The Mermaid's Knight (22 page)

Leah shook her head furiously and shrugged out of his grasp. She didn’t want to go with him – she wanted to stay and see Royce.

“I’ll take you to the ocean – just come with me!”

Leah hesitated. Another loud call from the fray before them, and she paused, her anxious eyes scanning the crowd for a familiar dark head. She couldn’t see Royce anywhere in the tangle of flashing arms and swords.

A wiry arm wrapped around her and dragged her backward, too strong for her to overpower in her weakened state. “If you won’t go willingly, I’m going to have to force you to come with me, my dear,” the priest said, pulling her toward his waiting mule. Pain shot through her arm, and she stumbled along with him.

Away from the battle.

Away from Royce.

She wanted to cry from the pain – not from her body, but from her heart. Royce was out there in the midst of that terrible melee, and Baron Rutledge was trying to kill him by any means necessary. She wanted to see him – wanted to be with him, even if it was for his last moments, and hers as well. Leah flailed in protest, and the priest kicked her legs in response, his frustration erupting. Pain blossomed through her and she collapsed. He shoved her onto his mule, then climbed up behind her and spurred the animal forward.

The long, winding path to the rocky shoreline seemed to go on forever and the slow, jarring gait of the mule was unhurried. Leah rolled in and out of consciousness, the priest’s wiry arm wrapped tightly across her neck, pinning her against him and making it hard to breathe through an already wounded throat.

Salty, tangy air filled her nostrils with every step closer to the beach, causing her leg muscles to clench in anticipated response. Her breathing became more shallow, as if even her lungs were excited about the prospect of a release from pain.

Worry overrode everything in her mind – worry for Royce, not for herself. She didn’t care if the priest was kidnapping her as insurance for himself, or if there was a fouler motive. She just wanted to know that Royce was safe.

“Faster, faster,” the priest breathed against Leah’s neck, urging the mule forward as they descended onto the sandy beach. “We must go faster. If he catches us, we are both lost.” Fear clouded his voice, and she could feel his thin form trembling against her own.

Not me
, she wanted to shout.
Royce will save me
! She struggled against his arm, and bit down on the pale flesh near her mouth. Her teeth sank into the meat of his arm, and she ground down until she tasted blood.

Father Andrew howled in anguish. “Foul witch!” He shook his arm, trying to dislodge her. His arm smacked into her face several times, but she refused to let go until his fingers pried her mouth open. She spat the blood at him and shook her head, trying to clear it of the ringing pain and the taste of unwashed priest. “I’m trying to help you, you foul creature,” he snarled in her ear and clamped his fingers on her chin, forcing her to stare ahead at the ocean that lapped at the mule’s hooves. “I will release you to the ocean, but you must promise never to come back.

Never to tell Lord Royce what has happened here or I shall blame it all on you and expose your secret.” His whisper-soft words were nearly drowned out in the roar of the ocean against her ears. It covered all, soothing her with the soft wake and the sound of the tide, of the splashing as the water hit the mule’s hooves. The cry of seagulls overhead. Longing, physical, wrenching longing shot through her, and she trembled with the force of it.

“Take your hands off of her.”

The calm, deadly voice pierced Leah’s ears with the thunder of a lightning storm. Royce!

Her heart swelled, and she jerked free of the priest’s restraining hands, craning her neck to look at him, unholy joy shooting through her body.

Royce was almost twenty feet away from them, a good distance back on the beach. As she watched, he slid from his mount and slowly strode forward, a noticeable hitch in his step and blood soaking the front of his dark tunic. There was an ugly gash on his forehead, and his dark hair was plastered to his head in sweaty curls. And he looked absolutely furious. His hand clenched his sword tightly, and he continued striding toward the priest. “You’ll take your hands off her right now—”

“Stop!” Father Andrew’s sweet voice had taken on a nervous, high-pitched whine. “Stop or you’ll force me to do something I’ll regret!”

To her surprise, Royce halted, his dark eyes never swerving from her face. With one glance, he caressed her body, noted every bruise on her face, the gouges on her neck, all a tender appraisal that said he cared. “Let her go,” he repeated, though his words were calmer now than before. “It’s over. Baron Rutledge is dead.”

“I knew he would be,” the priest said. “You’re the true lord of the castle. Everyone knows it.”

“Then why betray me?” His eyes didn’t lift from Leah’s bruised face. “Why steal what is mine and try and give it to my enemy?”

Warmth flushed her tense, trembling body. His low, even words were for her as much as the priest. He was telling her that he knew it wasn’t her fault. That he wanted her. Hot tears of relief slid down her cheeks.

“I am helping you, my lord,” Father Andrew said, his voice taking on a dangerous tone.

“Please, step away. Return to the castle and let me finish this in peace.” Finish? Leah wondered at his words.

Something hard and cold pricked at her throat. She tensed, her eyes becoming wild with fear. Her throat flexed and she felt the hard tip of a knife digging into her bruised skin. “Back away, my lord,” the priest said softly. “I do this for you, so you may see that my motives are pure.”

The look on Royce’s face became shuttered, frozen. His eyes dragged from Leah’s to stare into the priest’s with hate. “If you harm her, I’ll skin you alive.”

“She has you under her spell,” Father Andrew explained in a calm, unholy voice. “God has shown me that I must break you from her hold. It is the only way to salvation.”
Oh no. Oh no no no.

The priest’s hand moved, as if in slow motion, and as Leah watched, Royce sprang forward. She felt the knife dig into her throat, felt it pierce her skin, felt the world tilt on its axis as the priest was jerked away from her. Without his slender weight to support her aching body, she tipped over the side of the mule and fell down…

Straight into the rushing, ebbing tide that beat against the sandy shore.

Her entire body clenched as the freezing waters slid over her legs, soaking her skirts immediately. Then, with an almost unholy joy, her entire body convulsed, and she began to transform right then and there. Helpless, Leah curled her arms around her body and waited for the intense mix of pain and unburdened relief to finish sweeping through her system. The waves beat against her as her lungs expelled the air trapped inside them, her gills separated and formed,

and her legs molded together, becoming a strong, powerful tail that had been suppressed for far too long.

In front of Royce. She’d transformed in front of Royce, despite all her careful precautions.

Somewhere in the distance, beyond the roar of the ocean and the roar of her own blood, she heard the priest laughing maniacally. “See? See! What did I tell you, my lord! Witchcraft!” Her painful transformation finished, Leah struggled to sit upright, but all she could manage was to lift her torso, propping herself up on her elbows as the waves of the ocean beat against her, over and over again. Dully, she stared up at the two men. Father Andrew had a look of triumph on his face.

The look on Royce’s face?

Aghast. Shocked. Betrayed.

Humiliated, Leah smoothed the hair from her face and tried to speak. “I’m sorry,” she wanted to say, but nothing came out of her mouth except a lonely squeak. Frustrated, she clenched her fist and pounded it against the grainy sand. She wanted to explain herself to him, to explain the fact that she couldn’t breathe because the dress was sticking to her gills, that her tail was flicking of its own accord, muscles twitching with relief.

She saw his gaze trail to her flickering tail, then he paled and shook his head. She had her answer. He’d found out her secret and had not declared love for her. She’d lost the game. It felt like her heart was breaking in her chest.

Heartbroken, Leah turned and slid out into the water, hurrying away from the shore, away from the accusing eyes that stared at her as if she was a freak.

Running away from her failures and the loss of a love that she was never supposed to have in the first place. The ocean soothed her soul, drowned her tears, and relieved the burning pain that she had found so familiar in the past few days.

But it couldn’t undo the pain in her heart.

#

The final three days of her ordeal passed surprisingly quickly for Leah.

At first, there was the mindless torment that numbed her heart and made her soul ache.

The pain that forced her brain to replay, over and over again, the shocked, horrified look on Royce’s face when he stared at her twitching tail. The priest’s exultation. Royce’s horror. Over and over again, and the entire time, she cried silent tears into the caressing, enclosing waves of the ocean.

When her heart was numb and she couldn’t think any more, she let the waves carry her.

She welcomed the dark, stormy depths of the ocean. Far out to sea she went, then ventured back to land when the waters became too deep and the creatures that lived there were much, much larger than herself.

The longer she retained her mermaid form, the more blurred her mind became. It was as if having the tail somehow turned off part of her brain and allowed her to focus just on the visceral world around her – the world that she’d be pulled from in just a few short hours.

She’d failed, and she’d be sent on from this earth, the earth with the dark, salty ocean full of swimming, breathing, teeming life. And she swam, not even surfacing to the air once during

those three days, living as the fish live, and letting it numb her mind. With air came memories, and she wanted to forget.

She
did
forget, for a time, but her dreams were haunted by dark eyes, betrayed and full of horror, and Leah would wake up with an aching throat and irritated eyes and know that she’d been crying, even underwater. So she sank deeper into mermaid consciousness, that half-awareness that left her only cognizant of her tail flicking through the deep waters and the pull of her gills against the icy ocean waters.

Until, at some point, the pinching began.

At first, she ignored it, thinking it was a muscle cramp. The pain was a slight throbbing at the base of her tail, insignificant compared to the pain she had endured previously. But it continued, growing stronger and sharper by the minute, until she was doubled over in the water, struggling to swim. She flipped over onto her back, belly facing the sky, and to her surprise, the pain abated slightly. Taking that as a cue, Leah began to swim upward, just a flick ahead of the rapidly increasing agony.

The pain disappeared the moment her head broke the surface. She squinted at the late afternoon sunlight, eyeing the sky with trepidation. It burned her eyes after the cool, wet darkness of the ocean the past few days.

“There you are! I was starting to wonder if I’d ever find you again.” Muffin’s thin voice was reedy with disapproval. “You are a hard lady to find once you get beneath that water, do you know that? I’ve been pinching your tail for hours now, and you’ve just now noticed. I was starting to think I’d have to come in after you!” She fanned herself with a gloved hand.

Leah turned to Muffin and squinted at her. The fairy godmother was dressed in another one of her outfits, this one a striped Victorian bathing ensemble, complete with a frilly parasol

perched over one shoulder. A flowered swim cap clung to her head. It irritated Leah to see her so chipper in the wake of her own mindless pain.

“Are we done here? Is it time to go?” Her voice was dull, but Leah didn’t care.

Disappointment clouded through her at the sight of the fairy godmother, and she knew that these would be her last moments on earth. Sure, Heaven was supposed to be paradise, but she still felt somehow… cheated out of a normal life.

Cheated out of a normal life
, she thought bitterly.
That’s rich, coming from a woman
cursed to be a mermaid.

“Not just yet, I’m afraid,” Muffin said cheerily. “You haven’t exactly wrapped things up here, you know.”

Leah resisted the urge to splash water in her face. “What do you mean? Isn’t this enough?” Her hand slapped the surface, causing a shockwave of ripples on the already rough waters. “I failed. You gave me a task, and I failed it. What more do you want from me?” Muffin inclined her head, a subtle gesture at the bright strip of shore that lay far back in the distance. A smile curved her lips, blissfully sweet and unaware of Leah’s resentment. “It’s not me, my dear. There’s a man that’s been standing on that shore for three days now, rain, shine, day, night. I think he deserves some sort of explanation, don’t you?” Her heart thudded to a stop in her breast, and Leah forced herself to slowly turn and examine the strip of beach that she’d previously ignored.

She was so far out to sea that it was hard to make out anything at all, but her straining eyes caught a dark figure near the water’s edge, and a flash of blue that was the exact shade of Royce’s favorite tunic.

Leah’s mouth went dry, and she turned to Muffin. Her eyes were wide with uncertainty.

“I can’t, Muffin. I can’t talk to him.”

“Why?” Muffin wrinkled her nose. “He was good enough to sleep with, but not good enough to talk to now that he knows that you’re part fish?” Her pert words humiliated Leah, and she fought the urge to sink back under the water.

The fairy godmother would be disappointed by her cowardice. She blinked rapidly, trying to force away the moisture pooling in her eyes. “I… I don’t know. I’m afraid of what he’ll say to me.” The words caused her throat to close up, and she swallowed hard, then glanced at her fairy godmother again. “You didn’t see the way he looked at me. Like I was… some unnatural creature. He was disgusted.”