“Mmm,” said Toinette, in reluctant agreement. “That’s the other half of what I think. Life goes on—and it may be that trying to kill another man for what he’s got is as much a part of that as eating or sleeping. Sence, or the priests, would say it’s original sin, I suppose.”
“So I’ve always heard,” said Erik. “Though my father’s priest when I was young was often too deep in the wine bottle to give much instruction on that or any other subject.”
As he’d intended, he got a smile from Toinette. “That explains a great deal,” she said. Getting to her feet, she brushed away crumbs and shouldered her pack. “And now, maybe we’ll see what a pair of near-heathens can do against a greater evil.”
“Just hope it’s not too much greater,” said Erik, following behind.
Thirty
Three days since the battle against the elk creatures, the site where it had happened naturally bore the marks. Flame had scorched the nearby trees and burned away grass and moss; footprints and the heavier weight of fallen bodies had crushed smaller plants; and dried blood still colored parts of the undergrowth that remained.
In a short time, both Erik and Toinette would look back and find those signs reassuring.
Few would have called blood or burns pleasant, but they meant a world that operated on the natural order. Burnt trees stayed burnt. Crushed plants stayed crushed. Blood seeped into leaves and stayed.
None of that changed immediately as they started to follow the trail of the elk creatures. At first, their route was like the forest they’d come through. The elk had done a decent job of clearing the way for them, making unnecessary the sweaty work with blades and feet that had been so much a part of forging paths before.
When the voices in the trees sounded louder than they’d been, Toinette at first thought it the work of her mind. She knew the forest to be unfamiliar, knew that danger lay ahead, so of course she was paying more attention to any hint of strangeness. She rebuked herself, ignored the sounds, and continued.
After a full minute of high-pitched giggling, as though a demented choir were hiding in the bushes, she looked to Erik. Yes, his face said, he was hearing it too. Yes, it truly was happening. It made little difference—they would continue—but Toinette’s skin prickled, and she went on with a hand on her sword hilt.
She saw the first of the blood-drinking vines a short ways after that. They curled around the trees further to the side of the road, pink and white flowers standing out against the darker shades of brown and green.
“Only to be expected,” she said, drawing her sword. “I couldn’t have gotten all of the damned things.”
“They don’t look near enough to be a danger,” said Erik, eyeing the distance between the trail and the trees. “The elk might’ve known enough to avoid them.”
“Or their blood had no allure. Would you want to drink one of those?”
“I wouldn’t want to drink blood at all,” Erik said. He drew his own sword and, despite his confident speech, walked warily and to the far side of the trail as they passed the vines. Toinette thought she saw them stir: a lazy wriggle, like earthworms stranded after rain. Even without danger, the motion turned her stomach.
It was midafternoon, the sky bright overhead, and not even a breeze stirred the branches around them. The sunlight was sharp. Toinette shivered and wished that she’d been ruthless enough to extort hose from one of her men. The cut-away skirt left her legs too cold—and too exposed. She could imagine any number of vermin crawling up her boot and onto her knee.
“All right?” Erik asked.
“I truly loathe the wilderness,” said Toinette. “I’ll be well enough.”
“This isn’t proper wilderness,” Erik said. He didn’t say what it was, nor did he need to.
Other than that exchange, they didn’t talk. It wasn’t the companionable, respectful quiet of their earlier journey. Although they were in it together, and that was a little comfort, their silence was wary.
They’d left the lands they’d come to know, if only slightly. Terra incognita was the phrase on maps, Toinette thought, and then, with a laugh that reached her mouth only in a twist of her lips: Hic sunt dracones. Except incognita wasn’t entirely right. They had an idea or two about what lay further up the trail.
Terra pericolosa would have been the real term had Toinette been making a map. If she’d been talking to her crew, she’d have used blunter language still: enemy waters.
Motion flickered in the trees as they walked. Glancing toward it, Toinette spotted the black silhouettes of crows, the furry tail of a fleeing squirrel—and then a small white shape that vanished with no sign of actual movement as soon as she looked in its direction. She blinked, and the forest was unchanged.
She didn’t walk with naked sword in hand, lest she fall over a rock and stab herself, but she kept several fingers of steel out of the scabbard, and her hand closed around the hilt. Toinette knew herself to be decent with a sword at best—better with knives and fists, not to mention feet, nails, and teeth—but the further away a weapon kept any part of the forest, the better. The feel of it in her hand was a reassurance too, as with the cabin: an object born of men’s skill, not the whims of nature or worse.
The light grew gray and faded. Toinette thought of storms, but felt neither wind nor the hot stickiness that went before summer squalls. When she tilted her head up, the sky was still cloudless. It only looked fainter and further away.
“How late in the day is it, do you think?” she asked Erik.
He frowned, peered at the sky, and frowned more deeply. “I would have said no more than midday. But—” An upward motion of his hand showed that he’d noticed the same change in the light Toinette had. “It is darker in forests. The trees block the light.”
“That’s not this, I don’t think,” said Toinette. She remembered the forest at Loch Arach. The light had been fainter, but bright and golden in the spots where the leaves had let it through. Memory was tricky. She hoped Erik would contradict her.
He shook his head. “No. There aren’t more trees here than there were either.”
That was true, and left nothing else to be said. As they went on, the trees did get closer together, but they shrank rather than grew, clinging to each other with warped branches and twisting trunks. The eye found no straight lines, only snarls that brought to mind staring eyes, or open mouths, or in a few cases, tangles of innards.
Darkness deepened quickly. After what felt like no more than an hour of walking from the time Toinette had noticed the change, night hung around them, without light of moon or stars. Had she been human, she wouldn’t have been able to see without a torch.
That might not be so bad, she thought, passing a dead tree whose branches clawed the sky like a malformed hand.
The voices spoke, without any wind to excuse them. Youuu, they said, and laughed.
Meat.
A white form appeared in the trees again. This time it had a man’s figure, even the suggestion of a beard and a sword strapped to its back. Toinette stopped and stared at it, remembered Franz and the plants, and then touched Erik on the shoulder as he was hesitating too. “I don’t think we should follow that.”
“No,” he said and then gave an incoherent shout of horror. Toinette didn’t blame him. She’d clutched his shoulder at the same time, with enough strength to break a mortal man’s bones.
The figure had turned toward them. In an instant, its jaw had dropped to its chest, showing fanged teeth. A long, pointed tongue curled out at them, as if in a child’s gesture of mockery, and its eyes had lit with the same eerie green-violet radiance that had flashed in the sky above the island.
Then it was gone.
“Christ have mercy,” said Erik and reached for the rosary Franz had given him.
“Someone had better.” Toinette forced herself to relax her fingers and lift her hand away. “I
’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”
“A few bruises at most. Never worry over it, lass.” His smile was a pale replica of what it normally was. Toinette felt that they might both be faint copies: echoes of past writing that a scribe had imperfectly scraped away. “I’d have likely had claws in your flesh, had it been the other way round. You’ve a great deal of discipline.”
“I’ve practiced,” said Toinette.
“Petty bastard, is it no’?” Erik asked, gesturing to where the apparition had been. “I wonder what death it would ha’ lured us to, if we’d followed? More of the plants, or worse?”
“It couldn’t hurt us directly. That’s a blessing.”
“For now,” said Erik.
“You’re a cheerful fellow. It’s almost like having Marcus with me again.”
They kept going. There was really no choice in the matter. They went on through darkness, through cold that got more and more bitter, and past plants that had grown pale and sickly until the leaves looked akin to drowned flesh. Toinette pulled the spray of pine needles out of her hair and held it under her nose for a time. It kept her from wanting desperately to scream.
She began to see different animals too. The squirrels were as pale as the plants. Many were hairless, and their eyes were large and clouded. A birdcall in the trees was thin and choked-sounding.
You, said the voices.
Meat.
She was glad to hear the sound of running water ahead of them, though she’d be damned if she drank any water in this place—likely literally so. The noise was a change, though, and it sounded almost normal. When she saw the stream, narrow as it was, it didn’t look to share much of the uncanny nature of its surroundings. It was only a rivulet running through the forest, though the tree roots hanging on to it did resemble fingers.
“Magic doesna’ cling well to water,” Erik said thoughtfully, sounding more Scottish than usual again. He knelt and examined the earth for a time, brushing aside fallen needles and leaves, frowning. “But the trail ends here. There are others, but I’ve no notion which to choose.”
“You might not need one,” said Toinette, looking through the trees in the direction from which the stream flowed. She thought she had seen stone—she ducked around one of the pines for a better view—
—and she cursed, quiet and disbelieving.
There was a temple in the middle of the forest.
It was still at least a day’s journey away, which made it all the more astounding. To be visible at such a distance, it had to be huge. Toinette couldn’t see details, and the trees did block much of the outline, but she could make out pillars, straight and smooth as ever came from the hand of a stonemason.
Erik, joining her, closed his eyes and shook his head. When he let himself return to vision a moment later, his head was still shaking, instinct denying what he was forcing his mind to accept. “But it would take a hundred men or more to build that,” he said, talking in theory to Toinette but truly to any sense of order in the world.
“It would,” she said. “And where would they have gotten the stone? Do you know any magic to make that appear?”
“No. Yes.” Erik drew the back of a hand across his mouth. “On that scale? I’ve only heard stories. They don’t say a very great deal about how to do it, just who does it. That’s Solomon, in most of them.”
Even she knew that name: the king in the Bible, yes, but more importantly the greatest wizard among mortals. Merlin himself, Artair had said, had not been half so powerful, nor had half the command of demons.
“Ah,” said Toinette. Once she composed her thoughts, she could speculate on whether Solomon himself had built the structure or an equally powerful unknown or a demon, on what might be the most effective approach for each, and on the next steps. Just then, she could only ask one question, in the terms of her youth: “We’re buggered good and proper, aren’t we?”
Thirty-One
Because of the darkness, they didn’t look to the sun to tell them when to rest. They wouldn’t have needed to in any case—full dark simply made colors look less vivid to the dragon-blooded—but Erik had become used to war and making camp before his men’s sight became unreliable, and to the hours of the human world as a matter of course. Toinette, he suspected, was even more attuned to those than him.
None of that mattered in the depths of the forest. With only the two of them in the midst of deformed trees and wildlife, it was as though they’d left all the mortal world behind them. The structure ahead didn’t count. Whoever had built it had power enough not to be mortal in spirit, whatever his origins might be.
With nothing outside to tell time, Erik could only attend to his body, marking the growth of weariness and hunger—and so, he reflected, mortality came into play again. Or not, perchance. Even God had rested.
He could still hear the stream behind them when they came to a wide spot on the trail. It was nothing so spacious as a clearing, but there was enough room for the two of them to sit and for one to stretch out at a time. None of the blood-drinking vines grew within sight, and the trees were no more warped than ordinary.
“That place,” he added to Toinette when she stopped to see why he’d done so, “doesn’t look very far away now. Half the morning’s walk, or so. We could try to get closer, but…”
“No,” she said, anticipating the end of his sentence. “I don’t want to sleep too near it either.”
The ground rose and dipped, making distance difficult to judge and unpredictable to view, but they could see the overhang of a roof above the pillars and the beginnings of steps below. They made Erik think of Rome and the ruins of the ancient world.
Time moved on and took all with it. The past was darkness and savagery, and yet it stared them in the face a morning’s walk away.
Erik averted his gaze, which inevitably led him to Toinette. She blinked. “Yes?”
“You’re all I wish to look at,” he said, and made a face at the way it sounded.
Understanding, she laughed. “I’d be more flattered…oh, anywhere else in the world.” As if to illustrate, Toinette looked around too, and grimaced. “I’d as soon not build a fire. I know it’s cold.”
“We’ll not die of it,” Erik agreed. The cold was enough to be uncomfortable, even for them, but they’d take no lasting harm. The attention a fire might draw would likely be worse; even the idea of burning wood from such trees, of looking into the flames or breathing the smoke, held no appeal.
It wasn’t as though they had any need to cook either. Their food was dried bread and meat. If using the wood for a fire was an unsettling notion, hunting anything they’d seen was a repulsive one.
They ate sitting on the ground. The meat was greasy, and the bread stale. It would serve. It might have been best. Erik couldn’t imagine taking any joy from food in such surroundings. The cold, slimy smell was in his nostrils all the time. Even a king’s feast would have tasted of ooze and mud; better to have food not worth ruining.
Toinette ate with her knees drawn up against her chest. When she was finished, she wrapped her arms around her legs, heedless of modesty—though she did pull her skirt down as far as she could. Erik doubted that had much to do with the view. “Come here,” he said and held out an arm. “We’ll be warmer if we’re close.”
She needed no more encouragement to curl against his chest, wrapping her own arms around him. The dragon-blooded usually gave off more heat than mortals to the touch, but Erik could feel the chill of Toinette’s hands through his shirt, and he suspected the same was true of his. “I thought I’d done with cold places,” she said into his neck. “England was bad and Scotland worse.”
“What about Muscovy?”
“I only went in the summer. It was hot enough then.”
“Ah,” he said. “My home’s colder than Loch Arach, so I never minded much.”
“Ugh. As cold as this?”
Toinette was warmer against him, though, and Erik felt warmer as well. He buried his face in her hair. The scent of her, mingled with the pine needles she’d put back behind one ear, drowned out the smell around them for the first time since they’d entered the darkness. Against his side, her breasts were full and firm, and the long muscles of her waist taut beneath his hand. His cock stirred, proving that joy, or at least desire, was yet possible in one or two areas of man’s life.
“Mmm,” she said as Erik idly stroked the length of her back. The sound vibrated against his neck, and when she spoke, it was with small puffs of hot air. “This your idea from the start?”
He laughed. “Would that I were that brilliant,” he said, and then, reluctantly, for the sound of her pleasure and the slight rocking of her hips were rousing him further, “or that we had another to keep watch. Though that itself might not help matters.”
“Bah,” said Toinette, “we’d just have him keep his back turned and hum. You don’t have much solitude on a ship, and I was wed.”
She didn’t argue the main point, though. Theoretical guards might or might not have let them take matters further, but their lack was a very definite obstacle.
For a time, they settled into a balance between desire and alertness. Neither moved away; neither moved faster or toward more intensity. Erik caressed Toinette’s back and sides in a slow, steady rhythm, never truly approaching breasts or arse. For her part, she kissed his neck, stretched against him, and ran her hands over his chest, but kept it all light, not surrendering to urgency—nor even to the idea of a struggle.
It was what it was. Erik’s cock pulsed, aching, but there was pleasure in the ache, and the moment would have been most certainly worth any pain.
They lasted like that until the light began.
Highland Dragon Master Page 19
