Tears burned her eyes. Fear threatened to drive her pounding heart out of her chest. The world blurred and swirled before her eyes, but she just pressed the old horse faster and faster.
Their house was a bit away from the village. It was useful in that most of the town was not aware of the odd hours of Keturah’s comings and goings, but it also meant that Jacob remained unprotected while Keturah was gone. “Jacob!” she screamed in a panicked sob when she saw the open front door. Before the horse was completely stopped, Keturah threw herself from her mount, shirt flying open, and raced into the house.
“Jacob!” she screamed, her voice reaching a shrill and terrified pitch. Not in the living room. Her feet scrapped along the floor, hardly making contact with it. Not in the kitchen. She bound up the ladder to the loft where they slept. She paid no mind to the broken furniture, broken windows. None of it mattered. Nothing but him.
“Mother!” She found him there, pressed as far as his little body could fit into the corner. He was curled up and, by the smell, had soiled himself in fright. Keturah didn’t care.
“Jacob!” she screamed and scrambled on her hands and knees (since the loft was not tall enough for even she to stand in) over to where he was and grabbed him. She checked him at once. “Are you hurt?” she cried, gasping now, her whole body shaking. “What happened? Are you okay?” Jacob was crying too hard to say anything understandable, and when Keturah was certain that no harm had been done to the boy, she clutched him to her chest and clenched her eyes in rage, rocking him back and forth.
Her hair lay in wild clumps against her red and wind-lashed face, and her whole body ached. She hoped beyond hope that she had not injured her horse, but she would not regret it if she had. The horse could be replaced. The windows, furniture. Hell, the whole house could be replaced. But Jacob…not Jacob.
“I’m so sorry,” Keturah whispered, kissing his head again and again before laying her cheek against it, rocking him back and forth, clenching her eyes. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry…”
There was a sudden crash, a shattering of glass, and Keturah cried out in alarm, thrusting the boy behind her. The rock lay harmless on their bed coverings, and Keturah pushed Jacob back into the far corner before going to the broken window. There, standing easily with his hands in his pockets, stood Alexzander’s man ominously in the ruined garden. In the darkness, she could barely make out the powerful frame: the brown slacks and leather boots, the black shirt and the dark blue cloak. The hood was pulled down, covering his eyes. She could see only the crooked thrust of his nose and a thin, hard mouth. “You belong to him, Ketan,” he called to her, voice like slick poison in her ears. “Finish it.”
Keturah scowled at him with every ounce of strength and rage within her until the man turned and left calmly through the little three-foot garden door, even pausing to close it considerately behind him before going back out to his horse and mounting. Keturah waited until the sound of the horse was long faded into the night, until the only sound was her labored breathing and her pounding heart.
She felt as if her whole body was shaking. Her face was wet with tears and her eyes burned with them. She felt tired and old, and her breast throbbed from where Alexzander had twisted it in his grasp. She sat back on her legs and looked over at Jacob. She hadn’t realized it, but every muscle in her body had clenched up tightly, and releasing them now, they trembled in pain and anxiousness. “He’s gone…” Keturah breathed, barely more than a whisper, and opened up one arm. Jacob scrambled into it, burying himself against her.
Chapter Three
It was dark, and Keturah was uncommonly grateful that she was so small and light. On the roof of the thatched inn, she removed her shoes, leaving only her black slacks and black tunic; she listened quietly to the inside of the inn, laying low against the back of the roof. The guards would be in the halls and by the windows, but their Eastern kind were far too heavy to scale the roof. Keturah did not cause any more disturbance on the roof than a bird or squirrel would, slinking along on her belly to the far edge, her head down by the side to listen for sounds of sleep.
The men stayed up late into the night, muttering about this and that, until one of them, she assumed the leader, Menawa, roared with so great a bellow that the whole inn shook. Keturah winced and held her ground on the roof, not even daring to breathe until the trembling subsided and the men stilled into dull murmurs once more. She was well acquainted by now with that terrible thunder of his voice. She remembered the previous night and how he had nearly shaken the whole inn as he had debated with his wife. Again, the fear of almost certain death encroached upon her, but Keturah swallowed it down. Dead or not, Jacob would be killed if she failed. Death was fine. Failure was not.
At long last, she heard the men leave for their own rooms and Menawa plopped onto his bed, the heavy wood groaning in agony. “We will leave at daybreak,” he rumbled in a low, tired tone to his wife, and Keturah heard the tell-tale kathunk…kathunk of two heavy boots being stripped off and deposited upon the floor. His wife said nothing in return, and Keturah listened as the pair settled into bed and let silence stretch on between them.
After a short while, a small, rhythmic thunder of snoring filled the room. Keturah refused the sigh in her chest and waited until the booming snore was joined by a softer, quieter one. She almost smiled.
With the lightness of a sparrow, Keturah eased herself down onto the window ledge and spied into the room. The two great lumps in the bed were completely lax, a foot twitching now and again like a puppy chasing a rabbit would do. She quietly pushed in the rusted old window pane. It made a soft creak, and once it was open Keturah went very still, listening, waiting, watching for any sort of change.
The thunder still gurgled away in the room and the steady march outside the door continued. The lady sighed and shifted in the bed, turning onto her back. Keturah waited until once again, the lady’s mouth parted to join in the soft song her husband snored, and Keturah stepped soundlessly inside. The dragon-bone rose had been left on the chest at the foot of the bed, and Keturah looked this way and that with suspicion. But she saw no charms, and nor did the state of the two sleeping giants from the East change.
So great was her relief and anguish when her fingers closed around the heavy rose that she did not notice how the room had gone quiet and still with reverence. The great, booming thunder had come to a halt. And then, the silence hit her like a tidal wave. Her head shot up, but she didn’t even see whether is was the bride or groom who struck her.
She went soaring across the room and into the wall. Her head rung from the tree-like arm that laid the blow to her head before it crashed into the wall, and her ears sang with so sharp and painful a screech. Her bones felt like liquid, but she struggled up, wavering, hearing the heavy thuds of feet pound all around her—from which direction, she had no clue. Her eyes searched desperately for the rose, and then another blow came and knocked her to the ground.
She roared out in pain as her shoulder snapped out of place, and the whole room spun and threatened to turn black despite the golden glow of candles everywhere burning in her vision, circling, spinning, swaying with the most sickening of motions as Keturah slumped and fought to stand. Her heart beat hard and heavy in her own ears. She could feel blood running slick and wet down at least one side of her face, and her shoulder was on fire.
“Hold!” cried a powerful voice and she recognized it as a woman’s.
Hands had seized Keturah and drew her up, but something had stopped the killing blow. Keturah’s head rolled back, and she tried to pull it forward, to bring it up on her own. She was breathing so hard. “There,” said the woman, although Regina’s face—or rather, the three visions of her face that Keturah saw—were circling around in front of her, refusing to sit still. She was suddenly glad that the stew had been thin that night. “Look at his hands. What is that on his hands?”
“Boy!” roared the great lord, and cold, used water from the wash basin was tossed onto Keturah
. It was enough to stir her to consciousness (since she hadn’t even realized that the world had turned black), and she clenched and unclenched her eyes, focusing on the great beast of a man standing in front of her. “Your hands, boy!” he roared. “My wife asked you a question!”
“I answer to no one,” Keturah hissed.
A sharp blow to the back of her knees begged to differ, and Keturah hit her knees on the floor, sitting there as she tried to gather her bearings. The woman, who was no delicate thing but boldly lovely, held the rose in her hands protectively, but was looking at Keturah’s hands which were forcibly held in front of her. “What is that black stain on your hands?” she asked again. “Is it a curse? A sickness?”
“What?” Keturah hissed, having a hard time understanding. Menawa raised his hand as if to strike again—although Keturah wasn’t sure that she would wake up from another blow—but his wife laid a hand on her husband’s arm.
“The black stain on your hands,” she said patiently, as if to a child.
Keturah’s head cleared enough to notice the state of her own hands, small, but calloused and rough, the bottoms and edges of which bore a dark gray, almost black tint. She sighed heavily. “The earth,” she said gruffly, a slurred murmur. “The soil here is black.”
“You are a gardener?” the wife inquired.
Keturah nodded and then thought better of it, wincing and grinding her teeth before hissing, “Yesss…”
“What do you grow?” she asked persistently.
Keturah was so confused by the bombardment of questions that she was very certain now that she had either lost her mind and her ears were no longer connected to her head or she was quite unconscious and having very strange dreams where the real world should be. “A bit of everything …potatoes…beets…pumpkins…some fruits…”
“What of…of bushes and flowers?” she insisted.
Keturah dragged her head up to meet Regina’s eyes, giving her the strangest of looks. Finally, she gasped out a sigh and said hoarsely, “Yeah…I s’pose…I don’t have need for them, but they’re not so different if you know how to treat ‘em…”
From that, Keturah was interrogated no farther. The woman withdrew to speak insistently with her husband, and Keturah could no longer hold fast to consciousness. It all faded and ebbed around her, and had it not come so soon and swift, she was quite sure that she would have spilled her stomach on the floor.
◆◆◆
Keturah was surprised that she awoke at all. She stirred on the floor, feeling pressure on her wrists and ankles. She tugged, finding them bound behind her. A chill told her quickly that her shirt had been removed, although the bindings on her chest were still wrapped up tightly, and her pants were on. So perhaps they did not know after all…or perhaps that was why she was alive. She released a sigh, shifting around. She heard some sounds, but her brain was still piecing together the events of the night before.
A golden glow in the room told her that it was dawn, and she groaned, clenched and unclenched her eyes, looking around as she struggled to sit up. Someone roughly kicked her back down. “Stop that,” snapped Menawa’s wife, and she went toe to toe with a man much bigger than her but clearly resembling her, a son perhaps, or a little brother. The Darkwaters clan were all of some kinship together. She came around to Keturah and crouched in front of her. “Are you awake, boy?” she said, although her voice was firm and unforgiving. So they did not know after all.
“Can I ask why?” Keturah grumbled irritably, not a morning person to begin with, much less in this situation. She sat up, and when she was not kicked down again, she began to test her binds and take in her surroundings. A great bear of a man stood on either side of her, and the woman was crouched in front of her, her husband scowling and imposing behind her. “Where’s my shirt?” Keturah grumbled, looking around until it was tossed in her face. Keturah shook her head to get it off of it, and it fell half on her leg, before she gave a resolute glare to the man who had tossed it.
“We have a proposition for you,” the woman said, snapping her fingers in front of Keturah to get her attention.
“I’m not a dog,” Keturah growled, grinding her teeth, but the woman seemed beyond reproach.
“Would you like to keep your life?” Keturah shut her mouth, eyeing the woman suspiciously. Her heart was pounding. What about Jacob? Had anyone told them about Jacob? Was he alright? Keturah’s teeth clenched harder. “You are a gardener, an uncommon trade for a man.”
“Is that a question?” Keturah replied, but when the woman frowned, she huffed a sigh. “There are no women in my house. I learn what I have to in order to get by.”
She gave a single nod. “And flowers too?”
“Yes!” Keturah yelped and swore when the sudden burst of pain faded. “What the hell is all this about?”
The woman did not seem bothered, instead giving a single nod. “Good. Then I have a job for you. There is a mansion far from here and no gardener to tend it. Winter is almost here, so I realize that there is not much that you can do, but if you go there and live through the next planting season and restore the lands there, we will cancel your debt.”
“What debt!” screamed the young woman. “That rose doesn’t belong to you! That is the Hawthorne Rose!”
The Darkwaters lady shut her mouth and watched Keturah with unknown intent for a moment before asking calmly, “Will you go?”
“To be a gardener?” Keturah asked. “You’re kidding. Get someone else. I’m not a damn house servant. I’m a thief.”
“And look where that’s brought you,” said she, and now Keturah was the one to shut her mouth. She huffed a sigh. “The few competent men we find will not stay…and you are the first to seem constitute enough to remain where others have not…”
Keturah narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
She looked uncertain then, studying what she thought was a young man in front of her. She glanced back at her husband who only scowled deeper before she sighed and put her eyes on Keturah once more. “We have…an agreement with a sorcerer there. He is powerful and his spells protect our lands and our people…but, he is cursed and thus terrifies most of the visitors…few stay.”
“And what makes you think that I would stay?” Keturah snapped back. She was tired, irate. She felt sick and her head was spinning.
“Three reasons,” the woman said simply. “Because first of all, we have told no one who the thief is. Should you stay, I am sure with a reasonable excuse, you can return to your normal life here.” Keturah scowled at her. “Second, because you have a much stronger…constitution than many full grown men who have gone…I do not believe that you are coward enough to leave even if you were afraid. And third,” she turned her eyes level with Keturah’s, studying her intently, “if you refuse, I will see to it personally that you are drawn and quartered. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
Keturah gave her a long, level look. Assuming that Alexzander spared Jacob’s life, how was he supposed to survive the winter? He was already so small…no. She couldn’t go. “Sorry,” Keturah snapped, and the woman narrowed her eyes in surprise.
“Look here,” she snapped, “You can either kill me or let me go and be on your way. Turn me in if you want,” she had at least the small chance of being run out of town with her son and laying low for a while.
“Why not?” the woman replied, clearly frustrated.
“You are wasting your time with this dog,” snarled her husband, and the lady gave him an impatient look before sighing and turning her eyes back to Keturah.
“I don’t need to give a reason,” snapped the thief. “I said that I won’t do it.”
The woman studied her for a moment, then stood up. “I don’t think you really understand your situation. Either you go or we drag you out to the town square and reveal you and relieve you of your limbs.” Keturah paled, but the woman stood up. “Manok, stay with him. Jasan, guard the door.” It was not needed security, but the Lady Darkwaters was known for being a very ca
utious woman, and rightly so. The woman stood, but crouching so long had cut off her blood flow, and she swayed just a bit.
In an instant, Menawa was a solid shield and statue at her side, one hand on her elbow, the other on her hip, crowding up behind her and blocking out all of the light. Keturah was grateful for the escape of the piercing needles in her head, but having the man so near was really pushing her fight-or-flight impulse, neither of which were possible with her bound up that way. Once the Lady Darkwaters was steady, her husband led her out, and Keturah was left alone in the room with the great giant named Manok.
She looked up at him, frowning, but the man scarcely considered her. On her own, Keturah pushed herself up into a more comfortable sitting position with her hands behind her (which was killing her swollen shoulder). She leaned back against the wall and just breathed for a moment. Her brain was having trouble working at all from all the blows that she had endured over the past few hours. She just leaned her head back and closed her eyes, trying not to fall asleep or be sick. She sighed, hitting her head against the wall (and reminding herself in her own stupidity why her head hurt in the first place). She groaned and closed her eyes, leaning her head forward.
“Put your head between your knees.” The voice was so rich and deep. Not quite aged and gravelly the way Menawa’s was, but a strong, sure thrum. Keturah looked up, confused, and realized that the great sound had come from the giant by the window with his arms crossed in front of his powerful chest. He looked over at her, as if confirming that it was he who had spoken. “It will help. You look green,” he explained, and then said again, “Put your head between your legs.”
She gave him a dubious look, and although it did little to help the pounding in her ears, Keturah put her head between her knees and just breathed for a long moment until the world stopped spinning and slowly righted itself in her vision and in her head. How long had Jacob been left alone? Had he eaten anything this morning? What if he was ill? His brow had been a little warm the morning before… she needed to be sure that he was alright.
Rose Borne Page 3
