Between (34 page)

“Isobel!”

“She can’t hear you,” Jehenna said. “No sound in there. Nothing to see, or touch, or feel. No passage of time. Not a thing but what is already in her head.”

Vivian, knowing something of what was in her mother’s
head, swept her hand across the invisible barrier. A shock of pain, a flash of green light. Her hand and wrist went numb; her arm ached.

Landon moaned and pushed himself back up onto his feet. “Isobel.” All the long years of separation were in his voice.

Almost she seemed to hear him, pausing in the rocking and raising her head to look around. Then she made a small sound of despair, like an exhausted child, and began rocking again.

“Let’s make this more interesting,” Jehenna said. She tossed something through the doorway, a thing that clattered and skidded across the floor, bumping up against Isobel’s bare foot.

A knife.

Again Vivian tried to press her way through to her mother. Green flame from the edge of the doorway grounded into the silver bracelets. Her muscles convulsed in an agony of fire that dropped her to the ground where she lay, twitching and helpless, able only to watch and do nothing.

Isobel stopped rocking. She picked up the knife, turned it in her hands. One finger tested the blade. She smiled, ran it delicately the length of her forearm, laying open the flesh with surgical precision. Again she ran a finger along the blood-wet edge, testing, then set it against her skin once more.

Jehenna laughed, releasing them all from the force of her will as she focused on the suffering woman.

“Now, Landon!” the Warlord shouted. He thrust the blade of his sword into the force field. Green light arced and writhed around his hands, his arms. His entire body went rigid and convulsed as the force field grounded itself through him and into the cavern floor. The Prince flung himself forward. For the length of one long breath he hung motionless in the air, his body outlined in green, flickering light. But then he was through, clasping Isobel tightly, tightly, removing the knife from her hands. She buried her face in his shoulder and clung to him.

Jehenna hissed through her teeth, her beautiful face distorted by rage.

Vivian drove her shoulder into the Warlord’s chest, pushing him backward and away from the current that held him. Released, he sagged onto the floor, unconscious, the sword clattering to the stone beside him.

Down on her knees, Vivian checked his vital signs. There was a pulse, faint and thready, but he wasn’t breathing. Tilting his head, she sealed her lips around his and breathed into him. Once, twice, three times.

He drew a deep shuddering breath on his own. And then another.

When she looked up, the door was gone, and Isobel and Landon with it.

“They’ll be sick of each other soon enough,” Jehenna said. “The knife will come in handy, years and years from now, when they’ve had nothing but each other and the love turns to hate. I couldn’t have planned a fate so perfect.”

“Why?” Vivian asked. “Why do you hate your own daughter so?”

“She was always her father’s more than mine. I bore her to please him, but it wasn’t enough. He turned against me, locked me away into that room. Do you understand what that means? One hundred years of nothing but my own thoughts and memories. Every long empty minute I worked to build my power. So much time to plan revenge. It was perfect. And when I broke free—”

“You killed him.”

Jehenna kicked the unconscious Warlord in the ribs, a sharp and vicious blow. “I weary of this game,” she said. “Perhaps I will kill him with his own blade.” She bent and picked up the sword from where it lay beside him. “Bare his chest.”

And Vivian felt her own hands moving, unable now to resist the Voice. She unfastened the chain mail shirt, lifted the tunic beneath it. Gasped at the network of scars marring the skin of his chest.

“Such a foolish man to punish himself so.” Jehenna
positioned the tip of the sword in the space between two ribs, directly over the heart. “Shall I?”

Vivian’s own heart keened in her breast. “Stop,” she croaked. “Please.”

The Warlord’s eyes flickered open, those beautiful agate eyes.

“Where is the key?” Jehenna demanded.

“No,” the Warlord said, “My Lady, no—”

Bound with silver, her will not her own, Vivian could no longer refuse. “I have it.”

“Give it to me.”

Knowing that great evil would follow, Vivian unbound the fabric strips that strapped the key to her thigh. It felt extraordinarily heavy in her hand, almost as though it was sentient and resistant to the exchange.

“No,” the Warlord whispered.

But the thing was already done. With a cry of exultation, Jehenna took the key from Vivian’s hand and pressed it to her lips.

V
ivian opened her eyes to complete and utter darkness. Someone seemed to be pounding her head with a hammer, in perfect time with the beating of her heart. Her throat felt bruised, her mouth so parched she could barely swallow. The air was cold, musty, heavy with the stink of human waste, sweat, and despair.

Memory showed up a few heartbeats later, reminding her that she was locked in a cell in the dungeons, that she wasn’t going to find a way out. Cold silver circled both wrists, controlling her, blocking her ability to create a door, to use the Voice on a guard, to do anything to help herself.

Alive, but not for long.

With a groan, she pushed herself up to sitting, waited for the storm of agony in her head to settle, then tried to make sense of her surroundings.

She sat on a pile of damp, rank-smelling straw. Her bare feet reached out and found clammy stone. It took three attempts for her to get onto hands and knees, and from there to stagger up onto her feet and stand, swaying. When the pain in her head eased back to what she was coming to think of as normal, she limped cautiously forward on her bruised and aching feet.

Five tottering steps brought her to a stone wall. She felt
along it for maybe ten paces before it intersected with another wall.

Definitely a cell. She went over it again and again, exploring every reachable inch with her hands for anything that could be used to help her escape, but there was nothing. No cracks, no loose stones. At last she sank back down on her pile of straw, remaining perfectly still except for the necessary act of breathing.

There would be no rescue attempt.

Prince Landon might have tried, but he was locked away with Isobel. The Warlord, if he was still alive, would not be free to come for her. Last she’d seen him, when the guards dragged her away, he’d been lying on the floor with Jehenna still standing over him pressing the tip of his sword against his bared breast.

Tears threatened, but Vivian blinked them back.

Her thoughts flickered in and out, short-circuited by cold, hunger, and fear of the unknown. Would she be sacrificed to the dragon? Or would she be left here to molder away, slowly decaying in the dark? It would take ten days, more or less, to die of dehydration. A month or more to die of starvation if they decided to bring her water. She feared this more than the dragon, she realized. It was too much like Isobel’s fate, locked away with her guilt and failures with no hope of setting them right.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway, slow and halting. She had time to picture a deformed monster come to torment her before there was a soft grating sound, and a flickering yellow light illuminated the line of a half-open door. Above it, distorted by the shadows, Jared’s face. No, not Jared, she reminded herself. Gareth.

“Come to gloat, or to finish what you started?” she asked. Automatically she reached for the knife, but her pocket was empty. Of course, Jehenna would never have left her something that could be either defense or a means of self-destruction in the face of torture or starvation.

Gareth flinched as though she had struck him. He entered the cell, a lantern in one hand, pushing the door not quite
closed behind him. “I never wanted this.” His voice sounded, just for the moment, young and a little bit lost. He bent his knees as though he would sit beside her in the straw, then changed his mind with a little gasp of pain.

Vivian kept silent, waiting for him to declare his purpose.

“Is there anything I can do to ease you?”

Water, food. She bit her lip rather than ask him for anything. “I didn’t expect you to be up and around quite yet.”

One of his hands twitched protectively to rest on his buttocks. “No permanent damage, the healer said. But it makes sitting difficult.”

“Why are you really here, Gareth?”

“I came to tell you you’ll be sacrificed to the dragon at dawn.”

“Always the bearer of good news.”

“Not just you—the Warlord as well, if he’s not already dead.”

Her heart skipped a beat in mingled hope and dismay. “What?”

“One rumor says he’s in the dungeon awaiting punishment. The other that she’s killed him already.”

Vivian found that she couldn’t speak.

“My Lady?”

“You’ve delivered the message. You can go and tell her I’m quivering in terror.”

A strangled sound escaped him, somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and then he did lower himself, very slowly, to sit beside her in the straw. “That’s not why I came.”

“So why are you here?”

“To explain. The thing that happened with your bird. She ordered me to do that. Said the creature must be removed.”

Vivian’s temper flared, but she kept her voice even. “And now—what? You want my forgiveness before I die?”

“Yes. I mean no—I don’t want for you to die, at all. She said the key was dangerous for you, that once it was safely
in her hands you would be safe. I heard that she had found the key. That you had been locked in the dungeon. I went to her; I asked that she would keep her promise. She—laughed. She said that now she has the key she has no need of you…”

“If you’re so sorry, get me out of here. Free me.”

He moaned, buried his face in his hands. “I can’t. There are guards everywhere.”

“People are dead because of you. Esme was eaten by the dragon last night. Did you know? She spattered. A great deal of her is now stains on my gown. And now it’s my turn.”

“You have power. Can’t you do something?”

Vivian stretched out her wrists, the silver bracelets glinting in the lantern light. “She has bound me.”

Gareth took one of her hands and ran his fingers over the silver. A familiar touch. In the darkness she could almost imagine that he was Jared, that perhaps he loved her. Almost. But Jared’s hands had also turned against her. She shuddered but would not give him the satisfaction of pulling away.

He turned one of her wrists, held it closer to the candle, and bent his head to examine the clasp.

“Look. You’ve said what you came to say. Go back to your chambers. Get some sleep. Tomorrow morning comes early. You won’t want to miss the show.”

Turning aside, he set the lantern down, well away from the straw, and then took her right wrist in his hands again. Pressure. A click. And the bracelet fell away. He took her left hand and repeated the action.

Vitality flooded back into her body. Voices shouted in her head, as though a switch had been turned on. The weight of responsibility settled back onto her shoulders; the harsh flicker of hope beset her heart.

“Why would you free me?” she asked.

“You were right—what you said about the dreams.”

Vivian closed her eyes to shut out his face, walling off a cyclone of emotions that she had no time to sort out. Too many lives hung in the balance for her to indulge in vengeance in
this moment. Clenching her fists, she steadied her breathing and her voice.

“What did I say?”

“That I was a better man in my dreams. I—have loved you, I think.”

“Whatever it was, it wasn’t love.”

“She made me, you have to believe that. I had orders…”

Vivian wanted to believe him. But he hadn’t acted like a man under duress. She thought about the Warlord, the way he’d fought the compulsion. The cold sweat, the way his face had twisted in hate and resistance when he’d been forced to obey.

She shook her head. “No, Gareth. You acted as you wished to act. She gave you the opportunity to live your own dreams. You took it.”

“My Lady—”

“Go back to your bed.” Half-unconscious, she used the Voice.

He stiffened as the command jolted into him. Picked up the lantern and took a step toward the door. “But I freed you.”

“Did you expect a reward? Get out, before I make you hurt yourself.”

Her own words echoed with the other voices in her head as the door closed with him, shutting out the last glimmer of light.

You acted as you wished to act.

There was truth in these words. Surmise was not entirely of Jehenna’s making. Each dreamer here bore some responsibility for the way things played out. They made choices, even in dream, and Surmise shifted and changed because of them. Things could be altered; nothing was set.

Perhaps it was not necessary to die.

Curling back into the straw, she tucked the bracelets into her pocket. Her brain spun in circles, trying to make sense out of Surmise and the Between. At last the voices carried her off into a fitful sleep, in which she dreamed of Poe, and
the key, and of soaring through a cold night sky on wide strong wings.