To Chase the Storm

by Kimberly Cates

"Men can be most infuriating, can they not?"

  The familiar breathy voice made Tessa wheel around, dashing the tears from her eyes. Her heart lurched as her gaze fell upon the white-garbed form in the doorway.

  Morgause Warburton? Nay, Tessa thought with a ripple of panic, it was impossible. The lady of Warvaliant had not been present in the queen's chamber with her odious son. Tessa knew she would have seen her, sensed her subtle menace.

  "M-my lady." Tessa forced the words from stiff lips, eyeing that otherworldly countenance with a wariness that brought a cunning smile to the noblewoman's lips.

  "Come, child." The honey-sweet voice dripped from Morgause's lips. "You need not fear me. I assure you that what transpired between us in the tower room of Warvaliant is forgotten. Look—the bruises from the ropes are nearly gone."

  The woman glided into the room, extending her hands toward Tessa.

  Tessa let her gaze sweep to the slender arms, bared as gauzy sleeves fell back, and she was horrified to see angry red marks still encircling those slender wrists.

  "Forgive me," Tessa said with genuine regret. "I did not mean to bind you so tightly."

  Morgause brushed away her apologies with a benign wave of her hand. "It is forgotten between us two, child. I did not seek you out to utter recriminations."

  "Then why are you here?"

  "I heard about what happened between you and the queen—the puppet play you made for her. And I happened to be in the corridor when Captain Santadar came storming out."

  Tessa could not keep the flash of pain from showing in her face, and it made her feel vulnerable, exposed.

  "I thought..." Morgause hesitated an instant, then gave a soft laugh. "It is little known that I had a broken heart myself when I was young. I know it is difficult to believe, now that age has taken what little claim to comeliness I might have had. But I suffered..." The words drifted to silence as the noblewoman walked over to Tessa and smoothed back a tangled lock of her dark hair. "I cannot tell you how much I suffered."

  Tessa shuddered at the woman's touch and at the queer light in her eyes, and she couldn't stop herself from drawing away from those chill fingers. Instantly she regretted it, for the unaccustomed softness in the noblewoman's eyes hardened like the thinnest layer of ice.

  Tessa swallowed, trying to conceal the revulsion she felt. "I am most grateful for your concern. It is kind of you. But if it would not trouble you, I would prefer to be left alone."

  "Trouble me?" Morgause's mouth split in a brittle smile. "Nay, child, not at all, as long you allow me to do whatever I can to see that you are... comfortable." The noblewoman turned, and the scent of withered roses wafting to Tessa's nose reminded her of winter and death.

  "I assure you, I am quite—"

  "Quite comfortable. I know." Morgause drifted toward the bed and smoothed one hand over the soft bedclothes. "This will do to give you a good night's rest, I vow," she judged. "And look. They have left you food as well."

  "I'm not hungry," Tessa snapped, more harshly than she had intended. "I just want to be left alone."

  "And so you shall be, poppet," the crooning tone in Morgause's voice grated across Tessa's raw nerves until she wanted to scream. "At least sip some wine to hearten yourself."

  "I don't want any wine."

  "Ah, but if you drink some, you will be rid of me, my sweet. I will leave you to your grief." The woman turned her back on Tessa, a bit of the glinting goblet just visible behind the shield of her skirts. Tessa thought that guzzling a whole tankard of wine would be a small price to pay for being left alone.

  She heard liquid being poured, heard the clink of goblet against the neck of the flask as those white hands hovered over the platter. Morgause turned, both hands curved about the wineglass, her eyes hooded, her lips curved in a commiserating smile.

  "There, child," she said, placing the cup in Tessa's hand. "Drink now, and then sleep. It will spare you from grieving over your stubborn Santadar."

  Tessa raised the goblet to her lips, suddenly thirsty, craving the oblivion wine would bring. Perhaps, once Morgause left, she would empty the flask and summon more from one of the servants. Perhaps she would drink herself into a stupor to forget Rafael.

  She drained the liquid, its taste clinging to her tongue—sour, with a most unusual tang.

  "More?"

  She lifted her gaze to Morgause's eager face, her wariness of the waxen-faced noblewoman waning. "I would like that. Thank you."

  There was a glimmer of happiness in Lady Warburton's face that pleased Tessa, and she did not object when the woman sank onto a stool beside her after refilling the vessel.

  "There, now. Is that not better?" Morgause asked, patting Tessa's hand, and Tessa did not move away. Her hand was heavy suddenly. So heavy. "They drive women mad—the Santadar men," Morgause whispered in that sorceress's voice. "They are like a disease that eats away at our souls."

  The wine brought welcome numbness to Tessa's senses. "I don't understand."

  "I, too, was taken by that plague in my youth, charmed by a man as beguiling as your sea rogue. He had hair as dark as sin and a form so tempting that I would have suffered in hell for it."

  Even through the webs the wine spun about her, Tessa felt unease flicker to life, and she raised her eyes to Morgause's face, which rippled in the candlelight as the room suddenly grew hot. Tessa felt beads of moisture on her brow as she stared, mesmerized, into the pale gaze of the woman before her. She had a strange image of a gauzy-winged moth being lured to a tongue of flame.

  "I don't—don't understand."

  "Your captain's father was the scoundrel who shattered my heart. Ruy Santadar." Those skeletal fingers swam before Tessa's eyes, as Morgause flicked back the heavy stone on her ring.

  A miniature was worked there, minute, yet incredibly detailed. And the face thus portrayed was so like Rafe's own that Tessa cried out in astonishment and felt a very real stirring of fear. Her eyes flashed up to Morgause Warburton's. The woman's features blurred, then snapped into a painful clarity that drove fear deep into Tessa's belly.

  "Rafe's father..." Tessa squeezed the words from lips that seemed suddenly too chill to move. Her tongue felt thick in her mouth. Her throat closed with dread.

  "Aye. He had the ill judgment to prefer Anne St. Cyr to me. Anne! Pah! A milksop with honeyed words and a face as blandly beautiful as that of an angel painted on some chapel's accursed ceiling. I hated her. Hated them both. But they paid in good coin for my suffering."

  Images spilled across Tessa's mind, scenes Rafe had painted on her imagination—the murder of his father and the mother he had adored, his own near death. Rafe had been but a frightened child when that horrible scene was seared into his mind forever. Surely this frail shade of a woman could not have had anything to do with those horrors.

  Tessa's gaze was drawn to the ring that glowed on the noblewoman's finger, the displaced gem winking evilly above Ruy Santadar's likeness.

  "Ah, so Ruy's son has told you what befell them." A witch's voice was binding Tessa in chains she could not see, crushing her will, weighting her limbs. "It was a regrettable necessity, their deaths. What a lovely phrase. Regrettable necessity. That is what your lover termed the binding of my wrists. And now he lies somewhere with ropes biting into his flesh. I have such fragile skin. It bled, as he will bleed... as you will bleed."

  Tessa struggled to cry out, to get someone, anyone to wrest her from the clutches of this woman—for Morgause Warburton was mad. But a fist seemed to be crushing her throat, stilling her screams.

  The wine... The goblet fell from her numb fingers, the dark liquid staining the rushes like blood. The woman had poisoned her!

  "Drive the fear from your eyes, my sweet," Morgause's voice dripped over her. “It is not poison. I am not adept at poisons, though I am learning. I only gave you a posset to make you sleep, dream. Though when you wake, I fear your world will smack of nightmare."

  "Rafe!" Tessa choked out the name, her voice the faintest
of whispers. "What... have you done to... "

  "I fear we had to ensure his... cooperation in a rather ungentle manner. But he will be awaiting you when you awake. And then, my sweet, you will learn"—that hideous face rippled before Tessa—"and your accursed lover will learn what true terror is... just as Anne learned."

  Her cackle rose in the air, whirling Tessa away into nightmares of Rafe being tortured, of blades slashing, of a child's agonized cries. The dream swept her into fear more horrible than any she had ever known, but far less terrifying than the reality that awaited her.

  * * *

  It was so dark. The night pressed down upon Rafe, making him afraid. Beasts lived in the blackness, hungry beasts that feasted on small boys. But he was a Santadar. A great lad of four years, far too old to cry.

  He closed his fingers about the hilt of the wooden sword his father had bought for him at market, his gaze shifting to where Ruy Santadar loomed, a magnificent giant, upon a prancing stallion. Not even the fiercest of monsters could reach Rafael with his father so near. And his mother... Rafe cuddled closer into her arms, his eyelids fluttering, heavy with sleep. It was so warm here against her, her silky hair brushing against his cheek.

  "Sleep, my little moppet," she crooned to him gently, brushing his brow with a kiss. "The dream-spinners await you. And such adventures they will spin."

  "I have to—help Papa guard..."

  "Your father is the strongest of men, Rafael, and the bravest." Her voice was sweet with love. "He will let no harm befall us."

  Rafe breathed in the soft scent of jasmine and cinnamon that always hung about his mother, felt sleep enfold him, but his dreams were haunted by death's-heads and faces masked by hideous paint—monsters. He could feel their breath hot upon his throat, see them in the shadows, feel them touching him. Panic tore through him, and he tried to scream, to warn his parents, but the night had come alive, catching them up in sharp claws.

  Rafe thrashed against the terror that seemed to be a living thing coiling itself about him. Laughter, hellish laughter, echoed through the darkness as a glimmering silver dagger arced toward his, throat.

  "Madre!" he cried, sobbing. "Help me!" But the devil's face only loomed larger as fiery pain snaked along Rafe's neck.

  "No!" he screamed, hauling himself upright, slamming his head into something above him. But even as the fragments of the familiar nightmare drifted away from him, they left him in a starker hell still.

  He tried to touch his face, to see if his eyes were indeed open. But it was as though his wrists were fused together before him, burning and numb. Then all sense of the darkness was driven back as he became aware of sticky, drying blood. With a shudder of horror, he raised his bound hands to his neck, but the skin there was whole and unmarred.

  No, the dream... it was only a nightmare from the past, but his head throbbed as if the devil himself were slamming cudgels against his skull.

  What, by all the saints, had befallen him? Where was he? He struggled to think, despite the roaring pain, despite the rolling sensation that set his stomach to pitching.

  He closed his eyes against the darkness, fighting to recall something, anything. His mind cleared a little, filling with images of a lavish palace, a lead-painted face wreathed in a nimbus of fiery hair. Elizabeth. He had been in the castle of Elizabeth Tudor. And he had been angry... angry and hurt. He could remember wide, dark eyes from across that huge room pleading for forgiveness above a wood-carved marionette.

  Tessa...

  Anguish ripped through him, fiercer even than the roaring in his head, that savaged sweet countenance shifting into another, far more sinister one.

  A specter's face, a sorceress spinning spells from fingers white as candle wax. Morgause had promised him a ship. He had rushed down the stairs to meet her. Then something... someone had struck him.

  He shifted against the surface he sat upon, suddenly aware of the smell of pitch and tar and the scent of seawater seeping through an ill-tended hull. He cursed himself for his idiocy in not knowing right away where he was.

  He was aboard a ship, right enough, but why did ropes bite into his wrists and ankles with a savagery that drained the blood from them and made them numb?

  Why the hell was he locked away in darkness, his throat parched? Was it some twisted revenge for the time he and Tessa had bound Morgause in the room at Warvaliant Castle? Had the eerie noblewoman vowed to make him pay?

  He struggled against the pounding in his head, trying to think. But he had not bound the woman's birdlike wrists. It was Tessa who had done so.

  Rafe's eyes flashed open, his fear for her lunging in his chest, a groan of denial passing his lips as he struggled to stand. His shoulder cracked into a beam, and the force drove him to his knees.

  He heard footsteps above him and looked up to where tiny cracks in the deck overhead let in slivers of light.

  “Open that accursed hatch! Plague take you!"

  His bellow echoed back to him, and he slammed himself back against the damp wall, frustration and fear for Tessa coursing through him in dizzying waves.

  "Open it, damn you!" His cry was choked, desperate.

  He started as the wooden panel above him was slammed back, crashing to the deck with a force that made the pain in his skull surge anew. A square of blazing light blinded him.

  Pain speared his arms as he raised them and ground his burning eyes against his velvet sleeve. Then he raised his face and forced his eyes to focus.

  Incredulity and denial bolted through Rafe, the stench of gunpowder and death assailing his memory. The soul-chilling crack of masts shattered by cannon fire raged again in his mind as he stared into the face of the man he loathed—the man who had sent Rafe's gallant crew to the depths of hell.

  Encina.

  With a curse of fury, Rafe hauled himself to his feet, staggering as the ship's roll mingled with the throbbing in his head and raked at his numb legs. He nearly fell again, only force of will and his own half-crazed fury keeping him upright.

  "Encina, you bastard!" he shouted, straining to see through the hatch. "I'll kill you!"

  "I doubt you'll kill anyone, Santadar, ever again," the inquisitor sneered. "You are the one who will die... a most gruesome death, I fear, but well deserved."

  "Damn you, I'll—"

  "You'll do nothing, Santadar. You should have perished on your infernal ship, as I planned."

  "Planned? Why, blast you?" Fury and confusion raged through Rafe. "Do you know how many men died that day? Innocent men! Brave men! Why?" Rafe shouted the question that had gnawed at his sanity in the hellish hours he had struggled to reach the English shores, the question that had haunted him with horrible guilt.

  "You do not know, then?" The smug expression that crossed the inquisitor's face made Rafe bellow a curse.

  "Of course, I don't know, you murdering bastard! Tell me! What grievous sin did I commit? What crime so heinous that you were willing to cast hundreds of men to the bottom of the sea to ensure that I paid for it? Tell me!"

  "Look at me, Santadar," Encina rasped. "Can you not see it? Feel it? From the first time you saw me, I feared that you would."

  "Would what?" Rafe demanded. The glint in Encina's eyes made his skin crawl, as it had from the moment the inquisitor had glided onto his ship.

  "I haunt your worst nightmares. When you remember me you wake in a cold sweat, screaming." Encina smiled— a leer that tore away veils of night terror to reveal a child's most hideous fears.

  "Ah," Encina purred. "Now you know me, my bold captain, don't you? Are you shaking? Scream, Santadar, as you did long ago."

  "You." White-painted features roiled within Rafe's mind, and Encina's eyes glared down at him. The knife slashing at Rafe's throat was grasped in that long, pale hand stained with blood.

  The tormented face of his mother rose in Rafe's memory. And he remembered his father, dead in the road.

  "Yes. I was most disconcerted when I boarded your ship and saw Ruy Santadar staring back
at me from your face. I might have dismissed it as mere coincidence, a poor jest made by fate, except that your jerkin lay open that day, and I saw the scar."

  "I'll kill you, Encina, for what you did to my father and mother. She was so gentle, and you—"

  "Killed her? Sí. And you cannot know how sweet it was to slash the beautiful body of Ruy Santadar's woman. He was still alive, your father, when I stabbed her. Did you know that? He saw me do it."

  With a bellow of rage, Rafe flung himself at the opening high above him, a futile gesture, fraught with madness.

  "Come down here, coward! Face me like a man."

  Encina made a clicking sound with his tongue, shaking his head as though scolding a blustering child. "Oh, no. I prefer subtler means than fists and swords, Santadar. Had your father been reasonable, we could have settled our... differences civilly."

  "How? With poison? Or a dagger slipped between his ribs?"

  "It does not matter now." Encina shrugged. "Ruy was too distraught to be reasonable."

  "While his wife was being stabbed? While his son's throat was slit? Oh, that would put me in the most reasonable of moods."

  "No, before that, when he had the misfortune to discover that I was, er... shall we say, purchasing secrets from the English and selling Spanish information as well, not for the benefit of your father's cherished king, but rather to line my own pockets. It was most lucrative, this barter I had arranged. You see, I had found it annoying to have to live within the confines of my misguided vow of poverty."

  "My father was going to expose you?"

  "Sí. And now you, too, could reveal dark secrets about me, could you not? However, I doubt my peers will put any stock in testimony regarding a pious man like me—especially on the word of a prisoner I have brought before the tribunal. And soon... the flames will silence you forever."

  "What, Encina, are you going to set fire to this ship as well?"

  "Oh, no. What happened upon your Lady of Hidden Sorrows was the result, I fear, of a momentary panic. I have given much thought to your demise, since I learned that you had escaped death's scythe a second time. I fear you are proving most difficult to kill."