Captivity

by Ann Herendeen

  My heart pounded like Jana’s as Dominic’s vision was superimposed on our memories. How many times had Dominic laughed with pleasure to see me in the same pose? How often had he told me that just imagining me with my legs open made him hard? His arms tightened around Jana, crushing the breath out of her.

  Then they were out, in the courtyard, gulping in breaths of fresh air, heads hanging. “I want to see Mama,” Jana said.

  “So do I, sweetheart,” Dominic said. “So do I.” He straightened up from his bent posture as voices preceded bodies appearing from all directions.

  The miners and metalworkers, having killed every human being overlooked by the Aranyi forces, regrouped in the back courtyard. “Margrave Aranyi!” their leader shouted. “Finished it is. No more bandit-scum find we can.” He pointed a bloody knife in the direction of the carnage. “Good work, yes, we did? All dead, your lady safe?”

  Dominic turned his cold, clear eyes on the man. He said nothing. These men were not soldiers, not professionals, had had only two days of on-the-march training from Dominic in the arts of war. They had recently been victims, not victors, had known massacre and indiscriminate death from the losing side. The code of the officer, of ‘Graven and the Royal Guards, was unknown to them, as to all novices. If his own men had done such a thing…

  “Yes, Gwynn,” Dominic said after a pause, “you did well. And ‘Gravina Aranyi is safe.” That much was true. Dominic was not used to being a petitioner. He had begged these men for help in his need, and they had come through for him. Despite what he had done to them not so long ago, they had proven themselves loyal and valuable allies.

  Dominic and the miners’ leader exchanged formal words of thanks and acceptance, and agreed on a sharing of the spoils. The men were welcome to take all the bandits had possessed, such as it was, and Gwynn and a couple of others would accompany us back to Aranyi for the settlement of their land claim. The rest would return to their homes, having pledged to respect people and property on their route.

  Dominic brought Jana to me the long way around, circling the castle’s perimeter to the front entrance, through the crush of dead bandits, the mangled, stripped corpses in the great hall. At least there were no women or children here. I became aware of Niall as he accompanied them, speaking in his lighthearted, humorous way, hoping to distract Jana while Dominic ran past the ugly sights.

  Reynaldo, the one bandit left alive, the one who had only begun to pay what he owed for the days of captivity, the threats and privations my children and I had endured, awaited us in the front courtyard. Ranulf, a grim look of satisfaction on his rugged face, guarded the bleeding, groaning prisoner while he cleaned his sword and supervised the Aranyi troops.

  I struggled to sit up as I heard my family coming down the stairs, felt their minds in mine—all of them, Jana and Niall—but it was mostly Dominic, his worry and anger, his warrior’s energy turning slowly into a husband’s concern, who occupied my consciousness. Propped on one elbow, Val dozing beside me, I reached my other arm to enfold both my husband and my daughter in the half embrace I could manage.

  Jana got to me first, leaping out of Dominic’s arms and running to me. “Mama! Mama! Mama!” she screamed, sounding more like Val than the too-mature ‘Gravina she had been forced to be these past days. She hadn’t been so effusive with me since she was nursing at my breast. She practically knocked me flat on my back as she hugged me, and I rolled over with her on the straw, returning her frantic kisses, crying with the joy of the reunion.

  Like Dominic, I was overwhelmed by my love for her, my firstborn, my daughter, my little female version of my husband. “My brave girl,” I said, “my darling, it’s all right now, it’s all right.” I could think of nothing else to say, but it didn’t matter. It was like the dreams I had sometimes, dreams in which I was in my mother’s arms, as Jana was in mine. My mother, not so long dead, a year or two before I came to Eclipsis. Despite Dominic and Jana and Val, all my happiness, it was always misery to wake and find that it had been just a dream. My life must be forever imperfect when my own mama could not be with me to share it.

  I wrapped both arms around Jana, Val momentarily forgotten, and continued to spout the usual silly motherly endearments. “You see I’m fine,” I said in answer to her anxious questions, clenching my teeth so they wouldn’t chatter with the ague. “All I need is dinner and a bath, just like you.”

  Jana couldn’t speak yet of her real fear; the loss was too terrible for her to express. She could only revel in my physical presence, filthy as I was, not willing to let a particle of air come between us, an arrangement which suited me just fine. Can she ever forgive me, I wondered, when she remembers that it was I who sent her out on her own, I who stayed quiet when Reynaldo told her that her mother was dead, and did not contradict him?

  Dominic leaned down to take his share of my affection. His eyes glittered, tears and the remains of bloodlust mingling in a strange expression. Had he caught my guilty thoughts? Well, I would have to tell him eventually. But not now, not here. Let me get home and regain some strength, then we’ll have to confess everything that led up to this moment, both of us. But not yet.

  The screams penetrated my woozy brain at last. Terrified, wild screams. Val, it was Val, howling as he had when Reynaldo had grabbed him. He had buried his face in my side, the side that Jana’s body had not claimed, and was trying to hide himself in me like a large animal attempting to stuff itself into a smaller creature’s burrow, all the while shrieking as if the miners and smiths were pursuing him with their bloody knives.

  “What is it?” I asked, making no impression. I felt him all over, expecting I didn’t know what—wounds, broken bones, biting insects. “Val, sweetheart, what’s the matter?”

  Dominic leaned down closer, also wondering. He reached a hand to his son and Val screamed even louder, rolling behind me, putting me in front of the dreaded apparition. “I hate bandits!” he said. “Make him go away!”

  I met Dominic’s knowing gaze, then shook my head. “It’s Papa,” I told Val. “The bandits are all– gone.” I thought in time to avoid speaking of death. “Papa’s here to take us home!” I stressed the word, repeated it. “Home.” That should help.

  “No!” Val screamed as if he hadn’t heard. “No more bandits!”

  I studied Dominic more carefully. He was blood-spattered and dirty, with lines of fatigue and worry carving deep furrows in his cheeks from his prominent nose down to his chin. His eyes showed the remaining effects of his recent battle and thoughts of vengeance, with glassy inner eyelids in which the silver of tranquility was just beginning to return around the edges. It was true Val had never seen his papa like this, yet surely Dominic’s face, his dark hair, his eyes, even in this odd state, were distinctive. Val, with his precocious powers of language and observations, should know his own father.

  But something about Dominic was different. The eyes and the face were merely the outward manifestations of a change that had occurred over the days of my captivity. The madness I had sensed, had shared, on the trail from Eclipsia City, and just now when he caught Reynaldo, was there to be observed by those with the ability. Val had seen it, had picked up on it as if his own gift had already developed, as it would be ten or more years from now.

  My love, I thought to Dominic. We are both delirious, my son and I. Once we’re home we’ll return to our true selves. I spoke of my son and myself, but thought of my husband as well.

  Jana lifted her head from my bosom. She touched Val on the cheek in a surprisingly affectionate gesture. “Shut up, brat,” she said softly. “Don’t make Papa angry or he’ll—”

  “No,” I said. “Papa isn’t angry, not at his children.” I looked helplessly at Dominic. Slowly his inner eyelids silvered over, until I could see myself in their opaque rounded surfaces. I shivered uncontrollably in the fever. Val sobbed, his voice trailing off as he succumbed once more to the fatigue of the simulated death and his own fever.

  Niall had stayed discreetl
y in the background, taking the opportunity, like the miner before him, to clean his bloody weapon on Michaela’s skirt. Now he stepped forward to help, dropping the soiled garment carelessly to reach for Jana. “Come on, betrothed,” he said. “Let’s go find the best tent for your mama to sleep in tonight.”

  Jana shook her head and didn’t budge. My two children were determined never to be parted from me again. I tried again to sit up, fell back.

  Dominic knelt beside Jana, stroking her hair, kissing her face as he spoke in a low voice into her ear. “I must carry Mama,” he said, “and your little crybaby brother. And such a big girl as you are, three of you is too heavy for me to carry.” Jana at last looked up into his face. Dominic managed to pry one grubby hand from my side. “Walk with Niall. He’ll be right beside me. Then we’ll all go together to the Aranyi camp, and you can stay with Mama the rest of the day and all night. How’s that?” It was the voice, more than the words, that worked its magic, the deep, mellifluous sound that was impossible to resist with its rumble of underlying laughter.

  Jana stood up and extended her hand to Niall. He bowed to Jana with a courtly flourish and pretended to flick the sweat of rejection from his face. “I was afraid you’d jilted me.”

  As Dominic rose he caught a glimpse of the dead woman’s bare legs and staggered back in horror. “Isis and Astarte forgive us. Cover the woman,” he said to Niall.

  Niall stared at the brusque command, noting the signs of Michaela’s attempted butchery before her death. “Considering the woman was trying to remove ‘Gravina Aranyi’s hand,” he said, “your regard for her modesty seems a bit excessive. One might even say misguided.” In the strained silence something of Dominic’s traumatic memories came through. “As you wish, my love.” Niall tugged the skirt down as far as it would go, to the middle of the dead woman’s calves.

  The blacksmith guard, who had watched the ‘Graven family’s strange reunion with undisguised interest and curiosity, interjected his own defense of Niall. “‘Gravina Aranyi,” he called in Dominic’s direction, “her wrist, bleeding badly it was.” He pointed to a filthy rag tied tight below my steel bracelet. “But with my own shirt, bind her up I did.” He pulled the garment in question from the waistband of his breeches to display the torn tail.

  The makeshift bandage was soaked with blood, turning brown now that the normal clotting process had begun. The man and his tourniquet had indeed saved me from a serious loss of blood, bandaging me without my knowledge while I was but semi-conscious, lost in Dominic’s actions and thoughts in the recent battle.

  My husband was startled back to the present. He examined my wrist, remembering the sights that had greeted him when he had climbed out of the tunnel into my cell. He bowed to the man, thanking him for his care of me in the graceful way he has, so that the man, caught by surprise, felt as if the sound of the voice, and the fluent words, more than compensated him for any small service he had been only too glad to render. Dominic removed a small ring of a strange dull material from the little finger of his left hand and presented it. “For the life and health of ‘Gravina Aranyi,” he said, “there is no single object that can compensate. But please take this as an inadequate reminder of what I owe.”

  The man held the little circle in the palm of his hand. His excited intake of breath was loud as he understood what he was holding. “No, Margrave,” he said finally, regretfully. “‘Graven steel, that, most eagerly, accept I would. But foreign work—” He shook his head. “Wrong it is, you from it to part.” He held the ring out for Dominic to take back.

  The “foreigners,” what I knew as aliens, are the descendants of genetic experimentation from the early days of the original settlement. They are a dwindling population, secretive and isolated, mythical to most of us, who will never see one. Their artifacts are museum pieces, or would be, if Eclipsis had museums. Dominic’s ring, a memento from his alien mother, was priceless.

  Dominic smiled at the man’s discernment. He inclined his head in agreement. “Carry it for me,” he said. “Wear it or hold it as a pledge of my faith, until we return to Aranyi. Then redeem it for what you think it is worth.”

  The man was much happier at these words. He stammered his thanks, his elation acting on our gathering of the gifted like another presence in the room. By drawing the short straw earlier, and by acting humanely and with initiative to fulfill the true terms of his guard duty, he had come out far ahead of most of his fellows, who would return to their country with only the scrap and refuse that bandits possessed, or a strip of barely habitable Aranyi border land. By killing one woman and taking good care of another, this man had earned himself a fortune.

  Dominic, assured of my safety, lifted me easily in his arms, along with my sleeping son, and carried us out of the stinking room that had been my prison for five days. My husband’s arms held me close as he climbed the stairs and passed through the great hall and entrance, and I never actually saw the bodies that I had viewed through others’ eyes. As Jana had done earlier, I buried my face in Dominic’s neck and did not open my eyes until we were outside, when I promptly shut them again. It was early afternoon, bright sun. I had spent five days and nights in the dark. Like a newborn kitten, I would need time to adjust to sunlight and fresh air. The cool mountain breeze felt like rainwater on my face and hair, the light probing my deepest secrets.

  “You’ll feel better after the eclipse,” Dominic said.

  Out in the front clearing, the rest of the Aranyi troops had assembled. Someone had retrieved the captured Aranyi and Ormonde horses, including Jana’s little pony. All the animals were looking starved and listless, like me, but they were already snorting with pleasure at the familiar hands and smells of their caretakers.

  Jana ran to her own mount. “Topaz,” she crooned his name to him, stroking the matted mane and the soft muzzle as he bent to snuffle at her hair, “Topaz, did they tell you I was dead?” The pony lifted and lowered his head a few times as Jana petted him, seeming to answer her worried questions in the affirmative. Jana patted his neck. “But you see it was just a lie, to make you afraid. I’m all right, and we’re going home.”

  Several of our men had been wounded, from the arrows earlier, and during the conventional fighting. Only two were seriously hurt — Wilmos, my housekeeper’s son, and an Ormonde guard, a young dark-haired man with an open, handsome face that looked familiar. I remembered him now, kneeling in the dusty trail when we were captured, Reynaldo making a lewd remark. The front line, the place of honor and redemption, had taken its toll. My eyes filled with tears, thinking of all the lives I had put in jeopardy with my careless act. Thankfully, neither man looked mortally wounded. Both were conscious, if immobilized, their comrades having laid them on pieces of the planking that had saved them from the arrows, using the boards now as stretchers.

  As Dominic approached carrying two of the human trophies—me and Val—of this rescue mission, all the men who could bowed low. Some called out encouragement to me and the children, expressing their pleasure at our safe deliverance. I tried to answer them, as Dominic would have, but my mouth was dry, my throat swollen, and I choked. Dominic answered for me, squeezing my arm gently as he spoke the proper words of thanks. Beloved, he thought to me, let me be your body and your voice, until you are strong again. I had only to think my acceptance and gratitude to him, my eyelashes brushing his neck, as I blinked in the unaccustomed light.

  Ranulf stood waiting with his bloody burden slung across the back of the most stolid, imperturbable of the horses. Groans and whimpers, punctuated by phlegmy gasps, broke the awkward silence, but the wounded Aranyi men were stoically silent. It was Reynaldo who made the sounds that sent shivers down my spine, forcing me to lift my face involuntarily to seek their source. I glimpsed the terrible bloody mask of his noseless face before I had a chance to prepare myself, then shut my eyes and cowered against Dominic’s shoulder as before.

  Dominic sidled up to Ranulf, keeping my back to the thing on the horse so that I woul
d not have to see it again even by accident. Ranulf handed something to Dominic. “I found this on him, my lord.”

  Even without Dominic’s startle, I knew what it was—my prism-handled dagger, taken from me at the start of my captivity.

  Dominic thanked Ranulf and placed the sheathed dagger in my hands. He said nothing to me. Dread and disappointment ran through us both in our communion in a roiling wave, soon displaced by Dominic’s cold rage. I felt the first stirrings of my returning power, the faint hope that all might someday be as it was before. Deeper emotions were impossible.

  “I am taking ‘Gravina Aranyi and the children to our camp,” Dominic said to Ranulf. “Put that piece of shit in the rear of the convoy, and make sure it is always out of sight of every member of my family.”

  When Ranulf positioned himself like a screen in front of the prisoner, Dominic thanked him again, propping me against his hip and resting one hand on the man’s broad shoulder. I could feel the affection and respect between my husband and his old lieutenant, the warmth that radiated up from Dominic’s hand, along his arm and into me, through his pumping heart.

  Dominic carried me and Val a long way, to the Aranyi encampment beyond the edge of the castle’s grounds, several yards within the cover of the encircling forest. Niall, true to Dominic’s promise, followed closely with Jana. It was cooler and darker in the woods, more protected. There were a few canvas tents pitched on grassy areas, but Dominic laid us down on a blanket that Niall spread beneath the branches of a tall tree. My husband knew I had had enough of darkness and close quarters. Jana sat beside me and her brother, clutching my arm, looking constantly from me to Dominic, as if to assure herself that we were really here, together, alive.

  In the light of day Dominic and I regarded each other. His face grew dark and angry as he took in the full extent of my degradation—the excrement and vomit and wet straw that encrusted the dress, the louse bites and typhus rash that showed on my face and the skin of my neck and chest. “You’re filthy, Amalie,” he said, trying to make a joke of it, the quivering of his lips betraying him.