Then she gasped as he grabbed a handful of her raven hair and pulled her toward him. “Don’t you understand? Your husband’s done with you, bitch,” he said. “He gave you to me to do what I like with. To throw you out like the trash you are. But first …” He pulled her face to his and mashed his lips against her. She tried to turn away but he wouldn’t let her, and the kiss hit her mouth like a blow. She tried to claw at his face. He pulled back and slapped her again, twice, a backhand then a forehand, harder. He leaned down over her, close.
“But first,” he said again, very softly this time, “first I’m going to pay you for every superior sneer you ever gave me. I’m going to pull you down off your high horse and show you what my lowborn body can do to the likes of you.”
With that, he hurled her back onto the mattress. She cried out pitiably and tried to roll away from him. He climbed on top of her and pinned her on her back. Then he seized the front of her gown and violently tore it open while she cried out again. He forced himself down on top of her as she struggled. Holding her by the hair, he buried his face against her breast.
She let out a ragged and awful cry: “God help me!”
By now, I had my sword. I had groped around and found it on the floor right by my hand. My hand, my arm, my body were all still clothed in the magic mercurial armor Queen Elinda had left for me in the Shadow Wood oak. It flowed with my body as I moved slowly—slowly so as not to draw attention to myself. My fingers closed around the sword’s hilt.
I began to climb to my feet—still slowly. If Sir Aravist saw me, if he had time to turn, time to draw his own weapon, he would drive his blade into me just as surely as he had the first time.
But he didn’t see me. He didn’t turn. He reared up above Lady Betheray and tore her dress again and then again until it was in rags around her.
She let out a sob of anguish and despair. “No, don’t.”
The sound of her misery went through me like a kind of fire. I rose off the floor like a flame. I stood. Sword in hand, I started moving toward them where they struggled on the bed.
Sir Aravist looked down at Betheray’s nakedness. He laughed. “You’re no fine lady now, are you? This is the truth of you. This is how the world’s supposed to be.”
It was just then I reached him. I stretched out my hand. My fingers closed around his collar.
The captain of the guard let out a broken little noise of surprise and perplexity: “What …?”
Before he could resist, I hauled him off the woman and off the bed and spun him toward me.
His face went as gray as the statue on the lid of a crypt. His eyes went as wide and white as supper plates. “But how …?” he said.
I drove my blade straight through the center of him.
“The miracle of modern medicine,” I said. “Now die, you piece of shit.”
Skewered, Sir Aravist hung gaping on my blade. He tried to speak, but only his eyes could tell his horror: he’d been struck clean through by the risen specter of a dead man. His last sight on earth must have seemed to him like the very proof of hell and justice. For another second, our faces were inches apart, his agony and terror that close to me, and my hatred just as close to him.
Then he was gone wherever dead men go.
The dangling weight of his corpse drew my blade point toward the ground, and when the sword was slanted down like that, the body slid off it and fell to the floor with a liquid thud.
I stood over him, looked at him. I remembered in a flash the shock I had felt the first time I killed a man—moments ago in Galiana time, but a week and a half since to me. I remembered the moral immensity of it, the cosmic immensity of snuffing out a life, of ending a consciousness.
That was gone now. I was a different man. Maybe crueler, maybe just harder in this harder world, I couldn’t say. All I knew was Aravist had struck Lady Betheray, he had tried to rape Lady Betheray, and I did not give a damn about him or his cosmic being or his consciousness or anything. He had earned this, and if I was the one to pay him off, then good for me. Let God forgive him. I didn’t.
I turned to Betheray. Still lying on the bed, she was staring at me, as shocked to see me standing there as Aravist had been, so shocked she did not move to cover her nakedness.
Oh, it was beautiful, her nakedness. Milky and rose and shapely as distant hills, decked only with the golden chain and locket at her ivory throat. And I—I was full and flush with bloodlust and revenge and the sight of her filled me and aroused me and made me breathless.
I averted my eyes from her and sheathed my sword.
As I did, the blade seemed to melt into the armor, and the armor seemed to melt into me, and it was suddenly gone. I was dressed in my strange Galiana clothes again. Only there was a ragged gash in the center of my vest now, the place where Aravist’s sword had gone in.
I stared into the candlelit shadows for a long moment until I had control of myself.
“Come on,” I said then, my voice hoarse. “Dress yourself. Let’s get out of here.”
WE LEFT SIR Aravist dead in the room. We went down the hall past the other two corpses. Lady Betheray wore a belted robe now. She held a candelabra to light the way.
I followed her to a sweeping, majestic staircase, and down we went by flickering candlelight. At the bottom, we traveled along another night-dark hall. Went into another room finally, another bedroom, larger than the last, the master bedroom, I thought. It was vast, with large windows on the moonlit sky and cushions on the window seats and chairs against the walls and a canopied four-poster bed even bigger than the one upstairs.
Betheray set the candelabra on a table and turned to face me and I faced her. We stood like that a long time, silent, gaze on gaze. Her face was bruised from Aravist’s blows. Her cheeks were still streaked with the tears she’d cried. But she was calm. I would have thought she’d be—I don’t know—hysterical, sobbing, trembling, in shock. But she wasn’t. She was calm and steady and regal and very fine.
“Are you …?” she said after a while. Her voice was calm too.
And I said, “What? Am I what?”
“Are you … a phantom? Are you real? Are you alive?”
“I’m real. I’m alive,” I said. “Look at me.”
“But he killed you. I saw him kill you, Austin.”
“No.” I glanced down at the gash in my clothing. I gave a little laugh. “Well … almost, I guess.”
“The blood though. There was so much blood.”
I searched the air above me for an answer. I hadn’t really thought about what to say. “My armor,” I told her. “The king of the forest gave it to me. It has some magic in it. It healed me.” It was the only thing I could think of on short notice.
It seemed to satisfy her though. She nodded. “Yes. Tauratanio has always been a friend of the queen and freedom. He’s with us.”
I smiled. I nodded back. It was kind of crazy when you thought about it. Magic and the forest king—that made sense to her. But if I’d told her about the hospital and antibiotics, she wouldn’t have understood what I was talking about.
She went on standing there, studying me, thoughtful, silent. Then she closed the gap between us with a gliding step. She lifted her hand to my cheek, her cool hand. I leaned against it, comforted and stirred.
“He was going to kill me,” she said. “Aravist. He was going to … use me and then kill me.” She was still calm. Still regal.
I nodded. “Yes, he was.”
“Winton—Lord Iron. My husband … gave me to him. Said he could do it.”
“I know. I’m sorry, Beth.”
We stood another long time, her hand on my cheek, my eyes on her eyes, and me breathing, trying not to pull her to me, thinking it would be wrong so soon after her trauma.
“But you …” she said. “You have never been anything but my hero.” And then, as if it were an official decree, she proclaimed, “I am free of my vows.”
And she came to me and kissed me.
There wa
s no resisting this, not for me. I pulled her into my arms. Now we were together with my hands inside her open robe, and the feel of her flesh radiating through my fingers into my core. Kissing her, I backed her to the bed and she folded down on it and I folded down on top of her. My fingers twined with her raven hair, and my lips were at her breast so that it occurred to me I was in the exact same position Sir Aravist had been in a few minutes ago.
The only differences were my devotion and the free consent of her willing spirit.
FOR A LOVELY STRETCH OF NUMBERLESS MINUTES, WE lay together side by side beneath the canopy. Betheray had her head on my chest and her hair spilling over me and her softness pressed against me, and it was bliss. I didn’t think at all, not for a long while. And then I did. And what I thought—what I wondered—was: Who am I? You know? That thing she said to me, that wonderful thing, that thing every man must want to hear, I think, from a woman like her: “You have never been anything but my hero.” It wasn’t true. Was it? That I had never been anything but. Hadn’t I been other things? Hadn’t I also been the Los Angeles man, the whining, lost failure of a Hollywood nothing who had come to this place through … God only knew through what? A brain tumor? A drug overdose? Magic? Madness? Really, God only knew. Another second, another hour, another day—who could say?—and I’d be back in LA running through that mall with Sera after me and I’d be that guy again. And I would know him as myself as I had always known him, while this guy—this guy right here who had braved monsters and pulled the sword from the oak tree and battled Sir Aravist and his men, this guy with this amazing woman in his arms—well, to be honest, I barely recognized him.
Still, here I was and I was him and we were each other. For now, at least. I did not know what to make of it. I did not know anymore which one of us was really me.
While I was thinking these things, Lady Betheray trailed her fingers down over my chest to my center, to the sickly white patch about the size of a saucer. She touched the ugly scar where they had stitched me up.
“It’s … strange,” she said. “It looks like you were sewn together. It doesn’t look at all like magic.”
I kissed her hair. “There are different kinds of magic, I guess.”
My face still in her raven tresses, I breathed in deep. And all at once, with the musky perfume of her, there came another flood of Galianan memories, just as when she had walked past me in the tribunal hall. In the dark of my brain, there was a series of flashes. Images of events I had never lived through but that nonetheless were preserved in my mind, as if somehow I had come into my own story here midway.
I saw a tavern in the dark, a pewter tankard of frothing ale. There was the smell of drunkenness, the voices of drunken men, and then—a woman in the doorway, her face covered by a low-slung hood …
“You were right,” I said softly.
“What do you mean?” said Betheray.
I saw the woman standing by me where I sat. Her head was down, her face hidden. Slowly, she looked up at me … I saw her frightened eyes … her hand coming out from beneath her cloak, an envelope in her fingers …
“Curtin did put a spell on Lady Kata,” I said. “Lord Iron seduced her. She was lonely.”
“Yes, of course. Her husband had been ill for so long. He was never a real husband to her. Winton took advantage.”
“And once Kata had given in to him, he had Curtin go to work on her mind just like he did on yours. He used sex and magic to control her. Because he wanted to get the talisman.”
Lady Betheray gave a little gasp of understanding. She tried to turn to me, but I pressed my face deeper into her hair. I drew in the scent of her, and with the scent, I set off a fresh set of flashing memories: the envelope with Lady Kata’s seal in yellow wax, the scrawled message on the page …
“The talisman,” Betheray said. “Kata was the one who had it all along!”
“The two of you were the only people the queen could trust to keep it for her. Her two ladies-in-waiting. She trusted you would bring the talisman to the emperor so he would know to come at the head of his armies to liberate you. She gave it to Kata because—”
“Because she knew my husband would get hold of it if she gave it to me.”
“Yes. So when Lord Iron realized you didn’t have it …”
“Of course. He guessed that Kata did.”
“Kata gave in to him at first. But once she realized what he was really after, she fought him. She fought the spell, I mean. She resisted. She wouldn’t tell him where the talisman was or even admit she had it. She gave herself to him, but she wouldn’t give him that.”
“She loved the queen more than anything,” said Betheray proudly. “Even more than herself.”
“She knew the talisman was the kingdom’s only hope. No matter what Iron did, no matter how Curtin twisted her mind, she wouldn’t tell them where it was.”
“Austin.” Now Betheray succeeded in pulling away from me. She leaned back, her face still close to my face. She lay her cool hand on my cheek again. “Austin, how do you know these things?”
As the scent of her receded, so the memories began to fade. A few last flashing images—the tower stairs, Kata’s frightened face at the crack in the door—and they were gone. I leaned close to Betheray and drew in another breath of her, but the effect was over.
I was about to tell her the truth, about to tell her I could not remember anything else, when something else came to me.
I thought of Jane. Jane Janeway in Hitchcock’s. I felt an interior punch of guilt as the image of her came into my mind, her sweet face flushed with pleasure at having helped me. I could imagine how that same sweet face would fall if she saw me here like this. Was it cheating to be with Betheray when I had never declared my feelings to Jane? Was it cheating even if I was in a fairyland brain-tumor hallucination that probably didn’t really exist in the first place?
I couldn’t work it all out now. I just remembered what Jane had said to me about Ellen Evermore: If the woman actually wants your hero to find this thing, but she’s in hiding because she’s afraid of her enemies, would it be plausible for her to find a way to slip the hero a clue?
That was it. That was what had happened. Jane had not only solved the mystery in Los Angeles, she had solved the mystery here at the same time. I remembered. She did leave a clue. Not Ellen Evermore, I mean, but Lady Kata, Lady Kata too.
“When Curtin forced her to lie to you,” I said, “when he forced her to tell you that I was her lover, the idea was to drive us apart and hide what he was really up to. And it worked, but at the same time, it made Kata realize I was the one the queen had sent for the talisman. That was why Iron was trying to turn you against me. Once Kata figured that out, she sent a servant to me with a coded message—a message about the talisman only the queen’s man would understand. She told me to meet her in the tower room.”
“And Kata gave you the talisman there? What happened then? How did she die?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but I didn’t answer. Because I didn’t know. How did Kata die? How did she die when she was alone with me in a tower room behind a locked door?
“Austin?” said Betheray when I kept silent. “Did she give you the talisman? Darling, if she did, why are you still here? Why haven’t you set off for the Eleven Lands?”
My lips moved, but still, I said nothing. I had nothing to say. What had happened after Kata opened the door to me? I did not remember.
Then something strange happened. I did. I did remember. Not the meeting in the room. Not the death of Lady Kata. Those things had happened before I—I, the real Austin Lively—came into this lunatic fairyland. What I remembered was something else—something that had happened after I arrived. Right after.
I had just walked through that door in the mazy Edison Building at the Global Pictures lot. Suddenly I was here, in Galiana, in the tower room, with the dead woman at my feet and the soldiers pounding at the locked door. Maybe the servant had betrayed Kata and informed Aravist. I
didn’t know. It didn’t matter. What mattered was what happened just then, just at that moment before the door was forced open.
Yes. I had it now. When I first came to myself in Galiana, I was standing on the edge of a tremendous drop. I was right at the ledge of the window, leaning out the window, with blue sky and castle towers above me and water sparkling far below.
And something else. Something bright was spinning through the air beneath me, spinning down and down toward the water. It was the very first thing I saw after I stepped through that door.
“I dropped it. I dropped it out the window,” I said—as much to myself as to Betheray.
“What? The talisman?”
“Yes! Aravist and his men were at the door. They were about to break in. There was no time to hide it. There was water below me so …”
I saw the thoughts unspool in Betheray’s eyes. “So you dropped it into the moat.”
I nodded, staring into space. That must have been right.
“And then Sir Aravist broke in and killed Lady Kata, is that it?”
My stare shifted to her, her valentine face, anxious to exonerate me. But Kata was already dead when Aravist arrived. “It … it was all really confusing,” I said. “There were soldiers everywhere …”
“That must be what happened! I knew you couldn’t have killed her. I knew it!”
I didn’t respond. I only wished I knew as much.
Lady Betheray sat up, running her fingers through her thick hair. The sight of her nakedness in motion stirred me. She looked back at me, down at me.
“And that’s why you came here,” she said. “Of course! With everyone hunting for you, you needed me to get you back into the castle, back to the moat. You knew—because of our meetings—I was the only one who could get you past the guard.”
“No,” I said. “No, I came here for you.” Because that was true, and because there was no way to explain to her that half of my own story had unfolded without me being here, that the details were locked away in my mind and that only her presence and my feelings for her brought them to the surface.
Another Kingdom Page 24
