by Lisa Cach
It wasn’t until much later that she realized those words had more than one meaning.
Chapter Seventeen
George tried another door off the south terrace and found it locked against him—like all the others except the one that had allowed him to leave the garrison room. He stepped back, shading his eyes with his hand as he looked up at the high windows of the great hall.
The great hall whose interior he had never seen. There were too many secrets on this island mount.
He had woken in the middle of the night and spent the small hours of the morning lying in his narrow bed, exploring the deep scratches on his back and failing to unlock a single one of the puzzles that plagued him. Daylight had brought more questions than answers, as the castle remained silent and there was no sign of the mistress.
Of Alizon.
He was 90 percent certain that was her name, her uttering of it the last thing he recalled before waking groggy and dry-mouthed in the garrison room.
Since he had started this adventure he had spent an inordinate amount of time waking up and wondering what had happened. He was beginning to get paranoid that he would go out cold each time things started to get interesting.
Fight with Milo: lights out.
See ghosts and a beautiful naked babe: wake uncertain it had been real.
Be on the verge of sliding home with the most confounding woman he had ever met: good night, sweet prince.
He certainly fared better in the ring than he had been faring here on Devil’s Mount.
This morning it had taken him longer than he cared to admit to remember that this was all happening in his mind. It had not felt that way, with Belch huffing dragon breath at him and slamming him against the cavern wall.
He shuddered in remembrance of how close Belch’s jaws had come—more than once—to snipping off big chunks of his anatomy. If that was what Belch was like partially drugged, George didn’t want to deal with the fiend when he was fully awake.
He returned his thoughts to Alizon. It had not felt like this was all happening in his mind when she had her soft thighs around him, her hips urging him into her slick, wet heat.
Christ, no, it hadn’t felt like he was imagining things. He didn’t have that good of an imagination. He was an up-front, straightforward sort of guy, never subtle in his playacting. Although Alizon’s silly crone costume fit with that, George didn’t understand how she could have sprung from his unconscious. He kept getting the feeling that there were convoluted layers beneath her surface, much more convoluted than was native to any aspect of his personality, however buried.
Of course, Alizon’s body was 100 percent edible—but he had seen plenty of pretty women, and he’d never been as obsessed with them as he was becoming with her! He never knew what to expect; each encounter with her was a challenge, sending the adrenaline of confrontation pumping through his blood. He didn’t know what she wanted: of him, of the dragon, of life, of anything.
He grinned. Except for French toast and his body. He was pretty sure she wanted both of those, although probably in the same order.
Where the hell was she this morning, anyway?
The sea was bright beneath a white haze of sky, wind gentle in its gusts, seagulls holding steady on updrafts. The distant shore was green and peaceful, dots of white sheep moving on the hillsides and pencil sketches of smoke drifting from cookfires in the town. It should have been a beautiful morning, but all he felt was irritated frustration.
His muscles hurt, the cuts on his back stung, he was hungry, his head was throbbing, he had a serious case of blue balls, and no one was giving him any damn answers! What kind of dream was this, anyway?
He needed a cup of coffee. Why couldn’t he have imagined himself in a quest to Starbucks? Two-ply toilet paper wouldn’t go amiss, either, nor would shampoo, a proper change of clothes, and a razor.
More than any of that, however, he wanted Alizon. He didn’t need a psychologist to tell him that she was an important part of his being here, perhaps nearly as much so as the dragon. That, at least, he was able to figure out on his own.
Her name sounded the same as that of Emoni’s long-lost friend, the one after whom she had named her daughter. Was it she? And if so, what had she been doing here all this time? Why did her friend think her dead?
He went to the edge of the terrace and leaned against the parapet, looking out over the shimmering ocean dotted with the dark sails of local fishing boats.
He ached with the need to complete what he had started with Alizon on the kitchen floor. Was it a mental ache and not a physical one? Was that what this was about? Maybe he was trying to “connect” with his feminine side.
He grimaced. That made it sound like a creepy, convoluted mental jerk-off—instead of the most exciting physical encounter he’d had since he was sixteen and had a girl go down on him for the first time. He had heard that a near miss with death was an irresistible aphrodisiac, and he could vouch for the truth in that now: after Belch had almost chomped him, he could think of nothing but plunging himself deep inside this Alizon woman.
Hell, it was still almost all he could think about, symbolic meanings be damned.
He pushed away from the parapet and stalked around the end of the great hall, around to where he knew the kitchen to be. He found himself on the north terrace, its flagstones as empty of humanity as those on the other side. There was an opening in the parapet, though, that he had not noticed before. He went to it and looked down on a flight of stone steps that descended into the first of several walled kitchen gardens, one beneath the other, like rice paddies on a hillside.
He trotted lightly down the steps, his mind going back to his disastrous fight with Belch. The dragon was supposed to represent the doubts that had been plaguing him about his work. Kill the monster, kill the doubts. Right?
But then why had he hesitated when it was time to plunge the sword into the back of Belch’s neck? For hesitate he had. He had been unable to stab that blade into the living flesh of an animal lying quiescent beneath his feet. He’d had to remind himself that Belch was a virgin-chomping dragon before he could force himself to give the blow—a blow that missed, due to his hesitation.
Belch’s attempts to turn him into lunch had made the second blow easy to deliver, and George had been surprised when, with a thick, heavy sliding, the blade forced its way through the dragon’s hide.
Then there had been all the blood. And the bellows of pain. It had only been Belch’s continuing attempts to bite him in half that had kept George from tearing off his shirt and trying to stanch the creature’s wound.
Perhaps this fiasco of a battle said something about the way he had handled the assault on his professional life. He had stood there and taken whatever they threw at him, believing himself strong enough to handle it, and believing as well that it would be somehow unfair of him to strike back at mothers who wanted only to protect their children.
Yet none of that answered the question of why his feminine side might be trying to connect with him. It sounded like he had an excess of femininity already, being overly softhearted. Which brought up a troubling thought:
He wasn’t … gay, was he?
He thought of Alizon’s parted thighs and felt a flush of heat through his loins.
No chance.
He stopped, standing still at the edge of a plot of sorry-looking cabbages, and tried to rationally think about this fairy tale he was living, to ignore the nagging conviction that Alizon must be a real person and not a part of his mind.
He had tried to do the nasty with her, had almost succeeded, and then out he’d gone like a light. It had to have been Milo who’d hit him.
Maybe Milo was the important character in this whole scenario. The man’s habitual silence and brief answers were like those of a guru, so maybe that’s what he was. His short statements were likely fraught with hidden psychological meanings that it was up to George himself to decipher.
Maybe Milo had been forced to knock him
out because he knew it was too early for George to fully “connect” with Alizon. George didn’t know or understand her well enough yet. He hadn’t learned what he needed to from her.
Of course.
A little of the tension left his shoulders, pleased as he was with that bit of nimble brain work. Everything made sense, everything fit, if he just trimmed a few corners, turned it upside down and looked at it the right way.
He should be hanging out his own shingle, to counsel people. Write a self-help book, maybe. Go on “Oprah.”
Deep inside a little voice laughed, giggling that he knew less than he thought. A dim memory surfaced, that a man’s feminine side could also appear as a femme fatale, a demon of death who would lead him to destruction.
He shrugged off the thought. Not Alizon.
He resumed his walk through the gardens, noting the variety of vegetables and herbs, a frown slowly growing between his brows. He knew a little about the trials of yard work, and he wondered how Milo and Alizon managed to keep a handle on all the beds and espaliered fruit trees against the walls.
The enigma was soon forgotten as he lost himself in musings on the symbolic meanings of gardens, and he was surprised when he came at last to the final walled enclosure, with no outlet except an iron-banded door set in the far stone wall.
He pondered the door as if it had appeared in a glimmer of magic dust, as dubious in purpose as a portal in a fairy tale. Should he pass through? What might await on the other side? The apparently simple decision could be important, and he should ponder the consequences before acting.
Or he could stuff the pondering of consequences and count on his wits and strength to conquer the unknown demons beyond. He pulled back the bar and opened the door.
A sheep stood on the other side. It lifted its head, looked at him without interest, and went back to grazing.
The door divided the fortress gardens from the open slopes of the mount. Maybe not everything had a special meaning. Sometimes a cigar was just a cigar.
He went through and shut the door behind him. Picking a path down the slope, he climbed down rocks, crossed narrow meadows, and passed through pockets of trees and brush. The rhythmic shoosh-shoosh of a saw caught his ear, and he followed it down to a small shed near the base of the mount. Milo was there, cutting a rough plank of lumber.
“Milo! Good morrow!”
The man paused in his sawing for a moment, looking up much as had the sheep, then grunted and returned to work.
“What are you making?”
Milo gave him a flicker of eye contact. “Not making. Fixing.”
His guru was being stereotypically laconic. George thought he himself should be meditatively reflective in response, but instead felt the impulses of a five-year-old pestering a workman. “Fixing what?”
“Platform.”
“You’re going to go down the tunnel and repair it?” he asked, startled by the answer.
“No. You will.”
George grimaced. Was he going to have to go back down there so soon? Entering Belch’s lair was not, he felt, going to get any easier with practice. He understood now why Milo never did, and he could only wonder at what inner resolve kept Alizon descending time after time.
“Fair enough, I suppose,” he said, trying to sound casual and not as if the thought made him ill. “It was my fault Belch smashed the end of the thing.”
He found a seat on a chunk of wood, watching Milo saw.
“I understand why you did it,” he said after a few minutes had gone by.
Milo glanced up at him, a question in his expression.
George lightly touched the bump on the back of his head in explanation. “It took me a while, but it makes sense. I almost feel I should thank you—but jeez, man, a tap on the shoulder would have stopped me just as well. It’s not like I would have continued with an audience. Take it easy on the brain case next time—I promise, I’ll get the message.”
The puzzled look on Milo’s face took on a shading of alarm. He wore the expression of someone who was slowly realizing that the normal-looking person he is sitting next to on the bus is actually in need of heavy doses of psychotropic medication.
That, too, only made sense. George was breaking role, and if he wanted to kill the dragon and get it on with the girl, he had to play his part by the rules. Tempting as it was, there could be no knowing asides to his guru.
He changed the topic. “So, I have a new idea for killing Belch, but I’m going to need your help in gathering supplies.”
Milo grunted. Warily.
“I need a few logs, of different lengths and widths, preferably of dry wood. Do you think we can get them?”
“I must ask the mistress.”
“Alizon, yes. She is the one to go to, isn’t she? But damned if I can find her.”
Milo gaped at him.
“What?”
“She told you … ?”
It took him a moment. “Her name? You didn’t hear her tell me?”
Milo shook his head.
“That’s all I did get out of her, and it’s my own fault, for rushing things. You know how it is, sometimes a guy thinks with the wrong head.”
Milo seemed not to have heard him. “She must trust you,” he said in wonder.
“You think so?” The thought was both cheering and sobering. Trust imposed the obligation that it not be abused. He must be more honorable in his treatment of her, for her own sake as well as for his, if he was going to learn what she had to teach him.
No more sex on the kitchen floor. At least, not until he knew her better.
Dammit.
Personal growth through creative visualization was proving to be a lot more work than he’d expected.
Chapter Eighteen
“Alizon! Yoo-hoo! Alizon! Where are you?” George called from outside the great hall, his voice floating in through the high windows.
Alizon hunched her shoulders and leaned closer to the tapestry she was working on to hide the burning of her cheeks. The tapestry on its frame was mounted vertically before her, a sketch of the picture it would represent drawn onto the wall directly behind. She worked from the reverse side of the tapestry, sitting on a tall stool, just as several of the other virgins around the hall were on stools before other tapestries.
“Yoo-hoo! Alizon! Come on, I’m starving out here! Don’t make me eat those scraggly cabbages I saw!”
“Are you going to let him in?” Greta asked.
Alizon felt the eyes of the others all turned to her.
“He will settle down if I ignore him.”
“Alll-i-zohhhn …”
Glances of doubt were exchanged, and Joye made a noise of disbelief from in front of her tapestry. Hers depicted six young women in a garden— young women whose faces were those of six of the virgins. They often used themselves as models for their work, and the resulting hangings sold well.
Every six months a closemouthed trader from France arrived in their harbor to take the tapestries they had produced and to bring such luxuries as silk and velvet, silver mirrors, illustrated books that they gazed upon but could not read, ivory combs, spices, sugar, and sweetmeats. Milo handled the transactions in the dark of night, with Alizon standing hooded and silent in the shadows nearby.
There were virgins in Alizon’s tapestry as well, albeit in the background. From the walls of a castle they watched the scene playing out in the foreground: a knight in black armor mounted on a rearing white horse, his surcoat displaying the red cross of St. George, his spear piercing the throat of a dark dragon. The dying beast, teeth bared, writhed on the ground amid the bones of sheep and humans. Lizards crept from a chasm in the ground nearby. Between the saint and the castle, a red-haired princess in pink robes and ermine watched in serene confidence.
“Allie-allie-allie-zohn!”
She ran her fingers over the face of the knight, completed many weeks before. Was there something of George in his features? She had not been striving to create any particular
face when she wove that visage, but that nose, the line of the jaw …
A flutter of uneasiness went through her. Surely not. She had none of Emoni’s predictive powers.
Marry! There were only so many ways to weave a knight’s face. A dozen other men would fit the features just as well.
This was not the first tapestry she had woven of the legendary St. George. None of those other weavings had drawn a knight to her castle, so it stood to reason that this one had not done so now. By the rood, she had had no wish to summon a dragon slayer!
But that jaw did look the same. And there were those imaginings that kept her awake through the nights, betraying her wish for something more than she had. Mayhap those imaginings had been caught within the spell Emoni wrought when she summoned the man.
“Alizon! I know you’re in there!” George banged on the heavy doors to the north terrace, making them all jump.
“He does not sound as if he is settling down,” Joye said.
“You should have locked him in the guard room, like on the first night,” Braya said. She was sitting tailor-fashion, sewing a border onto a finished tapestry. “I do not know why you let him outside. We are all trapped in here, as if he were a hound trying to find his way into a sheep pen.”
“If he is made to feel a prisoner he will fight me, and lose his faith in my goodwill,” she explained.
“Alll-i-zohhhn …”
“Verily, he howls like a hound,” Joye gibed.
The younger girls snickered as they spun wool on their spindles. Joye took the encouragement and started a soft yowling, adding Alizon’s name into it. The young girls joined in, until they sounded like a pack of wolves baying at the moon.
“Hush! He’ll hear you,” Alizon scolded.
They cut off their canine cries and were met with silence from without. Gazes met gazes, anxious that they had given themselves away. Long moments passed.
“Alizon?” George called, sounding worried. “Was that you?”
A giggle of relief went around the room, followed as quickly by an exaggerated hushing of each other.
