Siege of the Heart (Southern Romance Series, #2) (11 page)

“I pity men about to be tortured, and you know I was Horace’s friend! Still am. Was. I don’t know. Knox, if he’s a spy, I swear I knew nothing of it, but it doesn’t matter. They’re hardly going to come back again.”

“Oh, you think so? So they aren’t circling around us right now?” Knox’s face broke into a smile, and the men started laughing.

“And you’re happy about that?” Jasper retorted before he could stop himself. “They killed how many of your men?”

Knox’s face closed down in a moment, and Jasper regretted is words.

“Doesn’t matter,” Knox said, through gritted teeth. “Last time, we underestimated them. That won’t happen again.”

“That’s why we’ve been going so slowly,” Jasper said suddenly. His heart sank.

“How smart. Maybe you should have been the spy.” Knox’s voice dripped with sarcasm.

“You think you’re going to lure them into a trap.”
Oh, my god.
And there was no bargaining his way out of it. Jasper, by far more valuable than Cecelia, was now the least valuable of the men Knox wanted.

“We get you, and Horace. When they’re done with him, and they get Ambrose Stuart.”

“You weren’t here for them! You were here for
me.
”

“Plans change, Perry. You didn’t start the war thinking you’d turn traitor...did you?”

Anger boiled up at once, fury obscuring his good sense.

“I am not,” Jasper said, blood pounding in his ears, “a
traitor.
”

The camp fell silent. Knox stood slowly.

“I left,” Jasper said. “I saved the life of the man that saved mine. I watched hundreds die in those field camps and I took him away from that. I took him north, to go home, and while I was there, I fell in love, but I never gave aid to the Union. I never gave them information. I didn’t fight our men.”

All things that Solomon had done, but he did not say that.

“You tend their fields. You take aid from us. You haven’t set to burning their crops or poisoning their food. You left us when we needed you, Perry.”

For an unjust war.
And God help them, he was too much of a coward to come out and say it.

“So sit back down.” Knox’s face was right in Jasper’s. He pressed down on Jasper’s shoulder, on one of the many bruises; not a deliberate cruelty, but he did not relax his grip when Jasper went white. “You can’t claim you didn’t know what you did. You can’t claim to be better than anything.”

He went back to the fire as Jasper sank his head into his hands.

“You were right,” he said finally. “We should have run.”

“Well, it’s too late now, isn’t it?” Cecelia’s voice was a whisper, but hysteria ran in her words.

“Cecelia, I swear to you, I meant this for the best. If I escaped, I thought they would come again, and again. I’ve been waiting for this since I left. I thought the best that could be salvaged was your safety.”

There was a pause while the sounds of the forest continued as if nature cared nothing for the death and dying and betrayal and pain humans wrought below.
I give you dominion over the earth,
God had said, and yet sometimes it seemed that nature was the mask of God, watching, uncaring, as humanity destroyed itself.

“I know,” Cecelia said finally. “But it doesn’t matter anymore. They’re going to come back for us, and we won’t just lose you—we’ll lose Solomon too; and whoever that spy is, I wouldn’t want to be him. Nothing you could give me to trade places.”

I
t went wrong from the start. The woods were too quiet, even the birds strangely hushed as if they were holding their breath. Solomon lagged behind and Violet urged him onwards sharply.

“Something’s wrong,” Solomon murmured to her, and she shook her head.

“Stop being nervous,” she hissed and then shook her head. “You’re not one for this sort of thing, are you?”

He didn’t argue. It was why he had defected. Feeling the sick roiling in his gut, thinking that the revulsion he felt creeping up on men as they slept was to do with the Union, not with the act itself. How could he not feel pity? Some of the Confederate soldiers wore grey wool where he wore blue, but many had no coats at all, or the same brown they would have worn in the fields and shops they had come from. Some went barefoot, shivering in the cold air. Solomon had slain poorly trained, poorly armed men, and he had hated himself for it. In time, it had driven him away, him believing that the fervor he saw in his opponents’ eyes was truth.

Only, when he was the Confederacy, it was no better. The same dread, the same horror. Killing brought the same sickness in his gut, and he would spend evenings on his knees, asking absolution from a God he could no longer picture.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” he asked Violet, trying to get himself away from the memories of blood and life fading out of men’s eyes.

“These men,” she said softly, “want to kill your friend for defecting. They don’t mean to give him a fair trial. Whether or not they mean harm to your sister, they’ve kidnapped her and dragged her here against her will. They are not going to offer mercy, or kindness, or truth. They tried to splinter our country.”

“And it’s as simple for you as that?”

“It’s never simple,” she admitted to him. “It’s always a life. Always. I wonder whether I would be where they are if I had been born in the south.”

He stopped. “What do you think?”

“I think I might have. I’d like to think I would have the courage to reject their sentiment, but I cannot know.”

“How do you kill them, if you pity them?”

“You did too, remember?” Her hazel eyes were not condemning, but instead full of pity. “Did you hear me during the fight?

He shook his head.

“I always say,
you don’t have to do this.
  Sometimes, they listen. Those I have spared.”

“You’ve...”

“They wouldn’t take kindly to that, in command.” She swallowed and shook her head. “I don’t know what to say, Solomon. I don’t have any words that will make this palatable to you. I’m not a saint. I never have been. I don’t know if what I’m doing is right, but I believe in the Union, and I’m doing the best I can to see the war ended quickly. I’ve never taken lives for the sake of it.”

That, he could believe, and in the depths of her eyes, he could see some of the same fear that shadowed him: that none of this made sense, that it was all a terrible mistake.
I’m no saint.
It felt like absolution, after all this time, to hear another person admit to shades of grey. It was not, as the others claimed, good against evil.

“Then let’s go.”

Unfortunately the feeling had not eased; the strange quiet still signaled the coming fury of a storm. As they crept over the ridge, the camp had been eerily quiet, men sleeping though it was midnight and not midday. Solomon could see Jasper and Cecelia nowhere. Had they escaped? Solomon and Violet walked closer, their footfalls careful not to disturb this strange quiet.

The attack came from behind them, a shot that went wide and a yell, and the men in the camp sprang to their feet, running for Solomon and Violet with murder in their eyes. Solomon leveled his rifle, feeling the sickening drop of terror as a pistol was aimed. He was quicker; the man fell. Beside him, he heard Violet’s whispered litany:
You don’t have to do this.

No one listened, and the short blade in her hand was covered in blood. Bright red streaked down her shirt, and Solomon spared a moment too long to try to see if it was hers; a fist caught him on the side of the face and he stumbled sideways...

...directly into the hands of Robert Knox, whose blow lifted Solomon up off his feet and sent him skidding across the forest floor when he landed. A scream from somewhere. Cecelia? Violet? He was up and scrambling away as Knox pointed a gun.

Violet came out of nowhere, dropping her shoulder and driving herself against Knox’s thighs, pushing him out of the way so that he dropped the pistol. Violet landed only one blow before having the sense to dance out of reach, but there were too many in the camp.

“Let go of—”
Her.
Solomon pushed himself up, and stopped dead at Violet’s warning cry. He turned, slowly, and his heart dropped. Jasper and Cecelia were bound, their hands in front of them, and knives at their throat. Where they had been hidden, Solomon did not know. He wanted to scream in fury. “Knox...”

“It’s over, Delancy.”

Solomon looked away, swaying with tiredness. He could hear Cecelia’s sobs, and he could not stop seeing the look of the dead man: shocked, but not nearly so shocked as Cecelia herself.

“Delancy.”

“I heard you.” Solomon wanted to laugh until he cried. All this time, afraid of Violet and the Union, and this was how it ended, torn to pieces by the Confederacy. Even he could see the humor in it.

“How long, Delancy? How long did it take you to get turned?”

He didn’t understand that question. Solomon looked over at last, his brow furrowed, and he met Knox’s suspicious eyes.

“We know everything.” Knox sounded as weary as Solomon himself. “Of everyone, I never thought it’d be you who’d turn. You believed.” His voice was bitter. “Or I thought you did.”

Solomon could not stop himself. He looked over to Violet. Her arms were wrenched behind her back and she bit against her lips not to cry out in pain—a sound Solomon knew would be too female to disguise, a breathy cry instead of a man’s shout. Blood streaked down along the side of her face, mixing with dirt and sweat, and all he could think, for one slow moment as the world seemed to stop around them, was how beautiful she looked. Was her nose too long, her mouth too thin? None of it mattered. She was courage and honor and beauty and a fragile strength that he had never seen the likes of before, and he wanted to throw himself on the ground at her feet and beg her forgiveness for bringing her here. If he had only gone back with her at the start, she would be safe.

He would still hate her, thinking her a man with no heart, and Cecelia and Jasper would still believe themselves abandoned by their loved ones.

Violet’s head rolled slightly and her eyes came open to slits. Her mouth opened in a faint
ah
of satisfaction. A puzzle completed, and Solomon’s heart sank. She knew, then. She knew he had fought amongst the Confederacy.

“You don’t understand,” Solomon said numbly, and for once, he meant that his crime was worse than anyone knew.

But Knox did not have a chance to respond, for it was Jasper who leapt in to the rescue.

“Horace...don’t make a fool of yourself. So this one lied to you. You can still beg their forgiveness. You never seemed the type to turn. He must have promised you something, told you something.”

The look in the man’s eyes was urgent, and Solomon thought his heart would break.
No,
he wanted to say,
I’m guilty. Let me die.
“It’s not like that.”

“Of course it isn’t.” Jasper looked at him pleadingly. “You didn’t know he was a spy. You never meant to pass information.”

“Never meant to!” Knox’s voice rang out, and Jasper rounded on him.

“Neither did you!” His shout was cut off with a blow to the face, but he struggled up. “You rode with Stuart, you gave up information you didn’t know about until later. Well, Horace was nothing but honorable when I knew him. What if he got taken in too?”

“Then he’s a defector, same as you.”

Well, there was no arguing with that. Solomon saw Jasper give up even the thought of it. “Jasper...”

“What?” The man’s voice was weary. He looked up, his dark eyes surrounded by bruises.

“Don’t give up everything to try to save me.”

“Oh, shouldn’t I?” Jasper’s mouth twisted bitterly. “I almost think you’re right, you know. How much did I ever know about you, Horace?”

A faint indication of trust in that name, but Solomon knew that the loyalty was fading.
Dammit, Perry! What have you done?

“I should’ve known you’d come,” Jasper whispered. He wasn’t even looking up anymore, but down at the ground. Jasper could see blood vivid against his skin. What had Jasper endured on his behalf? And what was he thinking now? “I just didn’t think you’d come with a Union spy.”

Solomon’s head wrenched around to Violet, and she looked back at him, chest rising and falling slowly. Only her eyes showed her terror. She was not ready for the kind of death they would give her now. No one could be, however. Solomon felt fury radiate through him. “Why would you say—?”

“They know, Horace.”

“They do know.” Violet’s low, smooth voice. “I rode with them, once. Of course, no one here had any information, but it was worth checking.”

Solomon saw shoulders settle around the camp and understood, at last. He felt a wave of admiration. Violet had known at once that their violence would be stoked by the feeling of stupidity. They would want revenge on her for coaxing information out of them. If she had any chances of making it to a clean death, she’d just doubled them.

“You knew he was a spy,” Jasper said, his voice low, and Solomon looked over at him.

“What are you saying, Perry?” There was something going on here he did not understand.

“He’s saying you betrayed him too,” Knox said from the side of the camp. “I’d almost feel sorry for him, if it weren’t for the defection. The boy’s had a hard time of it. He trusted you, Horace. And here you are now.”

Too late, Solomon understood.
You knew he was a spy.

Oh, shit!

“I came to get Jasper back,” he said, low. “I came to save him. Ambrose helped me.”

“And how did you know a Union spy?”

The answer to that one would damn him, and as Solomon drew breath to speak, trying to figure out what to say, Knox decided he was done with waiting. Jasper was hauled away from Cecelia, her scream echoing in the clearing, and a pistol came to rest against the man’s dark hair.

“Time’s up, Perry. Make a choice. We’ll give you some mercy, if you tell us what in hell is going on with Horace.”

As Jasper looked up, his lips bleeding where the skin had broken, Solomon saw something new in his eyes: not terror, but anger and mistrust.