Highland Dragon Warrior

by Isabel Cooper

  They headed to the tower as soon as he’d transformed. Cathal gave his brother the story in short sentences, paring it down to the most important parts. He hoped he’d not left anything out; he didn’t entirely trust his mind.

  “What can we do?” he asked finally.

  “I don’t know.” Douglas entered the tower room, passing Cathal as the younger man held the door, but not looking into his face. “If she was going to the aether on her own, I would say she found trouble there.”

  “And?”

  Carefully, they placed Sophia down on the table. Douglas took off his cloak and folded it, then slid it under her head. “The cord is still attached to her. If I’m right, that means her soul is yet her own.”

  Cathal nodded. He’d seen no silver ribbon coming from Fergus’s head, not even in the few moments when he’d come back to himself. “Can I go there with her?”

  “Not you,” Douglas said too slowly and after too long a pause. “Not yourself. It may be, here, that we can send her your strength, but—”

  “Do it.”

  Their eyes met over Sophia’s face. Cathal read caution in Douglas’s, all of the warnings and objections that his brother wanted to state, but none of them passed his lips, and in time he dropped his gaze and shook his head. “Aye. Go find a page. Send for dry clothes for the both of you, and food. It’ll take me time to prepare. And send for Madoc.”

  Cathal paused on his way to the door. “The Welsh boy? Why?”

  “He’s half decent with magic. We’ll need two, and you’ll be in no condition to assist.”

  Had Cathal had the energy to take that as a slight, he would have soon found himself proved wrong. Before the spell began, Douglas and Madoc propped Sophia upright and bade Cathal sit before her, then bound each of his hands to hers, winding the ropes from fingertips to elbows and back again. He knelt with his legs beneath him and struggled to keep his balance, in no condition for the pacing they did as they chanted, nor for bending and drawing shapes on the floor in chalk.

  He might have spoken or joined the chanting, but the incense was strong and touched with poppies. Cathal wavered, balanced, breathed deeply, and tried to fall into the rhythm of the chanting. He felt her heartbeat through their joined wrists, steady but quick.

  Then the force of the spell tipped over and the effect began. Cathal felt energy draining away from him, slowly at first, seeping from his palms into Sophia’s. At the same time, her aura brightened. He could see no other difference, nor feel any in her body, but he began to hope.

  He kept hoping still as the chanting continued and the flow of energy quickened. Now it was like water running downhill, like snow melt in the spring, and his legs wavered beneath him. The room grew blurry.

  The chanting slowed and stopped. Cathal heard footsteps, then Douglas. “Shall we unbind you? It won’t stop otherwise.”

  “No,” he managed, though his voice was hazy. “No.” He repeated it stronger, with a glare, though he didn’t take his eyes from Sophia.

  Until she freed herself and woke, he would be with her, the cost be damned.

  Thirty-nine

  Sophia ran.

  She raced downstairs in the darkness, and this time she didn’t bother to look at the doors or the light that came from beneath them. She cared only that she kept her footing and that she outran the shape that ran behind her, his feet heavy and his breathing as twisted as the rest of him. Betimes he stopped to scream threats at her. They were ugly things, but she let them pass over her mind.

  The more breath he used to shout, the less he’d have to run. Sophia wasn’t sure if that was entirely true in this world, but she let it comfort her.

  She flung herself out the castle doors just out of Albert’s reach. The courtyard felt larger than it had before—mayhap it was, the way things were in the aether—but she ran across that too, ignoring the pain in her side and the burning in her lungs, and then stopped short.

  The bridge had vanished.

  She had no time for surprise, despair, or even thought. Bending down, she wrenched off one of her shoes and tossed it across the gap. Sophia sent her will along with it, and so she wasn’t wholly startled when the shoe landed upside down and grew in a flash, such that the sole stretched from the edge of the forest and upward into a tree. She was profoundly grateful, or as grateful as she could manage the attention to be. As soon as the bridge looked stable, she was lunging at the edge.

  At that, she was just in time. The claws of Albert’s long arm scraped down her back, tearing her gown open in four wide strips and scratching the skin beneath. Sophia yelped, more in fright than pain, and jerked away onto the bridge.

  There was no railing this time, nor even ropes. For all that, she couldn’t afford caution. She kept to the middle, fixed her eyes on the tree ahead, and went as fast as she could drive her body. The chill of her exposed back—real air or not, it was cold enough—and the stinging pain were spurs. When she wanted to hold back out of fright, she told herself that a fall from the bridge was probably better than what the monster behind her would do if he caught her.

  Even so, when she reached the tree and pulled herself onto the branch, it was with the last of her strength. Sophia’s legs and arms were shaking and boneless. Every breath was an ordeal, and the view before her eyes was misty. She could see Albert clearly enough, climbing across the bridge toward her with dreadful persistence. The effort, or the screaming, had taken its toll on him. The skin on his face had cracked, and a ghastly red line ripped its way from the bottom of his chin to just beneath his left eye.

  She shuddered, swayed, and clung to the tree for support.

  Damaged he might be, but he was still master of this place, and she doubted that she could sway it very much against his will. The shoe had most likely worked because it had mirrored a real object and its use in the context was plain, but she had few of those left, and she could think of few ways to turn them against Albert.

  Calcination. Dissolution. Go back to the source.

  Sophia looked upward. The tree kept going, and at the very top, tiny in the red-gray sky, she saw a shifting spot of pure black.

  That was where she needed to go, if for no other reason than that it was the only place open to her. She doubted she’d find a pleasant reception on the ground. Sophia gritted her teeth, grabbed a branch, and pulled.

  Her body barely moved. She tried again, and felt tears start running down her face with the effort—exhaustion, frustration, fear, or the shrieking pain of her muscles—but nothing happened, and Albert was almost to the tree. His lips drew back from his teeth, the smile splitting his skin further, and Sophia screamed with all the breath she had left.

  Out of nowhere, fresh energy poured into her body. It started at her palms and spread down, burning along her arms but in a pleasant fashion, or at least a useful one. Sophia thought of Cathal’s kisses, of the way he’d touched her and of feeling him deep inside her when she climaxed. The power she felt now wasn’t quite the same, but it was close.

  She pulled herself upward a third time, and this time hauled herself onto the next branch. Albert turned his face up to her and hissed. “Bitch,” he said, “you’ll know your place before I finish with you.”

  Sophia didn’t respond. Talking was a waste of climbing time and of energy, even though she was feeling stronger with every moment. She hugged the tree trunk now and pulled herself upward, a feat she could never have accomplished in the real world. She was making changes again, even if they were small ones. If Albert realized that, or if he didn’t have to make his own changes to follow her…

  Don’t think of if. Go.

  The voice in her head was her own, but the words might have been Cathal’s. As she took in more and more energy, she kept thinking of him, and no longer just in terms of their physical coupling. The force giving her strength had in it the peace and warmth of falling asleep in his e
mbrace, the triumph of that moment when the first potion had seemed as if it would work, and the freedom of flying through the night with him, with all the stars above her and the wind in her hair.

  He was with her. She couldn’t have explained how, but a part of him had reached her even across the way between worlds, and that aspect was giving her the means to go onward.

  Beneath her, the tree fell away. She could see Albert climbing after her, but not much below. The view didn’t diminish as it would have in the waking world, or as it had before, but dissolved into red-gray. Was the world itself disintegrating around them?

  All the more reason to climb fast.

  Albert had stopped screaming. Sophia could hear him scrabbling up the tree behind her, and his labored breaths echoed in the silence just as hers did, but otherwise he made no sound. She would have felt encouraged, but she knew she wouldn’t have had the breath to scream either, nor yet to speak, even with Cathal giving her strength.

  Up and up they went. The tree started to thin. The branches were no longer thick enough for Sophia to even try reaching them. Before very long, the trunk might not support her weight either. Albert would break it before she did, most likely, but that would be small comfort as she fell.

  She could do nothing about that, save think hold together at the tree as firmly as she could manage. Either it worked, or it didn’t need to work, or Albert was doing his own reinforcements—he might not be wild about the idea of falling to earth either—for the trunk swayed as she climbed but didn’t break.

  The entrance to the world-between came closer. It wasn’t properly a hole in the sky that Sophia could see, or a passage like a doorway. The treetops and the sky drained away into it, if things could drain upward. They blurred and distorted as they went. High in the tree, Sophia saw the stretching and stopped. She knew that the world-between was her best hope. Her body knew that this was not the way the world was supposed to work, that even looking at the passage too long made her eyes hurt, and she froze in atavistic terror, far worse than the first sight of Cathal’s dragon form had provoked.

  Albert had more knowledge of other worlds. He’d long ago decided that the rules of this one, moral and even elemental, didn’t govern him. He hesitated not a moment, but found from some hellish corner of his soul an extra burst of strength.

  His clawed hand sank deep into the flesh of Sophia’s waist, yanking her away from the tree trunk.

  Naturally she screamed. Even without the claws, his touch was vile. Through her gown, she felt his arm almost squirming, as if it were many small insects and not part of one singular body. He smelled like the demon that had attacked her in her laboratory, and his laugh of triumph was high and bubbling.

  Her first impulse was to pull away. Albert would be expecting that, and so Sophia bridled that reaction, forced her body to stillness, and made herself look beyond her disgust. She saw that the world-between was very close, not even really up as much as around, and that the branches were reaching toward it. She saw that Albert was holding on to the tree with his human arm. His knuckles were white.

  Sophia let herself go limp—the other reaction Albert would have expected from a lady. Then she turned toward him. With all her strength and Cathal’s combined, she flung both arms around the monstrosity, pushing off the branch with both feet at the same time. As she’d intended, one of her arms hit the one Albert was using to hold the branch, and she put her weight as much behind that arm as she could.

  As they toppled, Albert grabbed for the branches again. Sophia had hit him with too much force, though. His claws scored three lines in one branch, but skidded off without a firm hold.

  Together they hung for a moment, weightless; then together plummeted toward the void.

  She began to pray.

  Then claws clasped her shoulders, larger and yet far gentler than Albert’s were, and she heard the beat of great wings above her. Sophia looked up, hope suspended and aching in her chest.

  Cathal, shimmering and faint but present, bent his scaled neck around so that his eyes could meet hers. He still couldn’t talk in dragon form, but Sophia understood all he would have said: that he didn’t have the power to fight Albert directly in this world, but that he would hold her up while she did what she could.

  He was there. He wouldn’t let her fall.

  The three of them flew suspended through the place between. The red-gray world was nearly gone, swallowed in black and unseeable shapes of light. It was very small, and she doubted that it answered as much to Albert’s will now that he was out in the blackness.

  He still clung to her, and she to him. Sophia didn’t want to turn him loose into the void, there to perhaps find heaven knew what resources. If she’d had a weapon—

  She thought of the boxes, and how they trapped powerful souls within their enchanted walls. She’d touched them; she knew them; in theory, she could command them. Sophia closed her eyes, let go of Albert with one hand—he showed no inclination to try to escape, with the void all around them—and willed.

  The box in her hand was heavy and cold. She hoped she had the right one: she dared not open it to make sure.

  “Albert de Percy,” she said, and he snapped his head up to glare at her. Sophia stared back at him, right into the eye with the goat’s pupil.

  “Like calls to like,” she said in Greek. “Be one with your master, and one with his bonds.”

  Before he could look away, she faced the box toward him and opened the lid.

  The ape-thing lunged forward, shrieking. Albert had no time to get away—and indeed, Sophia didn’t think he could have. In a whirlwind moment, she saw him pulled toward the box, eye first, such that his whole body distorted and melted. For the moment, either the spell held both demon and magician, or the creature was too distracted by its prey to think of escape.

  That wouldn’t last long.

  Holding her breath, Sophia waited until the last of Albert’s trailing robes had come within the box’s rim, then slammed the lid—none too soon. A crashing blow made the box shudder against her hand, far too forcefully for an object of its size.

  “Be gone,” she said, and flung it as far as she could into the blackness.

  She and Cathal both watched it go, and both let out their breath at almost the same time. Sophia giggled, a touch hysterically.

  “We should go too,” she said, “though with luck not to the same place he did.” Quickly, she reached into her bodice and drew out the rust-colored sphere she’d taken from the chest, holding it tight in both hands.

  Now. Wake up.

  Forty

  Silence reigned in the tower room. Douglas and Madoc had finished their chanting, Cathal feared to disrupt the spell, and Sophia neither spoke nor moved except to breathe. The time might have weighed more lightly on Cathal if she had. Little as he liked the thought of her in distress, it was even more unsettling to see scratches appear on her arms while she sat as placidly as a nun at prayers.

  It was fortunate that Cathal’s energy was draining away, fortunate too that the process clouded his mind. He was a patient man, but he knew not how he might have acted, waiting at such a time in the fullness of his strength. Even his willpower wasn’t infinite. Weakness made the minutes easier to endure.

  The floor swayed beneath him, but he stayed sitting upright. His feet went numb, and then his hands, but he didn’t move. Dimly he knew that his mouth was dry and that his body ached in muscle and bone, as well as on a deeper level that he couldn’t have named. Cathal let all such knowledge enter his mind and then depart. None of it could make any difference.

  Lost in hazy vision and the struggle to hold on, he wasn’t the one who noticed the change. Madoc’s quick inhalation and Douglas’s low curse alerted him. He blinked, forcing his eyes to clear briefly, and then saw a dark red-brown glow, the color of rust or autumn leaves, surrounded Sophia’s hands down to her elbows.

>   Fergus, he thought. Then…?

  He couldn’t begin to guess. Neither profanity nor prayer came to his mind. He couldn’t think of a word that would have sufficed for that interlude, when he saw the change and knew not what it meant nor what came after. Hope would have tempted fate.

  All at once the silver ribbon coming from Sophia’s head blazed, sunlight bright. Cathal’s eyes closed instantly, the body’s mindless protection coming to the fore. When he opened them again, her hands looked the same, but the cord was gone.

  He no longer felt the outflow of strength. What little reserves he had were his; the connection between them had no pull any longer.

  Balanced between fear and hope, with no idea which way to turn, he seized Sophia’s hands in his. The russet glow surrounded Cathal’s fingers as he interlaced them with hers, and briefly he felt Fergus’s presence as well, as it had been during a hundred nights sitting by campfires.

  Good man.

  “Oh.”

  By himself, Cathal would have thought he’d imagined her voice. It was faint, no more than a whisper, but Madoc met his eyes and nodded, and Douglas, off to the side and dispassionate, was the one who managed to reply.

  “Madam, we welcome you back. We’ll have you free shortly, and your wounds tended.”

  “Am I back?” She blinked. Her eyes, staring up into Cathal’s, were dark and liquid and lovely, the awareness in them perhaps the most beautiful thing he’d seen in more than a century of life. “I—”

  Embracing her was not possible in their position. Cathal settled for squeezing her hands. “You’re here. You’re with us.” He remembered then that she hadn’t been conscious for any of their journey and added, “At Loch Arach.”

  She smiled. “You were with me,” she said. “I saw you.”

  “I’d never have it otherwise,” said Cathal.