Teresa Medeiros (33 page)

One man drove his blade toward Magwyn’s chest, only to discover the spongy toy went limp at its first contact with human flesh. He was still staring at it in dumb amazement when Magwyn whacked him over the head with a stick. He went down like a stone.

Auld Nana dispatched another of the guards by cramming the iron cauldron over his head. He staggered away, bleating piteously until he slammed into a wall. Nana ducked her head and made an offensive run at the enemy, sending guards flying in every direction.

One of the guards charged straight for Lyssandra only to falter at finding such a rose among the thorns. She smiled sweetly at him. Before ramming her dainty fist into his nose.

“Oh, Arjon,” she wailed, “I think I broke a fingernail.”

Her beloved stopped pummeling a guard long enough to press a passionate kiss on the wounded appendage.

The wild young boys who had yearned for a fight for so long threw themselves into the melee with such blood-chilling howls the guards feared Tabitha had summoned a horde of demons to defeat them. Rose petals and feathers soon choked the air.

“Get it off me!” screamed one of the guards as a toothless old man gummed his leg.

Tabitha stood gently stroking Lucy while chaos reigned around her. Colin dispatched more than his share of attackers, wheeling the stallion from cluster to cluster of fighting and subduing all challengers with the flat blade of his sword.

Soon the courtyard was littered with unconscious bodies, none of them their own. The guards who could still walk, limp, or crawl scrambled away like rats scurrying for their holes, leaving Brisbane standing alone on the balcony.

Colin wheeled the stallion back around, shooting him a triumphant look. “Do you surrender, sir?”

Roger’s shoulders slumped. He nodded sadly. “Aye, my friend. I surrender.”

As he disappeared from the balcony, Colin and Tabitha exchanged a baffled glance, having prepared for every eventuality except this one.

When Brisbane emerged from the castle, arms raised and hands dangling limply above his head, his demeanor was so pathetic even Tabitha might have felt sorry for him if she hadn’t known what a monster he was. After much frantic searching, they discovered they hadn’t a scrap of rope among them, so it fell to Tabitha to conjure up a shiny pair of handcuffs.

Brisbane didn’t even protest when Colin slipped them on his wrists and snapped them shut. He couldn’t seem to summon up any resistance more potent than a labored sigh. After Colin had lifted Tabitha up on the stallion to ride sidesaddle in front of him, their captive fell obediently into step behind the horse’s twitching tail.

As they passed through the bailey gates, they encountered no further opposition from Brisbane’s garrison. When they’d traveled a brief distance, Tabitha would have even sworn she heard a faint cheer go up from the castle walls behind them.

Colin’s people were equally jubilant. They clapped each other on the back and congratulated each other on their valor. They sang snatches of song both on-key and off—in Lyssandra’s case, as Arjon had warned, mostly off. The boys mock-wrestled and relived every glorious moment of their first real skirmish while the old men swapped tales of battles fought in the full vigor of manhood, but never forgotten.

As they started across the idyllic meadow where she had first met Colin, Tabitha cradled Lucy in her arms and turned her face to the sun, basking in its warmth. If someone had told her that someday she would be riding through this very meadow in the arms of a prince among men, her hair sprinkled with rose petals, and her heart brimming with love, she would have told them they were either crazy or hopelessly misguided.

Until she’d gazed into Colin’s golden eyes, she had believed that princes were for other women and love was for fools.

Brisbane’s voice cut through her pleasure like the whine of a pesky mosquito. “ ’Tis a pity we’ve come to such a pass, my lady. Did Colin never tell you that the two of us were once like brothers? At least until he decided to avail himself of my sister.”

Colin’s arm tightened around her waist. “ ’Tis an old quarrel, Roger, and a tired one. As you well know, ’twas Regan who first crept into my bed one moonless night when I was still half asleep. Had I my wits about me, I might have found the strength to resist her.”

Their handcuffed captive was walking beside them
now, nearly trotting to match the pace of Colin’s stallion. “You would have broken her heart either way. She loved you, you know.”

Colin’s sigh ruffled Tabitha’s hair. “Regan’s love is the cross I’ve borne since her death.”

“She loved you,” he repeated, as if Colin had not even spoken. “But she loved me first.”

Colin reined in the horse. Brisbane stumbled to a halt, his subservient mask slipping to reveal a sneer of triumph. The chattering crowd streamed around the two men, unaware of the brewing conflict. Despite the warmth of the sun, Tabitha felt a chill of foreboding.

“Don’t listen to him, Colin,” she said, longing only to free him from the chains of the past. “He’d say anything to hurt you.”

“That’s right, witch,” Brisbane snarled. “Anything at all. Even the truth.”

“The word is a mockery on your lips,” Colin said.

Brisbane’s grin was icy cold. “Regan and I had been lovers since we were naught but thirteen years old. Did you truly believe it was your child she carried? ’Twas her idea to trick you into bedding and wedding her so no one would ever know the babe was mine. When I threatened to tell you the truth, she hanged herself. She was too spineless to live without your love.”

Tabitha gasped. For the first time, she understood Brisbane’s bitter jealousy and unrelenting hatred. He honestly believed that Colin had usurped him as his sister’s lover.

“Why you wretched son of a—!” Colin launched himself off the stallion, slamming his fist into Brisbane’s face.

Tabitha screamed. Slipping Lucy into a saddlebag, she tumbled off the horse in Colin’s wake and grabbed the back of his tunic. Brisbane lay cringing on the ground,
his cuffed hands rendering him helpless to defend himself against Colin’s savage blows.

“Stop him!” she shouted at the gaping onlookers. “Before he kills Brisbane!”

It wasn’t that she didn’t think Brisbane deserved to die. She just didn’t want Colin to have to live with both the twins’ deaths on his conscience.

She nearly sobbed with relief when Arjon shouldered his way through the crowd.

Surrendering her frantic grip on Colin’s tunic, she grabbed Arjon by the arm. “You’ve got to stop him!”

Arjon cast the grappling men a casual look. Colin had his powerful hands around Brisbane’s throat and was slowly squeezing the life from him. Roger’s face was already beginning to turn a becoming shade of purple. “Why?”

“Because Colin will never be able to live with himself if he murders a defenseless man.”

Arjon sighed and rolled his eyes heavenward. “Very well. If you insist.”

He beckoned toward the others. In the end, only one of them was strong enough to get Colin in a headlock and drag him off Brisbane.

Colin rolled to his back, gasping for breath, and shot his assailant a wounded glare. “Christ, Nana, you almost strangled me.”

The old woman planted her hands on her meaty hips. “If I’ve told you once, lad, I’ve told you a hundred times—never make me ask you to do somethin’ more than once.”

Since it seemed Colin would survive, Tabitha dropped to her knees at Brisbane’s side. “Oh,” she breathed, studying his limp limbs and waxy pallor. “I think we’re too late.”

She leaned over to check his mottled throat for a
pulse and that was how, when Brisbane opened his eyes, her amulet happened to be dangling in front of them like a fat, juicy fig. His cuffed hands shot out and since Tabitha thought he was dead, his earsplitting screech sent her tumbling back on her bottom. He snapped the amulet’s chain with a single vicious wrench, bounded to his feet, and went running across the field like the White Rabbit in
Alice in Wonderland
. Several of the boys loped after him.

“Tabitha!” Colin bellowed, struggling to a sitting position.

She scrambled to his side. “Don’t worry, love, Brisbane’s not a witch. In his hands the amulet’s nothing but a harmless piece of jewelry. He can’t even—”

A jagged bolt of lightning shot out of the clear blue sky, striking the ground directly behind them. They looked at the charred crater, then at each other, then at Brisbane, who was gleefully hopping up and down at the edge of the forest.

“Scatter!” Colin bellowed.

He didn’t have to ask twice. As a supernatural current charged the air, his people fled in all directions, some of the more agile boys making it as far as the forest, others taking cover in the sparse stands of oak that dotted the meadow. Even his riderless stallion flew past them as if winged, making for the nearest shelter.

Colin grabbed Tabitha’s hand and they went flying across the meadow, rolling down an incline and into a shallow ditch just as another bolt of lightning seared the grass where they had been sitting only seconds before.

As they lay nose to nose in the grass, struggling to catch their breaths, Colin arched one eyebrow and growled, “You were saying, lass?”

CHAPTER
27

“M
ama always said I didn’t pay enough attention when she talked. But she talked
all
the time. And she was my mother, for heaven’s sake! How was I to know she was ever going to say anything important? Oh, no. The video! Now I understand why Daddy wanted the amulet destroyed and why Mama let him believe she flushed it down the commode all those years ago. They both knew that if it fell into the wrong hands …” Tabitha groaned and banged her head against the soft turf.

“Sweeting?” Colin said from somewhere above her.

“Hmm?”

“Are you quite done having hysterics?”

She sat up, spitting out a clump of grass. “I think so.”

Colin was peering over the rim of the ditch, his hand on the hilt of his sword. “He’s got the manacles off and he’s waving them at us in a most insolent manner. You do realize, of course, that he planned this entire escapade. I should have known he was too arrogant to surrender without a fight to the death.”

“Why couldn’t I have just let you strangle him? Remind me not to stop you next time.”

He massaged his throat. “Next time I’ll let Auld Nana strangle him.”

Tabitha scooted to the top of the ditch on her elbows and gently touched his arm. “I’m sorry about Regan. She must have felt trapped in an intolerable situation. I’m sure she never really wanted to deceive you.”

Colin shook his head. “If she had only trusted me enough to confide in me … I wouldn’t have hated her. I would have tried to help her.”

“I know,” Tabitha replied, smiling wryly. “You never could resist a damsel in distress.”

If they hadn’t exchanged a loving glance, they might not have become aware of the ominous silence.

“What’s Brisbane doing now?” Tabitha peeped over the edge of the ditch, unable to bear the suspense.

“He’s disappeared into the forest.”

“Maybe he’s headed back to his castle to establish his evil empire. After all, he can rule the world from there just as well as anywhere else.” Groaning with despair, she tugged on Colin’s sleeve. “We can’t leave the amulet in his hands, you know. If we can’t get it back, then we’ll have to find some way to destroy it.”

“But if we destroy it …?”

She finished the thought before he could. “I’ll never get home.” She gazed helplessly at him, tracing the rugged features she’d come to know as well as her own. A future with him would mean bitter-cold winters with no central heat or electric blankets. But a future without him would mean bitter-cold springs, falls, and summers for the rest of her life. She flashed him a tremulous smile. “It’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

His tender scowl meant more to her than all the smiles in the world. He reached for her, and even though she was lying in a ditch with grass stuck in the
most unlikely places, his touch still made desire burn thick and hot in her veins.

He pressed a fierce kiss to her lips, then plucked a rose petal from her hair. “You may not have your charm, lass, but you’re still a bonny witch. You can defeat him with your magic. I have faith in you.”

His solemn regard only worsened the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Colin, there’s something you should know …”

But before she could finish, a sound both terrible and familiar reached their ears, throbbing like a jungle full of natives beating a single massive drum. The ground beneath them began to tremble, then quake—a thousand times worse than it had on the day Brisbane’s men had come thundering out of the forest.

“I have a very bad feeling about this,” Colin murmured.

They both peeked over the rim of the ditch. The meadow was still deserted, but deep in the forest, the tops of the trees were beginning to sway.

Colin drew his sword and started to rise, but Tabitha latched on to his ankle with both hands, dragging him back down.

“Colin, you can’t! Brisbane will destroy you. You heard him. He blames you for stealing his sister’s heart away from him.”