by Darci Hannah
The familiar tone of his voice, the way he said it, elicited an immediate response from the young man, whose face, remarkably placid under the glistening sweat, came alive with wry amusement. It was what Lord Hume feared, and his response was an immediate and deprecating surge of regret. “I would tell you,” Julius answered softly, “but I’m afraid the effort might kill me. Might I beg a doctor first? I’ve a terrible pain in my side, and my head’s growing a bit woozy.”
“God! Of course! How stupid of me!” And Alexander, wasting no time, turned his head and shouted for his groom to ride and fetch the doctor. “We’ll get you to a proper bed, my lad, I promise.”
Julius’s lips pulled to a smile. “A proper bed sounds like heaven.” Then his focus drifted, and he stared at a point just beyond Sir Alexander’s head.
“Tell your groom that won’t be necessary,” came a gentle, lilting voice beside Sir Alexander. Startled, Alexander turned and came face-to-face with the disheveled and battle-weary figure of one of Blythe’s own men. The man’s intelligent brown eyes held his curious gray ones, and then he received another shock as the dark-haired man proclaimed softly, “I am a medical doctor. Allow me to introduce myself. Clayton Hayes, former personal physician to the Duke of Bourbon, at your service, sir.”
Lord Hume, a man who was not surprised very often but who had received more surprises in the last few minutes than he had in some time, would normally have regretted the words that tumbled out of his mouth: “What the devil is the personal physician of a French duke doing in my prison!?”
“That’s a fair question,” replied Clayton, mirroring the irreverent smile now on the master’s lips. “And it might help to know that I don’t serve a French master any longer. I serve a stubborn Scot, a man by the name of Blythe, who was shot in the back while trying to defend his family home. I’m sorry to say I’m no stranger to his particular sort of mischief, and, as testament to that fact, I’ve patched him up more times in the last two years than I can count. It’s what we call in the business job security.” His words, as they all knew, were not so much for Sir Alexander’s sake as they were for the sake of his Scottish master. “And he is, by all accounts, a resilient and stubborn man. He’s a temper on him too when he’s out of sorts. If you’ll allow me, we need to move him upstairs, and quickly. Cochrane,” the doctor called to one of his companions, “come here and give me a hand!” And then, turning back to Lord Hume: “If you’ll be so good, I’m going to need boiled water, clean linen, a small cautery iron, needle, thread, and whisky—Dear God, am I going to need whisky!” As the other man arrived to help lift the master, Lord Hume, stunned, shaken, his head perfectly spinning, nodded. He then stood and ran ahead, calling orders like a fishwife at the Market Cross.
“Danny,” said the master, grabbing the sleeve of his architect’s doublet as he made ready to lift him, “take the men and find Dante. Deliver the message that our friend has finally arrived and he has my sister. He’s not to take his package to Edinburgh; he’s to go directly to Rosslyn. You know the place; you used to work there. Make sure they get there safely. I have reason to believe my sister will be there as well, and I need her. I need you to bring her to me.”
“Aye,” said Daniel Cochrane with a grim set to his mouth as he lifted the master. The doctor was at his feet, and he was at the head, carrying the man with a gentleness that belied his gruff and belligerent nature. His eyes, black and shiny as sea pebbles, flicked to the white shirt, now drenched with blood. The sight caused his throat to constrict with awkward emotion, and he uttered, “I’ll leave as soon as I see your sorry hide tae bed. An’ never ye worry. I’ll bring the lass here. An’ if I’m going tae make the effort, ye better have more manners in ye than tae die before I return, my canny, muckle-heided laddie.” It was a voice that sounded foreign even to his own world-weary ears.
Chapter 20
DANTE’S TASK
DANTE CONTINARI, WHITE-KNUCKLED AND MAD AS hell, watched the attack on Blythe Hall from the crumbling parapet of the old peel tower. He had never sat out a battle. He had always fought beside Julius. But now he had that feeling—that odd, hard-to-pin-down, disjointed, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. And he believed that because he was not there to watch the master’s back, something terrible was about to happen. He was not, by any means, clairvoyant. He highly doubted his grandmother had been either. What she had excelled at, however, was interpreting gut feeling, and his gut at the moment was feeling positively dreadful. It ached. It yawed. It begged him to be reasonable. It was telling him to commandeer his horse and ride like a banshee headlong into the fray—regardless of the tongue lashing he knew would come. But he couldn’t. He really couldn’t. Because this time his hands were tied. Julius, damn him, had saddled him with a king.
The master’s opening move had been spectacular to watch. The handpicked band of mercenaries, along with the vengeful tenants of Blythemuir, had sprung an attack on Kilwylie’s pillagers and driven them mercilessly back to the site of the main battle. There they had crashed on their own ranks and created exactly what Julius had wanted—chaos. It was hand-to-hand combat from there. Dante followed it as best he could with his eyes, always aware of the master. Watching him fight was much like admiring a work of art, where every precise and delicate brushstroke was integral to the final outcome. And so it was with a sword in the hand of Julius Blythe. The man had an eye for his art. Then, just as he was enjoying the battle, he caught a movement out of the corner of his vision. He turned and saw a sight that the aching in his gut had foretold. It was the fluttering banners and pennants of some local lord barreling across the new-planted fields. The men battling outside the gates of Blythe Hall had no idea they were coming, and he knew it couldn’t bode well for Julius. The heavily armed warriors were not reinforcements sent to help an outlaw and his merry band of reivers take back the family home—no matter how much he wanted to believe it. These men had the unbending look of the law about them, and as he was painfully aware, men who upheld the laws of a nation seldom had sympathy for those who delighted in stretching and twisting them to their limits. It didn’t help matters any that Douglas of Kilwylie was a man who, like tenacious pond scum, suspiciously rose to the surface on the right side of the law time and again. And Dante, receiving an abrupt but thorough lesson on the nature of the man, knew that Kilwylie would stop at nothing in order to destroy Julius.
All the impetus the master had gained during his feisty attack on Kilwylie slackened when the army arrived. Caught between the burning gates of Blythe and two hostile forces, Julius had no choice but to do what he did. And it broke Dante’s heart to see how he sent the men scattering just before turning himself over to the law. The fighting had stopped. He watched his comrades surrender. And then the unthinkable happened. The entire world slowed when he saw that a bolt had been released from the vicinity of Kilwylie. He followed its inevitable trajectory, like that of a comet racing across the night sky, and watched, with his heart in his throat, as it hit the master. Julius had come before the mighty lord. He had surrendered, and the bastard had put a bolt in his back all the same. The lithe and athletic body slumped forward on impact. The gates of the border fortress were broken down, and Blythe Hall, like a gem in an alchemist’s crucible, was slowly debauched by the heat, and the violence, and the black-hearted devil who would continue to pillage, rape, and burn until his perverted hungers were sated. Dante, shaking with rage, and with tears spilling from his spectacular black eyes, was gently pulled back inside the tower.
Washed, rested, and dressed from head to toe in luxuriant black, Dante took his guard and headed down the long subterranean corridor that led to the secret room hidden twenty feet beneath Blythe Hall. He was very nearly drunk; he had dosed himself with opium, reverting to old habits, and now both sedatives coursed through his veins, relieving some of the anger—some of the anguish—but not all. His mood was still dark, bordering on violent, his temper just barely under control. He had lost it when the men started st
raggling home after the battle—without their leader. And he had nearly lost it again when accosted by the throng of women and children placed under his care, scared and huddled in the hidden warren of tunnels under the tower, wanting to know what had happened. He had told them, bluntly. He had told them they could stay as long as they liked. He had bidden them to eat and drink until all the stores were depleted. And then he had left them to their own devices.
Because he had a job to do.
However, once he had successfully fulfilled his obligation to Julius, like a wolf in the night he would hunt down Kilwylie, and he would cut out his still-beating heart. It was the one thought that made him smile.
As he approached the heavy door of the chamber, he could hear above him the odd, muffled cry of a woman, or a particularly resounding thud indicating that Kilwylie’s men were still at it, still violently celebrating their victory. He stood before the locked door, steadied himself, and motioned for the guard to open it.
The sight of the young king, in white shirt and dark hose, sitting at the master’s desk bent over a pile of old books, startled him. It was a flash—an ephemeral vision in which his nearly besotted mind had believed he was seeing Julius; for aside from the dark hair, the young king echoed the master’s posture whenever Dante had come to this room. And he found it slightly odd that the king should be so enthralled with ancient chicken scrawl and old scraps of parchment when he had a much younger and livelier plaything to entertain him.
That plaything was prone on the bed, dark and sultry, her naked body loosely draped in the fine satin sheets. She was also soundly asleep, and frowsy in the way lively women are after spending themselves in pleasure. He let his dark gaze linger over her body, taking in the roundness of her shapely backside, the way the rosy light of the fire reflected off the alabaster skin. And his eyes remained on her until the young man at the desk could take no more of it. “I will ask you to divert your eyes from the lady. And I will ask it only once,” came the soft yet commanding voice.
With a languid smile and eyes boldly proclaiming desire, Dante slowly brought his focus back on the young man. The king was now standing, bristling with outrage and contempt, yet undeniably regal. Dante now had his full and undivided attention. “I see you are an energetic man,” he said with deceptive bonhomie while raking his critical dark gaze over the young king. “I admire that. You and the young lady have ten minutes to get ready.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
Dante, with startling suddenness, turned back on the man, not bothering to temper the inimical look in his piercing eyes. “What is going on, you ask?” His speech was mildly slurred and flavored with a hint of Italian. “Why, Rome, signor, that shining city of seven hills, has been sacked by the barbarian hordes, and I am pledged to see you safely home … unless, of course, you’d rather stay here and eat, read, drink, and fuck some more. It is a good life, no?”
“How dare you speak to me like that,” James challenged, his tone made all the more dangerous by its softness.
“I dare because you are my prisoner. I dare because I could break your little white neck before you could blink. I dare because you are not my king!” And then, with a breath of bitter disdain, he said, “When you are no longer my prisoner, I will give you all the respect you deserve. Until that time, get used to it.”
“When I am no longer your prisoner I will see you hanged!”
“Hanged? Really?” Unable to help himself, Dante laughed, showing off the dark gift of his beauty. “Were I a king, I would think of infinitely more creative ways to punish a man than death by a rope! Hanging? What an astounding imagination you have. Tell me, have you ever seen a man impaled? It is a favorite death of the Turks, a nasty, degrading, sometimes even lingering death. Or flaying? There’s one that will make a man think twice. Remind me to explain them to you sometime. Hanging,” he mocked, and indulged in a bout of unstable laughter.
Neither man saw the woman wake up until her voice rang out: “You! What are you doing here? Get out!”
Startled, both men turned in the direction of the voice. Marion was sitting up in bed, angry, glowering, gorgeous, and holding tightly to the sheet that now covered her.
“You know him?” James cried, incredulity and indignation marring his regal air.
“Intimately,” Dante answered, his voice thick with innuendo.
“Barely,” Marion shot back with haughty indifference. “His name is Dante. He’s Julius’s wicked toy. Where’s Julius? Go tell your black-hearted master that we’re not leaving until he comes and gets us himself! Go! Shoo! Really, you overgrown children are becoming insufferable!”
Dante, thoroughly enjoying himself until the woman mentioned the name of his friend, darkened. Like a breath of fickle wind, his eyes narrowed and the smile was wiped from his lips. “Then you will stay down here and rot, because Julius has been shot in the back by Kilwylie. The balance of good and evil has shifted, my dears. You have ten minutes.”
An hour later, when Dante deemed it safe, the hoods were removed and the prisoners were surprised to find that they had been traveling in the dark. They were on horseback, riding silently under the glittering expanse of the night sky, with fourteen armed men to guard them. James stared for a moment at the back of the black-haired man in charge, noting the self-possession, the easy and relaxed manner with which he rode. Excusing himself from Marion, he nudged his horse forward and came beside the man called Dante. “Where are you taking us?” the king demanded. “I believe I have a right to know.”
Dante looked at him, arched a dark brow, and replied with a stunning lack of concern. “Home.”
“Interesting,” James replied levelly, his eyes holding the man as if studying a map of a battlefield. “Because I thought you were supposed to sell me to the English.”
The Venetian, keeping his eyes on the dark road ahead, answered, “No. I don’t like the English. I’m taking you home.”
It was incredible. James, unable to help himself, probed further. “You’ve abducted me so that you can take me back to Edinburgh? That’s unique, but I don’t believe you.”
Dante turned and, without the benefit of a smile, offered, “I like the French. I suppose, if pressed, I could sell you to the French king. But we both know that would be like selling your sister to your best friend. It’s too easy; too little money exchanges hands, and it’s rather embarrassing for all parties involved. No. I think I’ll just take you home. I’ve better things to do than play nursemaid to a spoiled child.”
“What? Do you really expect me to believe you’d go through all this just to return me? I may be young, but I’m no fool.”
Dante, smiling to himself, offered a challenge. “Really? Let us put that to the test, shall we? Do you know anything about stars?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“A good one. What star do you think that is over there?” Dante extended a finger to the star-littered sky.
“Which one? The sky is full of stars.”
“The star that doesn’t move. The North Star. Can you find it?”
“Of course I can!” James, indignant, scanned the night sky, then fixed his sights on the star in question. “There,” he said, and pointed triumphantly.
“Excellent! You can find a star. That is the true test of a king. I am satisfied. But suppose we take it one step further. If we agree that is north,” he pointed, “then in what direction are we traveling?”
James thought for a moment, then answered, “Northwest.”
“Very good. And in what direction lies Edinburgh from Blythemuir?”
“Northwest … My God! Why?” The young king looked at the disreputable Venetian as if he were mad.
“Do you want the simple answer?” Dante asked, and made a show of peering into the young man’s serious face. “It’s late. You’ve lain with a she-devil. I’d best give you the simple answer. Because Julius Blythe loves the King of Scotland. Forgive my brutal honesty, but I cannot imagine why.”
“A paradise,” Dante, glittering like the pirate he was, finished for him. “A place for a man who values knowledge, who values the wisdom of antiquity, and who yearns to unlock the mysteries of the universe. I know; it’s all there. It is a remarkable collection that few men have ever seen. It belongs to Julius Blythe, the man I have sworn my life to. And he placed you there—into a secure and lavish prison—for your own protection. What is more, you had charming company locked in with you … and nothing but time to enjoy it. Consider it a gift from a man who deserves so much more than this pitiful little country has ever given him.”
“What are you saying?” uttered James, and his eyes, so long blinded by what he thought were the irrefutable facts of the past, were beginning to open with the horrible shock of possibility.
“I’m saying that Julius Blythe has never had any intent to cause you harm.”
“If that’s true,” said James, eyeing his captor with a cautious mix of suspicion and speculation, “then I am not really your prisoner. If all you claim is true, then I can leave you, take the woman, and ride back to Edinburgh on my own.”
“You could, but I gave my word you wouldn’t. There are armed detachments of men scouring the countryside as we speak, with orders to kill you on sight. I’ve heard you’re pretty fair with a sword, but even a madman wouldn’t take that kind of chance, especially one who’s responsible for a woman like that. I wouldn’t, and I’m a dangerous, disreputable bastard. I think it best you ride with us.”
