MANMADE
Leah Petersen
The castle called to him. Lord Andrew Rorin rode on through the creeping grey mist of dusk, determined to spend the night within the castle walls. In a sack tied to his saddle, the head of a king bumped a pleasant tattoo against the horse’s flank. Rorin smiled and urged the horse faster toward home.
The siren song of the keep danced together with visions of meats roasting over the fire, fat sizzling and popping on the coals below, of spiced mulled wine to warm his bones, and a wench or two to warm everything else.
The gates came into view and Rorin’s pulse quickened. He was eager to show off his latest trophy. He loved the expressions on their pretty little faces as they looked at, while trying not to see, the grisly proof of his latest conquests. That this was the head of a man only sweetened the victory.
For Lord Rorin’s intolerance for other men was legendary. He allowed no man in his presence save the heads of those he had killed, carefully bound with spells so that their last expression of fear or pain or the sweetness of surprise was forever preserved.
The lights in the windows were a cheery glow and the bustle of activity in the courtyard was proof that the castle had rallied its inhabitants to welcome their lord home. Rorin galloped through the gates and reined his horse to a stop in front of the great doors where, turned out to serve their lord and master…were a dozen men. Tall, hairy things like a grove of blight oaks planted in his yard.
Rorin flew off his horse, trembling with rage.
He stumbled to a stop in front of a thick, furry one. The words rushed to his lips, power gathering in his cupped hand.
Something massive darted in his peripheral vision, slamming into his side. Rorin fell. A moment before he hit the cobblestones he was snatched up by the very blur that had knocked him down.
“Don’t, my lord.”
The deep, resonant voice sent red fury racing through Rorin’s veins. He rounded on the speaker. The man was tall and beefy, with hands that looked capable of snapping small trees in half.
“What is the meaning of this? Get out of my sight! Where are my servants? Charlotte!”
“Here, my lord,” the same man answered.
Rorin stared at him.
“They call me Charles, now,” he amended after a long pause.
It was so absurd Rorin sputtered, a spray of astonishment and rage.
Charlotte, his current favorite, was thin at waist and wrist, plump where it mattered—breast, hips, lips. Her hair was the color of new wheat, eyes the strange, enigmatic dusky color of moss in the dry season. She was the loveliest of the ladies he had acquired in the forty years since he’d claimed the keep.
This thing, this man, couldn’t have been more different. Although the hair that brushed his powerful shoulders and shadowed a strong jaw was the color of new wheat. And under thick, knitted brows his eyes were the enigmatic, dusky color of dry moss.
“Don’t you ever, ever touch me,” Rorin hissed, clenching his teeth against the involuntary shiver the man’s touch had excited.
He wouldn’t have time to craft a spell with the man’s eyes on him. “Don’t even speak to me you lying, disgusting, monstrous—”
Snatching his belt knife, he thrust it two-handed at the man’s neck. The man’s hands flashed up and snatched at his wrists, a painful, crushing grip. Rorin gasped in a breath but before he could do anything with it, a beefy fist slammed into his temple. As darkness descended he heard a faraway, “Forgive me, my lord.”
5
The silence was startling. After nearly a month of the constant, muted cacophony of travel, the soundless hum of the keep brought Rorin awake with a jerk.
He was alone and in his own bed. He didn’t remember climbing the stairs, or entering his room, or undressing, though he was in only his underclothes now. He didn’t remember anything after the courtyard and the men—
He shot upright. Fury, confusion, and fear rushed through him in equal measure.
He spluttered a rather hysterical chuckle. A dream. Of course. That was the only explanation. Rorin was the most feared magician in the fifteen lands. No handful of servants would dare vex him this way. No power could thwart him within these walls. The castle thrummed as if in agreement.
He drew breath to roar reproaches at whoever dared to attend their lord in so shoddy a manner, but he caught himself on the inhalation and closed his mouth in lingering doubt.
He tossed the blankets aside in disgust.
“Charlotte!”
The door opened at once, as if someone had been waiting outside for his summons.
A head popped around the doorframe, a mud-haired, mud-eyed young man just acquiring his first muddy-colored whiskers.
The edges of Rorin’s vision blurred red. The swell of anger strained under his skin. “Where is Charlotte!”
“I’ll get him, my lord,” the lad answered in a disturbing combination of rumble and squeak.
Rorin paced in front of the fire, hands reflexively clenching and unclenching as he ground his teeth.
“You sent for me, my lord?”
The deep bass voice had a familiar lilt and cadence, and for a disconnected moment it was soothing, welcome, like music. Rorin clenched his jaw on a wash of despair and longing.
“What is the meaning of this?” he bellowed. “Who—” he indicated the man with a dismissive sweep of his hand. “What are you?”
The wheat-haired man dropped into an aborted curtsey which morphed into an awkward bow. He blushed.
“A fortnight ago, my lord, we went to bed as always and woke like this.”
“Impossible.”
“And yet…” The man looked down at his hairy hands, turning them over and back again before looking up at Rorin. He shrugged.
The rise and fall of broad shoulders held Rorin’s gaze and for a couple of breaths he just stared. Rorin jerked, turning his head away.
“Insolence! I will not be contradicted in my own home. This is impossible. It’s nonsense. No magician but one of the blood can effect any kind of magic here. I killed all of them long ago. The castle acknowledges me as its master. You lie!”
“I swear it is the truth, my lord.”
“What have you done with the women who were here?”
“We are the women who were here. I give you my word.” The man turned to someone behind him, out of sight in the hall. “Get Mitchell.”
Rorin ignored it. “Your falsehoods mean nothing. Who sent you?”
“I’m here by your sufferance, as always,” the man replied, a saucy half-smile quirking at his lips, his shoulder tilted forward; the unconscious flirtation so second nature, so familiar in any of his servants, so pleasing in the women.
Rorin’s hands spasmed into fists. He flew at him. The man drew himself up and suddenly he was like a wall. Rorin stopped short, his breath catching in his throat, trembling with unspent fury and a muddle of feelings he couldn’t afford to think about. The side of his head throbbed with remembered pain and something indefinable but disorienting.
A soft shuffle sounded in the doorway and a gaunt, withered old man appeared.
Taking a deliberate step away from Rorin with a long exhale, the man gestured to the elder. “Mitchell, come here.”
The shriveled, wrinkled figure was both less and more disconcerting than the robust specimens. Rorin shrank away from the man’s tottering bow.
“This is Martha, my lord,” The man nodded to the oldster. “Show him.”
The old man extended one trembling arm, pulling back his sleeve to the elbow. There, shiny and bald among the wrinkles and patches of hair, was Rorin’s mark. “Put there by your brother,” he rasped. “Going on forty years ago.”
Rorin squinted at the mark, sure he could find evidence of duplicity. But the brand was long healed, only a blemish being slowly reclai
med by the sagging skin around it.
He slapped the old man’s arm away.
“This is outrageous! I won’t stand for it.” He turned to the younger man. “Bring in new servants, then. Women. Send these away. And you too, once you’ve done.”
“It won’t do any good, my lord.”
“And how do you know?”
“Because it’s already been tried. That is, Janie and Hera were out hunting the night it happened and they were not changed. But when they returned three days later, the moment they entered the castle walls they became like all the rest of us.”
“I don’t believe it. Bring me some young women at once.”
“And where should we get them, my lord?”
“There are villages, aren’t there? You’re capable of the two day journey, I hope? There are dozens of you brutes here now. Can’t you manage to plunder and ravish? Only, don’t think I will tolerate any of you taking liberties with them. They’re for me.”
The man’s eyes narrowed.
“What?” Rorin demanded. “Are you jealous?”
When he realized he’d made that statement to a man, he shivered so dramatically that he lost his footing.
“Just do as I say!” he roared. They departed without another word and Rorin slammed the door behind them.
5
Rorin slumped against the stone wall, sliding down until he plunked into a disconsolate heap on the floor. He thumped his head back and groaned.
Turning his cheek to the cool stone, he lifted a hand and laid his palm against the wall. The familiar pulse of the castle’s life was an unspeakable relief. Rorin knew this keep in his very soul and it knew Rorin; its touch was more tender than any mother with her babe, more welcoming than cruel, changeable people. The life of the castle recognized and enfolded him; a warm vibration, like the murmur of lips against skin, just there under an insubstantial curtain of stone.
Rorin let the sweetness of reunion wash through him and sweep away all the anger, fear, and violation. His home, his castle had been compromised and Rorin didn’t know how.
It was Rorin’s first and only friend. It knew Rorin, had chosen him when Rorin was still a boy, even before he killed his own father and older brother and freed the castle to be his. Rorin needed no father or brother or mother or so-called friend, so long as he could turn to the castle.
And it had always been there for Rorin. Everyone else who had witnessed Rorin’s childhood humiliations had laughed, beaten him with fists and words. His father had whipped him, even as Rorin pleaded, “It’s not true!” or “I don’t!”
It was enough that his brother suspected, and called him the names. They said it was a weakness in Rorin, a failing. And sometimes Rorin believed them. If he couldn’t make it go away, stop the feelings, then he was weak. Broken and wrong.
No. It wasn’t Rorin who was weak in the end. It was his father’s head on the wall in the study, and his brother’s, not Rorin’s. Sometimes Rorin wished he could bring his father and brother back so he could show them how wrong they’d been. How he wasn’t what they thought. How he’d banished all men from his very existence decades ago. He would prove it to them.
And then kill them again.
He closed his eyes and drifted past the barrier of the wall, into the heart and mind of the keep. The web of spells cast by generations of his ancestors to create, preserve, and protect the living structure wrapped around him like a blanket. He knew this weaving like he knew his own body.
How could anyone impose their will in competition with his own? Who could even try? Why had the castle allowed it?
Betrayed him.
The flash of his anger ignited an answering pulse of something like guilt. No, shame. Rorin seized it, followed it. You didn’t betray me, did you? What did they do to you?
He wandered through the web of enchantments, examining it as if for the first time; a child with his hand extended, touching everything because everything was new and wonderful. There it was, like a loose thread in a tapestry. He picked at it and it unraveled as if it wanted to be found.
“Hello there, my nephew.” The rich, warm tones of a woman’s voice washed through his mind.
No, this wasn’t possible.
“I think you know you have found only the message I left for you and not the enchantment that so torments you at present. Don’t trouble yourself, even if you do find it—and perhaps you will—you cannot remove it. My blood ties run deeper than yours.”
Rorin glowered. She was dead, he had killed her himself. Though hers was the infuriating gap in his collection, her head the only trophy he’d never collected. He’d never found her body, but no one could have survived that fall. Surely she wasn’t alive?
“You were always a wicked boy, Andrew. Your murders over the years have been appalling, but they were all your rivals and I don’t begrudge you your ambition, however much it offends me. But you went too far this time. King Daviel was no threat to you. He had done nothing to you that you did not cause yourself. Your petty revenge may destroy everything I’ve worked for over the past two hundred years. I will sit by in silence no longer. Consider yourself duly punished.” Her voice took on a self-satisfied tone. “I know this is an enchantment you will find particularly trying.”
She knew. They’d told her. Rorin had been so sure his father would never speak of it. It was a shame on the family name. He wouldn’t have told anyone. No. She couldn’t know. No one knew. He’d killed everyone who had even suggested, hinted.
“I urge you not to incur my wrath further,” she said. “However distasteful you find this situation, it’s nothing to what I’ll do if you force my hand.”
Rorin growled low in his throat.
“You have been warned, nephew. Find some other occupation. Your days of senseless and butcherous meddling are at an end.”
Rorin jerked out of the castle heart so quickly his head spun. He dropped his head back against the wall and roared.
5
Lord Andrew Rorin was not so easily defeated. He would not be forced to endure this mockery, this torture.
And so the master of Rorin Keep kept to his chambers. At night he snuck out to retrieve books and scrolls—all the books of magic collected and histories recorded by dozens of the castle’s former masters—desperate to find a solution to this problem.
The next morning’s knock on the door startled him, sending a stack of tomes crashing to the floor.
“Go away!”
“But your breakfast, my lord.” The man’s voice was placid, untroubled.
“Leave it in the hall!”
“And your bath?”
Rorin groaned. He did so hate cold water, but the thought of men in his chamber while he was naked and vulnerable…A violent shiver sent another book toppling.
“Go away!”
5
Five days later a rather bedraggled and still unwashed Rorin stood on the wall, struggling to look lordly and dispassionate as a dozen of his men approached, leading four young women. In spite of his orders to the contrary, the man who had been Charlotte stood a few paces away. Rorin was very aware of him, like a spreading flush on the back of his neck, but a jittery feeling in his stomach made him reluctant to dismiss him.
Three of the women were tolerably handsome, if trembly and teary. A grin spread across Rorin’s face at the thought of all the fun he could have with that—a weepy virgin was one of his favorite toys. But all his attention was for the tall, raven-haired beauty behind. Her face was set, her mouth a determined line. Rorin chuckled to himself. This one might make the whole ordeal worth it after all.
The guards and their captives passed through the gate. Rorin turned to watch them emerge into the courtyard, unchanged. Grinning in triumph, he rushed down the open stairs.
But before he reached them, a chorus of screeches erupted from the women. T
hey gaped and goggled at each other in horror as faces and limbs thickened, horrified cries dropping an octave. They huddled, arms clasped over ripped bodices, covering breasts they no longer had. The first three burst into noisy sobs.
The beauty who trailed them, now big and dark with arms like a blacksmith, cast a quick look around and with a mighty blow to the guard’s jaw, toppled his captor and sprinted back through the gate.
Rorin stared for only a moment before shock turned into an explosion of rage.
“Shoot him!” he yelled to the archers on the wall.
“Stop! Don’t shoot.”
Lord Rorin spun to face the man in dumbfounded astonishment. “How dare you?” He grabbed a nearby bucket, hurling it at him. “How dare you!”
Gathering power crackled in Rorin’s other palm. He picked up a shovel and pitched it as well, keeping the man at a distance long enough to complete the spell.
A discarded horseshoe was in his hand when the man rushed him, grabbing him by the arms. Spinning Rorin around, he jerked the lord’s arm up behind his back and the power in it drained away with a stabbing pain. The man yanked him backward into his body, locking his other arm in a crushing vise over Rorin’s chest. The heat of him was like a brand everywhere they met, and Rorin’s mouth went dry, heart thudding in a thrill of terror.
“Let me go,” Rorin’s voice had an undignified waver.
“Stop throwing things.” Rorin felt the reverberations of the man’s deep tones in his whole body.
“You have no right to command me.”
“And you have no right to kill that man, or me.”
Rorin’s pulse jumped against his skin. Apprehension, confusion, and excitement hummed along every nerve. The man released him slowly, his hands hovering, his body tense and waiting.
Dusting himself off to hide his sudden trembling, Rorin turned. “Get them out of my sight,” he spat. “I’ll be in my room.”
5
Rorin stumbled through the castle’s heart, gripping the web of spells and enchantments in desperation. The flavor of his aunt’s weavings was not new; it had been a part of the whole for as long as he’d known this tapestry. It was stronger now, fresher, but it was still bound old and deep, impossible to separate or remove. He felt so helpless—he who had spent decades doing whatever was necessary to be strong, to inspire fear, to feel safe.
When the Villian Comes Home Page 30