Dockalfar (36 page)

They might not be able to see through it to the fact that he had brought this all to be with his summons of Dusk. He could not be held responsible for the death of a high sidhe.

~~~

She did not recall the journey back to her room. She hardly recalled how she had come to be safe and out of the grasp of Deigah. She was finding it difficult to put together rational thought. But at the moment, if not comfortable, she felt marginally secure. She came to that realization as she was being lowered to the pillows of her bed. There were arms about her and a gentle solidity that she did not wish to abandon. She held on, closing her eyes and pressing her face against a soft weave of cloth and a warm body underneath it. An attempt was made to disentangle her arms, and in a panic she clutched at material and flesh. She did not wish to be left alone. She did not wish for the safe presence to leave her side.

“God. Please, please don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me.”

“Lady.” She knew the silken tones of the return whisper down to her soul. “I have to.”

She wrapped her arms around him and held on. She could not quell the tremors that cursed her body. Bile threatened to rise. He was safety, he was her protector. There was nothing, she thought in her panic, that could get past him to torment her. She could not let him leave her. Not now.

“I’m scared,” she whimpered.

His efforts at retreat subsided, and he knelt at the side of her bed and let her hold on to him. Where his hands touched her flesh he shifted them. He made no move to break her embrace, but he also made no efforts to return the comfort. Perhaps it was out of consideration. She had just been ravished by a man and he feared to frighten her more by his touch. She knew it not to be true, deep down. She knew it was merely because ‘he’ did not want or need the touch of a human woman. That ‘he’ was beyond such things. She knew he was repulsed by her, her memory was that good at least, all things considered. But at the moment, she did not care, for his physical presence gave relief and she was too shaken and covetous of her own comfort to give thought to his.

“He’s gone,” he said softly, hesitantly. How he hated to speak to her.

She kept her face pressed into the soft wool of his tunic, her head tucked under his chin. She wondered at the implications of that. She could not quite remember how he had come to be with her instead of that monster, Deigah. She remembered very well the terror and the humiliating magic that stilled her screams and left her mutely helpless to the attack. She did not think the rape had been carried out to the fullest.

She did become vaguely aware of the disarray of her dress. It was that realization that made her let him go. She shifted her hand to her bodice, pulling the gaping rip together. Her other hand slid off of him and she sat back on the pillows, touching a bruise on her face, tasting blood in her mouth.

He remained where he was, kneeling at her side, eye to eye with her. For a moment, she met his stare and thought she saw some glimmer of compassion before he broke it in rising. His colors were muted, tinged with hints of her own shading.

“You saved me,” she stated in a tiny, trembling voice. “Is he dead?”

A nod of the head. He wanted to flee.

She could sense it. She pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging them to her. The quakes tormented her body in wave after wave. The hurt was just beginning to register. She would be in pain later.

“Why?” The question was blunt and edged with tears. “After what I did, why?”

He faded to the point she had to peer to make him out. He was one with the colors of her room. He edged towards her door.

“You did not deserve it.” A faint whisper that she only just caught.

“Will you get in trouble?” She called.

He was at the portal, wood colored now and not looking at her at all.

“Yes.”

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The ogres were at the foot of the keep, treading among the sharp rocks of the sheer mountain drop to recover the broken body of Deigah. They were tiny, black shapes against the dull gray of the stone ground. The twisted form of Deigah was the only splotch of color amid the jumbled keep foot. Azeral chose not to use his mind’s eye to discover the details. He leaned over a stable section of balcony and watched the activity with narrowed eyes.

Foolish, foolish Deigah, to let himself be taken in such a manner. For a high sidhe to die was tragedy enough, but to die in such a graceless manner was unspeakable. He deserved that fate if he was inept enough to allow it to take him.

The wailing had stopped. And the screams of anguish. Azeral had put a stop that that soon after his arrival. Those High Sidhe that remained on the garden terrace milled about in quiet, shocked little groups. Their whispers, both vocal and mental drifted through the cool air. Azeral heard splashes of conversation. Memories of Deigah, sobbing denials, regrets, speculation. Disdain that he had died such a lowly death. Neferia huddled on a stone bench, red-eyed and sobbing. Her hysteria had been one of the worst. It had taken a sound mental slap to bring her out of it.

Azeral could not abide loss of control. It brought disorder and chaos. Those were not things he welcomed under his rule. But he supposed she, being female and more prone to emotional display, had reason to mourn. She had come to this court with Deigah from the court of a Northern lord.

They had always been close. Where he regretted the loss, but not the companionship, she had lost a close confidante. He would tolerate some degree of mourning.

“Tragic, hmmm?” The Mistress of the Hunt stood behind him. Her gaze lingered on the tiny figures below. Her eyes held the same careful serenity they always held. No bouts of hysteria from Lady Tyra.

“Foolish,” he amended.

“Hmmm.” Tyra arched a thin brow, a wry expression of affirmation in her eyes. “One almost wonders.”

He pushed himself away from the edge and met her gaze. “Does one? At what?”

She shrugged, her shoulders thick with the padding of light leather armor. She had been practicing or riding when word reached her. “At the lack of grace. Most unworthy.”

“That’s a lie.”

They both glanced aside at Neferia, who stood glaring. “Deigah is worthy of more than you’ll ever know, Huntress. He’s dead… the final death, and you slander him. How dare you?”

Tyra merely returned the angry gaze, expressionless. She was almost as old as Azeral. Almost as powerful. Neferia was nothing to her.

“We slander the method. Not necessarily the man,” Azeral stated. “It was an ungainly way to die.”

“It could not have been his fault!”

Neferia cried in frustration. Her fists balled in the material of her gown. “He would not have fallen!”

“Pray tell, why not?” Azeral inquired, curious at her almost desperate insistence.

She opened her mouth, then shut it, tears welling once more in the corners of her eyes. There was something there.

Something she kept to herself. “Because he was better than that,” she finally said.

“He was better.”

With a swirl of cloth she spun and fled. Azeral exchanged looks with his Mistress of the Hunt. She shrugged again, noncommittally, and he turned back with a frown to gaze over the edge of the balcony. Behind him, Tyra wandered along the garden path. She paused at the edge of a curving path and stared into the undergrowth. Then she crouched and retrieved something shiny and long. It glinted silver in the morning light. She stared at it for a heartbeat, then wedged it in her belt, under the cover of her armor.

There was a slight smile on her lips.

~~~

The spriggan came bursting into Victoria’s room, out of breath and wild-eyed. He slammed the thick wooden door behind him and pressed his back to it, as if holding off pursuers. Victoria forced her breathing back to normal, tried unsuccessfully to relax her tense muscles and stared at him from her curled position on her bed of pillows. She had done nothing since Dusk’s departure other than shed her ripped and bloodied dress, pull on a robe and fall into the softness of her nest to cry. Her eyes were bloodshot and swollen even now. She wished the spriggan elsewhere. He was not the comfort she needed. But he was insistent in his presence.

He scrambled over, breath hissing between his sharp, yellowed teeth. He smelled of strong sweat and other foul things. She hugged a pillow to her breast and stared at him expectantly.

“We’re in for it,” he gasped at her, almost accusingly. “By the Four, we’re in for it now! Where’s the damn Ciagenii?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. Her throat was raw from sobs. Her chest hurt terribly and the skin under her eyes felt like it had been rubbed with sandpaper.

Her other bodily aches were dull reminders of the attack.

The spriggan threw up his hands in disgust. “Don’t know!! Well damn me to Annwn and back! They found the damn sidhe’s knife. Lady Huntress found it. I saw it with me own eyes. They’ll put together that it was foul play that brought about their brethren’s end. Then they’ll piece together who.”

Victoria stared at him, uncomprehending. “But he attacked me. He deserved whatever happened. You and Dusk were only protecting me.”

“High sidhe’s dead,” Bashru snapped at her. “Dead! Don’t matter why. None of us’re high sidhe. None of us can be excused.”

She pressed her face into the pillow. “I don’t want to talk about this. Please just go away.”

Rough spriggan hands gripped her shoulder. She flinched from the touch. It brought back the memory of other rough touches.

“If they come to you, you don’t know nothing. You been in this room all day. You tell them that, if you value your life. And mine. And the damned assassin’s. Got that?”

She nodded, miserably. Unfortunately, she understood.

His heavy, shuffling footsteps receded. The door shut with a gentleness that surprised her. That he was sensitive to her nerves and her trauma was not something she would have expected of him. She lay alone and wallowed in her misery. She wanted arms about her. The logical choice was Alex, but he was not the man she knew anymore. She wondered if he would even care that she had almost been raped. Without her consent, she thought of Dusk, and his sinewy strength as he held her. She berated herself for it, but her mind kept returning to the comfort he had unwillingly offered. She squeezed her lids shut, moaning for a different reason. The last thing she needed, the very last, was to develop feelings for the dark servant of the man responsible for bringing her here. But try as she might, she could not wipe the image of him from her mind.

There was a disturbance at the window. A scratching and flapping that had her eyes wide open and her heart beat hammering. The great, yellow breasted bird found purchase on her window sill. It blinked its black ringed, yellow eyes at her and tilted its head. Its balance was awkward. It hopped on one sharp clawed leg and held the other close to it’s body.

When she looked closer, expecting to find some injury she found instead a round, smooth stone as big as a chicken egg. Why would it bring a stone to her window?

It squawked at her in impatience and dropped the stone to the floor. It rolled a few feet then came to a rocking rest. The bird stared at it a moment, then primly shuffled around and launched itself from the ledge. Victoria stared at it even longer, face frozen in surprise. She would not have been overly shocked had it chosen that moment to explode and end her misery then and there. But it did not. All it did was sit quietly in the spot it had come to rest in and wait for her to make the first move. She finally tore her gaze away from it and looked back to the window, but the bird was well and truly gone. She was alone again, save for the innocuous rock.

Slowly, she put her shielding pillow aside and put a foot to the floor. She crept towards the stone and knelt before it, staring at it blankly. It was a rock. A mere rock. Grayish brown and not quite evenly round. There was a chip in one side, and lighter scratches in its surface that might have come from the sharp claws of the bird. She reached out a finger and touched it. Nothing. Of course nothing. It was just a rock. She was allowing her nerves to get the better of her. Imagining a rock was something more than what it was. With a sharp jab of determination she picked it up. As soon as her fingers closed about it and it lay pressed against her palm, a sharp tingle shot up her arm. Eyes widening in mute shock she reflexively went to fling it down, but her fingers momentarily refused to obey her brain.

It was not a physical shock. Once she thought about it, she realized she had not really ‘felt’ it at all. It was something beyond physical that merely traveled from the route where she touched the stone to her head. It was a magic, but not the kind that triggered her defensive barriers. All it did was leave an intensive thought/

sentence in her mind. A message that once released ceased to be. The stone returned to being a stone, cold and lifeless. When she dropped it, it fell with a thud to the floor and lay still. She sat and stared at it, with words that were in the tone of her own voice playing over and over inside her head.

‘
Ride with the hunt. Ride with the
hunt. Ride with the hunt.’

It was simple and urgent and absolutely void of any explanation or reason why she should do any such thing.

Who could have sent her such a message capsule? Surely it had not come from the pair of curious birds. Surely some higher creature was responsible. What if it were some ploy of Azeral’s? Some twisted manipulation created to bewilder her more than she already was. On the other hand, what if it wasn’t? Might it be someone on the outside who knew of her plight, and waited to help? That was too giddy a thought. What if her Seelie friends had come to her rescue after all?

Bravely, she reached down and picked up the stone again, hoping it might release some further scrap of information.

But it lay passive in her hand. Biting her lip in uncertainty, she rose from her knees and went to her window. With all her might she flung the rock from it. It arched out, away from the keep wall and fell towards the steep slope of the foliage covered mountain side.