Dark Stallion
By
Raven Willow-Wood
© copyright by Raven Willow-Wood, June 2009
Cover Art by Alex DeShanks, June 2009
ISBN 978-1-60394-
New Concepts Publishing
Lake Park, GA 31636
www.newconceptspublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.
Chapter One
Aydin’s body was slick with the sheen of sweat that coated him. He paused, plastering his back against the stone wall of the corridor he was following as he heard the scrape of a boot on the floor. The stone felt like ice against his damp skin, and he struggled to repress a shudder, testing his grip on the handgrip of his sword while he waited to see if the hoonan would pass him or turn off.
He released the breath he’d held slowly when he heard the footsteps fading. Not that he would’ve minded slitting the bastard’s throat—he hated the hoonan’s universally—but the objective wasn’t to see how many he could kill before he reached the dungeons where he knew his brother was being held. It was to get the young fool out of the mess he’d gotten himself in to, and he’d already left three bodies in his wake. If they began to pile up, the hoonans were bound to realize they had an enemy among them.
He pushed the thoughts to the back of his mind as he spied the steep, narrow stairs he’d been searching for—the stairs leading down to the dungeon. Casting a sweeping look around the corridor, he moved quickly toward the opening, scanned the spiraling steps as far as he could see and slipped through the opening. He’d descended nearly a dozen when he heard a scrape below him and realized someone was coming up. He froze, glanced back up the stairs and considered whether to dash back up or not. He dismissed it as it sank into him that it wasn’t likely he could reach the alcove where he’d hidden before.
There was no hope for it. Moving away from the wall, lowering his sword to his side where it would be less noticeable, he continued his descent. The man he met stared at him blankly, his gaze flickering over Aydin’s face and upper torso as he jogged his mind to identify him. Aydin stepped up to him with a smile on his face, clapped him on the shoulder, and drove his sword into his belly just as he saw it flicker in the man’s eyes that he wasn’t looking at a hoonan.
The gods damned hair was good for something, Aydin thought in disgust as he whirled behind the man, clamped a hand over his mouth, and finished him by slitting his throat. He looked around the stairs as the man slumped heavily against him but, of course, there was no place to put the fucking body!
Allowing the body to sag toward the stairs, he rolled it toward the inner wall. He was about to continue his descent when an idea struck him. On impulse, he dragged the man’s tunic off and shrugged into it. There was a wide bloodstain on the front, but he might be able to use that, too.
With his sword arm down by one side to conceal his weapon as much as possible, his other hand over the sword slice in the tunic, he moved down the remainder of the stairs as quietly as possible and took a quick look around. There was a solitary guard—now. Clearly, he’d already dispatched the man’s partner.
Seated in a chair tipped back against the wall, the guard glanced at him, obviously expecting it to be the man who’d just left, did a double-take, and sat forward immediately. Aydin had reached the man by the time the front legs of the chair hit the stone floor.
“What the …?”
Aydin leapt at the man and sliced his sword across his throat before he could say more. The man slapped a hand to his throat, his eyes widened with horror as he felt his blood pumping through his fingers. He wavered a moment and sat down heavily in the chair he’d just vacated.
Aydin slipped his sword into the waist of his loincloth and headed down the corridor behind the man at a brisk trot, glancing in at the occupants of each cell as he passed. Hoonans by the look of them—and the smell!
Frustration and uneasiness was beginning to coil the tension in his gut tighter and tighter but at last he came upon a larger cell. The centaurs packed inside shifted uneasily when they spied him. Unfortunately, the darkness of the dungeon and the number of people inside made it impossible to determine if his brother was among them. “Colwin?” he called in a low voice.
To his relief, there was a stir among them and Colwin shouldered his way through to the front. He stared at Aydin with shocked disbelief for several moments before surging toward the bars that separated them.
“Aydin! You madman!” he exclaimed with a shaky laugh and then turned to look at the others. “It’s my big brother!”
“Keep it down!” Aydin admonished him, pulling his sword and beginning to work at the lock with the tip. “Are there any others down here?”
“Just us—as far as we know,” Colwin said, anger tingeing his voice now. “I’m pretty certain they took the others to work the mines.”
Aydin flicked a look at him, noting the healing lash marks and felt his gut tighten both with fury and remembered pain. “Still working on breaking you, huh?”
Colwin’s face twisted. He didn’t want to admit it, especially not to Aydin, but they were damned close to doing just that. He’d begun to think he couldn’t endure another lashing without shaming himself and his tribe.
It infuriated him. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t broken him down and no one knew how close he’d been to yielding. It was enough that he knew. It was enough that they’d made him begin to doubt himself as a warrior.
As Aydin finally broke the lock and opened the door, those thoughts made a random memory surface, the determination to have his revenge on their bastard of a king if he ever did manage to escape. It had been little more than an ‘if only’ at the time, something he’d mulled over lovingly while he’d lay trying to block his mind from the pain, but it occurred to him that he couldn’t have thought of a better way of avenging himself on the bastard.
It also occurred to him that he knew exactly where to find her. The guards couldn’t get their minds off of her more than five minutes at the time—and they had nothing to do standing guard but to talk.
* * * *
Aydin had been so focused on watching for the fucking hoonans as he guided the men he freed through the maze of corridors to the postern gate he’d used to enter the castle that it wasn’t until he paused for a head count that he discovered he’d lost Colwin along the way. Fear and fury instantly surged through him. He didn’t waste more than a second on the thought that Colwin had somehow lost his way. The idiot was up to something!
Abandoning his position in the lead, he rushed back to search for his younger brother, moving as quietly as he could despite his anxiety. He’d reached the door leading down to the dungeon before he spotted the young idiot, creeping down the adjoining corridor. At that, he’d barely caught a glimpse of him, but he doubted any of the hoonans were wandering about the castle barefooted. Uttering a curse under his breath, he glanced quickly around and hurried after him.
He’d vanished by the time Aydin reached the next corridor, but there was a narrow servant stair only a short distance along the passage. His gut told him that Colwin had passed that way, though what the fool was up to defeated him.
He just hoped to the gods that Colwin wasn’t deranged enough from his sojourn in the hoonan king’s dungeon to think he had any chance of sneaking into the king’s bedchamber and slaying him! Racing up the stairs on that thought, he nearly barreled into Colwin at the top.
Colwin, a harsh expression crossing his fingers at his brother’s intrustion, put a finger to his lips and pointed.
Aydin’s belly tightened. He stared at Colwin a
moment and then took a quick look in the direction he had pointed. There was a guard standing at a door near the end of the corridor. He ducked back into the stairwell. Grasping Colwin’s arm, he pointed down the stairs and gritted his teeth at his younger brother, mouthing the word ‘down’.
Colwin glared at him and pried Aydin’s fingers loose.
“King’s bride,” he said on a breath of sound.
Aydin felt cold wash over him. As quietly as Colwin had spoken, he had a bad feeling they were too close to the guard for him to not have heard. That premonition was confirmed a few moments later when they both recognized the scrape of boots on the stone floor. The guard had heard something, and he was coming to investigate.
Since he was still wearing his ‘disguise’ and it dawned on him there was no way in hell they could race back down the stairs without raising the alarm, Aydin put his sword behind his back, clamped a hand over his ‘wound’, and stepped out. The guard jolted to a halt less than three feet away. He was confused enough by Aydin’s appearance, however, that he lowered his own sword. The moment he did, Aydin leapt at him. Thankfully, he was able to end the scuffle quickly and somewhat quietly, but it had still been too fucking loud as far as Aydin was concerned. Sweating profusely now, Aydin glanced around for Colwin and saw him striding swiftly down the corridor—toward the door the guard had been standing at.
Resisting the urge to utter every curse he’d ever heard, gritting his teeth until his jaws hurt, Aydin lowered the guard to the floor and strode briskly after his brother, promising himself that he was going to beat the ever loving shit out of him if he managed to get him out of the castle.
He was going to beat him senseless anyway, he promised himself—especially if he ended up in the fucking dungeon because Colwin was too witless to escape while they had the chance.
Colwin had unbolted the door by the time he reached him and charged inside before he could stop him. Madman! Aydin dashed inside behind him and glanced around, his sword ready.
The room was empty—at first glance. As he swept the room in search of a threat, however, his gaze was caught by a flutter of bright red against the backdrop of the night beyond the window. There was a female poised on the window sill, her blue eyes like saucers in her head as she stared at them, frozen.
Even as it hit him that she was on the point of jumping, she went over the edge. He collided with Colwin as they both raced to the window. They jostled one another in an effort to look out and search for the body far below them.
That was when Aydin discovered two things at once—the rope, and the female dangling, or rather sliding, down it.
“It’s the king’s bride!” Colwin said in a tight voice. “Don’t let her get away!”
Aydin barely registered that. His gaze had followed the ‘rope’ to where it was tied off. Shoving his sword into his waistband, he grabbed the silk material that had been tied together to create a rope with both hands and started hauling it up and the woman with it. Suddenly, the rope became extremely light, and he looked over at Colwin.
Colwin leaned out. “Damn it! She jumped!”
Aydin let go of the rope, which he realized had been fashioned with the bed hangings, and peered out the window as well, fully expecting to see her broken body sprawled on the rocky slope. Instead, he saw her get to her feet and begin to hobble away. Almost the moment it connected in his mind that she’d escaped her brush with death, they heard, distantly, a clamor of alarm.
Colwin and Aydin shared a dismayed glance.
“Fuck! They’ve found the bodies—or they spotted the others! Gods damn it to hell, Colwin! Get your ass out the window before they find us here!”
He might just as well have saved his breath. Colwin was already halfway over the windowsill. Looping a hand around the rope, he went out the window, caught the lower edge of the rope with his feet, and slid with unnerving speed toward the ground.
Offering up a prayer to the gods that the damned thing would hold for him since he was heavier than Colwin and certainly a good deal heavier than the female, Aydin went out the window. The rope creaked and the ominous sound of rending fabric chased him down the rope, but he was near the end before the damned thing gave way, thankfully. He still hit the ground painfully hard.
When he’d leapt to his feet and whipped a look around, he discovered Colwin was in hot pursuit of the female—so intent on his quarry he hadn’t thought to shift. It dawned on him, however, even as he prepared to shift that, mayhap, Colwin wasn’t as distracted as he’d thought. Mayhap he was the one dangerously distracted by the female. His hooves were bound to make a great deal of noise on the rocks if he shifted.
Shaking his thoughts, he raced over the rocky slope until he reached the softer ground and then shifted, charging after the pair, who were rapidly approaching the forest. The moment Colwin heard the thud of his hooves, he, too, shifted.
* * * *
Emma’s palms were burning. She was in such a state of panic it was only peripheral pain, however, and she wasn’t certain whether it was from sliding down the rope she’d made from her bed hangings or landing on the rocky ground below the wall. Her knees hurt. There were twinges of pain from other parts of her body, as well, too numerous to count, but minor enough she didn’t think the injuries they recorded amounted to much. Most of her focus, though, was on running—no particular destination in mind beyond eluding the two men that were after her.
Huffing for breath, half blind from the darkness despite the full moon overhead, completely unfamiliar with the area, and driven by blind panic, it was little more than instinct driving her on. Her legs churned almost of their own accord while wild, random thoughts pelted her from every direction.
Naturally enough since she’d never seen a castle before in her life, she’d never climbed out the second floor window of one. She’d never climbed out any window, if it came to that, and certainly not one that required a rope. She didn’t know what her bed hangings had been made of beyond the fact that it had felt like silk and she’d thought it must be strong enough to do the trick.
And it had been. She just hadn’t counted on the slickness of the damned material! She’d thought she would climb down! She hadn’t anticipated sliding down the damned make-shift rope at a speed that was almost as hair-raisingly fast as if she’d simply jumped! She’d thought her heart would beat itself to death against her chest wall before she hit the bottom and splattered.
If that was anything like sky diving, she thought that was one experience she’d pass on!
She’d convinced herself she could escape with no one the wiser before morning, damn it to hell! She’d thought, once she scaled the rope, she would be home free, have plenty of time to put distance between herself and the lunatic that called himself King Bart. She didn’t know who the two men were who’d come in before she could get out the damned window, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t the physicians King Fart had promised/threatened when she’d thrown up all over him. They hadn’t looked like they could be physicians. They hadn’t looked like guards either, and she didn’t think she’d made enough noise to alert the damned guards anyway!
But what did she know? She’d fallen down the rabbit hole and woke up in Looneyville! There shouldn’t have been a castle, knights—any of the things she’d encountered since she’d blacked out and woken up here—where ever here was.
She’d been trying to convince herself that it was all a hallucination, or she was having the most bizarre nightmare she’d ever had in her life, but she’d found that impossible. Hallucinations, she was convinced, would have had a drugged-like feel about them and none of the things that had happened did, and she’d never had a nightmare that was so real it affected all of her senses. Her nightmares had always been like out-of-body experiences where nothing was really substantial and changed like mist. She’d never been able to see, hear, feel, taste, and smell.
She’d cried in her sleep a few times, but vomiting was sure as hell a new experience!
She�
��d always had a fairly delicate gag reflex, however, and King Fart had to be the most disgusting creature she’d ever had such a close encounter with! She thought she would’ve been alright despite the stench if he just hadn’t kissed her! The slime of his wet, wet kiss on top of the smell and the rancid taste of his mouth had just been too much!
Lucky her! He seemed to be a germaphobe! A damned strange one. How anybody could be that damned nasty and that damned fearful of catching something was beyond her.
Unless he thought the filth he was carrying around was some sort of shield from outside germs?
The urge to puke again washed over her. The sharp breath she sucked in to combat it was almost her undoing. She swallowed convulsively a few times and glanced around frantically for a place to hide when her ears told her the two men were still in hot pursuit, feeling her heart jerk painfully with fear in spite of its pounding rhythm from excursion.
A wall of darkness rose before her. Dimly, she could make out the branches and trunks of trees and realized she wasn’t far from a thick forest. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have seemed like a haven to her, but she knew it was pointless to look for a cop!
She’d begun to think she was actually going to make it to the tree line and find a burrow to crawl in to when she abruptly heard the thundering of horse hooves behind her. Her mind went perfectly blank for several moments while it tried to assimilate that, tried to figure out why she hadn’t heard the horses before and how they could be so close when she hadn’t. A fresh surge of adrenaline went through her, however, and her legs began to churn more rapidly without any conscious order.
Goosebumps erupted and raced up her spine to lift the hair on the back of her neck as the realization sank in that the riders were virtually upon her. She began to dodge and weave, also instinctively. The hand that suddenly snagged her flying hair nearly wrenched her hair from her scalp. She would’ve screamed if she’d had the breath for it.
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