or her own shift.”
“But—this is a battle, isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course.” We broke free of the encampment and walked up a slight incline to a knoll. Overhead, thick oily black and gray clouds blotted out much of the bloodred sky, periodically streaked with blue-white fingers of lightning. A distant rumble of thunder completed the nightmarish scene.
“But you have just one person fighting at a time?”
“Just one.”
“But . . . ,” I repeated, shaking my head. “That doesn’t seem to be a very efficient way to fight.”
“On the contrary, it’s quite very efficient. Lord Ethan found very early on that to have all of our troops fighting at the same time meant that many people were killed.”
“Isn’t that the whole point? I mean, killing your enemy?”
He looked horrified. “I do not know how you do things in your native land, Lady Gwen, but here in Anwyn, we do not condone slaughter.”
I felt like a genocidal fool. “Sorry. Obviously this way makes much more sense.”
“It does. We send out one person for a two-hour shift, after which he—or she—is free to rest until the following day’s shift. Few people are injured, and even fewer are killed. It is, as Lady Dawn says, a win-win situation.”
“Kinda makes you wonder why you bother fighting at all.”
“Oh, we don’t wonder that. We know why we fight. Lord Aaron attacked my lord. He had to answer. It was the only honorable thing to do.”
We crested the top of the knoll as he spoke. He stopped, nodding toward the center of the hilltop, where the grass had been blackened, eventually wearing away to nothing but dirt as red as the sky. Standing with his arms crossed (not as easy to do while wearing armor as you might think), his sword sheathed at his side, was a knight in full armor, including helm, obviously awaiting me. “That is the battlefield.”
I looked around. The area surrounding the knight appeared to be about twenty feet in diameter. “That’s a battlefield? The whole thing?”
“Indeed it is, although if you wish to get a running start, you are permitted an extra fifteen paces.” He clapped me on the shoulder, making me stagger forward a couple of steps. “Good fighting, Lady Gwen! Your replacement will be up in a little less than two hours.”
I watched him trot down the hillside, and then I turned back to look at the knight and the so-called battlefield. It could have served as a baseball diamond for guinea pigs. I took a few steps forward until I was at the edge of the scorched grass. “Um. Hi. I’m Gwen. I guess I’m supposed to fight you.”
The man inclined his head, a flash of lightning reflecting off the closed metal visor.
“Just so you know, I’m new to all this. I’m an alchemist, not really a soldier. I was kind of . . . er . . . conscripted into this job. Totally against my will, because as I said, I’m not a fighter, but there are times when you just have to take the lesser of two evil choices, and this was it. The lesser, that is. So, what’s your name?”
Yes, I was babbling, but there was a method to my madness. I figured I had at worst an hour and a half to kill before someone else came to fight, and if I could use up some of that time in pleasantries, I was willing to chitchat like I’d never chitchatted before.
The knight didn’t answer for a moment, but then he shifted his visor up so he could look at me unimpeded by metal. “I can’t tell you.”
“Is it against the terms of the fighting or something?” I asked, digging the point of the sword into the ground so I could lean on it.
“Don’t do that.”
I blinked at him. “Don’t do what?”
“Don’t bury the tip of your sword in that manner. You’ll damage it. Here, see?” He marched over to me and lifted the tip of the sword in his mailed hand, showing me where the metal was dusty with bits of dirt and dead grass. “A sword is a valuable weapon. You must treat her with respect and honor.”
“Oh.” I blew on the end of the sword, took off my metal gloves, and carefully, so as not to cut myself, brushed off the dust and grass. “It is a pretty sword. It even has a name: Nightingale.”
The man’s eyes widened. Although I couldn’t see a lot of his face, he looked pleasant enough.
“You bear the fabled Nightingale? You must be a very great warrior indeed.”
“See, that’s just the thing. I’m not, not at all. I’m an alchemist. Did I mention that? My moms—I have two—my moms and I just got here in Anwyn, and all of a sudden I found myself with armor on and this pretty sword in my hand. So if you wanted to forgo fighting, I’d be fine with that . . . er . . . what was your name?”
“I told you that I cannot tell you my name,” he said primly, lowering his visor again and pulling out his sword, obviously in preparation for skewering me.
“Why not?” I asked quickly, desperate to distract him from the actual act of fighting.
He lowered his sword and raised his visor again. “I am King Aaron’s man.”
“Yeah, so?”
I could have sworn he rolled his eyes. “A warrior of King Aaron cannot be vanquished unless his name is known to his enemies.”
“Really? So if I guessed your name, I’d win?” I considered him, trying to think of as many male Welsh names as I could.
Up went the sword. Down went the visor. “That is so. Are you ready to begin? We have wasted much time in conversation.”
“Hold on just a second,” I said, lifting a hand. “I’d like to have a few shots at guessing your name.”
“Why?” he asked, his voice muffled behind the visor.
“Because I’m not a fighter. I’m a . . . well, a scholar, I guess. And besides, I can’t fight someone whose name I don’t know.”
“Why?” he asked again, but he lowered his sword once more and lifted the visor so I could see the annoyed look on his face.
“I can’t think of you as ‘the knight dude’ in my mental narrative, now can I? Daffyd?”
This time I saw him clearly roll his eyes. “No, that is not my name.”
“Herbert.”
“No.”
“Owen?” It was my own surname, but there was a chance it was also his first name.
“That is not my name, no. Now, shall we fight?”
“I’m not going to fight you until I have a name that I can think of you by. Darryl?”
His shoulders slumped for a moment before he straightened up and said, “You may pick a name to use for me.”
I really didn’t want to fight him. He looked strong and immovable, and that sword was much larger than mine. “Fine. But if you hurt me, my moms will come after you. They’re very protective.”
He lowered his visor for the umpteenth time. “We shall begin. What name do you choose for me?”
I thought of whatever was the least threatening and the least likely to harm me. “When I was a child, I had a soft, fuzzy purple bunny named Douglas. I guess I can call you that.”
This time he didn’t just lift the visor—he took off the entire helm, pulling with it the soft cotton cap that was worn under it. His hair was close-cropped, and spiky with sweat. “Are you insulting me?” he asked, pointing the helm at me.
“Me? No!”
“You named me after a child’s toy! A rabbit toy! I am a warrior of Aaron! I am feared by all! The very ground itself trembles beneath my feet! I am not a soft, fuzzy Douglas!”
“Sorry. I can try to think of something else if you like.”
“You do that!”
I considered him, trying to formulate a vision of who he looked like. Maybe a Simon? An Alex? A Cadwallader?
“I’m sorry,” I said, slumping just a little. “Now that I’ve thought of Douglas the bunny, that’s what is stuck in my brain.”
He looked like he was about to explode, but he simply slapped the cloth hat and helm back onto his head, hefting his sword and waving it in a menacing manner. “It matters not what you call me, servant of Ethan. Commence the battle.”
“You know, I think I need a little coffee break. How about I go get us a little light refreshment?”
“You’re not going anywhere. Not again.”
The voice that spoke didn’t come from Douglas. He pulled up his visor, his frown being sent over my shoulder. I turned to see who it was that had joined us in our battle.
It was Gregory. And he looked angry as hell.
FIVE
The gentle glow of the Krispy Kreme sign lit Gregory Faa’s face. He was not happy, and he didn’t have one iota of trouble letting the man who stood with him know that fact. “I am not happy.”
“It’s hard luck that your girlfriend duped you again, but we need to focus on what’s important,” Peter said, without the slightest shred of sympathy.
“That just makes me want to punch you, you know,” Gregory answered, tired and cranky and utterly unable to keep from telling his cousin what was on his mind. Another day he might have been more circumspect, but tonight, as the two of them stood outside the Krispy Kreme shop in the Cardiff Shopping Centre, he lacked the verbal check needed to keep his emotions to himself.
Peter looked up from his notebook, wherein he was recording information on the chase that they had just undertaken across Cardiff to the shopping center. The fruitless chase. Gregory ground his teeth again at the thought of how Gwen had fooled him. Wantonly and brazenly.
“Why, because you don’t like me pointing out that she misled you?”
“Because you aren’t the least bit sympathetic with my plight. And she’s not my girlfriend.”
“You’re interested in her,” Peter insisted.
“I’ve never once said that,” he protested, wondering how Peter could tell that he was, in fact, quite interested in the delicious—if wicked—Gwen.
“You don’t have to. You saved her life. Twice, according to the account you gave of what happened after you stole time.”
Gregory looked into the distance, ignoring the flashing lights of the police cars as the officers continued to mill in and around the shop, interviewing workers and customers alike about the events of twenty minutes before. “I thought we weren’t going to speak of that again.”
Peter laughed. “We aren’t. Why do you need sympathy if she’s not someone you’d like to have a personal relationship with?”
He found it difficult to answer that question, and decided instead to answer another one, despite the fact that it hadn’t actually been asked. “I don’t think she escaped by means of a spell.”
Peter returned to making notes. “You interviewed the security guard. Didn’t he say that Gwen and her abductees ran into the doughnut place?”
“Yes. And I’m not so sure they were abductees.”
“Look, I know your pride is still stinging over this betrayal,” Peter said, giving him a sympathetic look that he found he didn’t like or want after all. “But you’ve got to face the facts that this woman is not someone you should be lusting after.”
“I never said—”
“You didn’t have to. Anyone who uses the terms ‘lush’ and ‘delicious’ when describing a woman lusts after her. She’s a bad egg, Gregory. She’s rotten to the core, and she’s not above using you to get what she wants.”
Gregory fought back the urge to argue with his cousin about Gwen’s character. He didn’t, but not because he realized that arguing at that moment would be futile—surrounded as they were with the mortal police, who, by means of some false identification cards, they believed were members of Scotland Yard—but because he had better things to do with his time and energy. “The guard said that Gwen helped the women out of the car. He said that the women, in turn, helped the kidnap victim very carefully and that Gwen and one of the others more or less carried the woman into the shop. Would you do that if you had the cops right on your heels?”
“I might,” Peter said, thinking about it. “If I didn’t have a weapon, and needed to use the victim as a hostage to secure my own safety. As for the other two women—they’re clearly her accomplices. The nursing home said that there were two of them who abducted the old lady.”
It didn’t make sense to Gregory. Despite what Peter claimed, he didn’t think Gwen was a cold, callous woman who cared nothing about the people around her. Yes, the facts were irrefutable in that she had kidnapped an elderly woman, but according to the security man, she’d been very careful to make sure the victim wasn’t harmed in the act of escape.
“I’m going to talk to the police again,” he said, coming to a decision. “I want a look at that storeroom they went into.”
“The police scoured it already. It’s empty,” Peter said without looking up from his notebook. “The only way she could have gotten out is by using an escape spell of some sort.”
“If that was so, then why didn’t she use one earlier, when the police were chasing her? Or even earlier still, when she abducted the victim?”
Peter looked up at that, but clearly didn’t have an answer. Gregory, his false identification badge pinned to the outside of his jacket, went into the shop to have another look around.
“They didn’t look like criminals,” one of the customers was saying to a policewoman who was interviewing her. “They just looked like a bunch of old ladies and one young one. They ran around the counter and into the back, and then a bloke dashed in shouting at them to stop, and went in after them. That’s all we saw.”
Gregory passed the investigation team, moving around the counter to the doorway of the supply room. The room was filled with metal shelving units on either side, with the usual accoutrements scattered about—wheeled bucket and mop, cans of industrial cleaner, boxes of napkins, straws, and cup lids, which he assumed had been stacked tidily but were now splayed out in disarray. The back wall held a sink with a notice about washing hands, a small desk stacked high with take-out boxes waiting to be assembled, and huge drums of cooking oil. There was no exit door, no window, no possible way out of the room except by means of magic.
Gregory stepped into the room, intending to test whether he could sense any sort of residual magic, and came face-to-face with an anomaly: smack-dab in the center of the room was a portal. He glanced at the policeman who was at the rear of the room, tapping the walls in order to find who knew what, then back at the portal. He approached it. He’d never seen a portal in person, Travellers not having much of a need to visit places like Abaddon or the Court of Divine Blood (what most mortal people thought of as hell and heaven, but which were in reality quite a bit different), but he knew that what he was looking at had to be a portal. He circled it, examining it from the back. It appeared the same as the front.
He glanced again at the mortal, who didn’t seem to notice the oddity at all, and then returned to Peter’s side.
“I figured out how they got out of the shop,” he said in a conversational tone.
“Magic,” Peter said, in the middle of sending a text message, no doubt to his wife.
“Not really. There’s a portal in the room.”
“A what?” Peter stopped texting to look askance. “I looked in the room. There was nothing there but what you’d expect to see in a storage room.”
“Smack-dab in the center of
the room is a long oval that runs from ceiling to floor. The air in it is thicker, and twisted in long ropes that seem to spiral down in a never-ending pattern. If that’s not a portal, I don’t know what is.”
Peter looked thoughtful. “It does sound like one. But I swear to you that it wasn’t there when I looked in the room earlier.”
“I didn’t see anything, either, until I got within a yard of it. How far into the room did you go?”
“Not very far—just enough to see there was no exit and no place to hide. Damn. We’re going to have to find out where the portal leads to.”
“The cop in there didn’t seem to see it.”
“He wouldn’t.” Peter finished up his text message and punched in a phone number. “Portals are generally warded and protected so mortals can’t see or access them. If this one didn’t appear to you until you were right on top of it, it’s probably heavily protected. Dalton? It’s me. Gregory and I have found a portal in Cardiff. In a doughnut shop. Can you find out where it leads to?”
A small car pulled up. Gregory watched a familiar woman get out of the car and march over to the nearest police officer. She flashed some sort of a badge.
“Probably has identification set up through her boss like we do,” he said softly, his eyes narrowing as she entered the shop.
“Uh-huh. Got it. You’re sure? Damn. Thanks. Yes, we’ll wait until you get permission. So long as there’s no other exit for her to leave there, we should be OK until we are allowed in.” Peter stopped Gregory as he was about to follow the red-suited minion of Death into the shop. He didn’t like the woman at all, and worried that she might see the portal if she went far enough into the room. “Dalton says the records say the portal is to Anwyn.”
“What’s that?”
“Some sort of Welsh afterlife.”
“Great. So we’ll have to fight our way through dead people to get Gwen.” He started forward again, only to be stopped once more.
“It’s not that easy. We can’t go in.”
“We can’t? Do you have to be dead? Gwen wasn’t dead, nor was her victim and the other women.”
The Art of Stealing Time t-2 Page 8