Entreat Me

by Grace Draven

  “Cinnia, please!” Her father cried from his place behind one of the henchmen. Louvaen wanted to tell him to be quiet, but her command might give away the game. There was also an unexpected boon to his protest. If Ambrose fooled Mercer with his illusion, he fooled everyone else.

  The sorcerer dropped his candle in the snow and raised both hands to Jimenin. “How shall I ride?”

  As if the question punched Jimenin awake, he shoved Louvaen hard to the side and reached eagerly for his newest captive. She flew out of the saddle and sprawled in a powdery drift. The horse blocked most of her view, but she caught Jimenin’s shocked expression before he flailed and toppled out of his seat on the opposite side.

  Ambrose roared in a deep voice wholly his. “Move, Louvaen!”

  A flash of searing light burst across the bailey. Blinded, Louvaen scuttled on hands and knees away from the pounding of hooves as, for a second time, frightened horses bolted in every direction. A series of thunderous cracks added to the mayhem, and the agonized cries of the injured joined the chorus of equine squeals and whinnies. Somewhere in that chaos, Jimenin’s men had either shot each other, shot their horses or gods forbid, shot her father or Ambrose.

  The warning hiss of Isabeau’s roses sounded dangerously close, and she flinched away, sliding along a patch of icy mud. The trailing ends of a horse’s tail switched her across the cheek as one of the animals galloped by close enough to flutter her sodden night rail. She’d come a hair’s breadth from being trampled—an ending she’d suffer any day over death by climbing rose.

  As soon as her vision recovered from the blast of Ambrose’s light spell, another followed, putting to rest her fears that someone had shot Ambrose.

  “Hold your ground, you white livered rags!” Jimenin roared above the din. “Shoot the woman and the old man!”

  Jimenin’s threat held Louvaen silent, and she prayed Mercer would do the same. The heavy thud of a body hitting the ground made her jump. Hisses transformed into frenzied rustling as the fiendish roses latched onto a victim. A man’s screams cut through the clamor, pitching into unearthly screeches that froze every drop of blood in her veins to sleet. The bailey went still. Even the remaining horses stood quiet. Only the ebb and swell of one unfortunate soul’s dying shrieks pierced the hush.

  Grateful for the mercy of temporary blindness, Louvaen resumed her crawl across the bailey to where she guessed the door might be. If she got inside, she could arm herself with one of Ballard’s many weapons. A sword wasn’t much use against a flintlock, but better than what she currently had, which was nothing. She halted once more when a plaintive howl drowned out the dying henchman’s fading cries. Wolfish, savage, it was joined by another, different cry—more a roar that vibrated the earth beneath her feet.

  Her vision cleared in time to watch a black shape hurtle out the door and into the bailey where it leapt onto the nearest man so fast, he had no chance to cry out before a set of gleaming claws split him from gullet to gizzard. A second shape followed, just as quickly. The gait was different, more of a spidery sprint than a lope. Like the first creature, it dove into the fray, attacking anyone it could reach. Amidst more screams and the thunder of pistol fire, Louvaen flattened herself to the ground. She searched frantically for her father and Ambrose—now undisguised—in the concealing snowfall and sighted both men huddled behind the carcass of a dead horse.

  Across the bailey turned battlefield Jimenin and his men fought their attackers as they tried to escape through the gate. One of the beasts pivoted, and in the moon’s light she caught the lambent glow of sulfurous eyes, bristling fur and the squashed face of a giant bat. Louvaen cried out. Gavin lived. If the son lived, then maybe the father did as well. She hunted for the other creature and found it busy turning one of Jimenin’s lackeys into a pile of separate body parts. Blood splattered in every direction, and another pair of eyes gleamed in the semi-darkness. Ballard. Or what was once the master of Ketach Tor.

  This brutish thing bore no resemblance to the man she’d grown to love, just as the bat-wolf animal held no trace of Gavin. The terrible anguish in Ambrose’s gaze earlier had not been because they were dead, but because they were still alive.

  Her waking nightmare took a worse turn. The real Cinnia appeared at the doorway and darted into the bailey. Louvaen screamed and lurched to her feet. Forgetting caution, she raced toward the door waving her arms. “Cinnia! For gods’ sakes, get back inside! Get inside!”

  In that moment, the world slowed and the sounds of fighting faded. She saw Cinnia’s face, tear-streaked and pale, her gaze fastened solely on Gavin. She glimpsed movement from the corner of her eye. Jimenin turned, that hollow stare changing from terrified to malevolent. He sprinted toward them, the pistol in his hand raised and aimed at Cinnia. Louvaen lunged at her. The click of the flintlock’s trigger cracked in her ears, and she flinched in anticipation of the accompanying flash and muted boom of the lead ball flying out of the barrel to strike her sister.

  Nothing. The world sped up again, and the gods answered desperate prayers. Jimenin shouted frustrated curses as the pistol misfired. He half-cocked it but never got the chance to full-cock the hammer. Just as he took aim at Cinnia a second time his eyes widened, and he staggered forward. His arm fell limply at his side, and he crashed to his knees before falling face first into the mud and snow. A warrior queen’s knife protruded from between his shoulder blades. Mercer stood behind him—breathing harder than a winded horse—sagging features dark with a grim triumph.

  The shock of seeing her docile father dispatch their most hated enemy didn’t stop Louvaen. She limped to the fallen Jimenin and carefully pried the pistol from his still fingers. She reached for Mercer’s hand. “Come away, Papa. Hurry.” She tugged on him, holding him upright as he stumbled beside her in their bid to reach Cinnia.

  The cursed pair of father and son savaged their last opponents, leaving only Louvaen, Cinnia, Mercer and Ambrose to their non-existent mercy. Unfortunately, neither she nor Mercer were fast enough. Before she could take two steps, Gavin loped across the bailey and crouched between her and Cinnia. The hackles on his hunched back bristled in warning, and he snarled through an impressive set of fangs.

  She and Mercer froze. Louvaen full-cocked the pistol she’d plucked from Jimenin’s dead hand. If Gavin charged them or turned on Cinnia, she’d have no choice but to shoot. He did neither, but the fur along his back rose at every flinch and twitch they made. Louvaen watched him pace back and forth, and an idea took hold. He protected his mate. Somewhere in that bestial brain, the human Gavin remembered Cinnia, remembered the beloved wife and sought to guard her from those who might do her harm. Across from her, Cinnia’s gaze remained riveted on her cursed husband.

  “Gavin,” she crooned. “My darling boy, come back to me.”

  Louvaen blinked away tears at the longing in her sister’s entreaty and the befuddlement in Gavin’s beastly face as he struggled to understand its lure. What in the gods’ names were they supposed to do now?

  She clutched her father’s arm and leaned to whisper in his ear “Back up slowly, Papa.” Maybe if they weren’t so close, Gavin would concentrate his attention less on them and more on Cinnia. She, of all people, had the greatest chance of reaching him.

  They halted when every hair on Gavin’s fur-covered body stood on end. His yellow eyes blazed, and his lips curled back from his fangs as he stared at something behind them. In the moonlight, Cinnia’s face blenched white.

  “Careful, Lou,” she warned in a low voice. “De Sauveterre is behind you.”

  Forewarned, Louvaen pivoted slowly and almost bit through her lip trying not to scream.

  Every child grew up with stories about the sloe folk—those dark beings born of men’s evil thoughts, their suffering and their rage. They prowled at night—lurking behind curtains, at the edge of windows and under beds—ready to snatch disobedient children from their home and devour them whole. In childhood, the eleven-year old Louvaen shared a bed with the thr
ee-year old Cinnia. Many a night she’d stayed awake long after their bedtime, one of their mother’s washing bats clutched in her hands in case she had to fight off a sloe-kin looking for a midnight snack. She and Cinnia had grown to women and consigned those night horrors to childhood memory. Never in her blackest dreams did she imagine they were real or that she might face a one as an adult.

  When last she’d seen him, Ballard’s changes had been startling. She’d given a fanciful twist to the bittersweet woven through his hair and around the newly minted horns sprouting from his scalp by comparing him to one of the nature gods of old. His eyes, though, made her wary. The last flux had permanently transformed them from the darkest brown to the yellow of pine sap with the pupils of a serpent. She’d plucked the bittersweet, caressed the patches of skin made bark and kissed the reptilian eyes closed. Beneath the curse’s physical distortions he was still the patient, noble man she’d fallen in love with.

  This was no man. The bark previously dotting his body in patchwork designs engulfed him now, turning him as woody and fissured as an old oak. Tufts of bristling hair burst through the bark in random spots. The twisting scars etched into his torso, neck and face had erupted and hardened, sliding up into his scalp until they twined with the spiking horns and topped his head in a crown of gnarled root and antler. His arms and legs had thinned and elongated, as if he’d somehow survived the tortures of the rack with bones stretched like branches, ending in enormous knuckled hands and feet tipped with black claws dripping gore.

  Worst of all, he stared at Gavin from a distorted face empty of recognition. Skeletal cheekbones curved beneath hollowed out eye sockets housing radiant pinpoints of white light instead of eyes—light as cold and distant as stars. He growled, a strange scraping noise neither animalistic nor human but something otherworldly. Louvaen shuddered at the sight of the split mouth with its black tongue and rows of spear point teeth. This was not a woodland’s monarch, but its demon.

  “Ballard,” she said.

  “No Louvaen, not any longer.” Ambrose spoke across the clearing between Gavin and Ballard. Like Mercer, he’d left the safety of the horse barricade and inched his way closer to them. Shadows played across his morose features. He stopped when Ballard turned glowing eyes on him. The demon’s teeth snapped together in challenge, savage as any wolf trap. He returned his attention to Gavin and repeated the action.

  Gavin’s answered with a snarl, far less preternatural but just as threatening. One taloned hand swatted the air, and he stamped a foot in the mud in warning. Cinnia spoke softly behind him, still in the soothing voice that pleaded he remember who he was, remember his father.

  “My love, you are Gavin de Lovet. This is your home; we are your family. Your father stands before you—the man who loves you, who protected you from Isabeau’s curse.” She wheedled and cajoled ceaselessly, earning the swivel of his large bat-like ears as he listened to her and kept a jaundiced eye on the chimera who clawed the ground with his fingers and chittered strange noises from a ligneous throat.

  Louvaen chanted “Remember, remember” to herself in a whisper. Gavin was the final key to breaking the curse. As a coarse brute driven by aggression and blood lust, his chances of recalling the person he’d been were improbable, yet he’d instinctively raced to Cinnia, guarding her from those he considered a threat. Somewhere in there, a spark of the man burned. If anyone could feed the flame, it was his wife. A chance still existed to save one if not both men.

  She gripped her father’s hand so tightly her fingers went numb. They watched as Gavin closed his eyes for a moment, shook his head and opened them to reveal irises as green as spring. A strangled cry caught in Louvaen’s throat as he stared at Ballard and garbled out two words distinct enough for them to understand. “My father,” he said and dropped to his knees.

  The same booming snap and concussive wave that had struck the castle when the two sisters declared their love for father and son now bounced across the bailey. Mercer stumbled against Louvaen who canted sideways and nearly fell as a breaker of dizziness slammed into her. The bailey distorted into a warped landscape, as if she gazed through a thick pane of wavy glass. Curses, shouts and inhuman cries rose around her, along with the hissing of Isabeau’s bloodthirsty roses. She struggled to stay upright and clear her already compromised vision. Gavin remained on his knees, clutching his head and rocking back and forth in Cinnia’s arms. That same distortion cascaded over him, changing him from beast to man and beast again. Like Louvaen, Ambrose struggled to remain standing. He held out his arms to balance himself and shook his head several times.

  The distortion faded and the roses’ sibilant chorus died. Louvaen clutched her father and peered into his eyes. “Are you well?”

  He nodded before exclaiming in a breathless whisper “Merciful gods, Lou. Look!”

  She followed his gaze and gasped. The bat-wolf creature was gone. In its place, Gavin slumped unconscious in Cinnia’s arms. Louvaen whipped around to find Ballard. Her jubilation shattered when she found him unchanged. Still the abomination wrought by his long-dead wife’s hatred, he swayed and clawed at his gnarled crown.

  Her voice broke on a sob. “Let him go, Isabeau. I beg you.”

  There was no letting go, even with Isabeau’s power crushed. Ballard had shouldered the curse’s damaging effects for too long. Broken, it still held him in thrall. She refused to relinquish hope. Unlike Cinnia, she was not a tranquil woman with a comforting mien or soothing voice. Nor was she Ballard’s wife, but if her sister’s methods had been successful with Gavin, the same might be successful with Ballard. She had to try; she had nothing else.

  “Ballard,” she said softly. “Do you remember me, forest king? I remember you, just as you ordered.” She released her father to tap a finger against her chest. “The shrew, the scold, the fishwife. Who will make me gentle if you don’t come back to me?”

  Time marched by with an old man’s shuffle. Ballard blinked at her, the radiant eyes never darkening or showing a glint of recognition. His skin remained bark; the teeth stayed sharp and his legs and arms thin and stiff as leafless branches. Tears spilled down her cheeks.

  Mercer touched her arm. “It’s too late, Lou.”

  “Shoot him, Louvaen.” Ambrose’s stern command cracked across the bailey. She jerked and glared at him from her good eye. The flintlock rested in her grip, nearly forgotten and still fully cocked. “Shoot him,” he repeated. “And grant him the mercy he deserves.”

  The pistol’s weight cramped her hand. “Just a little more time,” she implored. The curse was broken. If they waited a few more seconds...

  Gavin moaned in Cinnia’s arms. Ballard crouched, snaking that black tongue across rutted lips. The jagged twigs distending from his elbows and shoulder blades quivered, and the fur tufts hackled. Behind her Cinnia screamed as he sprang forward, lunging for the helpless Gavin.

  “Now, Louvaen! Ambrose roared. “Shoot him!”

  She raised the pistol. Half blind and shaking from the cold, she aimed at the leaping monstrosity and pulled the trigger. Light burst from the pan in a shower of sparks. She turned her face away from the bright powder flash as the pistol fired. She caught only a glimpse of a hurtling dark shape flung backward. A grunt and a thud from something hitting the ground followed.

  The gun slipped from her fingers, barely missing her toes as it fell.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Louvaen stared numbly at the still figure huddled in the snow like so much deadfall. The tears she’d shed had dried, and she stood rooted in place as Ambrose sprinted past her, cloak flapping behind him as he sank to his knees beside his fallen master. Cinnia called her name, but she ignored her, along with the biting cold, her father’s gentle murmurs and the absolute silence from the thorny tapestry of roses. Only her voice echoed in her head, accusing, relentless. “You killed him. You killed him.”

  “Louvaen, I need you.” Ambrose’s voice cut through the accusations like a sharp blade.”

  She bris
tled, outrage incinerating the numbness. She’d played executioner once. She wouldn’t do it again. “I’ll not shoot him a second time, magician.”

  “Quit arguing, woman! Come!”

  Despite wanting to run away and screech her grief until she was hoarse, Louvaen joined Ambrose where he knelt by Ballard. Shock made her stagger when she looked down at her lover—naked, gaunt, bloody—and very much alive. More blood ran crimson in the snow around him and streamed through Ambrose’s fingers where his hands wrapped around Ballard’s thigh. She’d aimed for his chest and shot him in the leg. The sorcerer scowled at her.

  “Don’t just stand there like an imbecile,” he snapped. “Help me.” She dropped next to him, gawking so hard at Ballard’s face that she was barely aware of Ambrose’s bloodied hands guiding hers to Ballard’s leg. “Press tight to slow the bleeding,” he instructed. She followed his direction while he tore a strip of cloth from his cloak and tucked it around the wound. “Good thing you aren’t as precise with a pistol as you are with your kicks,” he said.

  He motioned Mercer over. “Louvaen’s father?” The other man nodded. “I’ll want your help in a moment. Stay with Louvaen for now. I need to see to Gavin and bring Magda from the bower. She’s guarding the other women and is the healer here.” He strode to where Cinnia huddled with Gavin.

  Mercer settled next to Louvaen. “You might have told me, daughter.” He stroked her hair. “Did I miss two weddings?”

  “No. I’m still Thomas Duenda’s widow.”

  “And Ballard de Sauveterre’s mistress?” Her silence answered his question, so he asked another one. “Do you love him?”

  Louvaen leaned down and brushed her lips across Ballard’s forehead. “Oh yes.”

  She inhaled sharply when Ballard’s lids twitched open. Dark and liquid, his eyes stared at her with a puzzled expression that sharpened for a moment. He wet his dry lips with a pink tongue and swallowed. “You’re a dangerous woman to love, Louvaen Duenda,” he said in a raspy voice. His eyes glazed over before rolling back, and he slipped into oblivion once more.