by Eve Langlais
“I shouldn’t imagine that it might,” she admitted as he made his way along the gallery to where it overlooked the great hall, then began to descend the stairs. His arms were firm around her, as strong as iron bands, his step sure on the stone steps. She trusted in him without question as she looked down over those gathered below.
The Barons Marston kept an old–fashioned household, and his dependents gathered for meals under his watchful eye, the small high table on the dais overlooking the low trestles as it had done for centuries. John always said that if he was to be the lord of his people, he should be among them, and that was what he had done almost every evening in illness or in health. When Sarah had fallen down the stairs and had caught a fever and lay sweating and weeping in pain in their marriage bed, John’s daily duty at dinner was the only time he had left her side for two weeks.
One of the young pages caught sight of the baron and his lady, and he raised the alarm. Heads turned, and then benches scraped back and a wave of silence broke over the room as their lord descended with his invalid wife.
Their people kept to their feet as John walked up the center aisle between the trestles and mounted the dais. He set Sarah in her chair, and she sank against the high back and looked out over the gathered people.
“Mama!” Henry’s piping voice shattered the silence, and the toddler wriggled from his nurse’s lap and ran to her knees.
Sarah’s arms protested as she lifted him into her lap, but her reward was his small, sweaty body curled up against her chest.
“My mama,” Henry said in satisfaction, patting her arm possessively.
Smiles appeared on the wall of solemn faces, just a few at first. Then one of the maids tittered, and scattered laughter broke out over the assembly as they all resumed their seats.
Sarah held her youngest son tight against her body as she looked out over the crowd, at the faces of those who had been strangers when she had first come to John’s manor but now were her people, just as she was their lady.
“Mama, do you suppose ought to be down here?” Ann’s face was creased in concern.
“I couldn’t stand looking at the same four walls for an instant longer,” Sarah said to her eldest daughter.
Neither Ann nor Richard, who sat across from their parents, appeared convinced. But there wasn’t much that Sarah could say to her children to change their minds, so she said nothing at all.
She looked over at John–and her heart jumped, for next to him was Don Argemirus.
Of course the doctor would sit next to her husband, she scolded herself. He would be the guest of honor, occupying a place second in honor only to hers. But it still made her stomach clench to see him there, in the busy, bustling atmosphere that was dinner in the great hall.
Even as John piled the plate he called for her with far too much food, meat and bread and the roasted root vegetables and cabbage of early winter, the doctor regarded her with his angel’s eyes. Sarah was suddenly acutely aware of the coarseness of John’s beard, the roughness of his hands and the heaviness of his features when compared to the painter’s fever dream that was Don Argemirus.
“Have you then decided, Lady Marston?” he asked, and Sarah was struck by how beautiful even his voice was.
Under the table, she reached for John’s thigh, resting her hand upon it for reassurance, for steadiness. “Upon the council of my lord husband, I have chosen to try your cure.”
On the other side of the baron, the doctor clicked his tongue, a satisfied sound, and smiled. Only then did Sarah notice how much of the female attention in the room was fixed upon him, as if the women scarcely dared to look away. Sarah, too, felt caught in his gaze, but it was the feeling of a small mouse caught in the regard of a snake.
“That was wise of thee. The cure is very dangerous, and yet it is thy best and only chance.”
“So you have said,” she said steadily.
“And does Baron Marston understand the risks?” he asked.
John frowned. “What import give you this word, ‘risks’?”
“If she live, she shall be forever changed,” Don Argemirus said. “What she found dear before, she may hold in disgust.”
John’s frown deepened. “There is no art, black or white, that could do such a thing.”
“It is as you say,” the doctor said, raising a shoulder in a negligent shrug, and then he turned back to his meal.
Sarah watched him from the corner of her eye. In truth, her decision to come below had been as foolish as it was impulsive, because only the clasp of the stays around her chest and the support of the chair kept her upright. She picked at her dinner to allay her husband’s concern and struggled against fits of coughing that would come upon her without warning, but she noticed that the doctor ate scarcely more than she did.
She wondered if he needed to eat as mortals did or if his dark bargain had extended to that as well.
The fire that roared behind the table warmed her back, and the screens at the doors deflected the draft that ghosted through the room. The floor was strewn in fresh rushes for Advent, and boughs of red–berried holly and yew were twisted about with evergreen ivy and hung up on the walls. Baron Marston did not have the funds for musicians in his small court, not like at her uncle–guardian’s great homes where Sarah had grown up, but instead, some of their servants who were handy with flaut, lute, and horn were celebrating the feast day at the far end of the room by playing a merry carol.
It was truly Christmas. Sarah had not felt it, immured in the baron’s room at the top of the manor. But here, picking at her food as little Henry in her lap mauled her bread, with the season’s songs and swags of greenery and the crackling fire, it felt like Christmastime.
And everything she was about to lose struck her in her heart.
But she pasted a smile upon her face and nodded and murmured at her husband’s carefully lighthearted remarks until, eventually, he suggested that she might wish to retire. And then she gave her assent readily and, after embracing her children, she allowed him to carry her upstairs again, and once again their gathered subjects rose in silent respect as the musicians fell silent until she was gone.
Sarah sensed the shadow of death over her, as if she had just witnessed the rehearsal of her own funeral procession. And she felt as if her center had been scooped out and filled with nothing but grief.
Chapter Five
When Sarah opened her eyes and saw the light of morning, she gave a brief prayer of thanks. The night had been a long and difficult one, for she had paid back what she had spent that day with an usurer’s interest. Even propped up nearly upright upon the bed, the bubbling liquid in her lungs had almost drowned her, and she had spent most of the night coughing it up with either her husband or Bess in anxious attendance.
As she stirred, John jerked awake in the chair that he was slumped in before the fire that he had kept stoked to drive the cold from her bones. But the chill she felt was the cold of death, something no fire was hot enough to chase away.
“I am well,” she said–or tried to say, for it came out as a terrible croak through her damaged throat. She swallowed painfully. “Have no fear. I am just waking, my lord,” she tried again.
John was already at her side, his dark eyes shadowed with more than sleeplessness. “I shall call Don Argemirus to attend you.”
Sarah seized his hand as he turned away. “Wait!”
He stopped instantly, gripping her hand in his. “My love?”
Sarah opened her mouth, yet she had nothing to say. She had given her oath–on the morn, she would allow the doctor to work whatever dark magic he could upon her. It was morning, a morning that at times that night she’d feared she’d never see. Never before, even in the worst of her illness, had she fought so hard to breathe. Never had the coughing taken her with such cruelty, shaking her until she could hardly wheeze out the coughs that were being wrung from her, until she pissed her shift and the bed because controlling her body was as impossible then as seizing the
moon.
Disgusting and humiliating, it had been a night that she wished that John had never seen. She wished him to remember their long rides, their wild hunts, their fine feasts and their many kisses, many embraces that had taken place in their chambers, the larder, even the hayloft of his own stables, as if they were peasant youth.
Not that night, with her bleeding and shaking and coughing and pissing herself. He should not have that memory. But when she had tried to send him away, he would not go, and so she had taken refuge in the comfort of his presence even as her heart mourned the weight of the memories that he would bear when she was gone.
But now there was nothing more to say. She’d wept all her tears the night before, and the pain of grief had already wrung her dry. So she simply squeezed his hand and said the words that she had said so many times before:
“I love you, my lord.”
He smiled softly at her. “And I you, my heart.”
She released his hand, and wearing only his shirt, braies, and hose, he stepped from the room and was gone.
Sarah had time to do nothing but smooth her blood–flecked shift–her third of the night–over her chest and shift her legs before the door opened and the doctor entered.
Don Argemirus was even more beautiful than she had remembered, Eros in an exquisitely embroidered doublet, and he moved with the lithe grace of a dancer.
“You are ready?” he asked, pulling up the chair beside her bed.
Sarah could not help but notice how he moved around the narrow, golden rectangle of light thrown upon the floor from the room’s window.
“I shall never be more prepared,” she answered with perfect honestly as he sat next to her. “Where are your lances and preparations?”
He looked at her with those hard, bright eyes, his perfect ringlets clustering around his angel’s face. “Should you believe me if I said I need none?”
Sarah swallowed as her heart began to race in an unsteady rhythm. “I should.” At that moment, she would believe it if Beelzebub himself sprang from the ground at his feet to take her soul.
He smiled, and her racing heart tripped as her breath came faster, a disturbing twist low in her midsection. “Then give me leave to begin.”
Sarah nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She wanted Bess in the room with her–she wanted John, to cling to his hand. Alarm mounted within her, like a thousand church bells clanging in her head. This wasn’t right. It wasn’t natural. Everything about this man was very, very wrong.
He touched her hand where it rested on the blankets that covered her body, and she gasped at the shock that went through her body, from the top of her scalp down to her very toes. Instead of jerking it away, though, she turned it under his, clinging to him reflexively even as the waves of sensation crashed over her.
“Very good,” Don Argemirus said, his deep voice resonant with his satisfaction. “Let us proceed.”
And with that, he raised their joined hands to his lips.
Sarah’s breath caught, and she opened her mouth to protest even though it was nothing more than a mannerly gesture. Yet with him, this man or angel or demon, it seemed anything but mannerly.
But no sound emerged before his mouth met the back of her hand, sending a short, sharp twisting from his lips down to the place where her legs joined. She gasped, then bit her lip, caught in the power of the influence that pulsed around him like a rabbit in a hunter’s snare. He seemed larger somehow, darker, as if he took all the shadows in the corners of the room and wrapped them around himself.
He pushed up the sleeve of her chemise with one hand and turned her arm with the other so that her naked wrist was uppermost. And holding her in his gaze, he kissed her again, his lips damp, insistent against her skin. The edges of her vision drew dark and the shadows that were around him seemed to touch her, too.
“God save me!” Sarah whispered, the words strangled, scarcely audible at all.
Don Argemirus lifted his head. “No,” he said, his white teeth flashing between those beautiful lips. “I will save you.”
And before Sarah could say or do anything more, he lowered his head again to her wrist, and instead of the caress of lips came a sudden, sharp stab of pain.
Sarah cried out, but even as she did, the pain twisted in her mind, coiling like a snake onto itself and changing suddenly into a spasm of pleasure that hit her in her gut and stole the breath from her lungs. She wanted him–more than anything she had ever wanted in the world, she wanted him, and despite the weakness that made her limbs feel like sacks of sand, she made a desperate mewling sound in her throat as her body spasmed with the intensity of her pleasure and her need. Her free hand was in his silky hair, holding his mouth to her wrist. The throbbing between her legs was intolerable, and she dragged herself up off the pillows, swinging her legs off the edge of the bed.
Don Argemirus broke the seal of his mouth against her arm, and bright blood flowed out from the slashes in her wrist. Sarah cried out again–not in pain but in regret because she could not bear to have him pull away from her.
“What sorcery is this? What are you doing to me?” she managed, but she was already tilting her hips toward his as he stepped between her legs.
“Saving you, perchance,” he replied. And then he caught the back of her neck with his bloodied hand and pulled her into his kiss.
A blaze went through her like nothing she had ever felt, a heat that seared her brain and belly and sent sparks flying behind her eyes. She could taste her own blood on her lips, but its coppery tang only drove her to greater heights of madness. She kissed him back hard, wanting more than the stroke of his tongue in her mouth that seemed to seize her entire body in its grip. She wanted the pain, too, the lash of it that twisted around into ecstasy.
She whimpered as he moved his mouth away, down her cheek and to her neck. Don Argemirus’ free hand was at his hose, yanking at the ties, dropping his codpiece and freeing his cock from his braies. He shoved her shift up without ceremony, his palm against her naked thigh wrenching a moan from her lips. Careless of her injured leg, he pulled her hips to the edge of the bed. And just as the mouth on her neck went hard, slicing through her delicate skin, he thrust inside her.
Her entire body was on fire now, as if her own blood sought to devour her body. Everything that he had said was coming true–the dark witchcraft that burned in her veins until she thought her whole body would break apart from needing him even as he filled her. She broke apart, whether from agony or ecstasy she didn’t know, couldn’t care, because she wanted them both in equal measure as long as they came from him.
He rammed into her softness as his teeth sliced deep, and it should not have felt as it did, like the two were connected by a thick rope of pure sensation that went straight through the core of her, something beyond simple distinctions of pain and pleasure. Every nerve screamed as she clenched around him, one of her hands still in his hair, the other clasping him to her body.
Sara was thrown to a peak where there was no air, no light, nothing but a storm of sensation that ripped apart the fragile pieces of her mind. The searing heat in her veins got stronger and stronger until it burned away the pleasure, and then her world was only pain until darkness fell over it all.
Chapter Six
Sarah opened her eyes and winced at the light that flooded through the narrow window, and with the first breath that she took, she knew that she was healed.
She threw her mind back to what had happened just before she’d sunk under the waves of semi–consciousness. Her body and Don Argemirus’ entwined, her desperation, the pleasure and the terrible, terrible pain….
It must have been a fever–dream, a madness, because it was impossible that Sarah would forget her marriage vows and her love for anything.
It was impossible that she could ever feel that.
Yet she had been lying flat on her back in the bed, and she was not choking on the foam in her lungs. She pushed up, and she did not cough, and she swung her legs over th
e side of the bed and slid to her feet.
And no pain shot from her leg up through her spine. Her legs were the same length again, for she was no longer crippled by the bone that could not be properly set.
Sorcery, indeed. Sarah shuddered, wonder and horror coming over her in equal measures. She took a breath so deep that that her ribs almost creaked with it, and all she felt was the sweet, chilly air of winter inside her throat and lungs.
She didn’t hurt. Nothing hurt–not even the tooth that had been sore for so long that she had all but forgotten that it had ever felt different.
“So. You live.”
Sarah spun at those words to find that Don Argemirus was sitting in the darkest corner of the room, his arms folded across his chest. Now that her attention had been drawn to him, it seemed impossible that she should miss him, but the shadows seemed to be gathered so thickly around him they all but swallowed him.
A witch, that was what he was. A man who had sold his soul to the devil himself.
And he must have sold hers, as well, or she would not want him so much. Even with her heart beating in terror at sight of him, she curled her hands into fists around the fabric of her shift to keep from reaching for him–from begging him to do again to her what he had done before.
“What debt to your master have I incurred?” Sarah managed to ask, and she was astonished that her voice hardly wobbled.
“Master?” Don Argemirus sounded amused. “I am my own master.”
Reflexively, Sarah made a sign to ward away evil. “God save me!”
At that, he stood and laughed, tipping his head back to reveal the beautiful length of his neck. “I am not the devil, you fond fool. I am descended from the lines of angels, accursed but not damned.”
“What do you want of me?” she asked, backing away as he advanced toward her. She was not paying attention to where she was going, and she stopped short as her rear bumped up against the heavy table that sat in front of the fireplace.
“What do I want of you?” he echoed, stopping just inches away from her.