“The lady wants you,” the man said bluntly.
Yhalen hissed, jerking his arm from the guard’s grasp, and refusing to set foot on the steps.
“I’ve no wish to see her,” he snapped, thinking foul things about the lady in question.
The guard stared mutely at him, determined in his mission. Another guard looked up from the hall at the commotion. All it would take would be a word and they would bodily haul him up those steps.
They’d already proved to have no qualms about forcing their will upon the reluctant.
He glared his distaste of them, straightening his back and climbing up the stairs before the man could dare to lay a hand upon him again. There would be violence done if he tried, of that Yhalen was sure. He’d taken as much manhandling as his pride would allow these last weeks. Though he had little enough choice with Bloodraven, who could snap him like a twig if he so desired, he wouldn’t tolerate it from these mere human men.
Two flights up, past more guards who seemed disinterested in his passage. The doors to the lady’s chambers were of richly carved oak. Whimsical etchings of birds and twining vines that were more suited to a lady of less intimidating nature, Yhalen thought, than Lady Duvera. Then again, it was an 106
old fortress, and it was likely these rooms had belonged to many a lady before the present one had taken up residence.
The guard rapped on the door and a moment later a maid opened it, peering outside timidly before stepping back and ushering them into the outer room. Yhalen had never before been in a room like it.
The richness of the furnishings was overwhelming and somewhat garish to the eye. Colorful tapestries, fine silks, velvets embroidered with strands of gold and silver, and furniture inlaid with the same. The room was cluttered with the trappings of wealth, and Yhalen found none of it appealing. The lady’s maid in her plain smock seemed the only spot of refreshing plainness in the chamber. She assured the guard that the lady would see to them shortly. The guard seemed content to wait, putting his back to the door and staring blankly at a wall. Yhalen stood in the center of this cacophony of color and fabric thinking dourly that he preferred the cleaned out storage room he’d recently shared with Bloodraven to this pompous cage.
The lady kept him waiting. A good while. He’d begun to shift from foot to foot, taking small idle steps around the room to simply relieve the pressure of standing in one place for so long, when the door finally opened and the lady Duvera swept out, haughty and grand in her fine dress, her dark hair coiled on her head and her dark eyes lazy and amused.
“Did I keep you waiting?” she asked with patently false regard for the fact that she had. The little maid hustled back to stand out of her way against the wall, waiting expectantly for any signal of need from her mistress.
“You did,” Yhalen said bluntly, feeling no need for courtesy in the face of what she’d done to him with her witchcraft. “It was wasted time, better spent enjoying the sunlight you and yours have denied me of late.”
She laughed, genuinely amused. She approached him brazenly, standing as close as a man might who wished to intimidate by the mere invasion of personal space. He met her gaze levelly, refusing to flinch, but inside he strained to sense any mystical tampering on her part. She caught his arm, twining it with her own and urged him towards the inner room.
He tensed, rigid with anger and despising her touch. He refused to budge, but wasn’t quite willing to jerk his arm from the grasp of a lady, even if that lady were a witch who had practiced dark magic against him.
“Oh, come, don’t be stubborn. Or are you afraid of a mere woman? Are the Ydregi so timid?”
Yhalen glowered, his pride stung, and allowed her to draw him forward.
“If you hear me cry out,” she said lightly to the guard by the door. “Come beat this fellow to a pulp, would you?”
The guard inclined his head, the glint in his eye a telltale sign that he’d be all too willing to do just that.
The lady’s private chamber wasn’t so cluttered as the outer one. The furniture was just as rich, the tapestries just as fine, but there was less of it. The bed was a large four-poster affair, affixed with sheer draperies. He refused to move further into the room than a few steps past the threshold, and the lady shrugged, then closed the doors behind them before daintily seating herself upon the cushioned stool at the foot of the bed. She stared at him as if she were trying to decipher a table of some ancient text that she only half understood. He stared past her, to the pale light of day that seeped through a crack in her drapes.
“Was our barbarous guest satisfied with your performance?” she asked finally, a sly curve to her thin lips. “Were you enthusiastic enough in the performance of your duty?”
Yhalen ground his teeth, feeling his cheeks flame despite the surge of cold anger that seethed inside him. He wouldn’t grace her with a response.
“Oh come now, why so shy?” she said. “It was just a simple charm. It would never have worked if you truly abhorred the touch of the creature. Grant me just a few details of the act. You seem little worse for wear, so he must have taken care to be gentle with you. I made sure there were lubricants sent down with the supplies you were sent, but even so, with such a size...do you bleed when he enters you?”
“Witch,” he spat, having endured as much as he could in silence. “Foul, evil woman. You take a pure art and twist it to your wretched needs. I know of no Ydregi that would stoop so low.”
“Except one,” she smiled, showing no offense at his words as she responded. “One that stoops lower, taking the vitality of others for his own needs. For the need of his half-breed lover.”
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She could have physically hit him and not scored so well. He felt the breath rush out of him so that his head swam wildly.
“He’s not,” he said indignantly,“ my lover.”
She laughed. “You’re naive. I haven’t yet decided whether it’s a fetching trait or a pitiable one. You think you’re the first one to abuse power. You think that even your forest-bred people are so pure that no one of them uses the power the gods granted them for more than altruistic purposes? If so, they’re not human.”
“You’re wrong,” he whispered, but he remembered all the same the Ydregi who had, all those years ago, burnt down half the forest with the misuse of his powers. That man was only recalled and spoken about because of the magnitude of his misdeed. Were there others that had misused the power in smaller ways that no one ever mentioned? That no one ever knew about, because like Yhalen, they would never tell in fear of what such knowledge would do to their standing amongst the people?
“I’m not,” she assured him. “Even though the magicks you use and those that I practice are very different things, I think.”
“All power comes from the Goddess,” he repeated. It was what he’d been told a hundred times, but the lady laughed with derision.
“Fool. If your Goddess even exists, she has no claim to all the magicks that fill the world. What a hidebound, cloistered race of people the Ydregi must be, to believe such. My craft hails from far eastern lands. I learned it as a girl, under the tutelage of my foreign nanny. She taught me potions and chants and incantations. There’s nothing haphazard or left to the whimsy of the gods in what I do. Can you say the same?”
He swallowed uncertainly, off his balance and fighting for steady ground.
“I didn’t think your people,” he waved a hand helplessly about to indicate all of the peoples that inhabited the towns and duchies and cities that lay under the fiefdom of Lord Tangery’s royal brother the king as he spoke, “believed much in the practice of magicks.”
“They don’t,” she said simply. “But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist in a dozen different forms.
That doesn’t mean they won’t turn their heads and countenance the use of it if it benefits them.” She lowered her head, staring up at him from under her lashes meaningfully. “Tangery might be a prince, a knight, and a devoted follower of the church, but that doesn’t mean he won’t look the other way to see his plans come to fruition. And he does so want our halfling complacent and cooperative.”
“For what?” Yhalen asked.
She smiled. “Maybe if you please master Bloodraven enough, he’ll tell you.”
Yhalen drew in a hissing breath of frustration. Duvera waved a hand.
“Suffice to say, if the prince is satisfied with what your halfling has to say, then it’s very likely that he’ll no longer be held at this keep.”
Yhalen lifted a brow, interest suddenly pricked. He fought to keep the eagerness from his face.
“No?”
If they moved them, there was no direction they could go that wasn’t through some forested lands.
Yhalen might find the chance to escape yet.
“If treaties are to be made, it’s best they’re discussed in a place where the people are less inclined to raise arms at the thought of negotiating with a murdering ogre. Some place more secure.”
She left the interview at that. Annoying, frustrating woman. He left with a great deal of questions tumbling about in his head, and a great many uncertainties. Of course that was what she’d intended.
She enjoyed the manipulation, he realized. It was a game to her, and she didn’t often have such interesting pieces to play.
He was allowed another hour’s respite in the warm light of the yard before two more guards approached the one that had been dogging his heels and drew him back into the coolness of the cellars and the sunless embrace of Bloodraven’s cell. All signs of Tangery’s presence were gone. Only Bloodraven remained, reclined easily amongst the pillows of his pallet, eyes hooded and thoughtful, only briefly flickering up to take note of Yhalen’s return before dismissing his presence completely.
No matter how badly he might want to know what had gone on in his absence, he didn’t voice the question. The thought of talking to Bloodraven as if he were a comrade or friend who would willingly 108
share information made his back stiffen in stubbornness. Still, there was something grim about the halfling’s expression, something deadly serious in his contemplation that made Yhalen’s stomach clench in dread—yet no word of it was uttered. Whatever Bloodraven and Tangery had discussed, Bloodraven had taken it in all seriousness.
It went badly, Yhalen thought. Tangery was even now considering sending men down to slit Bloodraven’s throat. And what would they do with the one witness to all of their maneuverings? It would be easier on all of them if he simply disappeared, buried in the same secret grave that they disposed of Bloodraven’s body in. Goddess. To spend eternity rotting alongside his captor, his tormentor. He shivered and drew his knees up tight against his chest, working himself into a nervous frenzy over the thought of it. So much so that when the door did open, he was on his feet with his back to the wall, his fists tightly clenched at his sides, ready to defend himself if need be.
It proved a needless precaution and an embarrassing one. It was only dinner, brought by two servants and the ever-present guard. He forced himself to relax. Forced himself to walk over and take the heavily laden tray with shaking hands. Bloodraven was watching him as he sat it down, one black brow arched curiously. Yhalen put the tray down with a clank and went to retrieve the flagon of wine and mugs.
The wine tonight was exceptional. The food mouthwatering. Yhalen couldn’t imagine Lord Tangery and the lord and lady of the keep ate anything less at their table. With such fine food and wine, it seemed unlikely that things had gone badly between Tangery and Bloodraven. One might even assume that Tangery was quite pleased.
Bloodraven didn’t give the fine fare the attention it deserved, though, his thoughts clearly elsewhere.
Yhalen ate his fill and still there were scraps left for the servants to take back up. The wine was consumed in whole, however. Bloodraven took the large flask after Yhalen had filled his mug the first time and drank from the bottle itself. He still didn’t offer comment on his meeting with Tangery, which presented some bit of disappointment, since Yhalen had vowed not to ask himself, but he wouldn’t have rebuffed an offering from Bloodraven.
In fact Bloodraven paid him very little heed for the remainder of the night, preferring to brood in silence, leaving Yhalen to dwell on the hope of leaving this place and the possibility of slipping away in the forest between here and wherever it was that Tangery might consider a safe haven to hold discussions with an age old enemy. But of course thoughts of flight led to ones of homecoming, and the prospect of revealing the paths his burgeoning power had taken. Or concealing those facts, as the lady Duvera had suggested had been done in the past by others who had abused the Goddess-given gifts.
He fell asleep agonizing over that decision, to lie or to be condemned for the truth. He woke many hours later with Bloodraven’s large, warm body close against his back, his head resting on one large outstretched arm, and Bloodraven’s other arm draped heavy and lax across him, as efficient a deterrent against withdrawal as any bonds.
Whether it was still night, or if they had slept through till morning, he didn’t know. His sense of time had grown distorted, held so long from the rising and setting of the sun. He lay for a long while, relaxing from the tension of waking in the embrace of the halfling, letting the deep, slow breaths of the body against his affect the state of his own breathing. Bloodraven was warm and solid—not entirely uncomfortable to lie against when he was tranquil and slumbering, his scent musky and not unpleasant since they’d been provided water for bathing.