Sian is unprepared, but not surprised, especially when
her method becomes clear. Kev is with her. By asking for him at the hut, Roanne
unwittingly revealed the way to find their hiding place. Kev sees the girl on
Sian’s far side and blurts a few heartfelt words in Lirosi. Sian does not need
to speak the language to understand an apology. Standing at his shoulder,
Roanne assures Kev that he is forgiven. Joel, for once, is in agreement.
Alarice ignores the children. Her brown eyes roam Sian
from head to tail. “I had to be sure it was really you,” she says, softly.
Sian is silent and wary. She sounds sincere—and she
may well be, having successfully run him to ground. His main concern is to
protect the children; he would be willing to talk if he had something to say,
but he left off speaking to Alarice after she put herself between him and his
brother.
She sees her husband’s name cross his mind. “Derrick
has been distraught since you disappeared. Every day, he leads the search party
and comes home despondent.”
Sian can’t imagine that. Derrick is moody, but
disinclined to wallowing. He is more likely to come home in a shivering temper
than deepening despair—and Sian has no doubt that he has tried more than once
to wring the truth from his wife.
A disturbing thought occurs. He looks toward his
sutured hip with a sudden, savage understanding. His widened eyes find Alarice
once more. She meets them with an icy smile. “I’d rather that he find you
dead,” she says.
“ ‘Dead’?” he echoes, horribly amused. He spreads his
hands to encompass his altered form. “Like this?”
“Dead is dead,” Alarice replies. “If I cannot have
you, my beautiful Blais, I’ll see that no one can.”
Before she is finished speaking, she is calling the
power she used to fool Derrick into wedding her; the same power she used to
make her own brother vanish and later turned on Blais. The air thickens about
her, blurring her features. A cold wind swirls through the cave. Kev is rigid
with terror and deaf to the sound of his name. Joel calls to him, but Alarice’s
rising magic has him immobilized. Roanne moves instead. Sian swings to shield
her with his quarters, but even as he means to protect her, he realizes that
Alarice will not stop at killing him. She will take the children, too. She
must, if she hopes to preserve her secret.
Sian decides. He has no weapon but his hooves and his
strength; against dark magic, his effort may be wasted. As he charges the
sorceress, the children scatter. Alarice throws up her hands, her voice raised
in pagan entreaty. The muscle stiffens in Sian’s legs, in his chest and back
and shoulders. Each stride becomes as ponderous as running through honey, slow
and sticky. In contrast, she is as quick as a lizard’s tongue. A dark sparkling
orb blinks into her palm. She flings it at Sian. It strikes him full in the
chest and sends him high on his hind legs, front hooves flailing. A girl
screams. He rears impossibly high, teetering on his hooves, twisting to catch
his balance, and falls heavily backward. His chest is numb. Beneath the skin
and muscle and bone, his heart is ominously still.
* * *
Roanne knocks Kev from his feet. They spill together,
rolling with the force of her assault, from the cave’s entrance. She cannot
think of Sian. She can only hope that between them, she and the manhorse have
sufficiently distracted Lady Alarice. If they have not, then Joel is dead and
she must face the witch alone.
She knows what she must do. Kev grabs at her ankle.
She screams at him to let her go. He holds on, yelling that she’ll be killed.
She doesn’t care. Her brother is in there with Lady Alarice; she has to go, she
has to try—
Inside the cave, Joel looses an agonized howl. Roanne
kicks Kev in the face and scrambles free when his grip gives on her ankle.
Behind her, she hears Da shout in alarm and thinks here too late as she
lunges through the cave’s rocky maw.
The feeble fire has gone out. Roanne cannot pause to
let her eyes adjust; she races blindly and promptly trips over something she
knows must be a body. Horror springs from not knowing whose it is. “Joel!” she
cries in a panic. “Joel, where are you?”
“Here,” he says, from a little way to the side.
She peers hard in that direction. Shapes are forming
in the gloom; she spies her brother’s face, pale and serious in its corona of
blacker-than-black curls. “You screamed.”
“I had to touch the arrow,” he replies,
matter-of-factly.
Her eye moves reluctantly to the thing that tripped
her. Faint light glimmers in pale hair and glows on moon-coloured silk. Lady
Alarice is sprawled on the dirt floor, impaled on her own poisoned shaft. Tears
spring unbidden to Roanne’s eyes. She and Sian have succeeded. Joel was able to
dig up the magicked arrow while the witch was distracted.
“How?” Kev wants to know. He and the children’s
parents crowd in the cave entrance. Sunlight flows around them, floating Lady
Alarice in a benign white pool.
“Magic destroys the one who calls it,” Joel says,
solemnly.
“But she used it on others.”
For once, Roanne’s brother tries to be patient with
the manor oaf. “You don’t use magic on yourself, Kev.”
Roanne’s throat aches. Beyond the pool where Lady
Alarice lies, the manhorse is a motionless tangle of golden limbs and flaxen
curls removed from the reach of the light. She cannot bring herself to venture
closer, yet she cannot make herself look away. All she can do is sit and stare
and wait for the tears to take her.
Da is demanding answers from Joel, who behaves as if
he slays witches with their own magic every day. Kev hunkers at Roanne’s side
and lays a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Roanne. I thought she was
going to kill you and I … well, I mean … I couldn’t let that happen. I
couldn’t, you know … ” He trails off when he sees that she isn’t listening. He
looks at Joel instead. “It was her along, wasn’t it? It wasn’t Lord Derrick at
all, was it?”
Joel shakes his head. He quickly hops up to get in the
way when Da steps toward the manhorse’s body. Roanne is roused as well. Without
regaining her feet, she throws herself between Sian and her father. “He saved
us,” she declares, daring Da to do any of the hundred things she fears Da might
do.
His tone is firm. “Let me by, child.”
Joel signs reassurance. He’s told Da all he
knows—which is probably more than Roanne knows, given her brother’s possession
of the sight—and all Da wants is to get a better look at the creature who
sacrificed himself for Da’s children.
Roanne steps aside, but she can’t look behind. She
can’t bear to see him dead and cold. It’s easier to look at Lady Alarice. She
was always cold. Now she’s just dead.
She hears a voice remarkably like her own though she’s
unaware of speaking. “He was Lord Derrick’s brother.”
“Da knows that, Roanne,” Joel whispers. “Kev told
him.”
She looks at Kev, who is still hunkered where she had
been sitting. Smiling is out of place in this moment, so the smile he offers is
a weak one. Roanne feels an answering smile, just as weak, on her own lips.
When she gets past the grief of losing Sian, she’ll think about Kev’s intention
and realize that he feels as deeply for her as she feels for him. Maybe between
them, and with Mam’s help, they might persuade Da to let them marry. They won’t
be old enough to wed for some years, of course, but they’ll need that long to
bring her father around.
The first tear falls. It trickles silently over
Roanne’s cheek and settles in the corner of her smile for Kev. She is startled
from shedding a second by a jubilant shout from her brother. “Roanne, Sian is
moving! He’s moving!”
To be continued …
copyright 2013 Ruth R. Greig
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