He shrugged the idea off. Books, blood, and power. She should know by now none of these things matter to me.
“So then, Garrett Croft, slayer of hundreds, destroyer of Furyon, why do you look away? It’s just me. I’m not under father’s spell. I’m here, with you.”
“I look away because I must.”
“You must?”
“Whether you are the work of the enemy or as real as the rain, I cannot tell the difference. I remind myself I should think only of what lies ahead, of all the evils surrounding me. But then I catch you in the corner of my eye and my better senses fall to pieces.”
“What are you saying?”
“I have not felt this way before. Not during my younger years, not even when you and I met on our way to Shivershore. Even your sister…she…”
“You’ve a fever.” She laid her palm against his forehead. “You should lie down. We can stay here if we need. I’ve food enough for days.”
“I am not sick. I am confessing. I cannot deny it a moment more. I am meant for grave things, Ona. Your father and Grimwain…I must destroy them. But here in the rain, I am distracted. I see you and I want to touch you.”
She basked in his words for many breaths, and for a time the only sound was the rain’s steady stroke against the earth. Then she stirred to life, rising to her feet and drifting back beneath the rain. She stood, showering again, inviting him with her smile.
“Garrett…” she began, but he was already upon her.
The next moments consumed him. Ona was no longer the slinking, predatory nymph from many months ago. He snared her shoulders, and she warmed to his touch, the rain steaming from her skin. He kissed her, and she kissed harder. He cupped her bottom and lifted her from the ground, and she clung to him as though he were a mountain and she its climber. The rain crashed against him, and for some hundred breaths he consumed her with his mouth. Then came a crack of thunder, persuading him to carry her beneath the rock.
“We should not…” He broke away for a half-breath.
“We should.” She seized him back.
His tension drained from his body. He hauled her onto his lap and pushed her frock from her shoulders. With his hands he wandered over her neck and breasts, the heat of her skin igniting him. He tasted the rain on her lips and drowned in the languorous smoldering of her eyes. She kissed him harder than beneath the orchard trees, her touch bringing him to the brink, but not quite over the edge. Still clothed, still steamy-eyed, he paused.
“Don’t stop,” she said. “Garrett, please. Kiss me again.”
He listened. The rain drummed in his ears, but he heard something beyond it. Closing his eyes, he imagined he heard footsteps. Two sets of boots. A man’s voice. Someone clomping in the mud. No, I am imagining it.
“Garrett?”
“It was nothing.” He kissed her. He felt her bottom grinding in his lap, and he might have taken her then and there. If not for...
“Garrett?” She grasped his collar. “What’s the matter? You went away. Come back to me.”
He wanted to forget the world and fall so far into her he might never return. When he pulled her off his lap and saw the fire dwindle in her eyes, he hated himself more than a little.
“Stay here,” he told her. “I will return.”
He stood. She looked up at him with eyes wide and wet. The deluge rent the earth all around the rock, tearing shallow ruts up and down the hillside. The clouds, black and grey, hugged the earth, close enough for him to touch. He stepped out from the rock roof, and the rain consumed him, just like Ona.
Shielding his eyes, he rounded the rock and gazed into the gloom at the hill’s bottom. I will see nothing, he willed himself. Let us be alone.
But he was not alone.
Thirty paces downslope, two Thillrian men stood in the rain. Both grinned like hungry wolves, both garbed in black tabards and steel-knuckled gloves. One carried a crossbow, nocked and ready to kill. The other wore a belt from which a longsword and two daggers dangled. He froze at the sight of them, his muscles tightening beneath his skin, the memory of Ona’s hands against his body breaking to pieces inside him.
“The warlock’s men,” he said to them. “Brave of him to send only two.”
The two stalked closer. The first leveled his crossbow at Garrett’s chest, while the other drew out his longsword.
“We’re not his,” said the swordsman. “We’re the other’s.”
“I see,” he growled. He means Grimwain.
The Thillrian with the crossbow took one step closer. “Where’s the girl?” he snarled. “A pretty thing, the younger one. Bring her out.”
She led them to me, he thought at first. No. Her kiss was real. They came for both of us.
“I am the one you want.” He glowered through the rain. “She is only a girl, no deadlier than the rain.”
“A girl?” snorted the swordsman. “Hardly. You know what she is. Everyone does. Doesn’t matter, your old blood, nor hers neither. It’s all red to us.”
He stiffened, waiting for death, but then he heard a sound he did not want to hear. Pattering through the rain, Ona slipped down the slope and halted beside him.
“Garrett?” she shuddered. “Are we in trouble?”
“We are.” His gaze darkened.
“Who are you? What do you want?” she snapped at the Thillrians.
“You shouldn’t have run off.” The crossbowman’s finger tightened on the trigger.
“Father would’ve kept me there forever. I’d have been a crone, my life wasted, had I stayed.””
“Aye, maybe,” said the swordsman. “But you’d have been safe. Don’t you know anything, stupid girl? He didn’t keep you in the dark as a prisoner. He kept you there to protect you…from us.”
“Lies.” The thunder boomed when she said it.
“Not lies,” laughed the crossbowman. “You’re a distraction, girlie. Your father has better things to do. We’re a reminder to him. It’s a shame, all this rain. Else we’d have killed you while you were fucking.”
Garrett glared down the hill. He imagined the Thillrians were only two from a host of hundreds, if not thousands. Fuming inside, he looked to Ona, whose eyes were wet with fear instead of rain. You should have let me die in my cage, he wanted to tell her.
“If I’m a distraction,” she shouted at the Thillrians. “why not let me go? We’ll never trouble father again. Will we, Garrett? Let us alone and we’ll leave Thillria forever. We swear it.”
Garrett knew what was coming. He saw the Thillrians’ smirks and felt every tendon in his body tighten. The crossbowman clicked his trigger, and the bolt whistled through the rain. He winced and turned his shoulder. Survive long enough to kill them both, he thought. And send Ona running.
The pain never arrived.
Ona, brave and foolish, leapt before him. The dread quarrel might have missed him, but instead plunged into the side of her breast. Almost gracefully, she slumped to her knees, where she sputtered and shook like a leaf.
“It hurts,” she whimpered. “Oh Garrett, it hurts! Please…pull it out of me! Garrett, please…”
He did not recognize his next feeling. As Ona wilted beneath him, he shook with sudden, uncontainable rage. He curled his fists like gathering storm clouds, and he abandoned all but his most murderous thoughts.
“What did you do?” he roared. “What…did…you…do?”
The Thillrians stared dumbly at him. Ripping a blunt-nosed rock from the soft hillside, he hurled the chunk of stone into the swordsman’s face. When he saw the fountain of blood erupting, he charged the crossbowman, tackling the broad-shouldered man to the ground. In a half-breath he mounted the poor Thillrian, ripped his crossbow away, and hammered its butt end into the helpless man’s forehead until the wood and the soil ran with the same crimson color.
He stood and faced the other.
“Ach! Just as well! More silver for my cupboard!” the Thillrian snarled, his face a bloody ruin. “I should thank you.�
�
Garrett remembered what it felt like to be at war. A hundred men, maybe, he thought. Only two Thillrians, never in this lifetime. He moved like the wind. Gliding around the Thillrian’s hacks, he snatched the swordsman’s wrists, jerked him to the ground, and pinned his swordarm beneath his knee. The Thillrian begged, but Garrett withdrew the first dagger from the man’s belt and sheathed the weapon in the Thillrian’s belly. The Thillrian writhed and spit and cursed, but could only watch as Garrett did the same with the second dagger, burying the blade so deeply between his ribs that its point came to rest in the soil below.
The Thillrian gurgled as his last breaths escaped. Garrett’s hate subsided. He stood in a cloud of steam from the Thillrian corpses and bolted straight for Ona.
“Wake up.” He cradled her. “If you have the old blood, this is not how you die.” She lay right where he had left her. The rain beaded on her face, her frock falling from her shoulders, kept up by the quarrel.
“Garrett.” A line of blood trickled down her chin. “It’s poison, Garrett. It hurts. Oh…it hurts. Take it out.”
Poison. Meant for me, he thought. “Look at me, Ona,” he bid her. “If I take the bolt out, it will only hurt more. I will carry you to the rock. Take a breath, if you can.”
“No.” She weakly slapped his hand away. “Don’t carry me. Let me stay here. I like the rain. It feels good. Doesn’t it, Garrett? It’s warm. It’s like summer. I could die in it.”
He knew. He had known the moment she had found him in the night. He cradled her closer. She rested her head against his chest. The rain, cold as death, pelted him hard enough to hurt, but he never moved. She looked up at him, eyes bright and gold, lips curled in a faint smile. “I’ll sleep,” she whispered again and again. “I’ll sleep, and tomorrow we’ll be together. Just one night, Garrett. I’ll sleep. Everything will be well.”
He did not move again until he felt her body begin to cool. She gazed skyward, but the gold in her eyes faded to grey. Her lips were white in death, her cheeks devoid of color. The poison. He felt his blood turning black inside him. The wound was shallow. She would have lived, but for the poison. He pushed the rain from her face and pulled her frock above her shoulders. He lifted her limp body and carried her to the rocks, and he realized that for all the blood he had seen spilled in war, none of it had ever mattered to him.
Until now.
He had never wept before then. Hard and stoic, he had never felt the need. Even now he resisted it, swallowing the lumps in his throat like cold stones from a riverbed. Beneath the rock roof, he parted Ona’s hair and looked upon her face a final time, but instead of serenity he saw her gaze as cold and empty as the seas beyond Shivershore. He wished the quarrel had struck him instead, for then we would both be lost, and our bodies at rest beside each other. As the rain made a ragged thing of the hillside, he let himself weep, sobbing over Ona until no emotion remained.
With Ona’s death, the better part of him withered and died. After using the Sarcophage sword to dig her grave beside the pond lake, he stood alone by the water, thinking thoughts he had not allowed himself to consider for many years. The rain fled, replaced by a miserable twilight, and dark ideas began to swell inside him. He clutched the Thillrian’s longsword, swaying it over the shore, glowering like an angry moon across the water.
“Death shall be a glorious thing.” He spoke to the night. “No matter what the fates of Saul, Rellen, and Ande might be, I will blacken the earth with my vengeance. A thousand years I will live if I must. Whole armies will I slaughter in their sleeps, and entire swaths of stars will I rip from the sky to hunt my prey. Furyon will seem a pale shadow of what happens here. Death to the warlock. Death to the creature Grimwain. Death to any who helped them, stood beside them, or wandered unknowingly across their path.”
Night came, and his blood cooled, a moribund winter settling inside him. His every breath was shadowed by fresh fantasies of destruction and despair. After so many years, the Garrett of better days was gone, and the Garrett of old at last reborn.
I should have listened to you. He knelt beside Ona’s tomb one final time. West of Thillria, you and I should have fled. I told myself I owed allegiance to your sister and Rellen, but it was false. I was a coward. I dared not believe your love could be true. And for my weakness, I shall never know you again.
Bones
She remembered her dream, but little else.
In the darkness of sleep, she drifted back to an age she could not know. She saw the Ur striding through a smoky, sunless realm, a land of shadows, black towers, lifeless oceans, and fields of bones. Alone, she ambled for what felt like centuries. This is the world that is, that will be, she dreamed. It will last longer than all the eras of mankind. It will never end. She lived a thousand lifetimes in the dream, naked, covered in ash, the last living creature at the edge of the Ur civilization. She hated it, but a part of her never wanted to leave.
When Andelusia crept back to semi-consciousness, she tasted blood on her tongue. He gaze was blurry, the clouds from her dream filling her head.
Where am I? She lifted her head from her pillow.
Crickets chirruped beyond the window. Shadows pooled on the floor. A lantern hung from the wall by a rusted nail, casting its temperate glow on the stacked stone walls of the dwelling she lay within. A house. She peered all around. A small house. Still in Lune. The world has yet to end.
She propped herself up on her elbows. She lay on a soft bed, half-buried in blankets. The bandages on her wrists had been replaced, and the grime on her hands washed away. Even her shabby shirt and ugly breeches were missing, replaced by an olive-shaded tunic and skirt.
I am not alone.
Seated at a wooden table only a few paces away, Lilia, an old man, and a young woman whispered beneath the lamplight. Andelusia cleared her throat, and all three fell silent.
“How long has it been?” she asked them.
Lilia stood and strode to the bed. Her pale cheeks soaked up the lantern’s ruddy light, her stringy grey hair a riot beneath her handkerchief. “We thought you might never wake,” she sighed, “Do you remember us?”
“Yes. I woke up on your hill.”
Lilia managed a slender smile. “Good. This is Greckan, my father. And Faye, my niece.” She nodded at the old man and the young Thillrian maiden. “You’ve been asleep since yesterday. You were fitful, thrashing and calling out names. We’ve been watching you in shifts. You scared everyone witless.”
“Sorry for that.” She shrugged.
“No need. We should thank you. You made the grey men go away. We know the truth now, that only a few of the warlock’s men are real. The rest are ghosts made to frighten us.”
“And the man with the painted face,” she recalled her last moments before blacking out, “did I murder him?”
“No. You let him go. We’ve never seen a man so terrified.”
Relieved, she rose beside Lilia. She looked herself over, flexing her fingers and toes, feeling herself for injuries she had none of. The dwelling’s hearth popped and hissed on the far side of the house. She sensed the frigid night air gliding through the shutters, but she felt as warm as ever.
“This is far from over.”
“What do you mean?” said Lilia.
“Until I drag father from his tower and take that damnable book of his away, he will become ever more powerful, ever more dangerous. This village will not be safe.”
Dark Moon Daughter Page 38
