Captivity (2 page)

Yes, ‘Gravina
. The mocking words
entered my mind silently and directly, one telepath to another.
What your lord husband will wear when he comes to beg your
freedom and pay your ransom
.

My shock was so great I looked around
wide-eyed, expecting to see someone else—‘Graven—who could read my
thought and respond to it in this manner, without speaking
aloud.

The bandit leader laughed and pulled off the
cap and the cloth, revealing unkempt hair and beard of bright red.
If they had been washed anytime in the last twenty years they would
have dazzled the eyes like a sudden burst of flame in a dark room.
Like Val’s hair
. Like my son, who has inherited his paternal
grandfather’s aristocratic coloring.

Then I saw his eyes. Two inner eyelids of
pure silver met mine, the reflections bouncing back and forth
between us with a sickening luster.

Oh gods!
A bandit with crypta
.
It was unthinkable, unimaginable, that ‘Graven or a descendent of
‘Graven could be robbing travelers on the lonely back trails, but
the reality was facing me now, looking up through his third
eyelids, leaning on my skittish mare, exhaling his stinking breath
into my nostrils so that I parted my lips a little to breathe
through my mouth.

I felt myself sag in the saddle as the full
implication deflated my last remnants of optimism. According to
traditional wisdom, the brighter the silver the more powerful the
gift.

The man bowed to me, imitating courtly
behavior in the overdone, foppish way of one who has never seen it.
“Captain Reynaldo, at your service,” he said. His rendition of
patrician speech, the elaborate, archaic language that would
accompany the bow to ‘Graven, was poor, like his buffoonish
gesture. But it was clear enough, with or without telepathy.

“Captain Reynaldo,” I said, the words
sticking in my throat.
How ridiculous
, I couldn’t help
thinking. Dominic had been a captain in the Royal Guards when I met
him, about as far above such a creature as his battle charger is to
the mule that pulls a farm’s dung cart. I shielded my thoughts of
contempt, sensibly as it turned out, and tried not to show my fear.
“Captain Reynaldo,” I repeated, “you have indeed caught us at a
disadvantage. But Margrave Aranyi has never paid ransom, and never
will.” I did not add that he had never encountered a situation like
this. “You are welcome to our clothes and our horses.”

Apparently I had said something hilarious,
because Captain Reynaldo doubled over with laughter, waving one arm
to encourage his men to join in, which they did on command. The
sound echoed in the natural ravine of the trail, making Val whimper
with fear. As I tried to move closer to my son, Reynaldo
straightened up suddenly, the false humor gone from his face as
quickly as it had come.

“Yes, little lady,” he said. “We will have
the horses, and the clothes.” He looked me over in a way that would
have ensured his death had Dominic been with me. “And we will have
you, to hold for ransom, so that all of us can buy good horses, and
fine clothes and the company of ‘ladies.’ ” He gestured again to
his men, and they shouted their approval. They were terrified of
him, I saw, knew that his gift of
crypta
left them
vulnerable to every thought of disloyalty or disobedience, and
jumped at his every signal like trained dogs.

All this time my hand had been creeping
closer to the sheath of my dagger, hidden under my cloak. Now I
held it up so that the prism in the pommel caught the sunlight,
bending it into its rainbow of colors, each with its particular
power. Captain Reynaldo had no such dagger—at least I saw nothing
like it in the array of weapons slung over his shoulder and hanging
from his belt. As he reached for the bridle of my horse I angled
the full spectrum of light into my eyes and erected an invisible
electric fence between us, so that his hand received a shock,
harmless but painful. It was the best I could manage without more
preparation. The bandit leader roared at the unexpected jolt and
stepped back.

“You see,” I said, once he was quiet, “it is
not so easy to capture ‘Gravina Aranyi after all.” I thought about
what would be the best approach. “My offer is still good. Take our
horses and our clothes. When my husband comes for your skin, I will
tell him you did us no harm. Perhaps he will kill you quickly.”

Captain Reynaldo said nothing. I watched him,
silver eye to silver eye, wondering if I should attempt to lower my
mental shield. While it kept my own thoughts hidden, it also
prevented me from reading his and learning his intentions. Before I
could decide, the man acted with sudden confidence, punching
through the force field he must have known would not injure him,
grinding his teeth to endure the pain, and snatched my dagger from
my hand.

The agony was so intense I couldn’t even
scream. The full concentration of white sunlight, no longer
separated by the prism, bored directly into my brain like a skewer
through the eyeball. It was impossible not to squeeze my outer
eyelids shut, which set off a series of convulsions. The artificial
rainbow that our inner eyelids polarize and filter into our brain
stimulates the telepathic neurons, creating an electric circuit
that runs along our nerves. Remove the prism during the process,
and you overload the circuit.

It was as if a live wire flowing from my head
to my toes had been severed. My body arced with the raging flow of
current as the waves of telepathic energy ran through me with no
insulation, and I went alternately rigid and limp. Eventually, as
the excess electricity leaked out from my hair and my fingertips,
and was expired through my pores, the fits moderated, until I
regained a depleted equilibrium, drenched with sweat but alive.

Captain Reynaldo had observed my paroxysm
with a dispassionate, almost scientific interest, holding my dagger
in his fist, the prism covered. “My father taught me that trick,”
he said in a conversational tone. “He did that to my mother, so
she’d know who was master, even without
crypta
. And it
worked.”

I dared to take a deep breath, which made me
gag, leaning over the side of my horse and retching up the remains
of my breakfast onto the trail and the folds of my dress.

“Until she killed herself,” Reynaldo said. He
stuck the dagger through his belt, concealing the handle under the
skirt of his leather coat.

Despite my own pain, I felt sympathy for the
horror of some poor kidnapped noblewoman, at the mercy of
Reynaldo’s father, left to her fate, not rescued by her family.
Suicide is a ‘Gravina’s duty when honor and hope are gone. If all
else failed it would be up to me to liberate myself in the same
way, by choosing death. There was screaming in the background, what
I assumed was my own voice, not aloud, but in my head, my mind’s
expression of grief at the decision I might be forced to make.

I was too weak to talk and I must have lost
my mental shield during my ordeal, because Reynaldo also picked up
my bleak question:
What makes you think I, too, won’t kill
myself?
and replied to it.

“This,” he said. Reynaldo held my son up in
front of me, shaking him to make him cry, although Val was already
wailing with all the force his little lungs could muster,
windmilling his arms and kicking his legs in his attempts to free
himself.

“
Mama!
” Val cried. “
MAMA, MAAAAA MAAAAAAA!
” until it wasn’t words, just the
pure sound of fear made real. That was what I had been hearing, all
the time I fought for life and breath—my son watching his mother
being tortured.

“Gi’m t’me!” I said. My voice wouldn’t work
yet. I coughed and tried again. “Give my son to me!”

“What will you do for me in return?” Reynaldo
said. He held Val in one hand and smacked his face with open palm.
Val, who had known nothing but the most indulgent tenderness his
entire life, gasped until he choked, then let out another howl of
outrage.

“Anything,” I said, hating myself, hating the
man for making me crawl.

Reynaldo dared to come a little closer, while
keeping Val just out of reach. “Listen carefully, little lady,” he
said. “You will not use your gift against me, or any of my men. Do
you understand?”

I nodded my head, but that wasn’t good
enough. Reynaldo slapped Val again, harder this time, and my son
made a sound like a dying rabbit in a snare. “Say it. Say, ‘Yes,
Captain Reynaldo, I promise not to use my gift against you.’ ”

I repeated the words, thinking slow death to
him, imagining gangrene moving up his body, from feet to legs to
belly, of cancer eating at his colon, and last and best, of Dominic
taking his revenge, as only Dominic would know how, so that
Reynaldo would be the one to crawl, begging to be put down like a
sick dog, until he would be unable to do anything but writhe in
agonizing pain.

As I said the words, Reynaldo handed Val to
me. The man knew my thoughts that I was still too weak to shield.
“You may think all you like,” he said, smiling with false
magnanimity. “But remember, if you try to make any of those kind
thoughts real, I will
know
, and I will take the boy and
deliver him to his father, piece by piece.”

I held Val tightly to my chest, rocking him,
kissing his tear-streaked face and stroking the bright red hair. In
his fright he had wet and soiled himself. “My brave boy. It’s all
right now. I won’t let him touch you again.” I could only lie to my
son. Although his own
crypta
was not yet fully active, he
could, like any young sentient being, detect his mother’s fear, but
I did not know what else to do. The truth, that I was powerless to
protect the person dearest to me in the world, was too terrible to
express.

Reynaldo watched the mother-son reunion with
a gloating look. He had us now, exactly where he wanted us. He was
ready to take the third part of his prize, and checked to make sure
she was still where he had last seen her.

Jana had sat quietly on her pony all this
time, rigid with fear but with a self-control that most adults
would envy. The bandit captain extended an eager hand, holding her
cheeks together tightly in what must be a painful pincer grip. Jana
didn’t flinch or cry out as the man studied her face.

“Margrave Aranyi sired one true foal,” he
said.

The resemblance between father and daughter
that blazed in Jana’s proud face was unmistakable. She has dark
brown hair like Dominic’s, almost black, rare for ‘Graven, and her
nose was changing from the soft blob of childhood, becoming narrow
and prominent like Dominic’s aquiline beak. Her eyes, even without
their third eyelids lowered, are a similar cold, pale gray; today,
in the late-morning sunlight and with the terrible events
unfolding, her eyes shone as bright and metallic as mine and
Reynaldo’s—and her father’s. Dominic, with his distinctive looks,
his height and his hawk-like profile, is a universally-recognized
figure throughout the ‘Graven Realms; in the north, his own
territory, he is like an avatar of ‘Graven power. No one who had
seen Dominic could look at this little copy and fail to be reminded
of the man.

Foolishly I intervened. “She’s only a girl,”
I said, hoping to spare one of my children. “Margrave Aranyi won’t
pay ransom for a girl.”

The lie was monstrous, absurd. Already the
household knew Jana was Dominic’s heir in some intangible way that
Val could never be. “Lady Jana,” everybody called her. That was her
title, technically, although rarely used until one was an adult.
The Aranyi guards all loved her, finding in the child something of
the qualities that inspired their devotion to her father. But there
was no reason for a bandit to know any of this.

Apparently the fact was as obvious as Jana’s
Aranyi lineage. The terrible laugh sounded again. “Margrave Aranyi
will pay for this girl,” Reynaldo said. “He’ll pay more for this
girl than for a runaway wife and a little sissy boy.”

The bandit leader motioned to one of his men
who stood close beside him, and the man jumped eagerly into the
saddle of a guard’s horse. He reached to lift Jana off her pony and
seat her in front of him, but Jana shook her head. She was tall for
her age, and strong, rarely growing so tired on a journey that she
could be coaxed to share another’s mount. “I can ride by myself,”
she informed her abductor, with immense and touching dignity.

Reynaldo chuckled with appreciation. “So you
can,” he said. “So you will.” He gestured to his man, who let her
go. “Easier to have a rider than to lead it,” he said of the
pony.

He turned his attention at last to the rest
of the group. His men were at the limit of their restraint, ready
for the pleasure of stripping and raping and killing. I could feel
the waves of excitement running through them as they prepared for
the quick release of tension. They had stalked their prey carefully
and were beginning to imagine the sweet taste of success from their
coordinated and difficult undertaking. They had earned a reward,
and their leader was going to give it to them.

I was shaky from my own physical suffering
and my fear, but I knew I could not leave Isobel and Katrina, women
who had been part of my family for six years, to such a fate. My
life as ‘Gravina Aranyi, responsible for the domestic side of a
‘Graven household, had changed me from the Terran woman who would
have rationalized any decision to save myself and my children and
abandon others. Apart from any sympathy I might feel for the women,
it was the thought of living with this dishonor, the shame that
would shadow me for the rest of my life, tainting Dominic and his
companions and the children, which made it impossible.

“Please, Captain Reynaldo,” I said in an
obsequious, fawning voice. It made me sick all over again to hear
myself, but I was desperate and did not know any other way. “If you
spare my women, my husband will be generous. But if you harm them,
he will doubt your good faith. He will think you mean only to kill
us, and entrap him.”