Silently I followed Maerwynn out into the frigid water. We chanted the spell, and spilled our blood into the water. Once more, I felt the heat rush through my body, running down my legs and exploding outward, churning the water into swirls of colour and pattern. I steeled myself for what was coming, telling myself over and over, “It’s just an image. It’s not happening here, but somewhere else.”
The waters shifted, and became an image. I saw Ulrich and Tjard galloping through the woods, swords drawn. I saw them leap upon two scharfrichters who were raping a woman in a clearing. They killed both men, and stole their clothing and supplies. Then, they were back along the road, heading south, back the way we had come. Why?
I saw tall walls of stone rise up between them. The walls of a city. I’d never been there before, but from the look of the buildings and the castle, I thought it might be Stuttgart. Aunt Aubrey had visited the city many times on her travels, and she told lively stories rich with details. Ulrich and Tjard snuck through the wicket, and hid at the back of a beer hall. Then, they were on the move again. I saw them standing before the gates of an enormous, opulent castle. Pennants featuring a strange crest of two swords and a coiled snake hung from every tower.
The image shifted again, and I was following Ulrich down a narrow, dark passage, lit by the dim light of a single torch. The water lapped against my legs, rippling across Ulrich’s handsome face. He glanced all around him, on high alert. Ulrich, what are you doing?
Ulrich emerged in a long, dark hall, the vaulted ceiling hung with chains and cages. In every corner stood frames and racks of shackles and knives. A torture chamber, like the one where I had first encountered Ulrich, but larger and grander, each corner stocked with new and despicable machines of pain. Ulrich hid behind a furnace, watching for several moments while another black-clad figure bent over a naked women who was strapped into the rack. It was another scharfrichter, and he turned the wheel slowly, his shoulders tensed as he strained to pull the machine tighter. The woman’ mouth fell open in a silent scream.
Ulrich rushed forward, his sword drawn. The scharfrichter looked up, and I saw a handsome face framed by greying hair and calm eyes. I gasped as I saw how similar he looked to Ulrich. I was staring into the eyes of his father, Damon of Donau-Ries, the most dangerous man in the entire land.
Ulrich flung his sword out wildly, and their bodies blurred together as their blades clashed, their black clothes flapping around their bodies. Guards rushed in, sword points flashed. I saw through Ulrich’s eyes as they surrounded him. The soldiers stabbed at him in an attempt to stop his attack. Panic seized me. As a blade slashed at his skin, tearing open a cut in his chest, I felt his pain as if it were my own. Fire seared across my chest.
Another blade slammed into my chest, tearing at my heart. I gasped as the air rushed from my body. Suddenly, even though the heat from the water swirled around my legs, a wave of ice flowed through my body. My teeth chattered. I grew colder, deadly cold.
Ulrich.
I watching him topple backward, blood spurting from his wounds. His head bounced against the stone floor, the loud CRACK resonating through my head, even though I knew I couldn’t have really heard it. The men set upon him, their swords catching the light as they slashed madly at his body.
I thrashed in the water, tearing my hands from Maerwynn’s, breaking our bond. She took a step toward me, her face concerned, but I cowered away.
Ulrich is dead.
“Get back!” I screamed, pulling my hands over my chest, trying to smother the pain that welled there. I sank to my knees in the water, barely noticing the pain in my knees as they hit the sharp stones at the bottom of the river. The water covered me, sweeping me up and dragging me under, my body plunged into the icy torrent that mirrored my own heart.
Ulrich
Pain surrounded me.
My chest heaved, my whole body felt as though it were being stabbed by a thousand tiny needles. A frigid coldness crept through my limbs, threatening to overtake me. I knew once that cold reached my mind, I was gone.
The pain was so brutal, so all consuming. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. There was nowhere to go to escape the pain, only blackness surrounded me. I thought I was screaming, but the screams were such a part of me that I couldn’t hear them. I was the scream.
But above it all, rising over the pain, calling me back, was Ada. Her voice was like honey, her wide eyes regarding me from the furthest reaches of my mind.
Ada.
How could she be here? Why had she come? It wasn’t safe for her here. If he caught her, she too would feel what I felt now. She too would be trapped inside a prison of ice, her own body her tomb.
The ice rose higher, clutching at my chest. I gasped again. As the air entered my chest, it stabbed at me, sharper than any knife. Silently, I howled for release, begging to be set free of this agony. How pleasant it would be to just stop breathing, to just let the pain carry me away...
I wanted so badly to surrender, to lose myself completely to the darkness, to be free of the pain. But Ada was in the light. She was the light. She called me to her.
And I had to obey.
Ada
I awoke some hours later, in my bed, the sun streaming through the cabin door. I did not know how it was that I had ended up there. Maerwynn must have carried me there, but I did not remember. I reached over to the chair beside my cot and saw a goblet sitting there, empty now, the rim dirty with some kind of sweet-smelling potion. She must have given me something to help me sleep.
The truth of what I’d seen last night hit me with all the force of a thunderstorm. I remembered the terrible vision I had witnessed, the pain that arced through my body as I felt the deadly blades enter Ulrich. I remembered feeling Ulrich’s life leave him, as if it was my own life ebbing away.
Ulrich is dead. My love is dead.
Fresh tears welled in my eyes. I could not believe that he was gone, that I would never again feel his strong arms around me, hear his voice like gravel in my ear, kiss those soft, hungry lips of his.
I rolled over and pulled the covers over my head, letting the tears fall freely down my face and splash across the furs. How could I go out there and face the world, knowing that he was no longer in it? How unfair it was that I had finally found someone and he had been taken from me?
“Ada? What are you still doing in bed?”
I peeked out of the blankets with one eye. Aunt Aubrey stooped in the doorway, a ceramic bowl of porridge in her hand. She looked at me with concern.
She doesn’t know. She couldn’t know, because she wouldn’t act so flippant if she’d known what I had seen last night. That meant Maerwynn hadn’t told her. She was still keeping our secret about teaching me to scry. But why?
“Are you feeling ill?” Aubrey placed the porridge down on the chair and bent over to feel my forehead. I let her, the warmth of her hand reassuring, reminding me of how comforting she had been whenever I got sick as a little girl. I needed that comfort now.
“A little,” I said weakly, as another tear trickled from my eye. I wanted to tell her, but the thought of speaking the words aloud – Ulrich is dead – made my heart ache. So I did not. I sank back into the furs, hoping the bed might swallow me up so that I never again had to dwell in a world that did not have Ulrich in it.
Aubrey rushed to my side, and pressed her hand against my forehead, as she had done when I was a child. “You feel a little warm,” she said. “Does anything hurt?”
“My stomach,” I said weakly. “And my chest.” It was true, but not because of any illness.
“You poor thing. Perhaps you’ve eaten something that doesn’t agree with you. But Bernadine and I find some of the plants here upset our stomachs. I will make you something to settle you.” She rose again, stroking her finger across my damp cheek. “Don’t worry, Ada. You’re going to be fine. You’re in the best hands here.”
“Thank you,” I whispered as she left the room. I turned over and faced the wall, sq
ueezing my eyes shut and giving over to my grief.
* * *
I stayed in my bed for three days, alternating between sleeping, weeping, and staring at the ceiling, my mind a dark void of despair. Aunt Aubrey brought me droughts mixed with ginger and yarrow, special potions designed to calm a sore stomach and break a fever. But they did nothing for me, because I had no fever. My only ailment was a broken heart, and that could not be mended with any potion or poultice.
I heard footsteps approaching the bed. I opened one eye, and saw that it was not Aubrey, but Maerwynn. She stared at me with knowing eyes, and I felt embarrassed to be seen in such a state, as though I were disappointing her. I wondered if she was still angry with me over Brunhild’s death. She was behaving extremely kindly… for Maerwynn, that was.
“How do you fare?” she asked me.
“The pain is like a great wild beast standing upon my chest,” I said. “It crushes me as it devours me, swallowing me down. You have not told my aunts what we saw?”
“It is your sorrow to bear as you will,” she said. “When you are ready, you will tell them. I suspect Aubrey already suspects the sickness is of your heart.”
“Maerwynn, is there any chance… could what we have seen been false? Could Ulrich have survived his wounds? Could someone have created a false vision for us to see?”
Maerwynn shook her head. “I am sorry, Ada. The images you saw are the truth.”
“Oh.” The last drop of hope was crushed from my heart. My chest felt heavy, the weight upon it sinking deeper, pushing my further into my depression.
“If it is any consolation,” she said softly, as she left the cabin. “I too mourn him with this unrelenting agony.”
I glanced up, curious, but Maerwynn had already disappeared from view. Had I heard her correctly? I had read Maerwynn’s antagonism toward Ulrich as hatred, but now I saw that it could have been her own fearful desire.
Ulrich
My eyes fluttered open, and immediately I wished for them to close again. When my eyes were closed, I’d felt no pain. But now it flared through my limbs like fire, burning me from the inside.
“Get up,” a familiar voice commanded. In the dim light I could just make out a silhouette standing over me, something long and pointed clutched in its hands.
I didn’t obey. What reason did I have to obey, when my body already burned with agony?
Something bit into my shoulder, causing a fresh wave of pain to tear through my ruined body. I cried out as whatever-it-was twisted inside of me, my eyes squeezed shut against the horror I knew awaited them. The pain relented ever so slightly, and I used my hands to steady myself as I rolled over, pulling my knees beneath me. My sides exploded with pain. I reached down to grab them, and grazed bandages wrapped tight around my torso.
“I have had my löwe dress your wounds,” my father said. “I cannot allow you to die until the demon has been purged from your body. It is unthinkable that my own son should betray the church in this way. You have done me a service by coming here in secret as you did, for you have saved me from public humiliation. I can only conclude that beneath the demon within you hides something of the son I raised.”
Still squatting on my knees before him, I spat on his boots.
“It is a stubborn demon,” my father said. “But I have many ways to expel it.”
Rough hands grabbed me, pulling me to my feet, dragging me backward. My father’s words sank through the pain in my head. They were taking me to the torture chamber. I roared with defiance, lashing out at the men that held me, thrashing wildly as I tried to throw them of balance.
“It’s a feisty one!”
From somewhere inside my pain-addled mine, a message of clarity got through. With every struggle you make, you are only fuelling your father’s belief that you are possessed by a demon. You must be calm.
I slackened, becoming dead weight that the men had to drag through the narrow dungeon. I was not going to give them the satisfaction of righteousness. It was a small victory, minuscule in fact, when you considered the fact that I was now my father’s prisoner, and that the pain I was now experiencing was nothing compared to what he would soon inflict upon me, but I would take any victory I could get.
I opened my eyes again, watching cold stone walls and crowded cells fly past my face as I was dragged through the dungeon. I wondered if Muriel’s father had seen me being dragged toward the torture chamber like this. I hoped he did, and that he gleamed some satisfaction from it. It was the least I could give him for his suffering.
Once inside, my father slammed the door shut behind him, and slid the bolts to. He had the men drag my body up and strap me into the St. Andrew’s Cross. It took all of my self-control to keep my limbs slack as they forced my hands into the shackles and locked me in place. My whole body screamed for freedom.
“I think a stout whipping will do, at first,” he said. My father took a knife, and cut my tunic away from my body, and my trousers as well. My face flushed with shame as I stood naked before him, unable to fight back. He flicked his eyes over my body. “It is good to see that you have not let your physical fitness go,” he said with a note of admiration. “So many of my scharfrichters have let women and drink and other luxuries degrade their cause. Hopefully, when I am finished with you, you will still be a fine warrior of the Lord.”
I growled, and shook the frame of the cross. The wood creaked in protest, but held strong. I hate this. I can’t do it. I can’t lie here meek and obeying while he does this to me …
“Ah, yes. This one will do perfectly.” Damon selected a whip from the rack. It was the cat-o-nine-tails, a vicious implement with nine leather tongues, each one sewn with small metal balls that tore at the skin, leaving gaping, bleeding holes.
I can’t do it I can’t do it I can’t do it—
CRACK!
The whip fell across my shoulders, a terrible blow that brought all the force of my father’s arm behind it. My lungs expelled my breath, the air fleeing my body in an attempt to escape the stinging pain that flared across my torso.
I cried and struggled harder, slamming the shackles against the wood. I heard a crack as a splinter of wood flew from the cross and clattered across the floor.
“That’s it, demon!” My father cried. “Come to the surface, so that we may expel you from this mortal body.”
CRACK!
“NO!” I bellowed, as the pain arced. My blood pounded in my ears. My father held nothing back. These were not the careful, precise welts I had administered to my female victims in the privacy of my own dungeon, the kind that brought pleasure as well as pain. These were blows designed to break me, to lay me raw.
You cannot fight back. You will only make things worse for yourself. You will give him the satisfaction. You must stay calm. You must resist.
CRACK!
A cry for mercy was on the tip of my tongue. I was ready to beg him to stop, anything to ease the agony. But then something flashed across my vision, a whisper of golden hair, a smile that was like sunshine, a light in the darkness.
Ada.
As soon as I registered the vision, it was gone, but the memory stayed with me. If I could cling to Ada, to the thought of returning to her, it would keep me alive. She could make me strong enough to resist.
I steeled my mind and drew it back to the last time I had been alone in my dungeon with her, when I had strapped her into my own St. Andrew’s Cross and laid the whip across her delicious curves, the red lines decorating her porcelain skin, marking her as mine, as she so willingly opened herself up to me. I remembered pressing my fingers up inside of her, feeling her juices run down my arm as I teased her to the point of oblivion, only to pull away again. My mouth watered with the taste of her, heat rushing through my body as though I were pressed up against her.
CRACK!
This time I did not cry out. Although my body screamed with pain, and my eyes swam with red welts that grew larger, in my mind I was somewhere else entirely. I was in a dif
ferent dungeon, with a girl who lit my body on fire.
Pleasure and pain- that had always been my motto. And now, with Ada’s help, I would draw upon the pleasure in order to survive the pain.
* * *
“I’m concerned that he is not responding,” Damon said to his löwe. “I think we need to try something. Perhaps heat will bring the demon to the surface.”
“As you wish.” The löwe, whose name I learned was Barba, bowed. “I will light the fire.”
For three days I endured my father’s torture chamber, although the hours soon blurred into each other. I remembered little, except the pain. There were beatings, and then a session on the rack. He pulled out five of my fingernails with hot pincers, and then had me sit inside a stockade until my limbs screamed in agony. But I knew that all of these tortures were designed to make me uncomfortable, but not to permanently harm me. It was strange, but I wondered if my father was sparing me his more gruesome and permanent tortures. Perhaps he was hoping that I would survive after he had expelled the demon from me, and that I would still be some use in his campaign against the witches. Could it true that Damon of Donau-Ries was guilty of sentimentality?
All through these tortures, I pictured Ada’s face, remembering the time we had spent together in the dungeon, and the way she had looked at me so confidently and defiantly the last night we’d spent together. I pictured her head tossed back as she touched herself, bringing her own body to orgasm as she thought of me.
Ada kept me alive.
After each session they returned me to my cell and shoved a bowl of gruel and a pitcher of wine through the bars. I longed to refuse the food, so as not to give my father the satisfaction of knowing he supplied something I needed, but I required my strength more. I ate these poor offerings hungrily, knowing that food and drink fortified my spirit against his next tortures.
Coven: a dark medieval paranormal romance (Witches of the Woods Book 2) Page 15
