The Prisoner of Silverwood Castle

by Marie Treanor

  “Oh, trust me, it does,” Barbara said.

  I was still staring at the dark stairs in weird fascination. Without conscious agreement, the three of us began to walk slowly towards it. The lights from the hall penetrated only so far up the staircase, and it seemed to me, just at the area where darkness and light fused, a shape hovered, as if trying to cross the barrier.

  “Maybe it doesn’t like the light,” I said hopefully.

  Kasimir dropped my hand and strode towards the stairs.

  “Kasimir!” I warned, trying to tug free of Barbara to go after him, but she held on.

  “Stay here,” she commanded. “It wants you, remember?”

  I gave in, because Kasimir had only gone under the stairs, where, I saw now, a heap of candles lay. He picked up handfuls and dumped them at the foot of the stairs and immediately lit one from the nearest flame. Quickly and efficiently, he lit a ring of candles all the way around the staircase. It brightened the area considerably. I could no longer see the hovering shape.

  “Has it gone?” I asked Barbara hopefully.

  “No,” she said. “No. But I think…I think it’s watching. Kasimir, come back. I’m going to try to talk to it.”

  Kasimir gazed at her over his shoulder for a moment, then shrugged and began to walk back to us.

  But now it was I who held on to Barbara’s hand. “You said you couldn’t communicate with such things.”

  “This isn’t like any thing I’ve ever come across before. Don’t worry. There are layers of consciousness. I won’t let it past the first. Wait here.”

  Reluctantly, I let her go. Kasimir put one arm around my waist, drawing me into his side. He seemed more curious than worried.

  “Come, then,” Barbara said as she came to a halt at the foot of the stairs. “Let’s chat.”

  Something moved then. I knew it, though I couldn’t really see it, like a ripple of air rushing. The candle flames at the foot of the stairs all blew towards Barbara and went out. At the same time, Barbara staggered backwards with a cry and fell.

  “Barbara!” As one, Kasimir and I started towards her, but she threw up one warning hand, clearly commanding us to stay back. Kasimir halted, his hand at my waist holding me back too.

  Barbara’s body heaved. She let out a groan of surely profound agony. Kasimir’s fingers dug into my waist.

  “Christ, I’m sorry,” he whispered, for it was his pain she felt, and he knew it better than anyone.

  “No,” Barbara gasped. “No! Enough!”

  She hurled herself forward and then scrambled to her feet, backing towards us.

  “What happened?” I demanded. “Did you expel it?”

  Barbara nodded as I grasped her hand hard. But there was horror in her face as she turned it up to Kasimir’s. “You lived with that?”

  “You know I did. What else did you learn?”

  She drew in a shaky breath. “How to disperse it. It has no will but the urges you gave it at its birth. It only exists. I can break it up with my mind.”

  “Don’t let it back inside you,” I pleaded.

  “It will just be for a moment.” She reached beyond me for Kasimir’s free hand. He gave it, frowning with incomprehension. But she only held it and mine for a moment, as if drawing strength from us. Then she dropped our hands and again advanced. “Very well,” she said, aiming her gaze and her voice somewhere closer than the foot of the stairs, which made me want to back much further away. I held on to Kasimir’s waist for courage.

  “Come back,” Barbara invited, lifting her arms.

  Again, I was sure I saw that ripple of air. I could swear it blew back Barbara’s hair, tugging it from its pins. But it didn’t stop. A chill seemed to rush around the hall.

  “Kasimir!” Barbara shouted, stumbling towards us. “It’s going for Guin!”

  Abruptly, he stepped forward, pushing me behind him. I clutched on to him in fear for him, crying his name.

  His body jerked, forcing mine back and back with his until I thought he’d fall on me.

  “Oh no,” Barbara all but wailed. “Oh no…”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Kasimir didn’t fall. He halted and straightened, and slowly his arm, which had been stretched behind to protect me, fell to his side.

  I walked around him. Barbara was already there. We both stared up at him.

  “Kasimir, I’m so sorry,” Barbara whispered, her face contorted with pity. “Take my hands. I can get it out of you.”

  “It’s in him?” I gasped. Of course it was. I knew. I’d felt it enter his body with the force of a cannonball. I’d just wanted to be wrong.

  Kasimir drew in a shuddering breath. He looked from Barbara to me, his eyes glowing amber like some wild animal’s, before darkening rapidly to sheer black. He threw back his head, and I had the impression that he was somehow growing. Dread closed up my throat, paralysed me. Slowly, his eyes came back into focus on me. No longer black, they seemed a darker blue than I remembered. But perhaps it was just the light and imagination,

  Quite unexpectedly, he smiled.

  Something in my heart leapt in instant response; I didn’t know if it was fear or a sudden blast of attraction.

  “It’s basic exorcism,” Barbara said urgently. “Almost as easy as blinking. Especially if you push and I pull. I’ll disperse it as it comes.”

  Kasimir raised his arms, put both hands on Barbara’s shoulders. “No.”

  She frowned. “What?”

  “It’s me,” Kasimir said apologetically. “I expelled all that because it was…inconvenient. But I missed it. I didn’t realise how much until it came back. It’s as if…as if I’m whole again.”

  I peered up into his face, absorbing his male beauty, the sheer, hard feel of him. I felt that thrill again, deeper, more profound.

  “Oh Kasimir, no,” Barbara whispered. She reached up, touching his face with shaking hands, pleading with him. They looked like lovers, and yet I felt no jealousy. I knew this was something else entirely. “You can’t, you mustn’t live with this. For your own sake. For your country’s. You got rid of it to be the duke. To be Guin’s husband.”

  “It scared me,” he admitted. “I’d been taught to fear it, and with some cause. But I know my strength now. I can bear it. And I can control it. All the pain, all the madness, if you like. These things are in all of us. I may have a little more than most, but it’s mine. I…I need it.”

  Tears trickled from Barbara’s eye, running down her cheeks. “You don’t need that, Kasimir. No one does.”

  She knew the evil, agonized part of him more intimately than I ever would. It had been inside her, part of her. But I knew the stronger portion. I understood his endurance and, gazing into his face, feeling the very stance of his body, assured and poised, I knew he was right. That he was whole.

  “We all need our own pain,” I said. “We may not like it, but it makes us who we are. This is who he is, Barbara.”

  Her gaze flickered to me and slowly, she dropped her hands. “You claimed the dukedom without it,” she pointed out, like a last gasp.

  “Maybe that was the right thing to do. Now I need this…urgency, even brutality, to get things done.” A smile flickered across his face. “Besides, I don’t think Guin would love me so much without it.”

  I wanted to protest. I’d always loved him, the half-mad prisoner, the reckless escapee, the returning duke. But somehow, his being whole gave the feeling new depth, new meaning, like a bottomless, turbulent ocean beneath a calm, merely rippling surface.

  Barbara swallowed. He still held her by the shoulders. “Controlled brutality,” she pleaded.

  “Well-controlled. I would never hurt her, Barbara. I couldn’t.”

  “It was trying to keep her,” she said with a sudden twitch of her brow. “For you.”

  “Us. Me.” He shook his
head. “This is too complicated. Maybe we should forget it ever happened.”

  “I certainly don’t think you should talk about it to anyone else,” Barbara said with a hint of humour.

  He bent his head and kissed her cheek. “Your Patrick is a lucky man. Thank you for being here.”

  His hands fell away from her shoulders, and even Barbara took that for what it was. Dismissal.

  She stepped back, her uncertain gaze flying to me. “Come with me?”

  It was almost a plea. Part of her still didn’t trust him. She knew the negative too much better than the positive. And she had been my chaperone for some time. A respectable, unmarried girl would have gone with her. But he’d taken my hand, softly caressing the skin between my thumb and forefinger, and everything in me needed to be with him just a little longer, now he was put back together.

  “Soon,” I said.

  She searched my eyes, then nodded once and walked away across the hall towards the lit passage.

  I watched her go, a brave and somehow lonely figure vanishing into the darkness. Only she was going to Patrick. It struck me she was still shedding loneliness, as I was. As if she couldn’t quite believe in her luck either.

  Kasimir’s gaze seemed to burn into the side of my face until, with conscious courage, I turned back to him. My stomach seemed to jolt, releasing a swarm of fluttering butterflies. Shadows from the candles flickered over one side of his jaw and over his eye.

  His hand lifted, cupping my cheek. “You once said you didn’t mind the madness.”

  “I don’t think you ever were mad. Or not very. Just enough to be interesting.”

  His hand moved, caressing. “You find me interesting, Lady Guin?”

  Heat seeped through me. “You know I do.” And because I hadn’t encountered the entire man in so long, it felt greatly daring to raise my hand and cover his on my cheek.

  “Aren’t you frightened of me?” he asked.

  I thought about it. I didn’t think it was fear. “No.” I drew his hand, roughened by recent riding, to my lips and kissed it. In a rush, I said, “It was all of you—or most of you—who made love to me when I was locked in the cell with you. You were gentle.”

  “I don’t always want to be gentle.” There was a faint rasp in his low voice that thrilled through me.

  “Maybe I won’t either.”

  Still with his hand on my cheek, he bumped his body deliberately against mine. “You shouldn’t say such things,” he whispered, pushing me back and back, walking with me. I had to trust him that I wouldn’t fall over anything in my path. “Not to a man who needs you as much as I do. Tell me I’m right.”

  “About what?” I managed. My back hit cold stone wall, and I realized we were between two of the hall windows.

  “Your disappointment when I forbore taking you on the dirty floor of our dining room.”

  A fresh flush of heat surged through me, centring between my legs. “Maybe,” I gasped.

  His hand caressed my face, then twisted, catching my fingers and raising my arm above my head. “Well,” he said, taking my other hand and lifting it to join the other. “I still won’t take you on the floor. I’ll take you here against this wall. Just because we both want it.”

  I moaned with only half-understood need. He smiled wolfishly, causing pulses to explode all over my body. Holding both my hands in his left, he took hold of the neck of my gown in his right and ripped.

  While I was still gasping in shock in that, he thrust his body hard into mine, pinning me with his hips, and my bones melted, trying to fuse with his.

  “This was my favourite gown!” I meant it as a little mock outrage, to lighten the suddenly unbearable heaviness of the moment, but the words came out as a shaky mumble that only served to draw his gaze from my heaving breasts to my lips.

  “I’ll give you another just like it,” he said, and fell on my mouth like a starving man, plundering, demanding, consuming. And I hung there, between the hard wall and his harder body, giving because I wanted to do nothing else. I tried to free my hands, to throw my arms around him, but he held me firm. His free hand tore away the rest of my petticoats, roamed wildly over my hip and thigh before dealing roughly with my drawers.

  Half-laughing, half-swooning, I gasped against his lips, “How will I get back without my clothes?”

  “I don’t care,” he muttered, freeing my breasts from the corset and closing his palm over one. His caress was wicked, drawing his rough fingers and thumb down over my breast to my nipple over, and over while he ground the hard, still-covered shaft of his erection against me.

  He kissed my mouth again, his tongue swirling, drawing me into him. And then his hand left my breast, forcing its way between our bodies to unbuckle his belt. He tore his mouth free of mine, his breath coming in quick, shallow pants, and seized his naked shaft in his hand.

  “Inside you,” he whispered, and pushed it between my trembling thighs. I moaned as it slid along all the desperate, sensitive spots between my folds and then it invaded me and I cried out. He yanked me onto the tips of my toes, thrusting once, twice, but the difference in our height was too great for him to get very far in.

  He released my hands, and my arms immediately flopped around his neck while he seized my leg, hooking it over his hip. With his other hand, he lifted my rear and then plunged into me fully. The pleasure was so fierce that I buried my face in his neck, almost sobbing because it was so wonderful and I wanted so much more. I pushed on to him, squeezing instinctively and he groaned, grinding and thrusting. I met him eagerly, twisting on his shaft, hanging onto the window sill to my right to brace myself.

  This was something I had never imagined. He pounded into me and I responded with everything I was. It was wild, unstoppable, and ferociously quick. The tide of ecstasy I remembered from our previous encounters came swiftly, yet pierced deeper, harder than before, completely drowning me in pleasure, in him. And when he exploded inside me, collapsing against me, he shouted, almost like the beast I’d once imagined. Almost.

  But there could be no doubt of his bliss, his joy. He growled it into my ear, still moving inside me more and more softly.

  “Did you scream?” he said breathlessly, his hand in my hair, drawing my drooping head up to see into my face. “I don’t think you screamed.”

  “I might have,” I mumbled. “I don’t know.”

  My legs dangled straight down, my feet not quite touching the floor. He let me down, easing out of me to scoop my fallen spectacles from the floor—when had that happened? And then he picked me up just as easily.

  “Then we’d better make sure,” he said, striding towards the passage. “A duke has to keep his promises.”

  “Again?” I said, amazed.

  He kissed my mouth. “And again. And again.”

  “Oh goodness,” I said faintly. “A duke has to keep his promises.”

  Laughter vibrated through him, deep and happy and excited. “I love you, you know. Even my evil bits love you.”

  “That’s lust.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I disputed. I’d never covered the distance so quickly before. There were bits of my dress and my underwear all over the old hall. Did he mean to carry me naked through the castle?

  “Let me show you,” Kasimir said, walking into my old bedroom. “Maybe we could have this discussion again in the morning.”

  I landed on my back among the pillows and smiled as I remembered the word from our first loving in his cell. “Are you really going to debauch me all night?”

  “Every night,” he promised, turning me over to unlace my corset which was all that was left of my clothing. “Whenever I like, in fact.”

  “And when I like?”

  “Only when you like. I hope you will, lots. And lots.”

  My corset flapped loose under me, and I
felt the movement of him tearing at his own clothes. I tried to turn, to see him, but he held me down, and just like that, entered my body again. He lowered himself onto my back, naked skin to naked skin and I closed my eyes. His cheek rubbed against mine. His lips dragged along my temple.

  Warmth, intimacy, fun, constantly changing, constantly new and wonderful. That was Kasimir and the life he promised. And as the duke, he was obliged to keep his promises. As the duchess, I supposed I must be obliged to help him.

  I made an enthusiastic start.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Since the world regarded respect rather differently from Kasimir and me, he left me at dawn to return to his own room.

  A couple of hours later, Barbara woke me with coffee and clothes, which only embarrassed me slightly. I doubted she and Patrick were celibate lovers. “We are all bidden to breakfast in the duke’s private dining room,” she informed me.

  Her gaze was sharp, looking, perhaps, for bruises or other signs of roughness. There might have been a few minor grazes on my back from the old hall wall, and between my legs was a dull ache, for I’d lost track of the number of times he’d loved me. In fact, I’d no idea how to count them, for it seemed there were many ways to many pleasures. I welcomed both discomforts with an exciting glow of memory.

  I sat up eagerly and gulped my coffee. “Who is we?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Augusta certainly. But not, I think the prince or princess of Karraden.”

  I laughed happily, and she left me to wash and dress. Button appeared to help me with fastenings.

  “What is it about this wretched room?” she sniffed.

  “I still like it.” I thought I might write in it. “Don’t you, now it’s been properly cleaned?”

  She disdained to comment.

  When I arrived in the duke’s rooms, which were, in fact, Leopold’s old rooms adjoining Augusta’s, with the dividing door well locked, I found the dining room already full of an alarming number of people. As well as Augusta, Barbara, and Patrick, several of the important statesmen were present, including Colonel Friedrich and the Bishop of Rundberg.