Bloodstone (18 page)

All around her night-birds shrilled and crickets chirped. The breeze sighing through the trees carried no sounds but the rustle and scrape of pine cones, branches and twigs. Mirianna forced a swallow. “Papa?”

It was a croak unworthy of a crow. Clearing her throat, she tried again. Only her echo returned, ghostly and plaintive.

She bit her lower lip, stilling its tremble, and tried to think. She was sure her father had been behind her at the mouth of the clearing. He should’ve turned first, when Rees shouted, and fled cleanly. Only Rees and she had been caught in the melee. Squeezing her eyes shut, she remembered Rees swearing, the sound of a struggle, and then his shouted “Come on!” His horse’s shoes had struck sparks, and she’d ridden toward them, but then the gelding had clamped the bit between its teeth and she could do no more than hang on.

She opened her eyes and stared at the dark forest. “Papa?” she called again, louder. She stopped herself when panic frayed her voice. If her father hadn’t answered by now, it would do no good to shriek like a marshwight. The gelding had simply carried her headlong through trees and meadows in a direction different than the others. When it was light enough, Rees would locate her trail and find her.

In the meantime, her horse needed to walk until it cooled down. After that, she would think about finding a suitable spot to wait out the night. She touched her heels to the gelding’s sides.

The horse plodded several strides, then abruptly raised its head and huffed.

Mirianna watched the gelding’s ears twist and prick. One large, dark eye rolled on a white rim. The animal huffed again and stamped. She tightened her grip on the reins—and her grip on her fears. It was probably nothing more than a night animal. If it were a Krad, she would smell it too, and she smelled nothing but the heavy fragrance of pine and spruce.

The horse shook its head, whistled, and back-stepped. Mirianna wound the reins another turn around her hands. The gelding champed at the bit, trying to tongue it forward, but she intended to keep the animal, and herself, under control this time. She leaned forward and peered into the darkness.

Her intent gaze separated the forest into shadows of blue and black. The black stood solidly, like sections of impenetrable wall. The blue shadow quivered like liquid, dissolving and reforming before her eyes. Lacing itself through the black, it wove a darkness of muted edges and velvet curves so quickly, Mirianna was only vaguely aware of the transformation. Just beyond her horse’s feet, pale bits of rock gleamed from the forest floor like scattered fragments of a fallen moon. Stirred by the whisper of the breeze, shades of bough and grass danced among the stones in an ethereal ballet.

While she sat, transfixed, warmth ebbed into her limbs, along with a strange tranquility that felt as if it had been willed into her. Her eyes drifted shut with the infusion of languor. She opened them slowly, knowing in her heart what would be waiting when she chose to look.

You’re here,
her thoughts said to a disembodied pair of yellow-green, iridescent eyes.

Yes.

The she-cat’s voice purred along Mirianna’s nerve endings as if the word had been transmitted directly to them.
Come,
it said, and not a sliver of her logic raised a protest when she heeled the gelding and followed a glimmer of green deep into the Wehrland.

The man saw her as he straightened from spreading the burned-out remains of the Krad pyre. He froze in the incomplete motion of a turn and stared while ash settled in a fine powder on his boots. He knew he didn’t dream, yet she was here, the woman of his dreams. She stood at the edge of his camp, her hair a halo about her face in the first golden rays of sunrise, her body a slim, glowing column against the purple line of forest.

“By Kiros,” he whispered. He closed his eyes, breathed, and opened them.

She stood as before, wrists crossed under her chin, hands clasping the edges of her cloak. Hands like the sculpted wings of a dove. He imagined their feather-light flutter on his shoulders, the hidden fingertips’ delicate glide over his chest, the slow slide of her palm down his belly. The thought sucked the breath from his lungs.

He completed the motion of his turn and, dream-walking, climbed toward her. She rotated like a carved figurine at his approach, and her gaze settled on him with a heart-stopping gleam of blue. Her eyes were large and luminous, her skin as softly translucent as pearl. Her fragrance, heady as lilacs scented from a distance, wafted toward him on the faintest breeze. He drank it in like a man dying of thirst.

Each deliberate step brought him higher and nearer until his body broke the incandescent plane of dawn. Rays of sunlight filtered through the edges of his hood and formed themselves like golden tracery around his shoulders and torso. He was aware of the glow only as it reflected in the pools of her eyes, a glorious halo around the lightless form of a man.

Lightless.

His boot struck a stone, and he stumbled. His gaze dropped with his hands, for balance, and he saw his shadow.

His
shadow
had wrapped itself snake-like around her ankles. While he straightened, it rose sinuously along the curves and hollows of her body—curves and hollows his hands had longed more than a dozen years to explore. And now his
shadow
had touched her first!

Cold fury arrowed to his temples. His hands balled into fists. But there was nothing to seize and pummel, nothing but a shape-shifting absence of light whose touch sucked the vitality from living things and left a pale echo in its place. He watched in impotent rage while this...
shade
of himself slithered across her face, taking first her mouth and then her eyes into its unholy possession.

When the shadow passed, the sunlight had faded. Gone was the luxurious golden glow of sunrise. Gone, too, was the dream, and the woman of it. In her place, bathed by mundane daily brightness, stood her ghost.

The merciless light revealed cheeks from which all color had washed, eye sockets lined with charcoal, hair disheveled and festooned with pine needles and broken twigs. Two uneven, raised scratches stood out garishly red on her forehead and trailed into her hairline. More needles and twigs decorated her cloak and clung to a long, jagged tear near the hem. Her eyes, bloodshot and dull, fixed him with the dazed stare of a sleeper shaken from a dream.

The transformation left the man equally disoriented. He’d expected—what had he expected? Something evil. Lustful. A conjurer’s trick. Not something as wretched and bedraggled as a—as a lost kitten. His gaze swept her once more, this time taking in the exhausted horse standing head down behind her.
A woman. Nothing more than a mortal woman.

A woman?
the Voice in his head said.
Or THE woman?

The man’s hands paused in the act of unclenching.

She came to your camp the night before last. Lost then, too.

There had been three men with her. Where were they now? His gaze raked the clearing, but nothing moved in the brush except a doe watching with ears outstretched. He raised his hand to the Sword of Drakkonwehr stuck in his belt. Closing his fingers on the hilt, he rubbed his thumb over the stone embedded in the crosspiece.
“Bluet drakkenoth, ominor ay rhoenon pek
,
”
he whispered.

He risked a glance at the bloodstone, but no glow answered the incantation. No mage magic here. But someone—or something—had clearly left the woman in a trance-like state.

“Who are you?” He resisted an impulse to shake her. “How did you get here?”

Her pupils narrowed at the sound of his voice, and her gaze shifted until it landed on his torso.

He felt it like an inadvertent touch between strangers, one that lingered a second too long. For a heart-thudding moment, he imagined her hand flattened there at the apex of his ribs.
By Koronolan!

When her gaze reached the fastenings of his hood, he watched a swallow work its way down her throat. The action left her lips slightly parted, the lower one shadowed mauve. He yearned to touch his finger to it, to probe its fullness for the dew hidden just inside—and entirely beyond his reach.

Her head lifted and she looked full into the black shroud where his face should have been.

He thought he knew how to endure this moment. He’d seen it all before: horror, shock, revulsion, panic. But the fear contorting her features twisted in his stomach like a Krad blade. With rising gall, he watched her eyes roll back in her head and her body crumple.

She lay at his feet like a discarded rag doll, her cloak open, her throat a white curve descending into the hollow formed by fragile collarbones. Below it, an expanse of delicately veined skin stretched from her shoulders to her bodice and disappeared into a deepening valley beneath the lacings.

Heat flushed his chest. His hands tingled. Yellow light flickered around the edges of his vision. “By all that’s holy,” he whispered.

Take her,
the Voice in his head said.
She’s a gift.

He shuddered. Why shouldn’t he take her back to Drakkonwehr? A woman, lost in the Wehrland—who would wonder if she simply disappeared? He saw her stretched out on a bed in a darkened room, her body illumined by a single candle flame. He saw his black-gloved hands reach out, cup her breasts, stroke down her belly. Blood rushed to his groin, and he felt himself grow hard. He reached, in the vision, to snuff out the candle flame, and saw her face—and the terror etched there.

“No! Not that way!”

Not THIS woman.

He came to himself with a disconcerting rush. The echo of his cry lingered along the trees when he realized he was still standing over the unconscious woman, that he had not, in fact, knelt and touched her. Weak with relief, he sank down on the nearest rock and passed a hand over his eyes.
Take your fantasies elsewhere, flesh. I finished with you in Ar-Deneth.

“—Good—” said a voice he knew. And feared.

The she-lion sat on her haunches not fifteen strides away, her body as motionless as a statue but for the leisurely flick of her tail. Her fur gleamed golden in the morning light, and her eyes shone like twin suns.

“You brought her,” he said hoarsely. “Why?”

Her stare held his gaze for heartbeat after heartbeat. When he’d almost forgotten his question, he felt her reply purr in his ear. “—Because you need her. And so do I...Durren—”

The name shot through his body like a lightning bolt. He stared at the huge cat as she turned and glided toward the trees. “Ayliss?” he whispered.

She gifted him with a momentary turn of her head, black-lined lips curled in an enigmatic feline smile. Then, like a ghost, she melted into the shadows.

****

Mirianna peered through her lashes at blue sky decorated with wisps of bright clouds.

Morning? But how…?

A quick inventory of her senses told her she lay on broken plates of rock. Spikes of meadow grass leaned over her shoulder. Distant treetops speared the sky, ringing a clearing that sloped down and away from the lichen-studded stone under her fingertips.

The last she remembered, she’d been riding her horse through the night and searching for her father. Alone. Lost in the no-man’s land that was the Wehrland, while branches lashed her face and snatched at her cloak. Running from…
something…

Led by…
someone?

Twin glimmers of yellow-green, luminescent,…
eyes
hovered on the edge of her consciousness and vanished when she tried to bring them into focus. The effort awakened a torrent of complaints from every muscle and joint in her body. Mirianna groaned.

Had she fallen? She moved each of her limbs in turn. Finding them stiff but uninjured, she struggled to sit up, and a damp cloth dropped from her head into her lap. She stared at it while everything else pitched and rocked.

“Would you like some tea? It’s willow bark. Good for aches.”

Mirianna carefully raised her gaze. A boy about thirteen knelt beside her. He wore a cloth wrapped around his forehead, and his tunic, ripped over one shoulder, was russet with dried blood. All she could think of to say was, “You—you’re hurt.”

Color rose on his pale cheeks. “I’m on the mend. You’re the one who fainted.” With a crooked grin, he proffered a bowl. “Drink this. It’ll make you feel better. I should know.”

He’d coaxed a smile from her, and he looked harmless, so Mirianna held out her hand. When he made no move to pass her the tea, she leaned toward him and took the bowl from his grasp. His gaze, which ought to have followed her movement, remained fixed on a point somewhere near her chin.

The blind boy.

Apprehension thrilled along her nerves.
The boy couldn’t possibly be alone. He hadn’t been alone before…

Memories followed in a stomach-tightening rush, tumbling over one another, strange events made even stranger by this ungodly wilderness. A voice in the night, sounding from nowhere and…everywhere, terrifying her and yet—somehow—stopping her horse from bolting. A presence haunting her room at the inn, invading her dreams with vivid, erotic suggestions. A touch—
a dream!
—that wasn’t so much a touch but a desire made...
tangible
. Mirianna quivered. Her breasts swelled, and the burgeoning nipples prickled against the fabric of her bodice.

Where was the boy’s master?
Where was the
Shadow Man?

Her fingers clenched, sloshing warm liquid onto her hand. She sucked in a breath, placed the bowl on the ground, and twisted her body to find the answer.

“So,” said the voice that made her stomach break into shards of sensation, “you
do
remember.”