You know, maybe, how loath most men are to admit there’s magic on their side, and the English more than most.
Reading, Cathal nodded. Save Valerius and a few others, the English use of magic in war was mostly indirect: swords that could wound the MacAlasdairs as mortally as steel could any other man, armor that stood fast against dragonfire, traps that exploded or poisoned or brought down mountainsides. A man who didn’t want to see magic could pass all of that off as craft or chance.
Most were even worse about Valerius. I bribed, and I threatened, and the ones that would talk in the end talked mostly in hints and in tales.
None could say what name he was born to, nor exactly where, but there were stories.
His lands are on the border, though nobody could tell me where. They’re not wide, but he put his stamp on them, by all accounts. God help the man who falls short in his taxes or catches a hare in His Lordship’s forest. Hanging’s not the worst of it. His vassals’ one comfort is that he’s not often at home. The bastard’s got ambitions, and they put him in the field more often than not.
Here’s the part for a winter’s night:
Once there was a lord, and he had a son—maybe two, as comes into the tale later, and depending on who you ask. Son grew up, went off, and became a knight, or almost became a knight. The first death may have been there: a fellow squire who ran afoul of his temper, or was better than he was, or crossed him in another way.
Three different men tell three different stories. You know the way of it.
Our young lordling, knight or no, comes back home. Mayhap he’s learned a bit of the world. Could be he’s learned too much. He takes up his place and his duties, regardless.
Then—well, the story branches again. One version is his father hears what he’s been doing and goes to cast him out. One version is there’s a girl, of course, though whether she had the bad taste to choose a younger son—the brother who may not exist, aye?—or a villein or the veil is also down to the teller. And one version is he’s just not content, he wants more, and he sees no way in this world to get it.
All the branches come back to the same place. The old lord dies. Messily. Slowly. If there’s a second son, or a peasant rival, he hangs for it. If not, I’m sure some poor servant took his place. The elder son, the man of our tale, becomes lord in his turn, only now he calls himself Valerius, and now he has powers that his vassals don’t speak of, and he goes seeking a wider place in the world. And whatever the English king knows or believes about him, he sees a tool and picks it up.
One more thing: none of the men know quite when this happened, but those who heard about it heard when they were young. Twenty years past, I’d guess, and could be more. If the man you fought was no more than middle-aged—
Cathal winced, remembering that Valerius had looked no less hale than half the men he’d fought.
—then there too is a thing to consider.
Mortal magicians could do a great deal. Staving off age was a rare power; usually it involved some contact with the great forces of the universe.
That’s your enemy, brother. If I get back in time, you know you have my aid. If not, may God aid you, and may this woman he’s sent you be the ally you need.
Slowly, Cathal folded the letter and put it down. He would double that last wish in brass, only slightly differently. He didn’t doubt that Sophia was the best ally he could hope for, but he wished he could be as certain of her safety.
And as he finished that thought, he heard her scream.
Twenty
The first sign of something amiss was a foul smell, so Sophia was less alarmed than vexed to begin with. Unpleasant odors were common enough when alchemical processes went right—she’d learned early on to keep a veil over her face during certain stages of compounding elixirs, and to breathe only through her mouth—and far more common when an error had crept in. Not expecting either smoke or sulfur in any of her ongoing experiments, Sophia sniffed the air, cursed, and then swung around to check the crucible over the flame.
No, the mixture inside the vessel was the dark red of Mars, as she’d intended, and the surface was smooth, with no bubbles or other signs that it was heating too quickly, and certainly no more smoke than Sophia would have expected from a properly tended fire. The air around it smelled strongly of herbs, notably garlic, and of hot iron, but no sulfur. Sophia breathed a sigh of relief. This was her first experiment with the protective formula she’d found. It was in a sensitive stage, and she hadn’t even added the dragon’s scale to catalyze it.
The next potion for Fergus was also in progress but in distillation, and thus, she’d thought, less likely to be giving off a smell. She turned to the glass apparatus and the lead vial anyhow, to be certain, and eyed the black mist within. It looked ominous enough, but she could see the streaks of silver within it that she knew should be there, and Saturn’s power was for tenacity. Until she could wrest more control from Valerius, tenacity would have to do.
Meanwhile, the smell was stronger. Had the kitchens exploded? She turned, taking another breath to try to track the reek to its source, and then heard a screeching, clicking sound, like a million insects with very sharp legs were walking across the stone floor.
A hole was appearing in the air.
It hung in the center of the room, a spot the size of her hand that her mind translated as black because black was the color of things not there. Looking at it made her dinner rest uneasily in her stomach, and her eyes hurt. Looking at it also gave Sophia the impression that it was getting larger, and that it was struggling to do so, writhing against fences that she couldn’t see.
Crystallization: the world went still around her, each piece of it separating from the one adjoining. Into that stillness, her own voice spoke inside her head.
So then. There is a hole in the world here. Likely this is going to get worse. Cathal might know how to repair it, but he’s said himself that he knows little of magic. You have no time for research. So—tenacity or protection?
Three silver vials stood on the table, each containing one powdered scale. With hands that felt barely like hers, though they were steady and quick, Sophia opened one and poured the contents into the red mixture heating over the crucible.
Red smoke billowed up, but not enough to block Sophia’s view of the hole. Still twisting, it had grown to the size of her head, and now there were other colors than black. She could see flashes of olive green, of sickly yellow. One of the yellow patches turned. Clarified. Became an eye.
Sophia shrieked at the top of her lungs. It seemed the most sensible course of action, considering the presence of armed men nearby. It was also irresistible instinct. When a clawed hand reached out of the hole, she screamed again—and managed to do it even louder.
She started for the door, then stopped herself. Well enough if Cathal or his men could arrive and dispatch the thing. Not well if it got out of the door and started running amok through the castle.
At hand she had a knife she used for chopping herbs: sharp, but not nearly long enough, and she was good at chopping herbs, not fighting demons. She doubted she could close the hole in the world now, with the demon already partway through.
In theory, she knew how the potion of protection was supposed to work on a person. She’d hoped that she could have tested it gradually.
The world, her mother had often said, is almost never the way we’d prefer.
Before she could think too much, Sophia grabbed the crucible and upended the contents over her head.
Her whole body was already cringing, expecting unbearable pain, but she felt only a moment of heat, as though for a breath she’d stepped into July sunshine, and then nothing. Her skin and clothes were as dry as they’d ever been, and they felt like—well, like her skin. Her clothing. God grant that means it’s worked.
The demon was most of the way out of the hole now. Even as demons went,
or were supposed to go, it was ugly: starved-cat skull with a too-big mouth, six spindly legs with clawed talons on the end of each, body like a mastiff’s. It reared up, putting its head almost level with Sophia’s, and the rest of it fell out of the hole like a repulsive, oversized caterpillar.
Sophia didn’t scream again. Anyone who’d hear and help would have heard the first two times. She needed to save her breath. She thought she heard running footsteps from lower down in the castle; she prayed that she wasn’t only hearing what she wished for, or that it wasn’t Alice or some hapless and unarmed servant.
The hole closed behind the demon. At least that was no longer a problem, Sophia thought, and gripped the knife.
She didn’t know how soldiers managed this: the moment of preparation, of knowing that the enemy would be at your throat in the blink of an eye. She thought it might be easier when the enemy had the right number of limbs and no fangs.
She had time to say half a prayer.
Then the demon sprang.
Scholar rather than warrior, Sophia managed only a clumsy dive sideways. The demon didn’t close its jaws on her neck as it had intended, but its body hit hers almost squarely, bearing her to the floor. She heard the crack of bone on stone before she felt either the pain in her head or the impact along her spine. The body protected the mind somewhat, even when it couldn’t save itself.
In this case, her mind—and her decision—had reciprocated. The demon scrabbled at her side and shoulders, whipped its head around to bite again at her throat, but neither claws nor teeth could seem to find much purchase, and Sophia felt no pain from either. The potion had given her a suit of armor in its way: invisible, intangible, weightless, but as sturdy as a knight’s chain shirt.
Almost remotely, as men close to death were said to see their own mortal wounds from on high and afar, she observed the weight of the creature, the venom-yellow of its eyes, and the almost boneless flexibility of its limbs. Its smell wasn’t sulfur or smoke, but foul-sweet, burned honey or rotting fruit. The scent she’d caught earlier must have come from the hole itself.
Remotely too, she remembered that she had a knife. Bracing herself against the stone as best she could, Sophia stabbed upward, but felt nothing give way before her. Demons had thicker skin than plants, and the angle was bad. She swore, the English obscenities she’d learned as a child, profaning saints she thought to be as mortal as herself and invoking diseases she doubted would bother the creature she fought for a moment.
Pressure and heat reached the side that the demon was currently trying to claw. The sensation was no worse than a hot mug in the hand, but it was a warning. Armor would not last forever, for certain not against an otherworldly foe.
It was not a particularly heavy foe—the weight of a good-sized dog, perhaps, but not the mastiff it resembled in size. Later, Sophia would wonder over that and develop theories about hollow bones and magical flesh. Just then, she shoved upward and sideways, catching the demon by surprise and flipping them both over. Its skull made the same crack against stone that hers had, and she took bloody satisfaction from that. It warmed a primitive spirit that she hadn’t known dwelt within her, but which was proving quite useful.
In that spirit, she used her new position well, rearing back and driving the knife down into the demon’s neck. This time she had leverage enough, and it sank up to the bone hilt. Sophia was familiar with anatomy. If she’d been fighting a man, bright blood would have fountained out of his throat and he would have died in seconds, his jugular clumsily severed. The demon did bleed, a putrid-green substance that glowed and hissed as it hit the stone, and it shrieked as loudly as she had but with a buzzing sound mixed in, but it didn’t die.
Rather, it whipped an arm up and batted her hand away from the knife. The claws might not hurt, but the strength of the blow did. Sophia’s arm flew backward, and she cried out, feeling tendons strain and snap in her shoulder.
Instantly she wished she’d kept silent, no matter the pain. A new light shone in the demon’s eyes—wicked joy in her pain, yes, but also a look she recognized even across species, that of observation and calculation.
Claws couldn’t hurt her. Teeth couldn’t hurt her. But her body hadn’t gained much in strength, and it still had some of its limitations.
Before Sophia even saw the creature’s arms move, its hands had closed around her throat. She yanked herself backward and grabbed again for the knife still in its neck, but the demon’s grip was strong and sure. Already darkness began to fill in the edges of her vision. She knew what that meant.
And, as she panicked and weakened, the demon easily flipped them again and gained the same advantage of angle and force now that she’d used earlier. Its hands tightened, squeezing and turning. The pain in Sophia’s neck was nothing to that now building in her chest, the burning as her lungs screamed for air they couldn’t receive. With the last of her strength, she clawed at its face, seeking one of those horrible eyes, but it merely reared up, taking its head out of her reach.
Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai—she hoped her lips were forming the words, or that her mind counted. Everything was going dark. It was a mercy, in a way. She wouldn’t have to look at the demon at the last. Eloheinu. The words were becoming harder. Words had always been easy. She reached for the next, couldn’t find it in the darkness—
A sound. Smooth. Wet. Close.
Then the darkness was reversing itself. Her neck was free. Her chest was free, burning but now taking in air and letting it out again, frantic with possibilities. She lay on stone and gasped, fish-woman brought suddenly to land, but living and not dying.
Her vision cleared. There was a shape above her still, but it didn’t crouch on her chest. One hand was behind her head, not around her neck, and the other was roughly sheathing a sword. The shape had legs and hands; it was human.
Words came back and reattached themselves to things. Sword. Floor. Hand. Man. Cathal.
Unaccountable joy swept over and through her, despite her throat and her chest, her head and back. She was alive; the potion had worked; Cathal was here.
He was speaking. “You’re not dead. You’re not dead.”
“As,” she said, and her bruised throat made the words come through gravel, “my lord commands.”
It was a lovely line, sardonic and detached and composed, and the look on his face—surprise, joy, affront—was one she’d treasure for a long time. In the next second, though, she spoiled it by flinging herself off the floor and into his arms.
Twenty-one
This time Cathal wasn’t gentle: couldn’t be, not with recent danger still setting his blood afire in ways he hadn’t felt in months, nor with Sophia’s rounded body suddenly flush against his, impelled there with a speed and force that had surprised even him. Her breasts rose and fell against his chest, and their steady movement was a delight both to his quickening body and to the mind that remembered how still she’d been when he’d rushed into the room. His arms closed around her almost at once, and he was kissing her only a moment afterward.
He shouldn’t do this, Cathal knew. Oh, he knew it was unwise, and he knew it was probably unchivalrous, even for the very flawed version of those rules that he’d ever bothered to follow, and he knew she might pull away and slap his face in the next instant, but he held her close and took her mouth, his tongue urging it open with very little effort. The last thing on his mind was regret; the next-to-last was stopping.
And she wasn’t stopping him, this beautiful girl in his arms. No, she was wrapping her arms around his neck, pulling him down and herself upward so that she could kiss him back, her lips sweet and soft beneath his. At first there was a slight clumsiness about her motions, whether from inexperience or because she was still disoriented from her struggle, but that vanished quickly, and she seemed eager to pick up where they’d left off in the grove.
Cathal had will enough to remember that she had been in a fi
ght, that she might have injuries other than the bruises on her neck. When he slid his hand down her back, he kept his touch light, ready to stop if she flinched or made any sound of pain. She did gasp, when he cupped her arse and pressed her against the swollen length of him, but there was no discomfort there. No, she circled her hips against him and then made a—sound.
It was low in her throat. It was curious and eager at the same time. And it made Cathal’s whole body clench with lust. If he heard nothing else in his life, if he went deaf the second afterward, he needed to hear her make that noise again.
He left her mouth for her neck, that long golden column he’d admired across the table on too many nights. He brushed over it with his lips, felt Sophia shiver, heard her catch her breath, then returned to kiss with more strength, to suck and then nibble, careful always of the bruises. Her buttocks were firm beneath his hand, muscles tensed as she pressed herself to him. She was continuing her earlier motions too, little jerks of her hips that brought her sex against his thigh, her stomach against his cock, and then away, driving him mad, and he didn’t know whether she knew it.
Another swift motion and his hand cupped the curve of one breast, feeling its shape and weight through the wool of her gown. Cathal circled his thumb lightly upward, rubbing over Sophia’s nipple. He longed to feel it better, would have sold his soul for magic to banish her layers of clothing in an instant, but there was still no mistaking the stiffness there, nor the way Sophia thrust her breasts forward at his touch, nor yet the whimper that came from her throat this time. He hadn’t known it was possible for her to make a more arousing sound than the last one, and yet there it was.
He bucked against her, feeling her soft and yielding against his aching cock. The drag of fabric and the imperfect angle were a sweet kind of torture, the motion a desperate, almost unthinking attempt at his true goal. The wool beneath his caressing hands became a more frustrating barrier with every second, every sensation, every desperate little wriggle the lady gave. If it had been summer, Cathal thought, if she’d been less respectable—more practically, if there’d been a bed anywhere to hand… There was a table, but even for his lust he couldn’t destroy its contents.
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