Rogue's Pawn (24 page)

Chapter
Twenty-Five

In Which I Learn a Thing or Two

At least, so I was told.

The thing about being hit by lightning—even one’s own—was that the enormous electrical surge scrambled the nervous system. Senses, thinking processes, organs—everything connected to that nervous system—got hard-booted in the most wrenching way possible. So all you really got of the experience was how you felt afterward.

If you survived.

Rogue regained consciousness first—which only confirmed my suspicions that he had nerves made of steel, or at least some sort of aluminum alloy. Immortality was an enviable thing.

I awoke to find him crouched over me on all fours, holding my hand wrapped in his so that our wrists spiraled around each other, just over my heart. His face loomed over mine as he breathed into my face. For a confused moment, I thought the Black Dog had me pinned, but my blurred vision resolved and Rogue’s gorgeous face appeared.

My heart thundering in a beat too rapid to feel possible, I gasped for breath. Every rib protested the movement. This had to be how a hummingbird felt, just before its heart exploded from stress.

Rogue squeezed my hand hard, drawing me back from the precipice.

Oh yeah, don’t imagine your own heart exploding, dammit.
I calmed myself, shrugging the well of nothing around me. His hair was singed and still vaguely smoking. He blew steady breath between my lips—even now only touching me with one hand and no lips, I noticed with wry humor. His breath streamed into me like mountain run-off. Like the oxygen-saturated chunks of glacier dropping into the ocean in Alaska, effervescent as Alka-Seltzer, releasing primordial air back into the world, fresh, clean, powerful and ancient.

I drank it in and my heart slowed. My ribs moved. My lungs drew air.

At last Rogue sat back, drawing me to a sitting position as he did so. Then he released me, drew up his knees and, echoing my earlier position, wrapped his long arms around them, steadily studying me.

I didn’t know what to say.

Apparently he didn’t either.

I watched Rogue, waiting for an acid comment, but he only gazed back, weary and faded.

I felt curiously depleted, so I tried standing and, though my legs were shaky, managed to get to my feet and turn to look at the tree. Rogue had either dragged me or we’d been thrown about fifteen feet away. The tree was neatly cleaved in half, limbs draped over the ground as though a drunken debutante passed out in her own voluminous skirts.

I turned back to Rogue, who still sat, eyes unfocused. He seemed to be concentrating on something. Holding something tightly inside. It made me uneasy. I looked at the tree again.

“In the stories,” I said, “of places like this—there are dryads, spirits who live in the trees.”

He nodded.

“Was there one here?”

He shrugged.

I began to wonder if he’d lost his voice. It occurred to me to ask if he was okay, but that seemed foolish, because what could I do? And I thought about asking if the cat got his tongue, but I wasn’t feeling flip enough. Maybe his nerves were less steely than I thought.

At a loss, I paced over to the tree, across the carpet of shredded leaves. The soft toe of my shoe clunked against something and I looked down to see one end of the gray-handled knife poking out, still lying where I left it. But when I picked it up, I saw that the blade had warped, the sharp edge running in rivulets like tears. Not a promising sign. I tossed it away again. I’d get Larch another.

A deep hole split the middle of the tree and I tried to peer in. Sharp splinters arrayed the edges, but deep shadows pooled inside. I thought I could make out something pale.

I stretched an arm down and hissed as a splinter dug into my triceps. Standing on tiptoes, I tried again but couldn’t reach. I looked around for Rogue, who still sat, facing mostly away, as if in a trance.

“Rogue!”

He didn’t move. I walked over to him, laid a hand on his shoulder. He seemed to warm a bit to my touch and slowly tilted his head to look up at me.

“Lord Rogue,” I said gently, “would you help me?”

I held my hand down to him, acutely aware of the role reversal. He raised one eyebrow, an arc of wry comment in the fanged lines around it, and stood in one uncoiling movement. I snatched my hand back and tucked it behind my back, like a child startled by the sudden springing of a jack-in-the-box.

His full lips curled at one corner, but the smile lacked his usual insouciant curve. He slipped past me and strode to the tree, reached in with one long arm and withdrew a pale, fleshy mass that just overflowed the one hand he held it in. Rogue turned back to me and, for a moment, I thought he might toss it to me and I panicked a bit in my heart.

“Now what, my powerful lady sorceress?” he asked.

The silky disdain gave me pause, but I eased up to him to peer at what he held. Up close I couldn’t make any more sense of it than I had from ten feet away. It was flesh-like, a healthy-seeming pink color. But featureless, kind of ovoid.

“I’m out of my depth here.”

“Oh,” he drawled, “do you really think so?”

I sighed. “I apologize for the lightning. I won’t even mention that you drove me to it. So to speak,” I had to add.

He tilted his head to the side like a raptor changing sight lines to get better depth perception.

“I may have erred,” he said softly, “in not killing you after the bird incident.”

“You mean, not letting me die,” I corrected.

Rogue didn’t comment—he simply held out the object to me, clearly intending me to take it. Well, yes, I’d asked him to get it. So I took it with the ginger care I would an infant, wrapping it in the tattered remains of my robe and gown. A little bigger than a football, it seemed to be living flesh but undifferentiated.

“This…is the dryad?”

“What remains.”

“Does she—it—live?”

“If the tree lives, she lives. And the reverse. Heal the tree, you heal her.”

I turned to face the tree, holding my bundle of grief against my bosom. “I can do that.”

“Can you?”

I glanced at Rogue, who’d folded his arms. His face was remote, still.

“Yes, I can fix a tree—especially when it’s just putting it back together.”

He waved a gracious hand at the tree, inviting me to proceed. I focused my thoughts, imagined the xylem and phloem running with sap, the tree whole and mighty as it had been, connected it to my desire to see it right again, and…nothing.

No spark. Nada.

I pretended to be still working at it, unwilling to see the smug vindication on Rogue’s face. I tried to look as though I was concentrating, while I madly scrambled within myself for some hint of the well of magic that had coursed through me ever since I first woke up on that grassy hill. Maybe even, as Larch had suggested, before that.

Rogue, shockingly enough, was not fooled by my dissembling. He reached over and tipped up my chin with one elegant finger and shook his head at me. Then he slipped the fleshy bundle from my arms and returned her to the tree, settling her deep inside again. He turned back to me and suddenly the tree behind him was whole and full again.

Rogue swooped a shredded leaf from the ground and presented it to me with a bow.

Then turned and walked away.

Part V

Preliminary Conclusions

Chapter Twenty-Six

The Blood of the Dragon

I sank to the ground and sat there for a long time, holding that leaf.

Twirling it in my fingers, watching the uneven spin of it, the singed and torn bits fluttering as it spun. Utterly depleted, I stayed long enough for the afternoon to give way to the long shadows of twilight. The forked shadows reminded me of the black patterns on Rogue’s face.

Apparently I had won. At least for the moment, Rogue was leaving me alone. No more teasing. No more seduction. No more trying to move up the timetable for my impregnation.

And here I sat in my nightgown and dressing robe, hollowed out and empty, bereft of even the magic that was the first gift I received here. Funny that I hadn’t thought of it as a gift before. So cliché of me, not to appreciate it until it was gone.

I steeled myself against the staining of regret. This was what I’d wanted. By the time Rogue thought to try again, I’d be long gone. I didn’t need magic to get home. I hadn’t been a sorceress when I came here, so it followed I didn’t need to be one to get back. If I was well and truly fried, then perhaps I could persuade Falcon that I no longer held any use for him.

I walked back to my tent. After all, where else did I have to go? Not to mention promises to keep. Plans to make.

Our camp spread out before me in the valley in all its colorful eccentricity. The usual music and tumbling glittered here and there. Falcon’s mini-village sat on a hill across the way, silks fluttering gaily in the slight breeze.

My tent was dark and empty. Neither Larch nor Dragonfly was in evidence and all the pillows were out. Still no sign of Darling. I sent an inquiring thought at him and got sulky cat grumpiness back. I slapped a few pillows into life and desperately wished the tub would just be full of hot water, though if the magic was gone…but there, suddenly the tub was full of steaming water.

“Thank you, magic,” I whispered in the quiet of the tent, as another wave of exhaustion washed over me. It began to make sense to me. When I was full of sexual energy, I had plenty for magic. But fully releasing it, as Rogue had driven me to do, pushing me so high, so far, and then the way I’d emptied myself, both in orgasm and with the lighting… No wonder I’d had nothing left.

I scavenged the remains of the brunch tray Dragonfly had brought for Rogue, and guzzled from the pitcher of water. The decanter of too-sweet wine I took into the tub with me.

In the morning, I had a slight headache from too much wine but awoke with that peaceful feeling of sound rest and well-being. The way you felt waking up after a terrible fight with your boyfriend the night before, when at first you felt good and peaceful and you wondered why that was so surprising and then you remembered how awful you felt when you went to sleep and it all came flooding back, but somehow muted, less immediate and ferocious than it was before you slept.

Darling, curled up next to me, stretched and purred. I dug my fingers through his plush fur. He sent me contented thoughts.

“I’m sorry you got hurt,” I whispered.

He licked my hand with a raspy tongue and sent an image of a disemboweled Falcon.

“Not a bad idea, if we can pull it off.”

Feeling better, I found some clothes for the day and stripped off the tattered nightgown, dumping it on the pile of tattered robe I’d left the night before. I pulled on the new dress quickly, though Rogue likely would not put in another appearance—not this morning, nor any other, if I read him right. I brushed out my hair and tried some tentative deliberate magic to do my makeup—which worked just fine.

“Today is the first day of the rest of your very strange and twisted life,” I told my reflection, attempting the jaunty tone I imagined people who practiced affirmations used. Darling, engaged in an intensive washing, snorted at me mentally.

I opened all the tent flaps, dumped out the dried remains of the food tray and neatly stacked the pillows into the corners. I even made my bed. My black dress still lay on the workbench where I’d left it after the molestation session with Rogue. The dragon blood gleamed an uncomfortable yellow. I needed to find a way to get that out. Either that or burn the dress, which I just couldn’t face doing.

No Larch out front still. After wishing the water away to the foot of the dryad’s tree, I dragged the brass tub out the back of the tent to dry in the sunshine. A little UV disinfection never hurt anything. Darling hopped up on the rim, balanced a moment on tiptoes, then plopped inside. Clearly he was much more cat than man. He flicked a tail tip at me in disdain.

And, since I was out there already, and determined not to spend any more days hiding in my tent, I marched myself over to the pillow factory.

There was Larch, his buddies and the girls, busily working and chirping away. Ants to my grasshopper. They all glanced up, surprise on their pixie or gnarled faces alike.

I didn’t see Dragonfly.

“My lady.” Larch bowed to me. “We thought you had left.”

“Off with Rogue, you thought?” I asked archly.

He bowed again.

“No.” I took a breath to say something more. Blew it out again.

“I’d like to see the tribute tent, Larch, and—seeing as how Rogue is gone and I’m still here—I’m keeping my word. You want to set me up for self-defense lessons for this afternoon?”

I wouldn’t let myself think about how much
those
lessons would probably suck. Instead of gritty Hilary Swank, I’d be girly Sarah Jessica Parker—okay, size 8 to her size 2—facing an impossibly long and steely fae version of Clint Eastwood. But Rogue’s accusation had hit home. I was not doing a good job of taking care of myself. Or the people dependent on me. That, at least, I could control. An idea hit me.

“I’d like to learn from other people like me—are some nearby?”

“Yes, my lady. I know of an excellent human fighting teacher.”

Excellent—two birds with one stone.

“Where is Dragonfly?”

“We thought she’d gone with you, my lady.”

Oh, I knew who she’d gone with all right.

“Well, may he have joy of her,” I muttered. “And that reminds me—I kind of melted your knife. Maybe there’s one in the tribute tent you could have to replace it?”

“Yes, my lady sorceress.”

Gotta love a place where you could admit you melted a knife and no one blinked.

I followed Larch to another tent, this one with the sides all securely tied down. A couple of gnomey guys bobbed and bowed at me, nimble fingers undoing the knots on the tent flaps. They helpfully slapped some pillows into life, setting them in strategic spots so the dim interior was illuminated. Darling slunk through and immediately disappeared down a narrow aisle.

“Wow,” I breathed. “All this from less than a week?”

The place was crammed full, items stacked in uncanny towers that defied gravity. Immediately by the door something that looked very like a Persian Empire hookah worked in brass and burgundy velvet teetered atop a pile of fabrics interspersed with carved wooden pieces and a bit of yellow poking out that I would have identified as a rubber ducky, if that weren’t so completely out of context. And that was just the near tower.

I edged farther into the tent, careful not to upset any stacks. What appeared to be a copper fire pit lurked in the corner filled with jeweled pear-shaped objects.

“This is all in exchange for pillows?”

“Well, and tribute, of course, to curry favor with you.”

That sounded promising. Surely I could use that somehow.

“Was my lady sorceress looking for anything in particular?”

“I need a basin. Can we empty the jeweled pears of that copper fire pit thing? And I need a blank book, if there is one.”

“A book?”

“You know, pages inside a binder, something I can write notes on.”

Larch cocked his head at me.

“Never mind. Maybe I can make one.”

I dumped the hookah on the ground, ignoring Larch’s wince, and tossed some fabric bundles onto a statue of a unicorn. I grabbed the carved wooden box now on top and the—yes, it really was a yellow rubber ducky—fell, bouncing off my foot. Darling shot out of the shadows and pounced on it, batting it across the ground.

“I’m not even going to contemplate that one,” I muttered to myself.

Larch retrieved the duck, earning a displeased look from Darling, and reverently added it to the pile of jeweled pears he was making, by way of emptying the copper fire pit. I opened the box. Nothing inside.

“Any reason I can’t monkey with this?” I asked him. Larch frowned up at me. “Empty wooden box?” I demonstrated, shaking it upside down.

“Well, does it look valuable to you?” He pointed in disdain.

“No, but neither does the rubber ducky, other than as evidence that I’m experiencing a psychotic break rather than an honest-to-goodness trip to fairyland.” I paused under his solemn gaze. “Which, when I say it out loud like that, just makes me realize there’s no point in worrying which one it is. This box will work then.”

I needed ink, too. Or something to put ink in. I examined a cloisonné bowl that I might be able to fill with water that could be magicked into ink.

“How about something like a quill?” I caught Larch’s bewildered look. “Something to dip in ink to make pretty designs with?” Larch looked dubious, but handed me a handful of paintbrushes he dug out from behind a pile of furry things.

Darling swatted the yellow rubber ducky out of the bowl and batted it soccer-ball style to my feet. Obligingly, I added it to my pile of things. Yep—looked, felt and even smelled like a regular rubber duck. Maybe Darling had a point. If the ducky had traveled from my world to this, it might contain a clue toward reversing the path.

By the time Larch and some of his fellows carried in the copper fire pit, I had started my notes, the rubber ducky sitting on the workbench next to me, Darling curled up sound asleep with one paw on it.

I’d managed to change the box into a blank book and filled my bowl with water turned to ink. The book still looked largely like a box, as I’d kept the wooden sides intact all around. It gave it a satisfying grimoire look. I even contrived to create the pages with a thick parchmenty feel. It wasn’t the graph-paper-filled lab book my high school chemistry teacher taught me to use, and which I’d used for lab notes until I switched to a computer, but I found I liked the feel of the vast blankness of the page.

The first page I titled Dr. Jennifer McGee’s Big Book of Fairyland. It made me smile to see it.

Knowledge is power.
And this would be my first step. Perhaps through the process of cataloguing all my observations, I could begin to make sense of this world. And find a way out of it.

A little judicious wishing got the tip of the brush hardened sufficiently for reasonably neat printing, though the bristles didn’t hold ink as well as I’d like. I labeled several pages with headers such as Rules of Magic, Rules of Bargaining, Faerie Species Identified, The Black Dog, Flora and Fauna, Objects with Magical Properties,
etc. I left generous pages between headers, expecting to fill them all eventually. I devoted an entire section to Rogue, though I was perversely tempted to make him a sub header under Flora and Fauna. If I could have ensured he’d see it, I would have done it, too, if only to take his ego down a notch.

No dwelling on Rogue.

I flipped to Rules of Magic, made a subsection for Sex & Magic, and began writing out what had happened at the dryad’s tree. Larch and the guys brought in the copper fire pit, plopping it where the bathtub had stood.

“Right here, please.” I gestured to a spot I’d cleared next to the bench. Larch gave a sigh of the long-suffering and they heaved it over to my chosen location.

“Thank you, boys,” I said with an effort at charm. The other Brownies blushed and smiled, but Larch frowned at me suspiciously.

“What task are you engaged in, my lady?” he asked.

“Oh, this and that, puttering about.” I flipped to the title page, reflexively keeping my ruminations private.

His eyes fell on the book.

“What is this?” He peered at it, then touched the page gently with a stubby fingertip. He reminded me of Isabel poking at her cat food with a testing paw, as if dubious that it wouldn’t bite back.

“I’m making notes—organizing my thoughts.”

He looked puzzled.

“You know, writing things down?”

He shook his head, as if shooing away gnats. “I’ve never heard of such a thing, my lady.”

“Books? Writing?”

Larch continued to shake his head. He looked suspicious, even superstitious. “No, Lady Gwynn, this is a powerful magic beyond my ken.”

Interesting.

“And so it is,” I agreed. “Please make sure that no one disturbs my…grimoire,” I said with great satisfaction. “Am I signed up for self-defense?”

“Arranged. I shall escort you.”

“Never mind.” I waved my hand. “Fetch me when the time comes.”

I thoughtfully chewed the end of my paintbrush. No written language. This world seemed suddenly more empty without the prospect of books. At least I could be uninhibited in what I wrote, now that I knew no one but me would ever read it.

I flipped to the back page of the book and labeled the top To Do List.

1.

And stared at it for a while.

When overwhelmed, just make a list, my mother always said. If you have to, start with the things you already accomplished and cross them out.

1. Figure out a way to keep Rogue from impregnating me.
   
2. Get dragon blood out of dress (find use for dragon blood?)
   
3. Find out about humans in this world
   
4. Study the tie between sex & magic
   
5. Deal with Falcon
   
6. Get home—Rubber Ducky? Black Dog?
   

It would be ironic if, like the shoes on my feet, the creature that had dogged me along would turn out to be my way home. Crosser of boundaries. The Black Dog was the only being, besides me, I’d seen in both worlds. I really wondered who the rubber duck tribute came from.

Several of the girls brought me lunch, along with a couple of buckets of waterfall water. I put down my pen and set to filling the copper basin of the gleaming fire pit with water.