Passion Play (12 page)

It lasted longer than she had hoped. When he finished, Brandt called Niko over. “You’re next,” he said, casually lacing up his trousers. “Choose three more after you. That’ll be the routine—four a night not counting me. More when she gets used to the work. We want this one to last.”

Niko flashed a grin and nodded. When Brandt was gone, he ran his fingers along Ilse’s throat. He was a raw-boned man with knotted muscles from hefting barrels, and his hands were rough and callused. “Pretty,” he said. “Never had one so pretty like you.” His hand dropped from the skin of her throat to her breast, already sore from handling. Ilse winced, and the man laughed deep in his throat. “I like that, too.”

He gave her to the second man, the third, the fourth. Afterward one of Ulf’s boys came with a bucket of water and rags and a rope coiled over one shoulder. “Clean up,” he said. “Alarik’s orders.” She dunked a rag and wiped her face. The boy had not moved. He was there to watch, she realized.

She washed herself thoroughly, shivering all the while. The water was frigid, its waters born in the nearby mountains. Water from Duszranjo’s glaciers. From her father’s homeland. Taking up another rag, she scrubbed her body clean.

CHAPTER FIVE

HER NEW DUTIES
became a part of the caravan’s routine, no different from breaking camp or resting the horses at intervals. When Brandt judged her used to the routine, the four men became six. Sometimes he offered her during rest breaks, as a reward for work done well. Otherwise they kept her bound, and when the caravan passed near settlements, he ordered her gagged and hidden behind the pots in Ulf’s covered wagon.

She lost track of the days, but she remembered other details. The curses the men used. The taste of their skin. The weight of their bodies atop hers. She remembered whether they took her fast and brutally, like Niko, or used her slowly, like Alarik Brandt.

“Open your mouth,” Brandt said. “Make it soft, like a peach. Good.”

Pretend,
she told herself, opening up her mouth to his. Brandt’s manner was different this night. He had ordered her to strip. Now he kissed her slowly, as a lover might, and ran his hands over her bare skin in a light caress.

Pretend.

Murmuring softly, Brandt kissed her throat, her shoulder, the crook of her elbow, the inside of her wrist. He’d unbuttoned his shirt; she saw a number of scars—a long jagged one near his shoulder, a semicircle of small ones like tooth marks above his left nipple. His rough gray hairs tickled her skin, and his mouth felt hot as he bent to suckle her breast. Slow. Insistent. He gave a groan and slid up to kiss her full on the mouth, inserting one hand between her thighs.

“Good,” he whispered hoarsely. “Now do the same with your other mouth, wench. Makes it easier, eh? Almost feels good, right? Yes, now grip tight, tighter.”

I chose him. I chose him.

She never knew why her body betrayed her—whether she had worked so hard to pretend that she had crossed an invisible boundary—but when Brandt slid his fingers inside her and caressed her with skill, she unexpectedly moaned in response.

Brandt smiled. “I knew you could. Now do it again.”

That night he would not yield her to the next man until she had cried out for all to hear.

*  *  *

HE SET NEW
demands on her and watched to see that Ilse complied. Yielding wasn’t enough. Consent wasn’t enough. He wanted her willing participation.

I can pretend anything,
she told herself.

No matter how shameful the act, she never resisted, knowing that Brandt watched sometimes, when she coupled with the other men. His presence was like the night breeze upon her skin, or the salt taste in her mouth. With Brandt himself, she had entirely lost her defenses, it seemed, because when he caressed her, she moved, and when he entered her with his customary skill, the tightness in her belly relaxed into warmth. She had never meant to make a trade like this. She would have wept, except for Brandt’s dark eyes that studied her so closely.

Four weeks passed. Ilse never saw Volker, except at a distance. Sometimes she caught Brenn glaring at her. She didn’t blame him. She didn’t blame any of the men. Not Ulf, who was always glad for his turn. Not the horse boys. Not even Niko, who liked it rough. Blame was too easy.

The fifth man for the night had just left. Ilse was wiping her face with a dirty cloth, thinking she had just one more obligation for the night, when a soft voice said, “My turn.”

Brenn pointed from her to the blanket. She obeyed and lay back with her skirt pulled up. He unlaced his trousers and took her quickly, not bothering with kisses or talk, the way some did. When he finished, he rolled off to one side with a groan. “Alarik has plans,” he whispered.

Ilse started. “What do you mean?”

“He says he’s done with you. He wants the money your father offered.”

“He can’t,” she whispered. “He promised.”

“He will,” Brenn insisted. “He’ll hand you over to your father’s agent in Donuth. He’ll get a reward and be gone inside a week.”

“My father will have him jailed.”

Brenn shook his head. “He’ll say he found you on the road. Niko will back him up. If you talk about whoring, Alarik can say you started it yourself.”

“That’s not true. I—”

“Ilse, everyone heard what you told Brandt. You did ask for it.”

Cold swept through her. She had. By Lir’s mercy she had asked Brandt to make her a whore.

I pretended too well.

Brenn pulled her close and kissed her on the mouth. “One more time,” he murmured. “Pretend good for me, Ilse.”

So Ilse slid her arms over his back and kissed him with feigned passion, whispering all the words Brandt had taught her. She moved her body in time with his, urging him with every caress to finish quickly. Only when his breath came ragged, and she knew he was on the point of his climax, did she turn her head away, too weary at last to pretend. There, just beyond the circle of firelight, stood the scholar.

*  *  *

THE NEXT THREE
days passed in a chill gray blur. The late autumn rains had commenced, a cold steady downpour that soaked their clothes and turned the hard-packed dirt road into sludge. Brandt’s mood, never good, turned as foul as the weather. He drove the men harder, ordering longer marches. The horses slogged through the mud, heads down, but their progress slowed to a few miles each day. Campfires served only to make wet clothes into damp ones.

By nightfall of the fourth day, the rain had subsided to a heavy drizzle. Mist rose from the wet ground; above, a veil of clouds obscured the half moon. Ulf tried in vain to light his campfires and succeeded only in burning his fingers. The scholar used magic with greater luck, but the wet logs smoked more than they burned. In the end, Ulf handed out cold beef wrapped in flat bread.

Tired and miserable and damp, Ilse finished her meal and drank her coffee. It was bitter stuff, thickened with bark, and hardly warm enough to ward off the cold. All that was left of her was an emptiness, a pervading chill and damp, and not only from the rain. But if she thought too long on that, she found herself weeping helplessly, and so she would not let herself dwell on Brandt, or her condition, or how she had once hoped for freedom. Even when Brandt summoned her, she obeyed but could not bring herself to pretend. Another week in servitude remained to her. Then a term locked up in Donuth. Then her father. After that, she would be just another kind of prisoner.

Brandt leaned against a wagon. He grabbed Ilse’s hair with one hand. With the other, he pushed down on her shoulder. She knelt and opened her mouth. She was used to this routine as well. Her mind wandered. She let it, wondering idly if Brandt would increase her duties next week, or if he had set a limit.

We want this one to last.

Brandt pulled her head back and looked down at her face. Firelight cast blue shadows over his eyes, making her think of the fiends in her grandmother’s stories.

“You’re daydreaming,” he observed.

She licked her lips and suppressed a tremor. “I’m tired.”

His free hand circled her throat, fingers resting lightly against her pulse. “From sitting all day?”

Nervously, she nodded.

Brandt studied her, running one thumb along her jaw. “Go to bed. It’s a wet night. You can make it up in the morning.”

Niko led her to her bedding and made her ropes fast, grumbling all the while that Brandt had cheated him and the others. “He says tomorrow,” Niko said, half to himself. “But I know him. He’ll start us early, damn it, and me without a turn in three days.” He gave a last tug to the ropes, then tossed several blankets to her. “Keep warm for me, sweet.”

Ilse wrapped herself in the blankets and lay down. The ground was cold, and the air tasted of winter. In Melnek, there would be snow on the streets and tracings of frost on the windowpanes. Her mother would have ordered the heavy curtains hung and the fires constantly lit throughout the family and servants wings. Home. Did they remember her? Was her father still searching? Was her grandmother alive?

“Dobrud’n,” a man whispered. “Are you awake?”

She recognized the scholar’s voice.

“I am,” she whispered back in Károvín.

He squatted beside the front wagon wheel. “I heard what the boy told you. About Donuth and your father. I have something for you. Here.”

Uncertain, Ilse reached toward him. Their hands met, and he laid a hard round object in her palm. It was rough and gritty, flat like a disk, with sharp edges—a stone, shaped into a cutting blade. Ilse detected traces of magic beneath its surface, calling up images and textures that reminded her of the scholar’s hands and face and voice.

“Wait until moonset,” he whispered. “Use it to cut your ropes. When you get past the perimeter, head east, then south. That should take you into Gallenz, into the valley and away from Donuth.”

The valley was a week’s ride from here. Did he mean to give her food and a tent?

It seemed he had thought out everything. “Dig a hole to keep warm at night. Cover yourself with leaves and dirt, if you have to. Look for pine nuts and groundnuts. Carrots and thistles and cranberries if you can find them. Drink from running streams.”

He poured out a flood of details, things to remember, which foods to avoid and which to hunt for, how to build shelters and traps with just a knife and her own strength. Ilse listened hard, knowing she would forget the half of what he told her, but trying to remember just the same. In passing, she wondered where he had learned all these skills, or if he had read them in a book.

“Your best chance is to find a village,” he said. “There have to be dozens in these hills. Beg for food. They won’t refuse you, not these people. They know what it’s like to starve. Once you reach the highway, you can go west—to Jassny, even Duenne.”

“Not Duenne,” she said quickly. Not with Alarik Brandt heading there. And surely her father would expect her to go to Duenne.

“East, then. Tiralien is closest. It’s a big city. Girl like you can find work.” He paused. “I’m sorry I did not come to you sooner. I— I didn’t want to take a wrong chance and hurt you worse than before. No, that wasn’t it. It was because—”

Because he was afraid. Just as Brenn had been afraid. As she was now.

“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered. “I understand. And thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

He stopped her with a gesture. “Do not thank me. Please.” Then his hand brushed her cheek. “You remind me of my sister,” he murmured before he crept away.

*  *  *

ILSE WAITED UNTIL
Ulf had banked the fire, and the guards had dispersed to their first watch. She would not forget herself this time. Gripping the stone blade between her knees, she rubbed the rope over the sharp edge. Back and forth. Back and forth. Her hands went numb from holding the rope taut, but she kept going. Once the watch changed. She paused until the new sentries had taken their posts and the old watch had retired, before resuming her work. Her wrists were bloody from pulling against the ropes, but she was nearly free. Just a few more strands.

The last strand snapped. Ilse, taken by surprise, pitched forward and nicked her chin on the blade. She pressed her hand against the cut. Her hand came away sticky. She wiped her chin again before it came home that she was free of her bonds.

Free.

Her chin stung, but she was grinning. The first victory was hers.

She wrapped her skirt around the knife and cut through the remaining ropes, then hid the stone in her boot. She rolled up the bulkiest blanket and draped a second one over it. It cost her something to give up the blankets, but unless someone checked, the guards would think her still asleep.

She crept from underneath the wagon. The trees were little more than dark blotches against the gray mist blanketing the camp. Nearby, the horses shifted about restlessly. The horse pickets lay toward the sunrise, she remembered. She crawled in that direction. There was a danger that Brandt had posted an extra watch over the horses, but the horses themselves made enough noise to cover hers. If she were quiet and quick …