David stepped through the bow, hooked it on his opposite ankle, and bent it. It was stiff. Damned stiff. He fumbled the string's loop onto the tip. Pulling the bow to full draw damn near cut his fingers off, but he managed. His hands trembled as he held it long enough to draw a bead on the bow-sight. Then he slacked off, shoulders and biceps screaming.
It had been a long time. Too long.
Brian's face was still a mask. "The people I'm going to fight are stronger mages than I am. They like causing pain. I wasn't joking with that match. If I could draw my bow, I wouldn't consider bringing you along."
David met his eyes. "Jo is over there. Do you have a better chance at saving her with me or without me?"
Brian's smile looked more like a skull. "This isn't some damn fantasy novel. Are you seriously willing to be tortured to death? To be forced to watch while they torture Jo until she uses her powers the way they want?"
Torture. Jo. David swallowed bile.
"I have to. I couldn't live with myself if I didn't."
Grim sadness washed across Brian's face, as if he saw memories in the air between them. "Bards never have done well as warriors. They die a lot. Quickly or slowly, they die a lot." He shook himself like a wet dog. "Okay, you can come with me. We're going to need that bow."
A bow David could barely draw. "Don't expect me to hit a barn at more than fifty yards."
Brian grinned, a savage expression with too many teeth exposed. "I'm not too damned good with one, either. What I'm worried about is more likely to be in your face, ten yards or less. You'll be facing dangerous animals, ones you won't find in any zoo, and you won't get time for more than a single shaft. Don't worry about aiming, and just let the adrenaline do the work for you."
He rummaged around in the closet until he came up with another kukri. David caught it. It was heavy, heavy as hell. The blade looked to be a quarter of an inch thick.
"That's not a bad weapon for a beginner. Just hack at things. The balance and curve of the blade take care of the rest. Don't even think about stabbing with it. That takes practice. A Gurk, now, he could shave you dry and never leave a scratch, or slice you in two halves before you ever saw the steel. The buggers can even throw the bloody things. Little brown brother has lived with one since he was in nappies, see, knows it better than he knows his wife. He sees it a hell of a lot more often, that's for sure."
Brian's voice wove an atmosphere, the air of the military training camp. He had more accent, all of a sudden, and David felt like a raw recruit under the wing of an old soldier. There was a new depth to Brian, a sense of age far beyond his looks, the calmness of a veteran.
He's doing it on purpose, David thought. He knows I'm scared. He's telling me he's been through this a thousand times before.
Brian flexed his left arm, swung his right in a slow, exploratory arc, winced. "I'm glad you'll be carrying the bow."
And that, thought David, is the closest you'll ever come to admitting how badly hurt you really are. The confidence rings a little hollow.
"One suggestion," Brian added, "from a veteran. Bathroom. Don't take it as an insult, but the body has its own ways of dealing with fear. Any time you have the chance, empty your bowels and bladder before going into combat."
David grimaced. They took turns at the plumbing, then filled canteens and empty plastic Pepsi bottles with water and tossed more dry food into Brian's pack. Brian rigged a quiver full of broad-head hunting arrows through the loops of the pack and adjusted the whole mess on David's back until it hung right and he could draw and loose without fouling on something.
David blinked. "Hey, I didn't put on my jacket first."
"You won't need it. I plan to put us on the edge of the forest, between Dougal's keep and Fiona's garden maze. Neither of them likes rain or winter. Weather is a matter of consensus in the Summer Country."
Speed limits on chemical reactions. Weather by consensus. Mages with the power to control someone else's muscles. David's stomach knotted at the picture.
Magic.
Maureen and Jo, the match, the psychic Super-Glue: none of that really had the impact of feeling skin heal under his fingers. It had a kind of greasy heat to it, sort of like plastic straight from the molding machine. He wanted to wash his hands of the memory.
Brian grabbed his wrist, and they stepped from the kitchen into a darkness full of soft, slimy touches and the faint warmth of breath on his cheek or the back of his neck. David’s nerves twitched at chittering noises on the edge of hearing and moist air warm and slightly foul in his nose. Brian's hand was an iron clamp pulling him through the darkness and into green light.
Chapter Fourteen
Sean smiled at Maureen and nodded. His approval made a good decision better. Not just better, but imperative. She draped her jacket over a branch stub and left it as a puzzle for the squirrels. She felt warm in the forest, and she no longer needed that reminder of ice and slush--would not need it ever again. After all, this was the Summer Country.
She wasn't going back to winter. As for the gun, she had never needed that at all. Sean would protect her.
They walked on into paradise. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou beside me in the wilderness . . . . Who the hell needed the bread and wine?
She clung possessively to Sean's arm, as if the warm damp earth-smells could prove more seductive than her woman-scent. Not that they were any real threat: she felt powerful, secure in her sexuality. She was a woman and he was her man.
Something rustled and the brush parted to reveal great, yellow, slit-pupil eyes in a flat triangle of a head plated with black scales. She glared at the giant lizard, daring it to threaten her lover, and it retreated.
Then she noticed the man next to it, a brown-skinned, brown-clad little man who almost disappeared if she didn't stare right at him. He had the same general look as Brian and that Liam creature, but smaller, leaner, and almost primitive. Somehow, the name "kobold" seemed to fit him, even if he wasn't in a mine.
The apparition spoke grating syllables to the dragon, and it darted its forked tongue at her, testing, tasting, as if it needed to know her smell again. It slithered off into the tangled brush.
"Tha i an so," Sean said to the funny-looking little man, and Maureen heard him say it and also heard "She is here," at the same time.
So Fiona had been right. This warm, green land gave people understanding of another's speech. It even told Maureen that Sean spoke Scots Gaelic with a Galway Irish accent, a feat that would have had her giggling if she could laugh at anything Sean did.
But she could not mock Sean. Not after he had kissed her body awake to a fire of longing and brought her to this beautiful place. She floated in the golden glow of the romance novels she'd snitched from her mother back when she was a kid. She waited impatiently for Sean to draw her away into some grassy bower, longing for him to strip her clothing away in slow delicious torture until he played upon her body like a harp and entered into her to give her release from this tormented ecstasy.
She loved Sean.
She loved him with the unquestioning devotion of a spaniel. He was her god made manifest. Whatever she had felt for Brian faded into ghostly invisibility. She loved Sean and belonged to him, without reservation.
The strange little man studied her. She decided to call him Rumpelstiltskin, a gnome out of fairy tales. He had too large a head on too thin a neck, gnarled muscles showing beyond short-sleeved shirt and shorts, a chest and belly dropping straight from shoulders to hips, dark hair standing out in tufts like some mis-cut field of hay. Scars ran all over him as if he had been built hastily from spare parts. It was such a funny way to make a man. Nothing like Sean's slim beauty.
"Trobhadaibh, the man said. "Come here," she heard.
She stood still. Sean smiled his slow, mocking, lovely smile and shook his head.
"You don't want me to release her yet," Sean said, while her mind stepped between sound and meaning. "This exquisite little kitten has claws and teeth."
He turned to Maureen, and she melted under his gaze. "My dear, allow me to introduce Dougal MacKenzie, self-styled Laird of the Clan MacKenzie. He aspires to be your husband, your lord and master. I wish you joy of each other."
He smiled again, as if mocking Dougal, and her, and even himself.
"But...."
"Bi samhach."
Maureen's heart sank. She wanted Sean, not this strange caricature of a man. But Sean told her to be quiet, so she bit off the words and closed her mouth.
He turned back to Dougal. "She's under a glamour now. Unless you want to take up the reins of it, I would suggest something more substantial to hold her. She can be dangerous."
"I know how to handle dangerous animals," the little man rasped. "Padric, the irons."
Blinking, Maureen noticed a third man. She had centered her whole existence on Sean to the point she barely knew where she was standing.
Now she saw beyond her god, as if he had let her eyes loose to learn her new world. Padric, this one was called: tall, thinly muscular, dressed in battered leather coat and a pair of green twill pants over worn black boots. His eyes looked sad under long blonde hair, guarded, as if he was used to doing things he'd rather not talk about.
He carried circlets of iron joined by thin chains. They burned with a peculiar cold heat when he locked them around her throat, around her wrists in front of her, around her ankles.
Maureen jerked at the touch, eyes wide and appealing to Sean. Why did he allow this?
"Sorry, love, we have a deal. I give Dougal what he wants; he gives me what I want. You may be very beautiful, but I'm not prepared to take the risk of keeping you. Dougal likes living dangerously. I have other needs."
He turned away from her. "Dougal, old boy, I promised that no one would take her without her consent. I trust you won't make a liar of me."
"Och, no," the little man drawled. "She will ask me to bed her before we are done. She will beg me. And nothing we do will mark this beautiful maiden--no scars, no blood, no fire. Just simple discipline and training."
Sean gave Maureen a long look that drew flame to her cheeks. "Maiden? I think not. A virgin wouldn't have reacted the way she has to the glamour, wouldn't have such vivid thoughts of the smell and feel of a lover. Such complicated thoughts. She's known men before and doesn't like the species. She's more dangerous than your hawks and beasts. Don't blame me when you find her pulling your keep down around your ears."
The heat faded from Maureen's belly, leaving sour ice behind. The word "glamour" echoed in her ears. That was the emotional touch Brian had used, to calm her after Liam's death and the strip-club fire.
She was trapped.
Kidnapped.
Brian had tried to warn her. "Don't trust Fiona," he'd said. "Don't trust Sean. The Old Ones don't have what you'd call a conscience." What they could do, they did, no matter what pain it caused to others.
She snarled and threw herself at Sean, hands out and fingernails turned to claws. Her feet jerked out from under her, and she smashed full-length into the forest dirt. She rolled, spitting rotten leaves, scrambling to kick and scratch and bite the slimy bastard who did this to her, to claw his eyes out and loop her wrist-chains around his throat and strangle him.
Her feet jerked away again and dragged her backwards, twigs and leaves gouging into her bare skin where her blouse rode up along her back. The pull turned upward and she swung by her ankles, head just clear of the ground, thrashing around and screaming at three sets of feet.
She finally calmed enough to see the thin chain hooked to the shackles around her ankles, then looped up over a low branch and held by Padric. A leash. They had her on a fucking leash, like some kind of dog.
Maureen spat, again and again, until she cleared her mouth of all the forest trash. "I'll kill you! I'll kill every single fucking one of you!"
Sean smiled that mocking smile again. "Too bad she isn't wearing skirts, Dougal. Pants just aren't as interesting in this position."
Maureen's blouse hung loose around her neck, and that fucking bra-snap had popped open again so her breasts bounced free as she swung. She snarled and curled up, to reach the chain hooked to her ankles, but Padric yanked it higher and she fell back. Now even her hands didn't reach the ground.
She twisted, helpless, jerking like a hooked fish. She didn't even try to cover herself, to hide her flushed breasts from their greedy eyes.
"Okay, you bastards. Go ahead and rape me! Three strong men against one woman, you should be able to do it!"
She glared at each of them, through her tears. If they'd just come close enough . . . . Sean looked amused, Padric frightened, while Dougal licked his lips as if he was considering her challenge. She hoped he'd try. She'd strangle him with his own goddamned chains.
Sean's quiet chuckle broke the silence. "I warned you, Dougal," he said. "Now you begin to understand what you've bought. I hope you still plan to pay."
The gnome spat. "Oh, I'll help you capture your Pendragon. He'll come after her, right into our trap. And this little wildcat won't be that hard to tame. I've handled worse--bigger, stronger, and with real claws."
Pendragon.
Brian.
Trap.
She'd let her guard slip because her paranoia was more afraid of Brian than of real dangers. She'd turned off her fucking brain when she walked into the Quick Shop, and ended up in chains. Ended up as bait.
Dougal stepped forward, expertly snagged her wrists, and snapped a second chain to those shackles. Then he tweaked her right nipple with his free hand, spun her around to smack her butt like a horse turned out to pasture, and motioned Padric to let her down.
She thumped limp on the ground. Brian! she screamed, but only in her mind. The thoughts kept circling through her terror. He'd warned her. Now he was in danger because of her stupidity. And he was still hurt.
She rolled to her knees, shaking herself. Padric loosened the chain from the limb overhead, giving her an instant's slack. She flung herself at him. Her arms snapped around against her motion, nearly ripping her shoulder joints apart, and she thumped back to the ground. A scream tore loose from her throat.
Chains bit into her wrists. Chains chewed on her ankles. They pulled her taut between them, stretched helpless face-up on the forest floor. Fury gave her the strength to pull against them, and she gained an inch, six inches, a foot, before the raging fire in her shoulders stopped her.
She lay rigid between the chains, panting. Tears streamed from her eyes and matted the tangled hair across her face. Something blurry hung over her head, dark and calm and sleek.
"You'll only damage yourself, love," the blur said, with Sean's voice. "Dougal would be most upset if you scarred your pretty face. And those magnificent breasts of yours, so small yet womanly, so firm, so perfectly proportioned to your chest: you must protect them for the children you will suckle. You'll be a mother within a year, love."
Cold clarity struck through Maureen like a flash of lightning. "And you'll be dead before the full moon shines upon your face. Your own treachery will kill you."
"Ah, 'tis prophecy she's giving to us, Dougal. The witch blood speaks. You'll notice she even calls upon the sacred goddess of the night to witness her revenge. Do you have a fate to offer Dougal, love? Care to bring the heaven's wrath down on our unhappy Padric?"
Her throat made words, without her will; they echoed strangely. "Padric will bring his own fate upon himself. As for Dougal, if he dares to taste my body, its fires will burn his body into ash. Beware."
"The oracle speaks," Sean mocked her. "Maybe you should sell this lovely wench to a whorehouse, Dougal, her favors are so dangerous. That's an absurdly high price for a piece of ass. Find yourself another bitch to breed your bloodlines."
The chains pulled tighter. Maureen grunted, gritting her teeth against another scream. She wouldn't give them the pleasure of it.
"A week," Dougal said, yanking again, "two weeks at the most. No bird or beast has ever taken more. She'll dine
at my table when there's no food elsewhere; she'll wear the clothes of a proper woman when her choice is to go naked. She'll sleep with me, willingly, when that's the only sleep she'll get. What woman has the fierce will of a hawk or hunting cat?"
Father Oak, she prayed, protect me. That was your limb they strung the chain across. Drop it on Sean's head. Trip his feet with your roots, burn him with the acid of your bark and acorns, smother him in the litter of your last-year's leaves. Call on the forest to lash thorns across his eyes, raise up the rotted dead to clasp his ankles, breathe poison from the flowers and fruits. Father Oak, protect me.
Iron burned at her throat and swallowed her words. Her wrists and ankles caught an icy fire separate from the scrape of tension in the chains.
Iron.
Morgan had feared iron in White's tale of Arthur--the cold iron which had replaced the Old One's flint and bronze. Iron defeated magic. The shackles bound spirit as well as body.
So Brian had been right. She bore Power, the Power of the Blood, and the bastards trapped her Power as neatly as they'd trapped her body. They knew her better than she knew herself.
Brian, forgive me. I've done this to you, led you to a trap. I've led you to your death.
The chains slackened again, and she curled in upon herself. Her bladder burned with the pressure of her fear. She fought against adding that to her humiliation.
Dougal looked down on her, his form made even more lumpish by the blurring of her tears. "You can walk and have some dignity, or we can carry you on a game-pole like a gutted pig. It's your choice."
"Carry me, you bastard!" Then words formed again in her throat, words that seemed to rise up out of the dirt pressing against her bare skin, words that were not truly hers but belonged to the land and to all women. Even the burning iron at her throat couldn't freeze her voice.
"May the axe turn in your hands when you go to cut the tree, may the falling trunk drive branches through your skull, may the bark blister your hands at the touching of it. May the sap poison you, may the splinters of the tree's flesh drive into your own flesh and fester there." She gasped for breath.
The Summer Country Page 15
