Fire Dance (42 page)

She grabbed his hand, placed it against a rock face, and led him by his arm as he groped with feet and hands for the pathway. She guided him through the nightmare of total darkness, creeping on hands and knees, squeezing through narrow spaces, tripping, falling, gasping. After an eternity of blindness, they reached the steps hewn into the stone.

"Twenty-seven steps," she whispered.

"Aye."

"Duck your head at the top."

He crawled up the steps, feeling for each one as it came, his only salvation the hard gasping of the terrified woman ahead of him. He almost forgot to count the steps.

But she counted aloud.

"Eleven, twelve, thirteen– "

He let her count them. It would be less confusing. With each step, he reached out to touch her ahead of him, needing the reassurance that she had not vanished in that cloying blackness.

"Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two– "

Still there. Solid steps of stone, cool and damp, beneath his hands and knees. Melisande's precious foot ahead of him.

"Duck your head. Twenty-six, Twenty-seven. Stop."

He halted where he was, probed the limits of the stone and waited the duration of a millennium for her to manipulate the concealing panel that would lead them back into sanity.

Painful bright light flooded his eyes. As the darkness receded, the chamber before him became slowly visible, and she crawled through the hole. He crawled behind her with all the speed he could muster.

He stood up. Before him, she trembled, gasped as if she could not get air into her lungs, and her knees folded beneath her. He caught her, supporting her weight. Violent trembling racked her body.

His lips found hers, forced her into a compelling kiss, deep and hard. He shook as badly as she did. He kissed again, again demanding all of her attention until at last she sighed and her body relaxed.

"Don't think," he whispered, "don't think of anything." And again he kissed her, a gentle and tender caress on her lips, to her cheek, to the lids of blue eyes that closed in anticipation.

Until the most crippling of the fear disintegrated.

"Guard!" he yelled, as he scooped her up in his arms and carried her to her bed.

The man stepped into the room, his mouth gaping.

"I want Chretien, Thomas, and Gerard, immediately."

The guard whirled around and sped out the door.

Then he tightened his embrace once again, not wanting to release her for even the space of a breath. "Ah, love, forgive me. I was wrong not to trust you."

"He cannot be alive!" she said, and her voice still trembled. "He said he was the Spawn of Satan. It must be true!"

"He is but a man."

"But he was dead! I killed him!"

"How?"

"With poison. He took an antidote every day, so that he could not be poisoned. I found one he knew not about, and put it in his antidote."

"Mayhap it was not enough to do the job."

"But he was dead. I waited until he died. Thomas found no pulse. And we buried him."

"And I'll wager if we dug up the coffin, we would find it full of rocks. But we did leave the corpse alone overnight. The coffin was found nailed shut the next morning, but no one thought anything about it then. Mayhap he was so nearly dead that he appeared so."

He could see she did not believe his wild conjectures. He did not really believe it himself. It left too many questions unanswered. But there had to be another answer.

Chretien and Gerard raced into the chamber, and stood there, astonished to see him holding the lady from whom he had recently been estranged. Gerard's gaze flew to the corner of the chamber and the gaping hole in the wall.

"What is that?"

"That," he said, is the true Hole into Hell. Block it off, if you must use every stone block in the curtain wall."

Thomas rushed in the door, gasping from a hard run.

"Close the door."

Thomas obeyed.

"Fyren lives," he said simply.

"Nay, it is impossible," replied Thomas. His gentle eyes widened as he gulped down fear.

"He lives. He is in the cavern below us. I know not how, but it is so."

"Then he is Satan's spawn, as he said."

"I do not believe it. I sliced him with my sword, and he bled. But then he threw something at the ground, and it made a loud noise and much smoke. I have never seen the like."

"I have," said Melisande, still taking deep breaths. "It is something I can do, except that I do not know how to make it work without fire. He would never let me learn that."

"It is magic?"

"No more magic than making bread. It is just ordinary things put together differently. He would not let me learn the remainder of the secret. If it were truly magic, he would not have bothered to keep the secret from me, for I would not be able to do it anyway. But he feared my learning all his tricks and becoming as powerful as he was."

"But I do not understand how he could live, lord," said Thomas, shaking his head.

"There is another thing he learned," Melisande said. "I had forgotten it. I read it in one of the ancient books, but I did not believe it was so. There is a way to make the heart beat so slowly it seems to stop. He must have learned it."

"And his antidote might have affected the poison, so that it did not kill him. We can but speculate on that. But he is alive, and filled with rage."

"I'm going after him," said Gerard, and he started toward the hole in the wall.

"Nay!" cried Melisande. "You do not know the caverns. You could send a hundred men into them, and he would pick them off, one by one."

"If he has any sense, he is long gone," said Chretien. "I do not see that he is any great threat to us, for Anwealda and Cyneric are both dead. He cannot raise an army now."

"What if they are also not dead?" she asked.

"They are dead, love. That I know," Alain responded. "But I want to know more. He had a small chamber, almost like a room carved into the stone, and an assortment of substances in jars. Lady, tell us what you know of it."

She gulped, and he realized she was afraid to speak. What he had seen looked very much like witchcraft, and the more she said, the more she, also, looked like a witch.

"Do not fear, love. I know you are no witch."

She gave a tentative nod and worried at her lower lip. "Fyren dabbled in alchemy. I have been there but a few times. He did not want me to know what he did there, like the powder that makes the loud noise. I call it lightning powder. There were many things like it people do not know, yet the ancients must have known. Fyren wanted to learn them, and use them to gain power. He planned to rule all of the Isle, someday."

Now she looked at him as if expecting a blow, knowing what she said would remind him of the rest of what Fyren had said. Aye, he remembered. He remembered his rage, as well.

"Do not think I blame you for Fyren's evil," he said.

"But you heard."

"Aye. He used you in the most evil way."

"You cannot want me, now. I am also to blame."

"To blame. Is that why Fyren forced you into the pits?"

Her head jerked as she nodded.

"Then, how can you blame yourself?"

"You do not understand. It is because I allowed it."

CHAPTER 22

"Allowed it?" He knew better. "You hate him too much. Chretien, fetch Father Hardouin."

"Do not give me to them. You said you would not."

"And I do not, love. But you must know what sin is yours, and what is not. This is not your doing."

 
"He is in the hall," Chretien said, and sped away.

The other two men stood as still as stone statues.

"Thomas, I do not think she wants to share this matter," he said, and Thomas and Gerard turned to leave.

"Nay, I am tired of secrets. I want no more of them. They also deserve to know, for they have defended me so blindly."

"Not blindly, lady," said Gerard. The tenderness in his eyes made Alain's heart ache. "We have always known you to be worthy."

"They will burn me," she said, in a sad, fatalistic tone.

"Nay, lady," said Thomas. "Forgive me, but I also knew of this."

Alain stared, stunned. "You knew and did naught about it?"

Father Hardouin rushed into the chamber, Chretien at his heels.

"I did too much," Thomas answered. "I told the Lady Edyt, and she was murdered for her knowledge."

Father Hardouin, his brow furrowed heavily, stood waiting, trying to make out from what he heard how he was needed. Alain gave Father Hardouin a summary of Melisande's confession.

"She believes she is at fault," Alain told the priest.

The priest came closer, and lifted Melisande's chin in his hand. "How is it that you are at fault, lady?"

"He said I enticed him. I tried not to, but I did not know what I was doing wrong."

"Lady Melisande," said the priest, "I cannot disagree that you are a beautiful woman. But such comes from God, not yourself. You must not be vain of your beauty, for it is God's doing. Neither must you accept guilt for it."

"But I was willing."

"Willing? Yet you were tormented with darkness, and imprisoned? That cannot be called willing."

"Nay, that was not it, though he did use that, too."

"What else, then?"

"If I was not willing, he stole girls from the village, or other places, I do not know where, for I did not know many of them."

"What did he do with them?"

"He tortured them, and used them, then killed them and threw them into the pits."

"So that was why they were never found," said Thomas.

"And if you were willing, he would not do this?"

"Aye. And some died for my selfishness."

"There were many who disappeared," Thomas explained. "Sometimes a wild animal would be found dead, and have upon it some cloth or thing that belonged to a missing girl. So some people believed Fyren could change people into animals."

Father Hardouin shuddered and shook his head. "Cannot you see, lady, the threat he used? If he had not been willing to kill those girls, he would not have had your cooperation. That is coercion of the worst kind. God looks upon your sacrifice as holy, not evil."

"He said I was consigned to Hell, anyway, for we are Satan's kin. And I committed murder, too."

"It is not murder if he is not dead. But did not Father Leanian put a curse on Fyren?"

"Aye."