Reap the Wind (15 page)

“So what does anybody do who ends up inland?”

“Find an accommodating farmhouse if no one’s looking for them.”

“And if someone is?”

“Camp.”

I closed my eyes. Wonderful.

“You’re luckier than you know,” he told me. “Medieval inns, when you could find one, were universally terrible. Flea-ridden, lice-infested, and teeming with thugs who would as soon shiv you in the side as look at you. And don’t get me started on the food! I think they deliberately tried to poison me on more than one occasion.”

“Then why did you come here?”

“The same reason anyone comes to this miserable little world.” He looked around malevolently. “Power.”

He didn’t seem interested in explaining that, which was fine with me. If I never talked to the man again, it would be fine with me. “Did you bring sleeping bags, at least?” I asked, trying in vain to find a comfortable spot.

“No.”

“
No?
If you knew there weren’t any inns, then why—”

“I didn’t know you were going to land us in the middle of the damned wilderness, did I?”

I choked down a few dozen comments about him being lucky we’d made it here at all, and instead focused on the pack he’d smacked me in the face with every other step. “Then what’s in that?”

“Clothes, mainly. Or did you plan to go to court dressed like that?”

I looked down at my shorts and T-shirt, and then what he’d said registered. “We’re going to court?”

“Such as it is.”

“You mean . . .
Arthur’s
court? We’re going to
Camelot
?”

Rosier looked like he was about to say something, and then clamped his lips shut. “Yes. We’re going to Camelot. Happy?”

“No!”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“Why can’t we wait for Pritkin somewhere less . . . public?”

“Because, my dear, unlike you, my son bothered to learn something about his magic. Magic I do not have, remember? Approaching him on the road would be a very bad idea.”

“But he knows you. Oh, wait. I see what you mean.”

“He doesn’t know me yet,” Rosier snapped. “All he would see is someone who had disguised themselves as him, who was also trying to hex him!”

“And he won’t see the same thing at court?”

“No. You’re going to go in and lure him out. I’ll hide and render him unconscious while he’s busy with you—”

“Yeah. ’Cause that worked so well in London.”

“—and then use some human drugs to keep him that way. No magic, see?”

I just looked at him.

“Do you have a better idea?” he demanded.

“Anything is a better idea. Trying to coldcock someone with Pritkin’s reflexes—”

“My own aren’t that bad, either!”

“—and why do I have to lure him out? Why can’t you just go inside and—”

“I’ll never get inside; there’s too much security. People are paranoid here, and for good reason. Place makes your Wild West look like Disneyland.”

“Then how am I supposed to—”

“Damn it, girl! You’re an attractive female! That’s a pass into virtually anywhere, if you know how to work it.”

I looked at him some more.

“And I will help you,” he said heavily. I started to comment, but he held up a hand. “You’re making this harder than it is. We go to court. We lure him out. We take him down. Getting here was the challenge; the rest is going to be easy.”

Easy, I thought mockingly, slopping along some “road” the next morning in the “shoes” Rosier had provided to go with my “dress,” all of which were ungodly ugly and didn’t even fit. And that included the “road,” which clung to the side of a mountain like it had been cut to go somewhere else.

Like somewhere that wasn’t at a forty-five-degree angle and located next to a cliff.

“I thought . . . Wales was supposed to be . . . chilly,” I panted, feeling sweat drip down my neck.

“Do you always whine this much?” Rosier demanded, slip-sliding his way through the mud. And barely managing to avoid a rapid descent into the valley below.

“I was making . . . an observation. And this damned wool doesn’t help.”

“It’s what people wore in this era. Wool and flax—”

Rosier cut off when he abruptly went down on his ass, which was funny. And then started sliding toward the cliff, which was not. I grabbed him and jerked back, but forgot about the mud—and my lousy excuse for shoes with nonexistent traction. I ended up going down myself, and planting an elbow in his stomach, or possibly something slightly lower, as we thrashed away from the edge, rolling and cursing and covered in mud.

But we ended up over beside the cliff face, so I guessed that was something.

Furious green eyes met mine, out of a slimy brown mask.

“So couldn’t . . . we have had . . . some more flax?” I asked him after a minute.

“Why has Emrys not killed you? Why has
everyone
not killed you?”

“They’ve tried.”

“Not hard enough!”

•   •   •

“I thought you didn’t believe me,” he said when we stopped under a dripping tree to gulp down some water. How it could be simultaneously rainy and hot
in Britain
, I had no idea. But it was managing. And slowly steaming us inside our lovely wool.

“About what?”

“About your mother.”

“I don’t,” I told him, wiping my mouth on my dress, because it wasn’t as if anybody was going to notice. I’d slipped in the mud three times, the last one face-planting, and the garment was beyond filthy. And I had a rock in my “shoe.” I sat on a really uncomfortable root and pulled it off, shaking the thing.

“Then what was that quip?” Rosier demanded.

“What quip?”

“About me using my son!”

I shrugged. “Just that you can’t have it both ways. You can’t react like Mom’s the Antichrist for supposedly trying to use me, and then turn around and declare yourself lily white when you’re doing the exact same—”

“I am not doing the same thing!”

“Oh no. Of course not.” We’d somehow gotten onto the subject of Pritkin’s mother, and Rosier had gotten defensive. And so, of course, he’d started to attack mine. But considering everything, I didn’t think he had much cause to feel superior. “You just impregnated some woman
you knew was going to die
—”

“I did not know that!”

“Because the last fifty dying in childbirth after their half-incubus kids drained them dry was a
coincidence
?”

“It wasn’t fifty, and women died from childbirth all the time in this era!” he said irritably. “Along with a thousand other things. At first, I thought I was merely unlucky.”

“Unlucky?”

“I didn’t have anyone to tell me otherwise. It’s not as if anyone had tried this!”

No, I didn’t suppose so. Incubi, like all demons as near as I could figure out, tried to improve their line by mating up the power chain. So demon/human crosses were actually pretty rare. It would have to be a pretty sad excuse for a demon to find a human a decent match.

Of course, this was Rosier we were talking about.

But he hadn’t been after Pritkin’s mother for her power, had he?

“But when you finally noticed, you didn’t stop,” I pointed out.

“No, I looked for a woman I thought would live!”

“Because of a tiny bit of fey blood?”

“It wasn’t tiny, and why do you know about all this?”

“Pritkin told me.” Rosier glared at me. “What? It’s his story, too.”

He looked away, and his jaw tightened. “He never talks to anyone. Not about this. He doesn’t talk to
me
about this.”

“Did you expect him to?”

“Yes! He makes assumptions, and always—
always
—I am the villain!”

“You could correct him—”

“That’s not my place!”

“—unless, of course, those assumptions are right. . . .”

He started to say something, and then stopped, lips tight. And then decided to hell with it and said it anyway. “You have no idea what it’s like at court,” he spat. “None! The plotting, the scheming—it never ends. The only way out is to die, or to get enough power that no one risks challenging you. But I can’t absorb enough on my own to build up that kind of surplus, not when I am constantly having to expend it to break up feuds and maintain order—”

“So you decided to give yourself a backup.”

“I wasn’t supposed to need one! I was never supposed to have this position so young. Until your mother decided otherwise!”

He trudged ahead, stabbing at the ground with the makeshift walking stick he’d crafted out of an old tree limb and not looking at me. Although that could have been because of the treacherous terrain. I scrambled to keep up.

It was hard to imagine someone who was probably older than the pyramids as “young,” but I guess it was relative. And he wasn’t wrong about my mother. Not entirely, anyway.

She’d been the last goddess left on earth because she’d kicked out all the others, and the gods, too. I’d known that for a while. What I’d only just found out was how.

She’d done it by hunting demons, the oldest, strongest, and most powerful—including the ones that the other demons called “ancient horrors” and shuddered when they mentioned them. And Rosier’s father, who hadn’t been one of the above, but who had had the bad luck to get in the way. Then she used what she stole from them, energy collected over countless millennia, to kick out her fellow gods and to slam the metaphysical door behind them.

No one knew for sure why she did this. The Circle viewed her as the savior of mankind, because the gods had been doing a pretty good job of destroying the new world they’d found prior to their abrupt departure. It was why the Silver Circle took that name, why it was still their symbol: a circle of light, like the full moon on a clear night, like the age-old symbol of the best known of mother’s many names: Artemis, goddess of the moon, the great huntress . . .

Of course, as the son of one of those she’d hunted, Rosier had a slightly different take. Namely that she’d kicked out the other gods in order to rule supreme on her own. Only they had resisted more than she’d expected, leading to her expending most of her newly acquired strength in the battle. And that had left her vulnerable to payback from all those outraged demons—if they could have found her.

They never did.

But they did find me. And naturally assumed that some nefarious plot on my mother’s part had led to my conception. Rosier especially was a big fan of that idea. Recent events had mitigated the council’s view somewhat, but Rosier . . .

He was still in tinfoil hat land, and showed no sign of coming back.

“It was a different age then,” he told me, looking off over the spread of mountains. “My father strode the gaps between worlds like a colossus, magnificent in his power, breathtaking in his influence. In his era, incubi were respected, admired, even coveted. Our people were considered ornaments to any court, valued councilors, trusted spies, functionaries, diplomats . . .” He trailed off.

“And then?” I prompted.

He shot me a glance. “And then came the dark times, and the world we knew shattered and broke. Everyone was set adrift as courts scattered and people fled and my father—we never recovered.”

“So Pritkin was supposed to help you reclaim lost glory?”

“He was supposed to help me survive!” Rosier said, slashing at some gorse bushes that had grown over the “road.” “That’s all any of us have done ever since. And it was damned hard, girl. Our specialized abilities, honed to a fine sheen over countless centuries, were suddenly useless. Beauty, luxury, flattery—none of these things mean a damn when you’re scratching and clawing for survival! When your very civilization is coming down around your ears!

“But survive we did, among them all, among creatures a thousand times more powerful. The ones everyone assumed would be among the first to go, the soft, the indulgent, the useless incubi, survived when countless stronger races fell.”

He whirled on me suddenly, so much so that we both almost went sprawling. “
I
did that, do you understand? I kept the remnants of us together; I forged us into a functioning whole; I found us a refuge! All I ask is for Emrys to help me hold it. And he could—easily, pleasurably. With two of us to absorb power, and with our gifts . . . no coalition would ever be able to challenge us. It would mean absolute security—”

“For you,” I pointed out.

“For all of us!”

“Not for Pritkin.”

“He’s incubus whether he likes it or not!”

“He’s human, too, and for him that sort of life is more like slavery.”

“It’s nothing of the kind!”

“Like those people whose world you turned into your refuge?” I’d seen it recently, a vast, sprawling desert world that had been taken over by the incubi. It and its people.

“If we hadn’t, they’d have been conquered by someone else. In those days—”

“But those days are over, aren’t they? They’ve been over for a long time. But I haven’t noticed any emancipation going—”

“Bah!” Rosier suddenly yelled in my face, causing me to jerk back. And stare at him. “I’m through talking to you!” he proclaimed, and strode off, his feet throwing up little clumps of mud.

•   •   •

“You need to stop panicking,” I said very clearly, some hours later. We’d made our way out of the steamy valley and onto a frigid mountaintop, but our luck was about the same. As Rosier was busy demonstrating.

“You stop panicking!” he snarled. “They’re not trying to eat you!”

“They’re not trying to eat you, either.” Well, I was pretty sure. “They just want what’s in the bag. Give them what’s in the bag.”

Rosier glared at me from his perch atop a birch, where he’d landed after the rock fall but before the avalanche. I’d taken refuge in a sort of cave-like depression in the rocks, but he’d been forced to jump over the cliff or be crushed by hundred-pound boulders and a mountain of snow. The good news was, he ended up grabbing the top of a tree. The bad news was that a mass of wild pigs apparently lived under it.

And had no intention of letting him down.

“How is giving them food going to encourage them to
leave
?” Rosier demanded, staring at them, wild-eyed.

“Because you’re going to throw it away from the tree,” I said, exasperated. “No, no. Take off the cellophane first. They won’t know what it is!”

“I can’t take the cellophane off and hold on to the damned tree!”

“Use your legs.”

“What?”

“Your legs!”

Rosier stared at me like I’d lost my mind. “I’m an incubus, not a contortionist!”

I took a breath and closed my eyes. That seemed to be the only thing that helped with him, if I couldn’t see his stupid face. “Use your
legs
to hold on to the tree. Use your
hands
to unwrap the food. Throw the food away from you. Then, when they go after it, get down and run in the other direction.”

There was some grumbling I couldn’t make out very well, and then some cellophane crinkling. And then a lot of agitated squealing.

I opened my eyes to see several pigs jumping up onto the trunk like they were trying to climb it, Rosier screeching and retreating even farther into the swaying, leafy treetop, and cheesy crackers raining down like manna from heaven. I sighed. “I said
away
. You have to throw them
away
from—”

“I am not Sandy Koufax!”

“Who?”

“Oh, for . . .” The treetop shook some more, and an outraged face appeared through the foliage. “Just do what I told you!”

“I am not using magic,” I said, grasping his big bag o’ tricks a little more tightly. Fortunately, he’d decided to lighten his own load by making me carry it earlier. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use anything in it without bringing the Pythian posse of doom down on our heads.

“Then use the gun!”

“The—you brought a
gun
?” I opened the pack, and sure enough, toward the bottom was a shiny new Beretta. “Why did you bring a gun? We can’t shoot anybody—”

“The hell we can’t.”

“We
can’t
! It would change time! I told you—”

“And I told you to shoot the damned pigs! Or will that change time, too?”

I put the gun away before I was tempted to use it on Rosier.

More
tempted.

“Shoot them!” he yelled.

“That mountain just tried to bury us,” I reminded him, trying to speak calmly. “Do you
want
another avalanche?”

“We don’t have a choice!”

“It’s only been a few minutes. If you stop screeching—”

“I don’t screech. I have never screeched!”

“—maybe they’ll get bored and go away.”

“Perhaps if I hadn’t just thrown food at them! They’ll never leave now!”

“You don’t know that,” I said, just as several more pigs started trunk jumping. “And can I remind you that it takes all of a second for a Pythia to pop in?” I added, over his renewed screeches. “Once they know where we are—”

“Shut up and get me down, you appalling woman! Get me down, get me down, get me down!”

“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this, you know; I really—”

“Augghhh!”

I would have put the infernal noise down to Rosier’s tendency for hysterics, but then I heard something else. Something like the creak-crack-pop of splintering wood. And, okay, it was just barely possible that this tree wasn’t in the greatest of shape.

Annnnnd now the pigs were ramming it.

I started rooting around in the bag. “What else do you have in here?”

“Use the yellow ones. The yellow ones!”