Desire's Hostage: Viking Lore, Book 3 (22 page)

She couldn’t stop shivering.

The night was surprisingly mild, with no wind to rustle through the trees, yet Elisead shook atop her mare, for the quaking chills rose from her very heart.

Only a few moonbeams managed to filter through the thick foliage overhead and gild the forest floor, but both her horse and Drostan’s were surefooted. Or mayhap the reason they moved so smoothly was because Drostan had confidence in where he was leading them?

As the terror that had been coursing through her veins ebbed, it was replaced with this shivering. The numbness of shock and fear left naught but pain in its wake, raw and choking. Though she longed for the sanctuary of detachment to return, its absence cleared her mind enough to think.

Drostan didn’t mean to kill her, as he had Alaric and Maelcon. If he did, he would have done so already. He could have cut her throat at the fortress, or stabbed her and left her body in these woods. Nay, he must have some other plan.

And if he didn’t intend to kill her, at least not yet, it meant that she could learn what his plans were—and perhaps even hamper them.

“I need to stop,” she said. Her voice, raw from crying, came out a ragged croak.

Drostan spared her a quick glance, but returned his gaze to the forest ahead without answering.

“Please,” she tried again. “We have been riding for hours. I need to relieve myself.”

She could see in the weak moonlight that Drostan frowned, but still he did not respond.

The horses moved at a swift walk. Judging their speed and her distance off the ground, she had a fairly good chance of coming away unharmed if she threw herself from her mare’s back.

She flung her leg over the animal’s neck and leapt toward the ground. As her feet came in contact with the forest floor, one of her ankles rolled out from under her. She tumbled, trying to protect her head as she twisted away from the horse’s hooves.

Drostan cursed loudly. Elisead’s roll finally petered out and she came up onto her knees. Even before she could rise to her feet, though, Drostan’s hands wrapped around her arms. He yanked her to her feet so hard her teeth snapped together.

“Fool girl!” he shouted in her face, shaking her by the shoulders.

“I am not trying to flee!” she screeched as her head whipped on her neck. “I only need to stop for a moment.”

Drostan stilled at last, glaring down at her. The blue war paint cutting across one side of his face made him look half-man, half-monster—which he was.

She shrank back, suddenly unsure of her initial assumption that he wouldn’t hurt her. What did she really know of Drostan, after all? She’d never paid him much mind, so like a shadow was he at her father’s side. He was ever the loyal warrior and her father’s most trusted man.

Yet here she was alone in the woods with him, her father and Alaric’s blood on his hands. God knew what plan spun in his twisted mind.

She needed to know what he was hatching and why.

But first, she had to lull him into thinking she was no threat at all.

“Please,” she said again, her voice trembling almost without the need for her conscious effort. “I just need to relieve myself.”

Drostan cursed again, but released her with a shove toward a large clump of underbrush.

“Be quick about it.”

She hobbled behind the underbrush, her ankle protesting with each step. When she was done, she slowly made her way back to Drostan’s side.

“I only wish I understood where you are taking me and why.” She looked up at him pleadingly.

He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back toward the horses a few paces away. She didn’t resist, though her ankle throbbed at his hurried pace.

Drostan lifted her back into the mare’s saddle and silently remounted his horse.

Elisead saw her window of opportunity closing. Desperation clawed at her, but she forced her voice to remain docile and submissive.

“Giving me the comfort of a few answers doesn’t cost you aught, Drostan. I…I only aim to comprehend what you have planned for me. Surely you have known me long enough to grant me that.”

In truth, Elisead didn’t know Drostan at all, but she wasn’t above appealing to any shred of decency he might still possess.

“What…what do you hope to accomplish in this?” she prodded tentatively.

The long silence that followed sent defeat sinking into Elisead’s stomach like a stone. But then Drostan spoke.

“I am doing what is best for our people. Just as your father, my Chief, taught me.”

Elisead fought the sickness that washed over her. What kind of deranged madman would justify what he was doing by invoking the honorable tutelage of the man he’d just killed?

She choked back the bile in her throat. She had to press on, no matter how revolting Drostan’s perverse logic was.

“What do you mean? What is best for our people?”

He turned in his saddle and pinned her with his gaze. Under the war paint, his face was a mask of disgust. “To rid ourselves of those filthy Northmen once and for all.”

She inhaled and shied away from his glower, but there was nowhere to go unless she flung herself from her horse’s back again.

“Once and for all?” she managed.

“They are like a pestilence,” he muttered, turning forward in his saddle once more. “Seven years ago we weeded them out—or so we thought. But now they keep coming. Your father was a fool to think that allying with them would solve his problems.”

Elisead swallowed, letting his words wash over her. “So you have been working against the negotiations, trying to force the Northmen out with subterfuge and veiled threats.”

Drostan’s fist tightened around the two horses’ reins. Elisead held her breath, fearing she’d gone too far.

“I tried to convince Maelcon that he was taking the wrong course of action,” he said through clenched teeth. “But my advisement fell on deaf ears. It would have been simpler my way, swifter. We should have attacked the Northmen when they first arrived at the fortress, not invited them in.”

Elisead thought back to that first day Alaric and the others had appeared on their shores. Drostan seemed to have completely forgotten that her father’s men were outnumbered and that the Northmen hadn’t even wanted to raid or attack the fortress.

Suddenly a memory flickered across her mind. Drostan’s family had been trapped in the village when they’d closed the gates against the Northmen seven years ago. He’d had a mother, a younger brother, and a handful of cousins living in a few of the huts beyond the fortress walls.

Elisead remembered Drostan’s singlemindedness in leaving the gates open a few more moments. But her father had given the order to have the gates sealed against the onslaught of Northmen. It had been for the protection of all those within the fortress, but the decision had cost dozens of innocent villagers their lives. Drostan never spoke of his family after that, though perhaps that was the moment when he’d decided to one day kill Maelcon.

Drostan seemed to believe that the Northmen’s arrival this time was the same as it had been seven years earlier. But it wasn’t—Alaric and his men had always intended to stay and join her people in living on the land, not raid and kill. And now that she knew Alaric, she was certain he wouldn’t have been deterred no matter how many times Drostan tried to thwart his mission.

Drostan’s memory was clearly colored by the desire to have a simple solution—kill the Northmen. But Elisead had sat in on the many rounds of negotiation between Alaric and her father. Peace was much more difficult than war. Drostan, however, had the simple mind of a killer.

“And…and since you didn’t convince my father to change course, you thought you could force the Northmen away by ending their negotiations?”

He waved one hand dismissively. “Those were acts of desperation, poorly conceived. I should never have wasted so much time on such foolish, small attempts to be a thistle underfoot to their plan to settle.”

“Then what should you have done instead?” She feared she already knew the answer, but she would hear it from Drostan’s traitorous lips.

“I should have sent for Domnall sooner, and not let the fool’s pride get in the way of my plans. The Picts must stand together against the plague of Northmen who threaten to blot us out.”

Elisead quickly checked the position of the moon through the trees overhead. She’d been vaguely aware when they’d left the fortress that Drostan was guiding them southwest. Though the moon had crossed a fair portion of the sky in the few hours they’d been traveling, they still bore southwesterly. Toward Dál Riata. And Domnall.

“And that is where we are going now. To secure Domnall’s aid in vanquishing the Northmen from my father’s fortress.”

Drostan glanced back at her. “Clever girl. Only it isn’t your father’s fortress anymore. It is yours.”

Pain and nausea washed over her at the reminder spoken flatly by her father’s killer. But before she could swallow her anguish, Drostan went on.

“Though soon enough it will be my fortress, for I plan to have us wed.”

At his calmly spoken declaration, the moonlit forest spun around Elisead. The ground seemed to be closing in on her. Suddenly Drostan’s hand was once again gripping her arm. He pulled her back into her saddle, from which she’d apparently nearly toppled.

She regained her seat, but his hand lingered on her arm, tightening painfully.

“I know you let that savage rut with you,” he said, his voice soft. “I have no desire to make you my wife knowing that the barbarian’s filth may grow within you. However, I can wait until your next bleeding to ensure that you do not carry the savage’s spawn. And then I shall have my own heir on you.” His jaw ticked behind the blue paint. “I will overcome my own disgust at your whorish ways and wed you.”

“Why?” she breathed at last.

“I already told you—I am doing what is best for our people.”

“You are mad.”

“Silence,” he snapped, leveling her with his dark, widened eyes. “It is you who are mad to open your legs to a Northman barbarian. And Maelcon must have been crazed to agree to let you marry him. Only I can see the depths to which our people would have sunk under Maelcon’s misguidance. And only I can save us.”

“You and Domnall,” she bit out, no longer checking her tone.

“Aye, he will provide the soldiers necessary to reclaim the fortress. He’ll not dirty himself with a Pict girl used by a Northman, so I will bear that burden. And then at last our people will be strong again.”

This time Elisead didn’t hesitate. She wrenched her arm free of his grasp and threw herself from her horse’s back. Blessedly she landed on a bed of moss. She rolled to her feet, her ankle screaming in protest, and bolted through the trees.

Even before she’d made it ten steps, she heard Drostan closing in on her. She pushed herself to the limit, for she now knew that she was in the clutches of a madman who would stop at naught to enact his twisted version of rule.

He tackled her, crushing the air from her lungs. Even if she could have cried for help, there was no one to hear her.

Drostan dragged her to her feet once more and flung her onto her mare’s back. But this time, he produced a length of rope. With deliberate slowness, he bound her hands to her saddle. The rope bit into the flesh of her wrists, but the pain was distant.

Might anyone come to her aid? Surely her father and Alaric’s bodies had been found by now. Would Madrena come after them? Or perhaps when they reached Domnall, she could persuade him somehow to free her from Drostan’s clutches.

Even as the sky began to lighten as dawn approached, blackness descended upon her.

There was no point in fooling herself.

No one would come to her aid.

How much of a lead did they have on him? And how long would it take them to meet up with Domnall as he made his way to his holdings in Dál Riata?

The two questions twined into a hard knot of fear and urgency within Alaric’s mind as he rode hard in the direction he prayed was correct. It had been too dark when he’d set out to pick up any tracks Drostan might have left, and Alaric wasn’t familiar enough with this land to know aught beyond the general southwesterly direction of Dál Riata.

Instead of dulling him, the pain at the base of his chest made him all the more sharply aware of his surroundings—and the stakes that balanced on the knife’s edge of fate.

Elisead’s life.

His people’s future.

The fortress and the villagers, for whom he now felt responsible.

Alaric forced his attention back to the present. Though he hoped to one day count himself a good leader and strategist, he was born a warrior, a man of action. All he could do was drive his horse a pace, then a pace more through the forest, which was now brightening with the first beams of the radiant morning sun. When he caught up to Drostan—not if—he would know what to do. He had to have faith in himself and the gods in that.

As the sky had lightened first to pale blue and then to the yellow of dawn, the forest around him had thinned. The rolling hills that surrounded the fortress had turned increasingly jagged and steep.

Alaric sent up thanks to Dagur, God of day, for lighting his path over the ever-rockier terrain. The old nag he rode was slower than he liked but surefooted even as they began to climb.

The trees suddenly fell away completely and Alaric was at last able to assess his surroundings. Rough, rocky peaks rose sharply from every side, with only a few patches of moss to blunt the stones here and there. Far below the rocky outcropping upon which he and his horse were perched, a river wound its way through the barren terrain.

A distant roar filled the air. Though the sky overhead was a clear and brilliant blue, a low mist clung close to the ground. As Alaric’s eyes continued to search the landscape, he realized the source of the mist and the distant thundering sound.

His gaze traveled up the length of the crooked river to his right and landed on an enormous waterfall in the distance ahead. Spray frothed at both the waterfall’s top, where the river cascaded over rocks and fallen logs, and from the churning pool at its base far below.

A flicker of movement to the left of the falls snagged his eye.

Two specks of color dotted the bare rocks. They had cleared the tree line and were slowly making their way up to the top of the falls.

Elisead
.

It had to be her and Drostan.

Alaric had overshot their path too far to the northwest, yet he was so close to Elisead now.

He spurred on his mare, but the steeper they drove, the looser the rocks under the nag’s hooves grew. Her strength was flagging, even though he tried to push her ever harder.

Alaric squinted at the rocks ahead. The two specks were still picking their way slowly up the craggy mount from which the waterfall spilled. He’d hardly gained any ground on them since he’d spotted them not long ago.

At least they hadn’t pulled farther away. Their horses were likely just as tired as his, and the animals still had to pick their footing carefully as they climbed.

Without thinking, he threw himself from the mare’s back. He landed on both feet, but the impact sent jarring pain shooting straight to the wound in his chest. He grunted and pressed the bandages down into the wound. His palm came away damp and red with his blood.

He didn’t have time to check the injury or to properly secure the nag. She was wise enough not to wander off the ridge atop which they were perched. If he survived, he could come back and find her.

Alaric forced his legs into a stiff run. As he scrambled higher up the ridge, the frothing mist from the waterfall began coating everything in a thin sheen of moisture. He slipped, then slipped again. The rocks seemed all too eager to give way under his boots. But still he pressed onward.

Every few scrambling paces, he allowed himself to look farther up the craggy ridge. The dots at last seemed closer, but so too were they closer to the top, where the waterfall spilled over. Was Drostan fool enough—or desperate enough—to try to cross the river in the span before it fell away over the steep cliffs?

He pushed his legs to the limit, his breath ragged in his throat, but still he had to climb higher. His eyes locked on the smaller of the two figures ahead. Elisead. Her flaming hair glinted like copper in the sunlight. No matter what it took, he would reach her.

The two horses and their riders disappeared as they crested the top of the ridge. With a new burst of energy, Alaric drove himself the remaining several dozen paces. Rocks slipped out from under his feet, clattering down the ridge the way he’d come, but the roar of the waterfall, which was deafening now, drowned out the noise.

Just before he crested the ridge, he paused, flattening himself against the rocks. The waterfall crashed through the air and down into the pool far below to his right. To the left, the ridge sloped off more gradually into the forest below.

Alaric dragged in a few misty breaths. He didn’t have a plan aside from reaching Elisead. He would have to trust his instincts beyond this point.

He eased himself over the crest of the ridge, body tensed and ready to attack.

A dozen paces away, Elisead sat atop a spritely mare. Drostan rode Maelcon’s warhorse. Both of their backs were to him, their eyes fixed on something to the right and across the river just before it tumbled into the waterfall.

His eyes followed their line of sight. A twist of dread knotted in his belly, just below the aching wound Drostan had delivered.

On the far banks of the river, a band of warriors approached.

One man rode in front of the others, sitting proud and straight in the saddle. His jeweled hilt glinted in the morning sun.

Domnall
.

Drostan stood in his stirrups and waved. Domnall returned the gesture, but they were still too far apart to be heard over the roar of the waterfall. Domnall pointed farther upriver and motioned to Drostan and Elisead.

So, Domnall thought they’d be able to cross and join him on his side of the river further up. Alaric’s gaze traveled up the coursing waterway. It rushed powerfully from higher still in the mountain range they all sat in. The river was full of debris—fallen logs and enormous boulders spoke of the water’s power.

At least neither Domnall nor Drostan was fool enough to try to cross in such a dangerous spot as they were in now. But Alaric doubted from the raging waters that the river was docile at any point. Blessedly, the river provided a natural barrier between himself and Domnall’s army. He silently thanked the gods as he crouched in preparation to attack.

Upon receiving Drostan’s signal of comprehension, Domnall rode back to where his small army, the remains of the men with whom he’d attacked Alaric’s camp, marched upriver.

Alaric was alone with Drostan at last. But just as he launched himself from his crouch, Drostan turned his head. His eyes landed directly on Alaric.