Lady's Pursuit (Knight and Rogue Book 6)

by Bell, Hilari

  The dog whined again, his gaze fixed hopefully on me.

  “You’ll have to be quiet.”

  The twitch of his tail looked like agreement. I sat the candle down in the shelter of the doorway, and cut the rope that bound him to Tipple’s saddle into a convenient length for a hand-held leash.

  I then took a moment to brush his excited mind with my animal handling Gift, pushing the need for silence into his thoughts before I led my ally into the old mill. The only sound was the soft clicking of his claws upon the floor.

  With a candle in one hand and a leash in the other I couldn’t hold a weapon, but the light let me climb swiftly. A good dog is a better weapon than any sword, and this dog had a heart that belied his odd appearance.

  Most who possess an animal handling Gift use it only to communicate their will to the beast it touches. But my father’s head groom taught me it could be more effective if you used it to learn what was going on within the mind you sought to command — that you could better soothe a frightened horse if you knew it feared the scent of a hunting pack, instead of a branch that was banging in the wind.

  The mutt’s mind held a dark, eager determination — and Fisk really had to settle on a name for the beast, because this dog had chosen him to be his master and companion. He wanted his human with an intensity that overcame even his fear of the strangers’ scents.

  ’Twas his awareness, that told me there’d been several strangers here, though I couldn’t tell how many.

  Stirred by fear, my magic roiled beneath its lid of thought and reason. I considered using that magic to go more deeply into the dog’s mind, to try to read the scent through his senses and learn how many people were waiting for me. But I could see so many possible perils in that — starting with a bark, or even a bite from an understandably startled dog, and ending with me sinking so deep into the beast’s mind that I couldn’t get out — that I hastily abandoned the idea.

  This was no time for experiments, but for reconnaissance, followed by action.

  So ’twas frustrating to reach the top of the first stair and see the bright glow of lamplight spilling down the second flight, along with the sound of voices.

  Mostly Fisk’s voice, as usual.

  In so much light, there was no way I could climb that stair and get onto the third floor without everyone up there seeing me, as well as my canine escort. Which would end any chance of taking them by surprise.

  But some years ago, when my funds were at low ebb, I’d worked a few months in a flax mill. The experience had taught me that processing flax takes a lot of effort, and also that big mills are complex structures — they needed to move many things from one floor to the next, in different ways and places.

  I set my candle under the steps, since I didn’t want to have to relight it. Then I told the dog to stay, firmly, for Fisk’s dog had pricked up his ears at the sound of his master’s voice. He quivered with the need to find his person, but I felt his submission to my will ... and even a dim understanding of my fear that rushing in could put his person in danger.

  I added some emphasis to this thought, then closed my eyes, turned my back on the light and took several steps away. I counted slowly to twenty before I opened them and looked into the shadows ... and up at the ceiling.

  As I’d hoped, patches of light glowed faintly in several different places. The biggest was beside the wall that faced the river, where the upper millstone once protruded into the room above. But with those great stones gone, there was no easy way through the gap.

  The small square patch on the opposite side of the room was more what I was looking for.

  After a moment’s thought — the dog’s claws had actually been quite loud — I led Fisk’s dog over to the hatch in the ceiling. I couldn’t tell why the millers had needed to drop something through the floor just there, but there was no ladder below it. I had to carry over an old workbench, too crudely made to haul away and put a cracked cask on top of it. Then I lifted the dog up, set him on the floor above, and levered myself up after him.

  The mutt was shorter than True but wider in the chest, and that truncated body was dense with muscle — even a bit of fat, after several weeks of Kathy feeding him everything in sight.

  I had plenty of time to note all these details. Now on the third floor, I picked him up and tucked him under my arm so we could draw near the others in silence.

  I had no fear of being seen. We started in the dense shadow at the far side of the big room, and the lanterns only illuminated the drama taking place on what I had to call “center stage.”

  Mayhap that should have warned me, but it didn’t.

  A man in a mask, presumably Noye, held a bound woman near the edge of an open service door, beyond which the skeleton of the water wheel turned.

  All this action had taken mere minutes to perform, and judging by the conversation I heard as I drew near, Noye was trying to persuade my friends to surrender.

  Since Fisk would never do anything that stupid, I was able to take my time closing in on them. The man I’d captured might have been lying, so I kept alert for lurking thugs as I crossed the room ... and I found no one. By the time I’d drawn near enough to be sure of it, Rupert and Kathy had thrown down their staffs — though Kathy soon picked hers up again.

  “You don’t dare move on me,” Noye was saying. “Because if I let her go, we all know I’m a dead man. That’s why I have nothing to lose. And if I’m going to die, I promise you I’ll take her with me!”

  There was a note in his voice that made me think he meant it.

  I was close enough now to see blood trickling down Mistress Margaret’s throat, staining her bodice, and I understood why Rupert was wavering — but if they surrendered, Noye would only become stronger. I’d better tell them I was here, and a nightjar’s call wouldn’t do.

  I took a deep breath, thumped one bare heel softly on the floor ... and saw Fisk stiffen.

  “So what do you want out of this?” he asked Noye.

  “What?” Noye shook off the distraction. “That doesn’t matter. If you don’t throw down your—”

  “Yes, yes, you’ll kill her. But if we do throw down our weapons, you’ll kill her and Rupert. And Kathy and me as well, though doubtless in a different way. So we’d be crazy to surrender. But surely there’s some way that we can all get what we want, with no one getting killed. Not Meg here, or Rupert, or even you. And if I don’t know why you’re doing this, it’s going to be harder to figure something out.”

  “It doesn’t matter why I’m doing it.” Noye’s voice had grown alarmingly shrill. “I’m going to kill this woman, now, if you don’t throw down your weapons.”

  This wasn’t going as he’d planned. I could almost feel sorry for him.

  Him, I thought at dog with all the strength my unaided Gift could wield. He threatens the Person, just as he does the woman with him. Rush at him, bark at him, he—

  But the dog’s nose twitched, his head turning, not toward Noye, or even Fisk, but to the darkness behind me. And looking to see what he had scented, I saw the pale familiar glow of a magica crossbow.

  It all came together, in a burst of comprehension; the knowledge that ’twas I who was his target, and further that my friends, two of whom I loved as dearly as anyone in the world, lay in a direct line beyond me.

  Then knowing ended, and my heart took over.

  I dropped the dog and ran into the light, one arm sweeping out to grab Kathy and drag her with me. Because I was listening for it, I even heard the bow’s string snap just as I threw my whole body in a flying tackle that knocked Fisk to the floor.

  We were so close to Rupert that his blood splattered over my back when the crossbow bolt ripped into his side.

  He staggered under the impact, but didn’t yet fall. In the moment of perfect silence that followed the shot I observed, almost calmly, that the bolt had been driven so deep the vanes pressed into his coat. The spreading red stain was high on his side — it must have penetrated his
lung.

  Mayhap Mistress Margaret knew something of anatomy. The sound that broke the silence was a muffled scream, grating and horrible through her gag.

  Noye awoke from his startlement, and realized that even if the means wasn’t perfect, he’d succeeded in killing the Heir. He let go of his hostage and bolted for the stairs, with Fisk’s dog baying at his heels.

  I rolled off Fisk and caught Rupert as he sagged to his knees, lowering him gently to the floor.

  Fisk sprang up, and ran after Noye and the dog.

  Margaret dropped down beside her lover, moaning with urgency and a terrible grief.

  Rupert drew a breath and coughed, hard.

  “Meg. I’m so sorry.”

  “No!” Wheatman came out of the shadows to stand at the edge of the light, the bow lowered, almost falling from his hands. “I meant to hit you. It should have hit you. It’s magica. It’s supposed to—”

  “Well, it didn’t,” I said.

  Kathy had pulled a knife from her belt, cutting the rope that bound Margaret’s wrists. But the girl’s hands, freed, went not to the gag but to her lover’s body.

  Rupert, eyes closing, coughed again. This time blood came with it.

  I had saved the two I loved best — but I hadn’t been able to save them all. And if I’d killed Wheatman when I had the chance, Rupert’s blood would not now be staining my hands.

  “You missed,” I snarled at Wheatman. “And you can add this boy to the tally of others, innocent or not, whom you’ve wrongfully slain. The whole point of the Liege’s law, of all those lawyers and judicars, is to make certain the wrong people don’t get... Ah, go and be hanged. If you still want to kill me you’ll get your chance, because I’m going to help this man.”

  I turned my back on him, easing Rupert’s head from my arms to Margaret’s lap ... but I couldn’t help but be aware of Wheatman, who still held that lethal bow. ’Twas as if I could feel his gaze on the skin of my neck, staring, staring...

  I heard him take one step, another, and then he turned and ran. And while I felt a fleeting regret, my mind was focused on the body under my hands.

  Margaret stroked Rupert’s hair, steadying him as he coughed dark blood onto her skirt. She was no longer gagged, but the only sounds she made were tiny gasps of agonized grief.

  “How can you help him?” My sister’s face was white, but it held a trusting hope I prayed she’d never lose.

  “I can’t be certain,” I said. “But there’s something I can try.”

  I placed my hands on either side of the bloodstained bolt, reached deep within ... and shattered the lid over the seething cauldron of my magic.

  Freed from restraint, it surged wildly though my torso, down my arms, and even through my hands into Rupert’s injured body. If I opened my eyes, I knew that my changed sight would see not only my own arms and hands aglow, but also the part of Rupert’s body where my magic had settled ... and stopped.

  Strangely, I could feel his wound with my magic, the tear in his flesh like a burn across my senses, the blood slowly flooding his lung like a tide of molten lead pouring into a sponge, pushing out the air.

  But beyond that perception my magic did nothing, so making it work was clearly up to me. I reached deeper still, and the thought of anything but the task before me dropped away.

  First that blood, which did not belong in the lung. I tried to grasp it with my mind, with a hand made of magic, but ’twas too liquid, too deeply lodged in the tiny pockets and chambers that should have held air.

  I had a fleeting thought that, if I knew better what I was doing, I could have made a net of magic that would pass harmless through the tissue of the lungs and gather up the blood. But that net would have to sweep up liquid and leave solid flesh behind, and I didn’t know how to shape such a thing.

  Rupert was failing, even as I sought for answers, his every ragged breath pulling more blood into his lung than air... If blood was the enemy, could air be my ally?

  I put the force of all that swirling magic behind the air he breathed, pushing it deeper into his lungs than his own muscles could ... and the blood retreated a bit before it. Another breath pushed more blood out. I found that if I cupped a bowl of magic over the puncture in the lung, holding back the pulsing blood from his heart, the blood in his lung flowed out more freely with each breath.

  When the last of it cleared, I tugged gently on the bolt with my real hand, pulling the sharp head out of the lung, while a hand of magic smoothed over the torn membrane that covered the lung’s surface, sealing it once more.

  I found the ruptured blood vessels as I pulled the bolt past them. A bit of magic softened their severed ends like wax, and I pressed them back together like pop grass, releasing my grip on the mend only when I knew ’twas strong.

  Connecting the densely matted fiber of the muscles was more like spinning loose wool into yarn. I couldn’t weave together all those tiny fibers, but I knew that Rupert’s own body would follow the path my spinning laid down and grow the rest together in time.

  A jagged nick in a rib that had almost blocked the bolt was rubbed out by a magical thumb...

  I almost healed the last inch of damage beyond the rib, and the skin above it. But I knew Noye, and even Wheatman, had seen Rupert wounded. If no mark marred his skin, eventually folk would wonder.

  Engaged in the task, my magic wanted to finish the job, almost as if it had a will of its own. I had to wrestle it back into its well, like... I was going to say, a reluctant horse into its stall, but ’twas more like trying to shove an angry snake into a bottle. When I finally got it in, the cover snapped down, and my normal senses abruptly returned.

  I was cold, and sweating with effort as if I’d run for miles and then tried to lift a weight beyond my strength. My stomach was a bit queasy, too.

  I pulled the tip of the bolt from Rupert’s flesh, and it ticked against the floor when I dropped it.

  “We can say it struck a rib,” I said. “And that’s what kept it from...”

  Three sets of eyes were fixed upon me, wide with astonished wonder — and to my relief, no trace of disgust or fear.

  Fisk was watching me too, but any wonder he felt was overwhelmed by smugness.

  “See,” he said. “I told you you could control it, if you just practiced.”

  I then had to explain how I’d come to have magic — though I was so weary from my first experience of deliberately working ... my new Gift? that I let Fisk do most of the talking.

  Rupert, who had an interest in natural science, was intrigued by Professor Dayless’ theory that many humans might possess magic, but that ’twas blocked by our conscious, thinking minds. But he agreed, along with the others, to keep my secret.

  ’Twas Margaret, now sitting in Rupert’s lap, who looked at me with fearless curiosity and terrifying trust and laid her hands over her still-flat belly.

  “Could you use this magic to make my child Gifted?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “The magic might be able to do so — I have no idea whether it could or not. But a developing child is so fragile... The slightest misplaced brushstroke of power might do unimaginable harm. But even if I knew I could, I wouldn’t want to. Gifts aren’t that remarkable, you know. Oh, I suppose in the far back times, when they stopped the unwary from harvesting magica, that was important. But nowadays, all Gifts are is another talent, such as your ability to master complex subjects, like law, or Fisk’s ability to set fine stitches. I see no reason to prize Gifts so high when they’re really just ... another talent.”

  And this magic of mine was only another Gift, when all was said. More versatile, mayhap, but it made up for that by being less reliable and harder to summon. I would no doubt use it in the future. Watching Rupert’s breath stir his lover’s hair, as she snuggled against his chest, was a marvel and a deep joy.

  But the magic that had wrought this was only another tool in my hand — ’twas how I used it that would define me.

  Peace flowed through my hear
t, and I felt an almost painful pity for Wheatman. He wouldn’t try to kill me again, of that I was certain, for his trust in his own righteousness had been broken. But he’d also turned his back on the harm he’d wrought. He might one day find another moment, another chance to redeem his soul ... but he also might not.

  Turning away from this chance, as with all the other choices he had made, defined him too.

  I was glad I had not killed him, for if I had I’d be no better than he was — and that was a man I hoped never to become.

  “Isn’t anyone going to ask what I was doing?” Fisk demanded plaintively.

  “You went chasing after Noye,” Kathy said. “Did you get him?”

  I was interested in this myself, as my attention returned to matters more mundane than life, death and magic.

  “Yes,” said Fisk. “But only because Trouble came dashing up and tripped him on the stairs. He was so distracted by Fearless, he didn’t even see Trou... Oh, all right, True. He’s earned it.”

  “Fearless?” Kathy’s eyes brightened. “Was he?”

  “Not in the least,” said Fisk. “He never got within ten feet of the man. But it will give him something to aspire to, and he’s barking up a storm if Noye so much as twitches. I left Noye tied to a post,” Fisk added. “So the dogs don’t need to do anything. But they seemed to be enjoying themselves, so I left them there.”

  “I left True guarding Noye’s henchman,” I said. “I wonder if my knots ... ah, well.” If he had fled, I hadn’t the energy or the will to chase after him. And really, there was little need. “We can all testify that Noye kidnapped Mistress Margaret,” I went on. “And plotted to kill Rupert, so there’s an end to him. But what about the Liege Lady? Unless Noye can be brought to testify against her — and he doesn’t seem inclined to — the only one who can name her is Wheatman. And I doubt we’ll see him again.”

  Mayhap I didn’t pity him so much, after all. Or rather I did, but I found I could despise him at the same time.

  “There might be more evidence than that,” said Margaret. “He never mentioned her in front of me, either. Though once I recognized him, I knew the Liege Lady had to be behind it. But after he ordered his hired thugs to help him kill Rupert, and most of them quit, he had to do more himself. And even before they left, he spent some time riding in the carriage with me. He’s got a packet of letters he keeps in his saddlebags. Sometimes, when he thought I was asleep, he’d take one out and look at it, or hold it against his heart without opening it. And if they’re from the person I think they’re from...”