Entreat Me (29 page)

Gavin lay atop her, fully human, unconscious, naked, and crushing the air out of her lungs.  Black spots danced in front of her eyes, expanding until her vision narrowed to a thin tunnel and a ringing in her ears grew louder.  She blinked, trying to focus.  The last thing she saw was Ambrose’s pale, sour features over Gavin’s shoulder.

“Daft shrew,” he said.  “There isn’t a woman in this entire castle who listens to a damned thing I say.”

Louvaen fainted.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The small animal spat and howled, thrashing against the glowing bonds imprisoning it on the bed.  Wiry fur covered a gaunt body of striated muscle and dark, leathery skin.  The lipless snout peeled back to reveal a set of fangs that shone a yellowed ivory in the chamber’s semi-darkness.  The creature’s clawed hands and feet had savaged the bedding, sending up a blizzard of feathers.  They spun in flurries before cascading to the floor.  Ballard stared at what was once his son and wished his wife was alive right now so he’d have the satisfaction of killing her.

“Do something,” he said in a low voice.

Ambrose stood beside him, covered in down feathers.  “This is all I can do for now, dominus.  Restrain him so he doesn’t hurt others or himself.”

Ballard ran his hands through his hair, horrified at the scene before him.  The curse had struck a second time in as many weeks.  He hadn’t seen the first manifestation, when Gavin had transformed and torn two men to pieces in Aelfric Haseldane’s bailey.  He understood now why that easy-natured lord had almost executed the boy.  “My gods, Isabeau, what have you done?”

The sorcerer tapped him on the arm and inclined his head toward the door.  Ballard followed him into the hall.

“I can’t do anything at the moment,” Ambrose said.  “But I can after the flux.”

Hope soared.  Were Ballard of a more affectionate nature, he’d embrace his sorcerer.  “Do what you must.”

Ambrose held up his hand, his features grim.  “Wait.  It’s a poor solution at best, and honestly, I think you should refuse.”

Ballard scowled.  “What is it?”

“Before I tell you, I want you to consider another choice.”  Ambrose’s voice was as hard and flat as his expression.  “Granthing sired Gavin.”  He paused at Ballard’s glower.  “Blood wills out, dominus—stronger than curses.  Marry again; sire a son of your blood.”  He pointed at the door.  “That thing in there isn’t Gavin; show mercy and put a bolt through him.”

A dullness settled inside Ballard followed by a surge of impotent rage.  A growl erupted from his throat, as bestial as the sounds his tormented son uttered in his bedroom.  He slammed a fist into the wall’s unyielding stone.  His eyes watered as a shockwave of pain surged up his arm and into his shoulder.  Ambrose didn’t flinch before his lord’s anger.  He waited quietly as Ballard paced in front of him, cursing and cradling his hand.

Ballard flexed his fingers.  His knuckles began to swell and he’d split the thin skin deep enough to bleed.  “Blood or no, Gavin is mine,” he said.  “I’ll not murder my son.  Find another way.”

Ambrose sighed.  “I knew you’d say that, but I wanted you to know there was a choice.”

“That’s no choice.  What’s your solution?”

“I can’t break the curse, but I can manipulate it.”  He shook his head as Ballard’s eyes widened.  “Words are power, especially in curses.  They bind their victims in several ways.  You and Gavin are intertwined in Isabeau’s words.  I can redirect the curse’s effects from Gavin to you.  You won’t be able to withstand them forever, but you’re a man grown and stronger than Gavin in every way.  You can resist more.  However, when it breaks you—and you will break—the curse will snap back like sinew stretched too taut.”

Ballard’s gut roiled.  The image of Gavin, feral and inhuman, rose in his mind’s eye.  Would he turn into the same thing?  Something worse?  A creature of such insensate violence that Ambrose—or someone else—would have to put him down like a diseased dog?  “You’ll need to do a lot more than just tie me to a bed.”

“Yes.”

“Will such a measure give you enough time to find a way to break the curse?”

Ambrose shrugged.  “I hope so, but I can’t guarantee success.”  His hard gaze turned pitying.  “You are my liege and my friend, Ballard, as was your father before you.  My actions won’t be those of a friend.  The spell I’d use to redirect the curse’s effects is permanent.  Once I cast it, I can’t reverse or revoke.”

Ballard stared at his boots.  He’d always been a man of implacable purpose and deep pride.  Those traits had gained him power, prestige and wealth.  They also blinded him to the wants of others, especially his wife.  She’d exacted her revenge, and her son now suffered for Ballard’s hubris.

He clapped Ambrose on the shoulder.  “Do it, my friend.  If we can’t break the curse—if Gavin and I both turn—then you kill us.”

----------*****------------

Three days had passed since the flux faded, and while he’d regained most of his lucidity, he’d lost the ability to see in color.  The world became shades of gray.  The fire dancing in the hearth gave off heat, but the flames were no more colorful than the ash they produced.

Long years and the continuous transformations to his body after each flux had built within him a kind of numb acceptance.  A colorless world was the least of his problems now.  Ballard raised an arm to study the patch of skin from elbow to wrist.  His claws skated across the ridges and crevices of hardened flesh resembling the bark of an old gnarled oak.  He sported a similar patch on his right side, riding along his lower ribs and down to his hip.

A day after the flux, he’d discovered the bony protrusions erupting from his scalp—a single pair peeking above his mop of hair like the brow tines on a young stag.  He’d laughed aloud at that—Isabeau mocked her cuckolded husband from the grave.  He laughed even harder when his fingers tangled in a mat, not of hair but of thread-like vines as delicate as tendrils of bittersweet nightshade.  He plucked one, feeling a hard pinch.  The tendril, crowned by a leaf, coiled around his finger.

The curse had changed him in many ways; these were new and different.  Like Gavin, he bore an animalistic appearance with his reptilian eyes, claws and fangs.  Unlike Gavin, he also wore the mark of the forest.  Bark for skin, vines for hair—as if Nature laid claim to him, turning him into an amalgam of the very land for which he’d sacrificed his wife and ultimately his son.

A hard banging at the solar’s door interrupted his thoughts.  He ignored it, as he had the past dozen times.

“Ballard, you whiteliver!  Open this damn door!”

He remembered a time when he would have ripped the door off its frame to reach and kill the person who dared call him a coward.  Now he simply shifted on the pallet near the hearth and stared up at the ceiling, listening to Louvaen rail at him for the fifth time today.

“Ballard, I know you can hear me!”

He’d wager half the countryside heard her.  He could never boast he loved a shy, retiring woman.

He waited through another round of pounding on the wood before it stopped.  Despite his lethargy, the sudden quiet piqued his curiosity.  He sat up and listened.  Only the fire’s crackle teased his ears.  He’d known her just a few months but learned early that Louvaen Duenda didn’t give up easily when she had a purpose.  She tenaciously stood outside his door for three days, at first cajoling him with a soft voice to let her in, then in firmer tones that grew increasingly frustrated and angry when he refused to acknowledge her or the food tray she or Magda brought him twice a day.

Ballard missed her.  He saw her face each time he closed his eyes to sleep, and his arms ached to hold her slender body against his.  As loving as she was shrewish, she offered him succor unmatched in her boundless affection for him.  She was blind as a mole to his disfigurement, but he’d seen the faintest shadow of aversion in her gaze when she discovered him testing the chain in the well room’s cell.  Even she couldn’t ignore the worst of the changes, and he’d bled inside despite her lighthearted banter and her continued willingness to embrace him.

The particular rhythm of her gait alerted him she’d returned.  He waited for the next round of insults she’d hurl at him.  Instead, a loud thwack sounded, and the door vibrated.  It continued to shake while Louvaen muttered words guaranteed to make a sailor blush.  Another hard thwack followed the first, and he rose, drawn to the door despite his resolve to ignore everyone and everything on the other side.  More baleful mutterings and a third thwack made the planks quiver under Ballard’s palm.

“What are you doing?”  Ambrose’s voice, heavy with disapproval, halted her cursing.

“What does it look like?  I’m opening the door.”

Ballard’s lips twitched at the sarcasm in her tone.

“Give me the axe, mistress.”

His eyebrows shot up.  He could picture the scene in the hall.  Louvaen’s temporary retreat had been anything but retreat; she’d gone for a weapon.  If he wouldn’t come to her, then by gods she’d come to him.  He shook his head and allowed himself a brief smile.  Blood-thirsty termagant.

Ambrose repeated his demand.  “Give it to me, Louvaen.”

“No.  Since his all-mightiness has gone deaf and chosen to starve, I’m opening this door even if I have to hack my way through it.”

“Hand the axe to me right now or you and I will have another
profound
discussion on the merits of toads.  Do you take my meaning?”

The silence that followed seethed through the slivered cracks between door and walls.  Ballard eavesdropped, captivated by the exchange between his quarrelsome lover and his equally contentious sorcerer.

“I’m going down to get his dinner,” she warned.  “If the door is still barred by the time I return, I will drag Plowfoot up here and tear the thing out of the wall.”

Ballard listened to the furious snap of her skirts as she marched away.

“I know you heard that argument,
dominus
,” Ambrose said.  “You might as well give up and open the door.  If anyone can shove a harnessed draught horse up a flight of stairs, it’s that stubborn fishwife you had the odd notion to take to your bed.”

Ballard slid the bar free to let Ambrose in.  He eyed the damage Louvaen had inflicted, noting the gouges she’d cleaved into the wood with the axe blade and the sharp splinters littering the floor.  He closed the door but left the bar raised.

Ambrose handed him the axe.  “I suggest you hide this.  I wouldn’t put it past her to try and split your skull if you refuse to eat.”

Ballard limped to a shadowed corner of the room and set the axe against the wall.  The flux’s residual agony coursed through his body, pooling in his joints so that his shoulders cracked every time he raised his arms.  His pelvis throbbed as if Magnus had trampled him not once but several times.

Ambrose nudged one of the chairs toward him.  “Are you still in much pain?”

He sat down gingerly, feeling every one of the four hundred and ten years he had lived.  “Aye.  The flux did a good job of crippling me this time.”

“I can brew you a simple.  It might help.”

Nothing would help, not even Ambrose’s strongest concoctions.  He’d only end up sleepy or worse, delirious.  “No.  I’ve just recovered my wits.  I’ll gladly suffer an ache or two to keep them intact.”

“I’d say you’re suffering from more than an ache or bruise.”

Ballard waved him off.  “Stop hovering.  How’s Gavin?”

Ambrose clasped his hands behind his back and took up a short run of pacing.  “Worried about you.”

A cold lump of dread settled in Ballard’s gut.  After so many years his son had once again fallen to the curse’s full effect, only now he was a man grown and made demonically strong by his mother’s bane.  And he’d turned on Louvaen.  Were it not for Ambrose wrenching the curse out of Gavin and slamming it into Ballard with all the magic he could muster, she’d be dead—ripped apart by claws and teeth.

“Forget me,” he said.  “Has he recovered?”

Ambrose ceased his pacing and took the chair opposite Ballard.  “Except for his eyes, he’s once more the Gavin we know.  You should talk to him,
dominus
.”  He indicated the solar door with a thrust of his chin.  “I doubt he’ll turn the door into kindling like some people, but he needs to see you.  You’re his father, and he has news.”

Ballard stiffened and bit back a pained groan.  “What news?”

“He’s marrying Cinnia.  Today.”

Ballard dragged his hand over his face.  “I didn’t think I’d raised a stupid child.  What was he thinking to pledge his troth?  Especially after what happened?”

Ambrose smiled wryly.  “He didn’t pledge.  Cinnia did, and he accepted.”

Even knowing he’d pay for it with more pain, Ballard chuckled.  “Boldness must skip generations in the Hallis line.  Mercer Hallis’s daughters inherited all that he lacks.