Highland Dragon Warrior

by Isabel Cooper

  Alice nodded. “Just as long as he considers what’s…significant”—her arched eyebrows and pursed mouth gave the word an unmistakable meaning—“to you. He’s a man, remember?”

  “You think we’d be here if that had slipped my mind?”

  “And he doesn’t seem the forceful sort, I’ll give him that…not that they always do.” Memory thinned Alice’s lips and drew a sympathetic noise from Sophia. Being unmarried, she hadn’t heard as much of the gossip back home, but she knew enough. Alice went on. “But he’s lord of this place—in fact right now, if not in title—and he’s got plenty of opportunities to be persuasive…and he might not really think anything of the risks you’d be taking. I thought it was worth reminding him. I still do.”

  “Not so many risks,” Sophia said, her voice falling as she looked into the fire. She’d made her choices long ago. Few men wanted a scholarly wife, and her studies had left little time for courtship. In the right frame of mind, she counted herself lucky that she’d had the choice to make, that with one daughter married and two sons, her family had been both able and inclined to allow for an unwed scholar. But on some nights, and on a certain sort of gray afternoon, she couldn’t keep her mind from wondering about the untrodden path. “It isn’t as though the rabbi will have a list of men for my father when I go back, is it? And at my age, it’s hardly likely that—”

  The hand on her forearm gave it a gentle slap. “‘Hardly likely’ is still possible, and you know it almost as well as I do. Remember Madame Laurent? Forty-five and twins.”

  “I remember,” said Sophia, who’d gone in with salves and potions to help the midwife. It had been a long night, but the yelling of healthy babes—and the look on Madame Laurent’s face—had been reward enough.

  “So. And you never know—if you were at home, you might change your mind. You’re not a hag, you know, and this isn’t so scandalous that a man might not overlook it…maybe a widower, one who had his own life too.”

  “The world does contain many things,” said Sophia, the nearest she could come to equaling her friend’s probably forced optimism and the closest she would get to admitting, either to Alice or herself, how little the prospect appealed to her.

  “Well, then.”

  “You don’t have to try to convince me. I’m not going to go throwing myself at the lord of the castle out of…of despair or recklessness. It was a moment. I don’t plan to repeat it, and I don’t think I’ll even have the chance.” Sophia managed another smile. “But it is good of you to worry.”

  “No, it’s just worried of me to worry.” Alice slipped an arm around her friend’s shoulders.

  This time, smiling was easier, and Sophia leaned into the embrace easily. Concern was good, and perhaps the reminder had been necessary. Her own resistance was evidence enough of that.

  Fourteen

  Sophia fell.

  She couldn’t remember what or where she fell from; she couldn’t see what or where she fell to. She knew only falling, the headfirst plummet that left her stomach far behind. She gasped for breath and clutched at nothing. The landing would be painful. The landing might well be fatal. She could do nothing about that.

  At first, there was only darkness around her. Sophia stared into it with wide eyes, looking for anything to grasp, any possibility of aid, but there was only black void. She’d been screaming from the first, but when she realized that the fall was taking longer than it possibly could have, she stopped and realized that there was nothing else around her to hear. The world might have ended.

  Then she began to see shapes in the blackness. They didn’t look like the products of strained vision—she knew those well—but all the same, she shut her eyes for a second. On opening them, the shapes were still hanging in the void. Now a few of them were moving. They didn’t move like earthly things. They didn’t look like earthly things either, not in shape or color, but Sophia couldn’t have said precisely what they did look like. The mind shied away from specifics.

  Through her fear, that inability irritated her. Details had always come easily to her. One pinned down the universe with knowledge. One looked, described, researched, experimented. Sophia’s mind had always served her well in that regard, and to have it fail her, even under such circumstances as these, vexed her all out of proportion. She glowered, braced herself, and then focused on one of the shapes.

  It was almost blue, except where it was more almost pink. It was a circular sort of square. It moved sideways and diagonally at the same time. Sophia closed her eyes again and shook her head—a head now shot through with pain, as if she’d tried to look directly at the sun.

  A very deep part of her mind, one that barely managed words, said things beyond. It wasn’t knowledge exactly; it was more instinct, like recognizing the smell of blood or the sound of thunder. Given time, she might have been able to translate the feeling into words, to pin it down in its turn and make it concrete, but the fall wasn’t endless. Sophia couldn’t see land when she looked down, but she felt the end approaching.

  The shapes changed. Without looking too closely again—and even Sophia’s curiosity quailed at the prospect—she couldn’t have said how, exactly. It was like they became grayer or greener, more twisted or sharper. The first ones hadn’t felt bad, only impossible to look at. These others…

  …she couldn’t say. She didn’t know if she wanted to say. Sophia knew only that their presence was a shudder down her spine and a twist in her gut. She shouldn’t have been able to fear anything more than falling rapidly toward an unknown destination, but looking at them was worse than that.

  Ground hit her, rather than the reverse. On one breath she was falling, trying not to look at the shapes around her. With the next, she was flat on her stomach, her face in dirt, jarred and probably bruised. She still breathed, though, and she felt no broken bones, which was a minor miracle.

  She pulled herself to her feet. It took surprisingly little time; she almost rose as soon as she thought it. Having ground beneath her feet was a new sensation, and one that should have reassured her more than it did, but this ground felt unpleasant, squashy, and unstable. When Sophia looked around, she didn’t like her surroundings much better than the non-place she’d fallen through, even though they made more sense.

  The ground below her was part of a tiny path, no wider than her shoulders and perhaps narrower in places. As far as Sophia could see, it wound forward and back through an immense forest of dark trees. They weren’t the trees around Loch Arach—or not in any place she’d seen. For one thing, they all had leaves. Noticing that, Sophia realized that there was no snow on the ground either, nor did she feel cold.

  What was she wearing? Strange that she couldn’t remember that. She looked down to check and, in doing so, glimpsed movement from behind her.

  Forgetting about her clothes—a shapeless gray dress, which would have struck her as odd, had she had time to think about it—Sophia spun around. Better to know, always better to know, even though it would likely only be a squirrel or a deer and she’d feel silly.

  It was a face.

  It was a face made out of shadow, one without eyes. It rested atop a shadow-body like a man’s, save that it was too tall and too thin. There were three of them, and they were coming toward her.

  Rationality and civilization asserted themselves for a second, letting Sophia stand her ground and open her mouth, even while she shuddered inwardly at the way the things looked and moved. “Hello?” she tried, holding up a hand. “Can I aid you?”

  None of them answered. None of them seemed to take any notice of her, except that she felt their not-eyes focusing on her, and the paths they each took on their stretched, spindly legs would converge on the spot where she stood.

  Then rationality failed and civilization surrendered to far older and stranger forces. Sophia spun around, though turning her back on the shadow-things was the hardest thing she’d ever h
ad to do, and bolted down the path, not knowing where it led and in that frantic moment not caring at all.

  Whatever they were, they wanted nothing good.

  While the shadow-things moved silently, Sophia’s flight wasn’t. The ground squelched with every step, wet and sucking like quicksand, and the smell that rose up from it was not that of earth after rain but stronger and meatier. She became rapidly grateful for the sound of her own panting breath in her ears as a distraction, and grateful as well that she was wearing sturdy boots.

  She hadn’t known until that thought that she was wearing sturdy boots. Her dress came to mind again when she realized that, and the combination nagged at her, like the nature of the forest. Where was she? Where had she been before she’d started falling?

  The path narrowed even further. Branches scraped at her arms and pulled her hair, and Sophia began to feel a malice to it, that the trees were deliberately reaching out to wound her. That was irrational; this place didn’t make much sense, and these were not normal trees.

  And she cried out in dismay when the path ended at one.

  There was no way through. The underbrush was thick on either side, the leaves almost blending together into a solid gray-green mass. Sophia looked back over one shoulder.

  The shadow-things were still there, and they were gaining. Even as she paused to look, they darted forward, the movement more like fish than anything that walked on land, or should.

  With the strength of panic, she leapt, grabbed a low-hanging branch, and pulled herself up. The wood was slick and half rotten itself. She actually felt her hands sink into it. Slime surrounded her fingers, and the few solid bits of bark that remained scratched her palms.

  Sophia looked down. The shadow-things were standing around the base of the tree, near-featureless faces tipped upward to watch her. Neither hunger nor hatred could show themselves on any of those faces. Still Sophia felt them, and she shuddered as the creatures stretched their long arms upward, the tips of tendril-fingers brushing through the air just an inch or two below her branch.

  The rotten wood gave way beneath her.

  Only a few seconds passed between the initial break and the moment when the branch split, just enough warning for Sophia to lunge frantically, blindly upward. Her hands found a higher, thicker branch and scrabbled for purchase, her fingernails sinking into the damp bark. She dangled there as the branch below her tumbled to the ground, her arms already starting to ache.

  One of the shadow-things wrapped a hand around her ankle. Sophia felt the cold of its grip burning through her boot. It pulled with a strength that belied its insubstantial form, and the branch to which she was clinging started to give under the pressure.

  “NO!”

  She shrieked the word, not in cosmic denial but with all the frustrated willpower she’d ever used on balky horses, disobedient dogs, and troublesome younger brothers: This is enough, and if you keep acting up, you’re going to be so very sorry.

  And under her hands, the branch became solid again.

  Analysis would have to wait. Sophia kicked out at the shadow-thing, hitting it squarely in the face, and yanked herself upward with all the force that fear and anger could give her. This time she didn’t stop, nor did she look down, but found another branch and kept climbing, calling on dimly remembered skills from her childhood and finding them surprisingly near to hand.

  The bark even felt drier now. She pulled herself upward over five feet, then ten, and no hand found her ankle again. When she did let herself glance down, she didn’t see any shadow-things pursuing her. Perhaps they couldn’t climb.

  That did leave the question of how she’d get down, but she climbed as she thought. It could be that the shadow-things would get tired and leave, or that, like wolves, they’d find other, easier prey.

  Then again, perhaps Cathal would be in flight nearby and would see her. Sophia would have put him up against a pack of shadow-things any day. He would have to find her first, of course, and she didn’t get the feeling that she was anywhere near Loch Arach.

  So how did you get here?

  As she asked herself the question, she broke through the top of the forest.

  Treetops stretched away around her. A few reached above her head, but even those, so high, were easy to look around. The view wasn’t reassuring. All the leaves were dark, and the sky itself was a muddy reddish-gray shade that Sophia could perhaps put down to clouds over a sunset, but that struck the deeper part of herself as more significant and less natural. If there was life in the forest, even as little as a squirrel in a tree or a spider on a branch, it hid itself well. As far as she could make out, the only beings nearby were her and the shadow-men.

  More like shadows than men. Cathal had said that. He’d been speaking of the creatures he’d fought, the less-human minions of Valerius. They’d sounded different, the way he’d described them, but still…men who looked a bit like shadows, shadows that took the vague shape of men. Was a connection so unlikely?

  The forest was on a hilltop, it seemed, so Sophia could look down over the dark sea of treetops and into the valley below. A castle squatted there, comparatively low and wide, vainly clutching at the sky with stumpy towers. She could see that the forest ended a little way from it, revealing bare earth and a dark river. Human habitation: it should have been an immense relief, but nothing in her wanted to take a step in that direction, even if it were a practical option.

  She shifted her weight, wrapping one arm around the tree trunk and freeing her other, and looked down. The shadows around the tree were thick. There was no way of knowing whether they were natural or animate. If she’d had flint and steel, Sophia thought, she could have lit one of the smaller branches and thrown it down, perhaps even injured one of the things in the process.

  A small shape settled itself into the palm of her free hand for a second, long enough for her to recognize it as a tinderbox, and then, as she looked down in surprise, it shimmered and vanished.

  “What—”

  “Sophia.” Disembodied, a voice filled the air around her: Alice, sharp and no-nonsense, with an edge of alarm. Sophia looked around for her, seeing nothing. “Sophia. Wake up. Now.”

  And a short, hard shake of her shoulders knocked her out of the tree and the forest alike, back into the world of her now-familiar bedroom at Castle MacAlasdair, back to candlelight and Alice’s narrow eyes.

  “I…” Now relief came, and oh, it was blessed. This was her room, her bed, with stone walls around her and no shadow shapes chasing her beneath a rotting sky. “Thank you. How did you know?”

  She put out a hand to grasp Alice’s shoulder, thinking both to thank her and to confirm her solidity. Pain jabbed into her palm at the first contact—not much, not really, but enough to draw a yelp from her and to startle her into dropping her hand. Then she stared at Alice’s shoulder and at the bloodstain on her chemise.

  “That,” Alice said grimly, “is how I knew.”

  Sophia turned her hand up. Three scratches ran across the palm. Now she felt the others, the ones on her shoulders and neck, and a cold pain in her leg. “The trees… In my dream there were trees…”

  “Dream trees must be fearsome. Look at your ankle.”

  Alice stepped back, far enough to pull up the hem of Sophia’s chemise. At her ankle, just above the bone, a ring of purple-red skin encircled her leg.

  Fifteen

  “This…” Cathal began, and then couldn’t say anything else.

  Sophia’s hand, palm upturned, rested in his. In his grasp, her hand was tiny, the small bones delicate as glass ornaments, and Cathal kept his hand perfectly still. He knew his strength too well. More than that, he knew the rage that was building within him, tightening the muscles of his shoulders and neck. Perfect control was more important when imperfect control could mean disaster. Artair had told him that many times.

  Let himself go, even
slightly, and the rest would give way like an avalanche. The time would come, shortly, when he would be dangerous to be around. He had no wish to hasten the moment, or to threaten Sophia further. Bad enough that he couldn’t keep her safe.

  None of the welts on her palm were truly bad. He’d had worse just about every day he’d been a squire, between training and chores. Any kitchen boy would pick up greater wounds peeling turnips. Yet the scratches blazed bright across her dark palm, dried blood an accusation like letters of fire.

  She left her hand in his and made no attempt to move it. Her skin was warm and smooth against his palm, though on her fingers themselves he could see calluses, and ink stains, and a few small red marks that looked like burns.

  “Let me see your ankle,” he said, curt and low in his chest.

  Really, he hadn’t expected protest from Sophia, nor even truly from Alice, but the lack was almost as painful, as was the quick grace with which she sat down and raised her skirt. “You’ll have to come around,” she said, “for I don’t think it would help matters were I to sit on your desk.”

  She spoke with mild, friendly tones and smiled wryly, just as she might have done in any other mildly troublesome situation, as if Cathal hadn’t put her in danger, as if he hadn’t failed in the most basic duty of a host. When he extracted himself from his chair and came over to her, he studied her face, looking for anger or accusation, and found none.

  Kneeling in front of her felt like homage, and he minded not at all.

  That moment passed swiftly, though, shattered by the sight of the ring of discolored skin around her ankle.

  He didn’t think either of the women knew enough Gaelic to translate the oath he swore, but his voice probably made the meaning quite clear. Alice’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve seen this before? I thought you might have.”

  “Yes. No.” He left his hands cupping Sophia’s leg, letting its weight and solidity, the heat of life and the firm muscle of an active woman, be a reminder to him. She was still here; she was still well; the wound would heal. “The shades I fought were more human. They used weapons. Mostly. But enough of their nature came through even there. And it was cold.”