The last person to make such a request of him had been Andelusia, but that moment, so long ago, felt so very far away. “Ask what you will,” he told her. “You have me, as much a captive as I have ever been.”
“I want to know all of it. Start at the beginning.”
“The night is not long enough.”
“This is only our second night. If you wish it, we can have many more.”
“The beginning…” He felt all his resistance evaporate. “You might look at me and think I carried a blade right from the womb, but it was not so. I come from Mormist, from a little village called Trebidal. We were shepherds, my mother and sisters and I. The children called me Croft, after my father, whom I never knew. The Crofts are well-known in Trebidal, though nowhere else.”
“Save to Thillria,” said Ona. “We know you. It was your name we heard first when the Fury warships fled our shores. They say you are the greatest swordsman ever to walk the earth. Is it true?”
“I would not go so far,” he said modestly. “I took the training of a Triaxe knight, but I was never one myself. If the old knights were still alive, they might best me. And in the glooms of Furyon, I was defeated by a younger, swifter man. I am not the greatest, nor the most honorable.”
“I doubt these stories,” she cooed. “They say you felled thirty men at Gholesh, a hundred more in Furyon. Not all of these can be lies. Your humility only makes you handsomer, Lord Croft.”
“I am no lord,” he said. “And a humbler man might have stayed in his cot. You are beautiful, far too much for me.”
“Oh?” She leaned in tantalizingly close, then drew back. “Do not be shy, Garrett. Not here. Not with me.”
Like a butterfly, she flitted away and danced deeper into the orchard. The dark spaces between the trees consumed her, but the pools of moonlight set her free. She teases me, he knew. She wants me to follow her. She looked ethereal, for all that her cloak trailed behind her. He could do nothing but wander after her among the trees, in which the starlight rained down upon like droplets of dew.
“Find me,” she sang as she glided between the trees. “Catch me if you can. A kiss for my captor.”
He pursued her, slowly at first, then faster. He glimpsed her as she twisted and turned between the trees, eluding him as though she were made of wind. He heard her laughing, the crunch of her bare feet on the leaves, and the soft songs she warbled whenever he lost her in the dark. The farther he chased her, the faster his heart began to beat. He found her cloak discarded beside one tree, her boots lying atop a pile of leaves, and her black shirt hung from a low-lying branch. One after another, he wandered across each piece of raiment until none were left to find.
He pursued her for longer than he knew. Glimpses of her naked bottom and flicks of her raven hair caused his heart to move. He felt like someone other than himself, blind to all other causes, not knowing what to hope for or what to expect if he should catch her. When at last he stopped, the wind stopped with him, and he found himself back where he had started.
“I will never catch you,” he called into the night. “Unless you allow it.”
Ona drifted into the nearest pool of moonlight. He needed his imagination no longer, for all her clothing was gone. In the pale, perfect light, she was a creature every man would desire. Her hair, loose and wild, streamed over her shoulders with the breeze, taking flight like the trails of an angel’s skirt. Her lips were flushed and smiling, her skin the color of cream. He saw her in the light for but a few short breaths, for as she walked to him, the clouds crawled across the moon, covering her in shadow yet again.
“This is a dream,” he said. “No woman is like you.”
“No. Not a dream. Prick yourself with your sword if you doubt it.”
He reached for his scabbard, but realized he had forgotten his sword in the barn. “You want something from me. I have nothing.”
“You have plenty.” She sidled nearer.
“I should be resting. Shivershore is near. The Uylen, the Thillrians…my sword will be needed.”
She cut the through the night, moving so quietly that when he felt her cool breath graze his cheek, he shivered with surprise. “You are needed here.” She trailed her fingers across his neck. “Shivershore can wait.”
He kissed her, and though at first he was tentative, before he knew it he grasped her by the waist and lifted her mouth to his. Her skin felt as cool as suntouched snow. Her lips tasted of the sweetest apples. He might have kissed her forever, but his head began to spin. He set her down, and the sound of her sweet laughter drove his dizziness away.
“You kiss me like a fearful man.” She played her fingertips across his hard black hauberk. “You needn’t be. Any woman of the world would trade places with me. I was yours the moment I saw you in Denawir.”
“We do not know each other,” he said.
“We know enough.”
“Chasing beautiful girls has always been Rellen’s domain.”
“You are not the chaser. I am.”
She stood upon her toes and kissed him a second time, melting like sweet syrup in his arms. He felt her body move against him, her hips undulating within his grasp. The night is cold, he thought. Yet she is warm. When at last she pulled away, his head swam with her touch. Were he a weaker man, he might have toppled.
She took his hands and placed them back upon her waist. He saw the starlight gleaming in her gaze, the dark line of her lips melting all his senses away. “I am Ona,” she whispered into his ear. “I can be your love, Garrett, your treasure to take, your secret to keep. I have dreamed of you. I have gone untouched by you for too long. Do not question your fortune in finding me. If you feel as I do, then let the night try and fail to cool us. Come to me tonight and every night hereafter…”
For all his strength, he knew he could not deny her. She was an island of pleasure in an hour of darkness, a warm candle in the winter of his soul. He needed no courtship, no wooing, no days and weeks of yearning. He needed only Ona, whose heart seemed as pure as snow, and who offered herself freely to his whim. When he locked her fingers within his, his concerns for the world faded away. When he lay her down upon the orchard grass and kissed her again, all that he knew fell into sweet oblivion.
The Warlock
After two days and nights of slogging through Nightmare, Andelusia’s body felt ready to crumble. Her skin was dewy with sweat and her heart palpitating beneath her ragged, rain-soaked shirt. Her eyelids hung halfway closed, threatening to collapse and drag her into sleep. Dawn’s creeping light illumined the paths before her, but she had lost her way long ago. Under the grey-limbed oaks and black-barked birches she sluggishly marched. Lost, she knew. I will starve soon, and die with naught but a nine-paged book of secrets in my hands.
She wanted to sleep. She dared not. She knew if she hunkered against any of Nightmare’s trees and drifted away, the Uylen would find her, flay her, and take their treasure back. The Mortician’s promises felt empty in her heart. She imagined the Uylen overlord was even now standing on his dais, clicking his surgical fingers together, laughing at me, the fool. And so she plodded on, lurching over tangled roots and black-watered streams, pausing only to pry the thorns from her calves and rest her bare and bloodied feet.
On this, the bleakest of dawns, any ordinary soul would have failed. The vacant, spiritless stagnancy of the world’s dreariest forest would have driven any man to madness and torn the hope from any woman in the world. But I am not ordinary. Each time she thought to lie down and rest, she heard the black whispers in her head, bidding her not to stop. I must put an end to the Uylen. And this book…I have to know what the words inside it mean.
For hours and hours and hours, she walked. Her heart felt made of paper, fluttering in her chest as though about to tear itself to pieces. She glimpsed roving packs of Uylen more times than she could count, and as her shadow powers felt too tenuous to control, she was forced to find conventional ways to remain unheard. She threw hunks of rotting wood to di
stract her pallid hunters. She held her breath and slowed her heartbeat so they would not hear her. Whether in the pitch of night or the sickly shadows of day, she learned to wait and hide and remain all but dead until the monsters passed her by.
On her third day since fleeing the Uylen city, dawn’s dead light brightened to the grey glower of midday. The cold, steady rain dribbled into the forest, enough for her to cup her palms and drink a few drops down. After several mouthfuls, she shrugged off any thought of giving up and clambered back to her feet, the Pages Black tucked under her arm. Delirious, she marched on. How many white Uylen, black trees, and totems made of flesh she wandered by, she never could have said.
By late afternoon, the rains slowed. By then she was a pale, wet, wretched thing, and each stride she took was agony. Tired. Thirsty. Tired, Hungry. Tired. Dead, she thought a thousand times. What I would not give for a horse, a wafer of bread, or a sip of anything else but rain.
Night approached, chasing away the fragile daylight as relentlessly as a hunting wolf on her heels. She saw no sign of Nightmare’s end. Knowing she could not last much longer, she wept. Almost, she thought as she staggered, her tears sliding silently down her cheek. I almost made it. Jix told me only half a truth. He said I would find the Pages Black, and I did. But he never told me I would die before I made it out.
The grey twilight was upon her. Rather than let the last of the day shine upon her dying moments, she sprinted past some hundred trees and loped into a red-grassed glade, where the mist hovered wraithlike, and where dozens of burial mounds bulged from the fetid earth. Her legs gave out halfway across the clearing. She tumbled against a burial mound, and the Pages slid out of her grasp, landing in a run of scarlet reeds. The earth was cold, the gloom of night almost complete. She lay with her cheek in the grass, the dew like blood beading on her body. The shadows can claim me if they like, she thought. I do not care. Not anymore.
Some hundred breaths after her stumble, a sound in the woods startled her back from the brink of sleep. That was no Uylen. She sat up. Nor an animal. Nor the rain. But what?
“Rellen?” She forgot her fear of the Uylen and pried herself from the earth. “Love? Is that you? Garrett? Saul? Jix? Where are you? Help me!”
She heard a distant branch splinter and a thud like thunder rattle the woods beyond the glade. Her heart jumped back to life. Numb to her pain, she stood, tucked the Pages back under her arm, and staggered into a thicket of black-barked trees. Her grasp of the waking world faltered with each step. Too weak to walk for long, she descended to her knees and crawled from tree to tree. The stench of rotten soil swarmed over her, Nightmare’s ghoulish mists snaking up her nostrils and down her throat. She gagged more than once, but like a wounded animal dragged herself on. Do not slow down, Andelusia, she commanded herself. Do not stop to rest. Do not lie down. Do not dare die. Not here. Not yet.
She tracked the sounds of boots crashing through brambles. She crawled frantically, tearing her palms to tatters against the short, swordlike grass.
And then she saw a light.
The lantern’s blaze was the first such flare from the mortal world to touch her eyes in days. In the pitch, it looked like an orb of shining gold, brighter than the sun itself. The lantern lay in the grass, illuminating a plot of wet earth in the midst of some dozen Nightmare oaks. The Captain. She saw the shadow beyond the lantern and felt her heart stop and start again. How is he here?
As she crouched in the shadows just beyond the lantern’s light, she glimpsed the last person on earth she expected to see. Am I dreaming? She peered at the Captain from her hands and knees. The tireless soldier was busy at work, dragging Uylen corpses through the grass and tossing them in a gruesome pile. The pale creatures’ eyes were still open, their ghostly gazes no different than in life, but they are slain, she knew at a glance. He slaughtered them all. Who is this man?
From the shadows, she watched him. His raiment looked as though the Uylen had savaged him, but the casual ease with which he hurled his broken prey into the grave-pile told her otherwise. His twisted knot of dark hair dangled over the front of his left shoulder. His chin and cheeks were stained with crusted blood and his shirt was twice as tattered as hers, but beneath his rags he looked as alive and unhurt as she last had seen him. As he piled the dead Uylen high, she saw what he had done to them. Some were missing arms, others heads. Scores of sword punctures riddled the spaces between their ribs, while their bones, broken in battle, snapped and crackled as the Captain made the dead mountain higher.
Trembling like a willow leaf, she willed herself to stand. “Captain,” Her voice was a whisper dying in her throat. “Over here.”
He dropped the last of the Uylen dead atop the mound and clapped his hands clean of the dust from the creature’s bones. “You are just in time,” he said. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
He is not even surprised, she thought. He looks as though we talked just ten breaths ago. She wobbled toward him, teetering like a baby learning her very first steps. Her legs gave out when she was just ten paces away, and as she knelt in the grass, she held out the Pages Black. “Here. It spoke to me. It led me straight to it. It wanted me to find it.”
“Good.” He tore his twin blades out of the earth and slid them back into their rotting sheaths. “Keep it. Better in your hands than mine.”
“There is a city in the forest.” She nodded blearily to the trees behind her. “I have never seen something so huge. You should have been there. The Uylen must have built it...before they changed.”
He came to her. As he approached, she saw his body beneath his tatters of clothes. He was not a large man, neither tall nor broad, but under his shirt he was nothing but hard, striated sinew, his lean arms cabled with muscles ordinary men did not possess. Even so. She glanced to the Uylen pile. He could not have killed them all. Look at him. Not a scratch on him.
He took her by the hand and pulled her to her feet. She felt fragile as glass in his grasp, near to shattering.
“We never doubted you.” His grin unsettled her. “We knew you were the one.”
“How?”
“It will be explained. Now, keep the book close and follow me. The Uylen are dying. They need what you have, and they will hunt us until they perish or you hang from the trees, whichever comes first.”
“Wait.” She halted behind him. “How are you alive? I saw them kill you. I saw them sweep over you. And the soldier boys, they…”
“Dead? Me?” He licked his teeth. “I will die at the hour of my choosing. Until then neither man nor beast may bleed me.”
It is not a boast, she thought as she fell in behind him. He believes it. She wondered how long he had been in the forest, how many Uylen he had slaughtered. I am safe with him, she reckoned. Safer than with Rellen, perhaps even safer than with Garrett. The Uylen might send every monster they have after us, and he will butcher them all.
“Ser Captain,” she staggered after him. “Do you think Jix might allow me a few peeks at the book? Might I study it for an hour or so before he destroys it?”
“He will allow you better than that, little one,” he said. “Best not to fret for it now. We are not free, not yet.”
“Where are we going?”
“Home.”
She did not know where home was. She supposed she did not care. The Captain could take her anywhere: to Denawir, to Furyon, to the haunted seas beyond Shivershore; it did not matter. She was Nightmare’s conqueror, the finder of the Pages Black. She trailed the Captain into the darkness, his lantern’s glow fading, and with every step deeper into the night, she felt stronger. I need no food, she remembered. I want no drink. The night will replenish me. Jix knew this would happen. He always knew. He put his faith into me, and I have rewarded him.
The hours fled past her. The Captain led, and she followed like a lamb. At some dark, dismal hour of the morning, after marching through thousands of black thickets, she arrived at Nightmare’s northern edge. The Captain’s lantern w
as dead. In the dark, the miserable grasslands beyond the trees stretched out before her. The rain was gone, but the wind tore the fallen water from the grass and hurled it across her. I should be freezing. But no, I feel warm. It must be some power of the Pages.
Dark Moon Daughter Page 23
