“No. Are you? I heard you hit the wall.” Glass and steel were softer than her expression.
“I saw stars, apparently long enough for Dryden to surrender.”
“Are they away?”
“Yes,” Will said. “Ada is safe.”
“But you are not.”
Resignation crept on stealthy paws, walking over his plans for the future. Unless he brought about some miracle, he would hang. And Meg almost sounded sorry for that.
Coming into the grand hall, a guard pushed her from behind. She stubbed her toe and faltered, falling to her knees and crying out. Will dropped beside her, his fettered hands gripping hers. Tears glittered in her pallid blue eyes.
“Meg?”
“Up, you,” Carlisle said. He and a second guard hauled Will to his feet.
Another man lifted Meg, his arms encircling her breasts. She paled and struggled. Will saw red. He pulled at his restraints, but unyielding metal snagged his wrists. “Leave her go.”
Carlisle released Will to a pair of soldiers and wiped his hands on his thighs. “Be more concerned for your own neck, Scarlet.”
“Because the fate of my neck is already sealed, I say again, leave her go.”
The guard spun her around and kissed her. He gripped the back of her head and her bottom, gloved fingers gouging her curves. Carlisle and other soldiers laughed. Even Finch raised an eyebrow, almost amused.
Meg squirmed, pulling, arching away, but her attacker would not relinquish his hold. His tongue pushed between her clamped lips. And she bit down.
“Bitch!”
The guard roared in pain, blood dripping onto his chin. He drew back his fist and landed a hard blow. Her cheek split. She screamed and dropped to the floor.
“Meg!”
Will pounced, landing atop the guard. Momentum propelled them to the floor, his ankle twisting at an odd angle. He pushed manacle chains across the man’s windpipe. The guard gagged, his face a deep, fiery red. A trio of soldiers yanked Will up, hurling him to the unforgiving floor. Familiar stars spun before his eyes. He doubled over when the hard toe of Carlisle’s boot connected with his gut.
“Enough, Scarlet,” Carlisle said, propping beefy hands on his hips. He unlocked a manacle cuff and nodded toward a distant corner of the hall. “Get him up.”
Limp, moaning with every graceless movement, Will was wrenched to his feet. Soldiers dragged him to a low strut angling between the wall and a support column. Carlisle looped an end of the cuffs over the beam and refastened them, leaving Will to dangle there. His toes scraped the ground. Metal bit his wrists.
Carlisle slapped him on the cheek, amused. “He’s yours to have, Smithson.”
The guard stepped forward, rubbing his windpipe and grinning. Blood tinted his chin like madder root. “Can I kill him?”
Finch denied his request. “I want him alive enough to hang on the morrow.”
Smithson nodded. Without hesitation, he burrowed a fist into Will’s middle. Then his kidneys. Then his face. Another punch. Another groan. He fought unconsciousness, stretching past the pain, looking beyond the blur of color and motion in search of a weapon. The only weapons he saw were trained on him.
Dreamlike, from some distant place, Meg screamed for them to stop. The screams multiplied and broadened. Shouts and calls. Voices. Voices upon voices clamored in his brain, digging at his ears like a crow’s razor beak.
But he was not mad. Others heard it. Wary guards shifted their eyes away from the beating Smithson dispensed. Finch crossed to a window slit overlooking the castle’s courtyard and peered into the evening darkness illuminated by the eerie orange glow of festival fires.
Across the wide hall where Will and Meg had danced, dozens of angry fists pummeled the pair of locked oaken doors. The doors shook. The hinges scraped and rattled.
Carlisle flashed the sheriff a hasty glance. “Finch, what goes?”
“A mob.”
“What do they want?”
“Listen.”
The room stilled. Ears trained on a hundred livid shouts weaving into a distinct and bloodthirsty demand. One syllable, over and over.
Panic seized his breath. He looked to where Meg sat, her legs sprawled on the floor. Except for the blood flowing between trembling fingers, her rigid face was ashen. She, too, heard the call—a single chanted word.
Witch.
And the doors ripped open.
She would succumb to the mercy of the mob, and Will would hang if the soldiers did not beat him to death first. His frantic shouts failed to rouse the passion she needed to fight. Too many years of suspicion and fear made such a fate inevitable. She hid in the woods. She practiced those ancient arts in secret. But fate found her and dragged her into the courtyard.
Fingers ripped her hair and gown. A chilly evening wind whipped around her legs as they spun her. Wide-eyed, she looked for color and tried to imagine the sky. Did clouds obscure the moon? Would the stars watch as these fearful, frenzied people put her to death?
The mob righted her body and pushed her against what may have been a maypole. She tried to stand, instinctively, but her boots slipped on unsteady logs. With lengths of rope, men tugged her arms backward and secured her to the pole. Perhaps girls had danced in circles that afternoon, weaving colorful ribbons around its length. She imagined the ribbons fluttering over her head, watching her as the stars did.
And then the fire.
She smelled it first, the smoke and the torches. Flames laughed and shushed, eclipsing the incensed shouts, soothing her. The pungent odor of burning wood and cloth wafted skyward. Heat warmed the leather of her boots.
She stood atop an island of fire. Soon the flames would consume her. Its power, its ancient mysteries would render her body to ash. She would drift into the air as smoke until nothing of pain and bitterness and betrayal remained. The crowd would become ordinary citizens again. They would wander home before dawn, able to sleep a little more soundly—their fears lessened, her fears gone altogether.
She closed her eyes, licked her lips, and remembered Will’s kiss.
“Burn her!”
Hugo.
He did this. She knew him; she knew his dark thoughts. He had rallied the mob. And he was murdering her as surely as if he slid a dagger across her throat, smiling and taunting her across the long minutes of a slow demise.
“Burn her! She’s a witch!”
Rage awakened the passion that the thought of death could not. She would not die with Hugo by to watch and laugh.
Her resignation gone, the flames turned against her. No longer soothing, no longer laughing, the fire grabbed at her. Smoke contaminated her lungs. The leather of her boots ignited. She kicked with her heels, stamping the unsteady logs. And she screamed.
A grand shout from the courtyard snatched his attention. The sinister orange glow intensified.
“Damn you, Finch!” Sweat wound tiny rivulets down his forehead. “After all this, you’ll let her die? Your precious alchemist?”
The sheriff recoiled. Alone in the hall except for Will and Carlisle, he turned his eyes from the spectacle beyond the window. “No one can stop them now. My men would have to destroy half the town to get to her. We’ll find another.”
Will caught sight of the satchel Carlisle still wore. “I can stop them. Turn me loose.”
“I’ll not lose two prizes in one day,” Finch said, eyebrows knitted together. “Better that my guards protect the castle and the allies in these walls.”
Another shout from the crowd. And Meg’s scream.
“Fiend!” He pulled again with brutal force. The beam above his head creaked.
“Secure him, Carlisle!”
The burly soldier strode forth. As if awaiting a fellow animal in a baiting pen, Will watched. Sweat blurred his vision. Pain scrambled his senses. But when Carlisle stepped into his realm, he kicked him under the chin.
Carlisle reeled. He spat broken splinters of teeth and a spray of blood. “Scarlet!”
He grinned, his lilting voice only half sane. “I must admit, Carlisle, I never liked you.”
Magnificent shadows danced across the hall, irregular measures of orange and black. Carlisle’s sword glinted in the light. He charged.
Will connected with Carlisle’s hand, kicking the sword in a high arc. He winched his knees into the air and swung forward. He clasped his attacker around the neck with his calves. They wrestled and tugged, every motion imbedding the manacles deeper into his wrists. He bellowed, fueled only by rage. With a twist of his hips in opposition to the swift snap of his ankles, Carlisle went limp.
Thighs shuddering, Will kept hold of the man’s hanging body. He yanked against the manacle encircling his left wrist, using Carlisle’s weight and his own. A bone in his thumb shattered. He roared as agony flared through his body. His wrist slipped free. The manacle flew over the beam, attached to only one arm. He smashed to the ground and landed atop Carlisle’s inert body.
He caught the fleeting sound of Finch’s boots running up the wide staircase at the front of the hall. But the villain could wait. Meg could not.
Rolling off Carlisle’s lifeless mass, his left hand refused to respond. It lay limp at the end of his arm. He retrieved Meg’s satchel and slung it across his shoulder. The sword, however, he abandoned. He could not restrain the dangling manacle while brandishing a weapon, not when his left hand was useless.
At another of Meg’s macabre cries, he tore through the hall and into the courtyard. A strengthening wind shot sparks into the night sky and challenged the brilliant stars. Smoke mingled with shadows along the castle walls, dancing like wraiths. Chanting and urging the flames to do the foul deed, tenscore citizens circled a blazing pyre.
Silhouetted, Meg stood bound at its center. She screamed and kicked. Each strike of her boots against the smoldering wood whirled a new puff of sparks around her legs.
Hefting the loose cuff in his right hand, he tested its weight and cinched the chain, forming a makeshift mace. He sprinted through the courtyard and swung the manacle around a guard’s ankles. A quick yank sent him to the ground. Will stomped the man’s hand and pilfered his shield.
Looping the shield over his left forearm, he bullied past, through, and over the mob. The thrashing manacle cleared whatever path the shield did not manage, connecting with random heads and limbs. Taken aback by the madman in their midst, the hysterical citizens of Nottingham cowered.
He dropped the shield facedown onto the stones near the pyre and withdrew the weighty bag of sugar from the satchel. He spilled it into the basin of the shield. The satchel came next, atop the sugar, where he smashed it with the loose manacle cuff. More of Meg’s black power exploded. Acids of all sorts bubbled with the sugar, forming a thick blanket of smoke.
People fell back, screaming. Will tackled a man and stripped him of a short sword and cloak. Smoke blackened the air. He hunched over as a cough wracked his body, the smoke spiking his lungs and setting off spasms.
“Stay! This is the work of the witch!”
Will whipped toward a disgustingly familiar voice. Two hundred people gathered around that pyre, but only two interested him.
Meg. And Hugo.
But Hugo could wait.
He doused the pilfered cloak in a barrel of rainwater, then draped the sopping cloth over his head. He tore past Hugo and scrambled up the pyre. “Meg!”
He expected her to be senseless. He expected her hysteria to match that of the mob. He expected her to be someone, perhaps, other than Meg.
But she was herself and spitting mad.
“Hugo did this!”
“I know.”
Flames licked his legs with hot scrapes of pain. The short sword made quick work of the smoldering ropes, freeing her hands. He pushed a length of wet fabric against her face. Four bounding steps later, they burst through the fire and onto the courtyard flagstones.
Free of the pyre, she collapsed on hands and knees, chest heaving. Her head hung low. Will slapped her gown with the cloak, extinguishing a dozen tiny fires. He draped the singed wool over her body and urged clenching fingers to take the short sword. “Stay here. I’ll return.”
He swiveled and ran back to the pyre.
Hugo clutched at his failing supporters. “She must burn! This smoke is her sin!”
Turning frantic circles, he spun right into Will’s fist. The dangling metal cuff hit Hugo in the forehead. Blood exploded from his nose. The satisfying crunch of bone goaded Will with the need for more. Finch, Carlisle, even Dryden the coward—not one of them mattered. His frustrations found a home in the shaggy, miserable thief.
Hugo produced a dagger from his tunic, but Will jumped free of the petite blade. He stumbled on a log at the edge of the pyre and fell. Embers stung the backs of his thighs. He saw the smoldering shield to his left. Rolling away from the pyre, he took a flaming piece of timber with him. Hugo swooped down with the dagger and just missed his neck.
The shield’s strap had melted beneath the onslaught of mingled chemicals. Will shook his disobedient left hand, to no avail. With his adversary at his back and no way to use the shield, he could only kick the hunk of metal. Hugo sidestepped the flying shield and pounced.
Spinning, Will smashed the fiery log into the back of the thief’s head, catching his cap on fire. The dagger glanced along the outside of Will’s forearm, but pain was a memory. Every new sensation blended into a numb pulp.
He spun and hurled his weight into Hugo’s torso, driving him down. The man’s skull bounced off the flagstones with a sickening thump. Hugo shrieked as his hair ignited.
“Scarlet!” He bucked and struggled. Flames slithered across his head. “I beg you!”
Will ground his knee-guard into the thief’s forearm and snatched the blade. “You’ll never hurt her again.”
Fire consumed Hugo’s face. Ending his life was a mercy he hardly merited, but with a quick jab of the dagger, Will did the deed.