In Camelot’s Shadow: Book One of The Paths to Camelot Series (Prologue Fantasy) (37 page)

But she would not look at him. She rigidly focused all her attention on her returning lord.

As he drew closer, Gawain saw the results of the day’s hunt. A stag’s carcass had been tied to the rump of Belinus’s horse. Its rack had been torn free already, and its shorn head flopped ludicrously as the horse cantered forward.

“Ha!” exclaimed Belinus as he reined his horse up. “It is the young eagle! How are those wings now?”

Gawain bowed. “Ready to fly, my host, and I thank you.”

“Excellent!” He swung himself onto the ground. “Although I think my wife will be sorry to see it.” Businesslike, he undid the knot holding the carcass to the horse’s back. The stag slid to the ground, lying contorted there, its glassy eyes staring up at Gawain, its red-stained throat pointed to the sky as if offering itself up to the knife.

“There you are, Lord Gawain.” Belinus planted his hands on his hips “I had thought to have it for your board tomorrow, if you are still with us. Be that as it may, this is what I gained today. What of you?”

Gawain could not help but glance at Ailla. She had not gone forward to greet her lord, but stood with her head bowed and her hands folded. She did not look up, or give any other sign.

Very deliberately, Gawain walked forward and kissed Belinus on the cheek. “That is what I gained this day, my host.”

Belinus threw back his head and laughed. “And such a treasure too! You will think my wife a miser if this is all you receive in my hall!”

“I think your wife a fine and noble lady and a courteous hostess.”

“I would be most disappointed to find you thought otherwise, my lord.” He lingered over the last word, drawing it out, bringing to it the slightest hint of discourtesy. But then that moment was gone. “Come! Let us go into board.” And he strode into his dark hall. His men lifted the stag’s carcass and carried it in behind him, followed by the other dark and silent servants and his pale, modest wife.

Gawain had no choice but to follow.

It was nearly dark when Euberacon summoned Risa again. The pain still burned in all of Risa’s crabbed and contorted joints, made worse by the weariness that turned her blood to water.

This fortress of dreams and nightmares did have a kitchen and a scullery, and Euberacon had left her there, presided over by the woman, Nessa, who had laid the breakfast, and by a cheerful stump of a man named Drew, who took one look at Risa and declared that she should be left in the pen with the pigs.

“Well, if we don’t take her, who will??” chided the woman as Risa hunched before her. “Hands is hands. Let’s get to work then, girl.”

They could not possibly see the full horror of her. Euberacon’s spells apparently sheltered their minds from the words of the strangeness around them. They blinked very little this pair, and as she watched them, they sometimes moved around as if there was something in their way that they saw but she did not.

If it was true they did not see the fullness of her monstrosity, this fact won her no respite from the work heaped upon her. She drew water and scrubbed the floor, cleaned up after the dogs and plucked the birds the man brought back, after she had cleaned up from their slaughter.

She looked hard at them to see if they had been killed with an arrow. If there was a bow … her hands could still shoot, her eyes could still see.

No. Don’t think it. Bury it, bury it deep. Don’t let him hear. Don’t think how you know when he’s afraid. Not yet. Not yet
.

But the bird’s necks had been snapped. Drew kept snares. She plucked furiously at the birds, quills cutting her fingers and their blood mixing with her own.

Now she hunched in front of Euberacon. She stank and she was covered in the filth of her work over the hideous form forced on her. She tried to still her mind, tried not to think, tried most of all not to hate. She tried not to see that in his hand he held a copper collar and that it was attached to a copper chain.

“Come here,” he ordered as if she were a recalcitrant hound, and as if she were that hound, she cringed even as she obeyed.

She knew what he meant to do. There could be only one thing. She tried to hold silent, but as he snapped the collar around her neck she heard a whimper come from her throat, and her malformed hand went instantly to the collar.

“Oh, no.” The sorcerer smiled. “No hand but mine removes that from you now.” There was a staple driven into the ground beside the fountain that she had not seen before. The other end of the chain had been attached there.

“Now,” he said. “We wait.”

It was almost past bearing. She tried to stand, to keep that much of her dignity, but the exhaustion and pain were too much, and she was forced to sit at his feet before she fell at them. Slowly, the darkness around them deepened. There was nothing to do but wait. Even the work in the scullery had been better. At least there was a task, something to occupy her body if not her mind. Now, there was nothing to do but feel the weight and the wrongness of her own body, to try not to hate, to try not to weep. She was hungry. She was thirsty. The edge of the copper collar slowly chafed and cut into her skin.

Bury it deep. Bury it all
.

Slowly the sky turned to black. Slowly, the quarter moon rose over the fortress walls. As it did, Risa saw shadows moving in the courtyard. She blinked the tiny eyes she had been given, and looked again.

She saw her nightmare.

She saw the marble fortress and the gilt-roofed towers fade like morning’s mist. She saw the kitchen woman trudging across the rutted yard of mud and clay with her sieve in her hands, blank, silver orbs where her eyes should be. She saw the little boy, who she now knew kept the stables, sweeping frantically at the dirt with his pitiful twiggy broom and heard again the rush of the sea, saw Drew who snared the birds and kept the gardens, struggling up the stairs in his chains. Impossibly, over it all, she saw Euberacon perched on the sagging turret, and saw the demons flocking to him, waiting for him to fall.

And yet he still sat beside her, calm and regal in his chair.

But not so calm as he had been in the day, for now his hands scrabbled nervously at the chair arm.

Above, his image was afraid. Below, his body was afraid. He had said he did not keep his life within him anymore. Was that his soul up there? Was that what the demons were waiting to take?

“What do you see?”

You do not see this? You
can’t
see this?
“Nothing, Master,” she tried.

The blow he dealt her was casual, but it knocked her flat to the ground with its strength, making her ears ring and making her ragged teeth grate the inside of her cheek. “You lie.” He did not even give her time to pick herself up. “What do you see?”

Drew fell, tumbling down the stairs, breaking his body and his will. Nessa wept as her water ran onto the ground.

The demons circled around Euberacon, gloating, goading, tempting, and he swayed and he was afraid. Two more demons sat on the rim of the fountain and laughed, jeering at the specters, and at their kin, enjoying all the games.

“Nightmares,” whispered Risa. Her own chain rattled as her spindly arms pushed her back into a sitting position.

“Tell me.”

Risa shook.
He cannot see. Not at night. Not everything you can see
. “I see you,” she said. She tasted her own blood as she spoke. Her voice shook, her hands shook, her whole crooked body was wracked with tremors. “I see you perched on a ruinous tower with demons all around you. They are waiting for you to fall. I see two more demons sitting on the fountain, watching all that occurs.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes, Master.”
He’ll hear. He’ll hear the lie. He’ll hear my heart pounding. He’ll do something worse. He’ll find something worse than this
. The cook was heading back to her kitchen now, weeping copious tears. The man lay still and broken in his chains. The little boy swept on, tears rolling down his sunken cheeks.

Euberacon nodded judiciously. His fingers still scratched nervously at the chair arms. He still knew his fears.
Good. Good
. “Kerra was right. You have sharp eyes.” He stood. “You may keep watch here tonight. Perhaps tomorrow you may return to your room, we will see how pleasant you are when the sun rises.”

He left her there, collapsed in the mud at the foot of his chair, and it seemed to her that he vanished. His specter, or perhaps it was his soul, remained where it was, high on its precarious perch, surrounded by its demons. Too far, too long, was it weary? Would it fall?

“Fall, yes fall, and take us all down with it!” cried one of the two who sat on the fountain. “Then my pretty lady would weep for sure!” It leapt into the air, dancing before Risa’s eyes. She knew better now than to swing at it. It would only fly away.

“Oh, poor spiritless thing!” squeaked its companion. “It’s all crunched up and has no fight left.”

“Shall we bite it, shall we pinch it?” asked the first, darting in so close that Risa shrank back involuntarily. “Watch it dance? It dances for the master now.” The creature’s fangs gleamed in the moonlight as it grinned with hideous merriment at her.

Its companion on the well’s cracked bowl scratched itself. “While it wears the chain, it dances like a bear. But does the master see the bear for the skin? Does he see the virtue for the sin?”

“Let’s see! Let’s see! He maybe has a dainty for us. Maybe doves, maybe better while he works!”

That seemed to please the other and they both took off into the air and were soon lost to Risa’s nightmare sight and she was alone.

Now was her chance if she had any, to lay a plan, to find a weakness.

But what chance could she have? The ruined courtyard with its overlay of dreams stretched before her. Euberacon stood on the parapet balancing himself before the swarm of demons that watched him greedily, furiously, impatiently, waiting for his slip, for his last mistake. Turn, and there was the stable boy sweeping furiously to the sound of the sea. Turn, and there was Drew, broken on the ground. Turn, and there was the cook trudging back again, with her empty eyes and her weight of weariness and her sieve.

Euberacon stood over all, lord and master of these horrors even caught in his own fears. All he had to do was look down and he would see her and what she did. All he would have to do was turn his head from the demons.

Which was all the protection she had. If he glanced away, if that shape of him aloft there looked away, what would they do? She had no way to know if it truly was vigilance that kept him aloft on that perilous height.

But he cannot
see, she reminded herself. His omniscience was illusion. There lay her chance. She must find her way to use it. If not, day would come again soon. It would come and it would go and she would be lost in whatever slavery he commanded of her, and every night would be this horror until … until what?

Until Gawain came for her? But what if Gawain did not come? What if he did not come soon enough?

Why should I even try?
asked a treacherous voice in the back of her mind.
Euberacon commands demons and I command a few peasant’s tales. I am lost and gone. God has already condemned me
.

No. No. I mustn’t. Despair is also a sin. Think. This is the
stuff
of those peasant tales. What would happen in one of them?

Absurd. Ridiculous.

No, it was the reality that moved around her. It was in Drew’s chains as he toiled up the stairs. In the sieve in the cook’s hand as she waded through the mud yet again.

An idea came to Risa then and nearly hysterical hope made her move, shuffling forward to the very limit of her copper chain as Nessa slogged toward the well. The woman did not look up, did not hesitate in her endless task.

Stretching her arm to its fullest length, Risa lifted the sieve from Nessa’s loose fingers. The woman opened and closed her suddenly empty hand. With a whimper of despair, she plunged her arms into the broken basin, seeking the sieve she must have dropped. Risa fell to her knees. With cold and trembling hands, she dug into the mud and clay at the base of the filthy, shattered fountain. She packed the clay and soaked grass into the sieve, blocking the mesh, stopping the holes. Praying with all the strength her weary and battered soul had left, she dipped the sieve into the water, and filled it to the brim. Then, she settled it into the Nessa’s hands.

The woman’s blank eyes stared down, her face gone slack with dumb surprise. She dabbled her fingers in the cloudy water, disbelieving.

Hurry, hurry
, begged Risa silently.
Whatever you must do, do it quickly. This trick will not work for long
.

Nessa gave a shriek of delight and scurried back toward where the kitchen would have been. Risa heard the splash of water, presumably into some vessel, and then Nessa came running out, staggered in the mud, and froze. She blinked.

She had eyes.

The scales had fallen from them, perhaps into the water she had carried, and now she could see. Nessa took several steps forward, her mouth agape. Risa straightened up, so she was among the things that were seen.

Nessa screamed, a high, insane sound. Fear of discovery lent Risa strength and speed. She slapped her hand over the terrified servant’s mouth and dragged her close. Nessa’s eyes bulged in their sockets and for a moment Risa thought she might faint. She could feel her panting breath against her palm.

“By that God who loves us both, Nessa, hold your tongue. I know how I look but if you scream you’ll bring worse down on us.”

Slowly, Nessa nodded, although none of the terror left her eyes. Cautiously, Risa removed her hand.

“What … what …” stammered Nessa.

“A prisoner, even as you.” She did not give her time for questions. “What do you know of your state?”

She swallowed. She was a solid, plain woman, obviously of a practical turn of mind. Devils and true monsters did not swear by holy things.

“My master sold me to … I don’t know. He had black eyes. That is the last I know.”

As quickly as she could, Risa explained to whom she had been sold into service to. The woman clutched at her apron as if it were her telling beads to keep back the devils that must surely be about to jump forth. But she did not scream, nor did she deny what she heard.