She saw that shackles bound his hands and feet. They glittered with a strange light, as though they took the meager sunlight and broke it into a thousand colored shards. When he raised his hands, she saw that the manacles were loops of clear crystal, angled and faceted as though they had grown in this form.
She gathered the cold loops in her hands. “I didn’t think of this.”
“Why should you? A few minutes ago I awoke. The cell door was open, the guard was gone, but these had come in his stead.” He raised his hands as one to touch her chin with his fingertips. “Don’t cry. At least I am outside in the air—if not perfumed”—he took a deep breath and his eyes watered— "it’s better than the air in that dungeon. A thousand years of despair has a definite odor.”
“I will ask her to take them off you.”
“She won’t do it unless I give my parole not to escape.”
“Then give it.” She leaned closer to speak more softly, though the noise in the courtyard had not abated. If anything it had increased as a barrel-chested, low-centered gnome shouted out orders of march. “We have to escape as soon as we can.”
“If I give my parole, then I can’t escape. It would be breaking my word.”
“The devil fly away with your word,” she said, knowing it was futile to argue. Part of the reason she loved him was for his honor; she couldn’t ask him to throw it away even to save his life. “O’Hannon told me Mother plans to make an example of you. She’ll send you back to your own time in order to persuade Forgall’s human soldiers to surrender.”
‘That won’t make them quit. We all know what the penalty is for failing.”
‘That may be true, but it won’t stop her from sending you back. And I won’t have that happen.”
He grinned at her, his devil-may-care smile never more heartrending when it was accompanied by the cold clink of his chains. “You’re as autocratic as your mother.”
“Yes, I am. You better learn that lesson now, sir!”
“I would kiss you if it weren’t for all these. . .” He looked about them and his smile was replaced by a dark frown. “What is happening?”
“I’m afraid this is my fault. Mother and I were talking a little while ago and I mentioned my age. It seemed to throw her into a panic.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“That would explain much.”
“As in?”
“Why you are so set in your ways, for one thing.” He winked at her. Then he said, “Your mother wants to make you immortal, but she doesn’t want you when you are old.”
‘Twenty-seven is not old!” she said, knowing that she only protested to see him smile again. “It’s . , . mature.”
“True. In the days of my birth, you could have been a grandmother by now.” He looked her up and down. She read desire in his eyes, even now, and wondered what it would be like to give him the children necessary to make future generations. He must have noted her blush, for Dominic missed no detail about her, however small.
But he said only, “Matilda must feel that she has no time left to waste on negotiations. She must march against Forgall now, ready or not, before you age any further.”
“Then we must escape, ready or not, and warn Forgall’s army.”
“You mean I must escape.”
“No. You and I both. I don’t intend to stay here and be forced to make any change so utterly abhorrent to me.”
He reached out as though to take her by the shoulders but his manacled hands would not part far enough to permit it. Clarice took his hands in hers. They twisted around and held her hands tightly. “Clarice, it’s too dangerous for you to come with me. If I am captured, I may be sent back, or even killed. I don’t dare let you take that risk too.”
“You’d rather I stayed here to face these risks alone?”
“Here, you have a chance of a future. If Forgall loses, you’ll be a Fay and live forever.”
“If you die or go beyond my reach, what good is immortality to me? We go together, whether into life or into death. As soon as we break those chains.”
“Clarice ... please.” She made sure he saw nothing but the utmost determination in her expression. He sighed and said, “You can’t. They’re unbreakable.”
“Then how far will you get? It may be hundreds of miles to Forgall’s army.”
“Not so far as that. My own cadre is hidden ... I won’t tell where. But I can reach them.” He chuckled low. “I wanted to be in the forefront of the battle. I may well have my chance.”
“And you’ll leave me here?”
“You’ll be safe.”
“Oh, yes. There’s safety in a broken heart.” She left him, pausing to throw him a last look before she traveled to the tower. He bit his lip to keep from calling her back.
Chapter Eighteen
They waited through an interminable day. Dominic sat at a refectory table in the nearly empty guard room, eating what Matilda’s own werreour ate, whenever it was offered to him. Though they looked at him as a curiosity, they gave no sign of hostility. Regardless of personal loyalty, they were all human beings when off-duty.
O’Hannon sat on the table, his feet swinging as he playfully flipped a razor-sharp knife from hand to hand. The man had the reflexes of a juggler and the eyes of a thoughtful killer. As he toyed with his knife, he said, “It’s what I don’t approve of—I’ll not hide my teeth! No gentleman soldier should be subjected to such treatment. Ah, it ‘ud make a Turk blush, so indeed.”
“You can’t blame Queen Matilda for taking no risks. She knows I’m honor-bound to attempt escape.”
“Ah, but to put shackles on a man like yer honor! ‘Tisn’t decent. Nor is it fair to us.” He paused for an instant between throws to gesture at those fellow soldiers present but never missed his cue for snatching his knife once more out of the air. A rumble of agreement came from their throats. “Here you sit, yer honor, at your ease, eating well, drinking well, buildin’ up the strength of yourself crumb by crumb. Do we begrudge you?”
The others said, “No!” with one voice.
“Do we say ‘that man is mine enemy let us use him despitefully’?” Again a “No!” came back in force. “And with all these crafty bastards on watch, what chance have you of escaping us? I’ll tell you! None! Absolutely none!”
He slammed his hand down on the tabletop, making all the jugs, bottles, and glasses jump. The others set up a last cheer and then, as a deep-toned bell rang in the corridor, took final swigs and gulps before going off to their duties. O’Hannon kept his perch on the table.
He leaned close to Dominic, his knife stayed in his hand. In a voice that hardly carried, he said, “For all of me, I’d be more’n glad to turn my back and let you escape. I daresay quite a few of the boys feel the same.”
“Why?”
“We’d far rather meet you on the field, d’you see? That’s what we’re waiting for.”
Dominic asked, “O’Hannon, have we met before? I have the feeling I know your face.”
“We may have done. For a long time I served in His Majesty’s Own before I went into the East for a spell. It’s no place for a decent man, that. Birds big enough to carry off a horse, an’ the cart it’s drawin’ as well. Sea monsters and girls with six more arms than anybody needs. Them thrice-blasted Djinn everywhere you look. Gets so a man don’t dare open a bottle in the hope of finding a bit of cheer in the bottom. That’s where I first heard about herself, out there.”
“What made you change sides, O’Hannon?”
The slighter man shrugged, as though the answers were too complex to be readily understood. Dominic pressed him. “There must be a reason you abandoned the king’s service for Queen Matilda’s.”
“Every man has his own little reasons. If I had to pick one that we all share though.. . .” His shoulders lifted and fell once more with resignation. “The boys and I all feel that the whole reason for us even being here in the Wilder World is to fight. But who was there
to fight? No one. Everything in the kingdom was peaceable until Matilda. Now there’s battle in the offing. I can smell it in the air, the way you can smell the morning coming after sleeping all night in the open. It is as if what we have waited for, trained for, and dreamed of is finally about to dawn. We’d follow worse than Matilda to gain our opportunity at last.”
Dominic felt some that drive in his own blood. ‘To fight at last. To be free...”
The Irishman clapped him on the shoulder. ‘That’s the spirit! We’ve spent years training for this moment, building ourselves and our cadres up with marvelous dedication. And never once have we been used as we should be. Dragons? Bah! Bit of pretend hand-to-hand with the four-armed guards of the king? That was something like, all right, they hate us like fire, but they weren’t allowed to defeat us and we couldn’t kill them because of their immortality. So what good was any of it?”
“No good at all.”
“Right! We knew there’d never be a good war without the king having some strong enemy to challenge him. When Matilda came along, she saw at once that the only way to challenge Forgall was to build up an army, and an army of mortals at that! We were glad to lend her an ear. Terrible persuasive talker, she is. I’d not be a might surprised to learn her mother came from County Cork. She knows the ones who aren’t content before they even know it themselves!”
“But can she rely on you to fight if all you want—" The words were hardly out of his mouth when O’Hannon slapped the blade of his knife against Dominic’s neck. “We’ll fight like devils because we’re werreour, same as yourself! What do we have we to lose? If we are defeated, we go home to our own place and time. Ah, to walk through the streets of Dublin again! To drink the good black beer and taste the rye loaf! There’s naught like it here, for all their fancy ways.”
Dominic sat with the knife at his throat and breathed shallowly. “And if you win?”
“If we put her on the cedar throne, then she’s sworn to send every man-jack of the werreour back to whence they came. We can’t lose, d’ye see? Either way, we get what we want.”
“I was no more than a boy when they took me. My parents died in a plague. There’s nothing for me there.”
“You break my heart.” Coolly, O’Hannon flipped the blade around, releasing Dominic, and began paring his nails. “I was hardly half-grown myself when I was left on the parish. I’m not saying the Fay didn’t do me a favor, but I would have been fine on me own. Perhaps if we win, Herself will see her way clear to sending us back to our own times as we are now, full-grown. A fellow who knows how to handle himself in a fight, now, he always has the means to find a full belly. I could just fancy the life of a mercenary soldier, eh? Choose sides and change if the battle don’t go to my likin’. Go off to kill for the highest bidder and take the pick of the camp-followers. Ah, that’s the life for a boy with a bit of spirit in him!”
“If all you want is to go back, fight me now. I’ll be sure to give you what you want.”
“What? With them chains on? You won’t win that way. Otherwise, I’d be more than a little tempted. Matilda might lose the battle and I might survive it. Then I’m right where I am now and I hate it.”
“I’ll fight you if we can get the chains off. Do you know how to do it?”
O’Hannon’s grin was not unsympathetic though its wryness told Dominic the smaller man knew exactly what he was up to. “No, not the slightest. That’s magic, that is. I never studied it. Ask Herself, eh? She’ll be happy enough to do it, after the battle.”
Once again, O’Hannon returned to his game of flipping the knife from hand to hand. “ ‘Tis a pity you won’t be fighting. All your trainin’ gone to waste.”
“Could the king take these pretty bracelets off me?”
“No doubt. But the king is far, far away.” He began to whistle “Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son” rather shrilly, flipping his knife to the rhythm.
Dominic had sized O’Hannon up from the first as a man who always kept one eye on the main chance. He could not imagine any of his own cadre talking the way the lightning-handed Irishman did. Despite his protestations of loyalty, he guessed that O’Hannon would change sides fast enough if the odds fell toward Forgall. Dominic could think of half a dozen things he could do to change those odds, but they were none of them possible while he stayed shackled in the Fortress of La’al.
“O’Hannon, I have a proposition for you.”
“You interest me, Knight. I had a feeling you might. Mind you, I’ll not do anything disloyal.”
“I’ll tell you what I have in mind. You tell me if it’s disloyal.”
“See me all attention.”
Dominic wished that his mother had been born in County Cork, for he’d never learned to speak persuasively, except to Clarice. Thinking of her, he found words. “You want to fight me because you think I am the one to send you home.”
“I’d want to fight you in any case, me boy. I’ve heard of you, d’ye see? We’ve all heard of you and there was not a man-jack among us who didn’t want to see if you were as good as they all say.”
“I am that good,” Dominic said, knowing it was true. Even after a day of starvation and all the bruises he’d taken when fighting at the Doors, he knew he could take O’Hannon and a dozen like him. “You only took me at the Doors because of my ...”
O’Hannon looked slightly abashed for the first time. “ ‘Cause of her. You don’t need to say anything more. I saw her yesterday and did her some little service.”
“I know it.”
“She’s an angel out of heaven. If I weren’t such a bad man . ..” He shrugged. “But I am. Not so bad that I can’t see how having her taken away by the likes of us wouldn’t make a man miss a swing or two. As it is, you sent four of our boys home a mite ahead of schedule. That, plus the Rider.”
“So you see, O’Hannon. I am as good as they say. And none of your lot have dispatched me, as I am sitting here now.”
“You speak like a Daniel come to judgment, Knight. May I call you Dominic? My name’s Jack.”
“Listen, Jack. Find a way to get me out of the Fortress. Let me make my way back to Forgall’s army. He’ll take these ‘bracelets’ from me and when battle’s joined, I’ll search you out. You and as many of your cadre as wish to fight me. I’ll either send you home, or you’ll send me.”
“You tempt me mightily, Dominic. Indeed, indeed. But how to do the thing, eh?”
“I must be away before your army marches.”
“You’ll give the game away to Forgall. We’ll have no surprise. Well, there’s not much chance he doesn’t know we’re coming, not while he holds the scrying stones.” O’Hannon slid his knife into the decorated scabbard he wore at his waist. He jumped lightly down from the table. “I’ll think on it, Dominic, my boy. If it could be done . ..” He chuckled. “Ah, but it’ll be a great day come the mornin’! If I had a proper fight to look forward to, I’d sleep like a babe in arms, so I would. I’ll think on it.”
“Not too long, Jack,” Dominic said as the other man’s hand went to the door. “If I’m not away before your army moves, they’ll recapture me. Then no grand fight.”
Dominic could feel the other man’s eagerness for the promised “treat,” He wished he could feel the same. Before he’d met Clarice, he could imagine that he would have been as eager for combat as any one of Matilda’s werreour. But with his heart warmed by thoughts of his beloved, he couldn’t chill his blood enough to kill. In all probability, if he faced O’Hannon without mastery over those feelings, the Irishman would have no trouble at all dispatching him.
But he was less worried about O’Hannon than he was about Clarice. If he left her with her mother, she would be comfortable and safe, at least until the battle was over. If Forgall won, Dominic did not think the king would hold her responsible in any way for her mother’s crimes. He’d just send her back to Hamdry. But if Matilda won, and Clarice were still with her, then she would undoubtedly suffer the change into Fay. Then he would
have no choice but to join her for he would not live as a man without her.
Even as he debated with himself, Dominic knew he was wasting his time. There was only one person who would decide whether Clarice undertook the hardship of escape with him, or stayed here. That was Clarice herself. He was very much afraid that he knew what her choice would be. She’d already decided that she owed her mother her presence.
Dominic groaned and raised his hands to rub his face. Every time he moved, the crystal chains gave out musical notes as soulless as the ringing of a water-filled glass. It was a sound he was already heartily sick of. He’d have to muffle it somehow during his escape. It would be simpler with O’Hannon’s help, but whether or not he had that, Dominic was determined to escape the fortress before Matilda’s army marched away.
Clarice listened, her hands folded demurely in her lap, while her mother and her generals discussed the plans for the approaching battle. Though she didn’t understand everything, she was impressed despite herself at her mother’s grasp of the essentials of warfare. Where had the daughter of an undistinguished if noble family learned how to conduct a battle? She wondered if Matilda was a reversion to some barbarian princess far back in her pedigree, a Boadicea reborn, who needed only the opportunity to prove what she could accomplish given an army to command.
When the generals, one of whom at least was human-form, finally left, Clarice asked, “Mother, wherever did you learn all that?”
Matilda smiled with some false modesty. “A woman never knows what she is capable of until tried by fate.”
“What a pity you could not have gone into the Army in our own time! You would have outshone Marlborough and all the other so-called great military minds.”
Matilda seemed to dwell a moment on that pleasant picture, but then sighed. “No, it is not to be thought of. Look what became of Jeanne d’Arc. All because she meddled in affairs better left to men. I do these things because I must for if I do not, who will? But I shouldn’t like you or any young woman to be forced to do something so utterly against their natures as join an army. Women should be content with their own sphere.”
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