The shudder rising up from her toes to encompass every part of her body nearly toppled her from the horse. She congratulated herself for somehow keeping her voice steady. “The mirror’s beacon worked,” she said. That is the home of Gavin de Lovet.”
What he lacked in honor and morality, Jimenin possessed in leadership ability. In short order he’d gathered his men and ordered them across the drawbridge. They advanced slowly—Jimenin at the lead—and clopped over the bridge’s creaking wood. Huddled within her father’s thin cloak, Louvaen shivered and squinted into the snow flurries whirling around them. The weather hadn’t been so bad or so bitter when she left for Monteblanco, and she wondered if Ambrose had used his sorcery to strengthen winter’s last grip on Ketach Tor.
They crossed over the bridge, through the barbican, and into the deserted bailey without incident. While the wind had quieted from a wail to a moan, the snow fell heavy. The castle loomed above them, a wall of stone wrapped in twilight. A murmur rose to her right, sibilant and rustling. All the hairs on her nape stiffened. She knew that hated sound, and if the horses didn’t know it, they still recognized the threat of a predator. Jimenin’s mount shied sideways, and his ears flattened against his head. The other horses followed suit. Louvaen peered into the shadows and shrank away.
Isabeau’s malevolent roses had swallowed up half the bailey and nearly all the tower keep. Silhouettes of thorny vines snaked up the stones, spilling into the window of Ballard’s bedchamber. Those on the grounds swayed from side to side, their dark blooms like snapping jaws. Jimenin’s men made signs with their fingers to ward off evil and wondered aloud what black sorcery abounded in Ketach Tor.
“Hold your tongues and light some torches, you bunch of lobcocks,” Jimenin ordered. “I’ll not be chased off by some talking flower.” The strike of flint and the hiss of sparks on resinous pinewood heralded coronas of light that revealed the bailey’s dilapidated buildings and squirming roses. After a pause, Jimenin spoke. “Cinnia married for this?” he said in a sneering voice.
Louvaen was tempted to taunt him, to tell him the woman he so badly craved married de Lovet despite his apparent poverty because she loved him and would live in rags or alone before she’d surrender to Jimenin.
“Oh Cinnia,” he called out in a sing-song voice. “Come out, come out wherever you are.”
Louvaen held her breath as the flicker of candlelight suddenly appeared in a parchment covered window and the main doors creaked slowly open.
A slight figure holding the candle appeared in the doorway. Louvaen couldn’t help it. She cried out at the sight of her sister, cloaked and hooded. “Cinnia, stay inside!”
Jimenin shoved the barrel of one of his pistols into her uninjured side. “Shut up,” he said. He addressed the approaching figure once more. “Come and greet us, fair maiden. Your father and sister are eager to see you.”
Cinnia picked her way daintily across the bailey. Louvaen squinted and leaned forward for a better look. An aura of cerulean light surrounded Cinnia. The candle flame danced in the frigid wind, and for just a moment Ambrose’s face stared back at her from the hood’s shadows.
Louvaen jerked in surprise, deaf to Jimenin’s snarl that she keep still. She felt the change in her captor’s breathing—quick, eager breaths and the speedy rhythm of his black heart—as the sorcerer drew close. The false Cinnia raised her candle, revealing the lovely face which had brought them all to this point and place. The brown eyes were solemn, the full-lipped mouth unsmiling but still seductive. “Here I am, Don Jimenin,” she said in sugared tones that were all Cinnia and nothing of Ambrose. “What would you have of me?”
Not yet sure of his triumph nor fully ensnared by his prey’s beauty and proximity, Jimenin kept a firm grip on Louvaen and distance from Cinnia. “Where’s your husband, girl?”
Her eyes filled with tears. “He is dead, sir.”
This Cinnia might be an illusion, but the grief was real. Louvaen choked back a sob. Gavin was dead. And if he was dead, then so was Ballard. Something inside her cracked—the scab of an old wound made when she lost Thomas. Ballard’s death reopened it, and the wound hurt a thousand times worse. She’d been with Thomas when he died; she’d been tied to a tree or strapped to Jimenin’s horse when Ballard had succumbed, destroyed at last by his own hand or by his son. The roses had told the tale with their conquering of the tower keep, but she’d held onto a slim hope that the two men might be saved despite the flux flooding Ketach Tor. They had failed to break Isabeau’s curse. She stared at Ambrose disguised as Cinnia, at the bleak despair in his ensorcelled eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “So very sorry.”
Another realization squeezed the last bit of air out of her lungs. With Gavin dead, what had happened to the real Cinnia?
Ambrose blinked long, tear-soaked lashes and gave a wordless nod. He turned his attention back to Jimenin. Louvaen couldn’t see the man’s face, but the satisfaction in his voice was clear enough. “That makes things much easier for everyone.” He lowered the pistol from Louvaen’s side. “You’ll switch places with your sister and leave with me. No struggle, no protest and I’ll let your father live.”
“What about Louvaen?”
“We’ll see.”
Ambrose glanced at her, his gaze granite-hard and bright with a silent message: Be ready. Their short relationship had always been one of sparring insults and wary truces, but she’d come to respect the wily sorcerer and gave him the trust he’d so valiantly earned when he walked amongst the enemy to save her. She inclined her head.
He bestowed a limpid look on Jimenin. “I will come with you,” he said simply.
“Cinnia, please!” Her father cried from his place behind one of the henchmen. Louvaen wanted to tell him to be quiet, but her command might give away the game. There was also an unexpected boon to his protest. If Ambrose fooled Mercer with his illusion, he fooled everyone else.
The sorcerer dropped his candle in the snow and raised both hands to Jimenin. “How shall I ride?”
As if the question punched Jimenin awake, he shoved Louvaen hard to the side and reached eagerly for his newest captive. She flew out of the saddle and sprawled in a powdery drift. The horse blocked most of her view, but she caught Jimenin’s shocked expression before he flailed and toppled out of his seat on the opposite side.
Ambrose roared in a deep voice wholly his. “Move, Louvaen!”
A flash of searing light burst across the bailey. Blinded, Louvaen scuttled on hands and knees away from the pounding of hooves as, for a second time, frightened horses bolted in every direction. A series of thunderous cracks added to the mayhem, and the agonized cries of the injured joined the chorus of equine squeals and whinnies. Somewhere in that chaos, Jimenin’s men had either shot each other, shot their horses or gods forbid, shot her father or Ambrose.
The warning hiss of Isabeau’s roses sounded dangerously close, and she flinched away, sliding along a patch of icy mud. The trailing ends of a horse’s tail switched her across the cheek as one of the animals galloped by close enough to flutter her sodden night rail. She’d come a hair’s breadth from being trampled—an ending she’d suffer any day over death by climbing rose.
As soon as her vision recovered from the blast of Ambrose’s light spell, another followed, putting to rest her fears that someone had shot Ambrose.
“Hold your ground, you white livered rags!” Jimenin roared above the din. “Shoot the woman and the old man!”
Jimenin’s threat held Louvaen silent, and she prayed Mercer would do the same. The heavy thud of a body hitting the ground made her jump. Hisses transformed into frenzied rustling as the fiendish roses latched onto a victim. A man’s screams cut through the clamor, pitching into unearthly screeches that froze every drop of blood in her veins to sleet. The bailey went still. Even the remaining horses stood quiet. Only the ebb and swell of one unfortunate soul’s dying shrieks pierced the hush.
Grateful for the mercy of temporary blindness, Louvaen resumed her crawl across the bailey to where she guessed the door might be. If she got inside, she could arm herself with one of Ballard’s many weapons. A sword wasn’t much use against a flintlock, but better than what she currently had, which was nothing. She halted once more when a plaintive howl drowned out the dying henchman’s fading cries. Wolfish, savage, it was joined by another, different cry—more a roar that vibrated the earth beneath her feet.
Her vision cleared in time to watch a black shape hurtle out the door and into the bailey where it leapt onto the nearest man so fast, he had no chance to cry out before a set of gleaming claws split him from gullet to gizzard. A second shape followed, just as quickly. The gait was different, more of a spidery sprint than a lope. Like the first creature, it dove into the fray, attacking anyone it could reach. Amidst more screams and the thunder of pistol fire, Louvaen flattened herself to the ground. She searched frantically for her father and Ambrose—now undisguised—in the concealing snowfall and sighted both men huddled behind the carcass of a dead horse.
Across the bailey turned battlefield Jimenin and his men fought their attackers as they tried to escape through the gate. One of the beasts pivoted, and in the moon’s light she caught the lambent glow of sulfurous eyes, bristling fur and the squashed face of a giant bat. Louvaen cried out. Gavin lived. If the son lived, then maybe the father did as well. She hunted for the other creature and found it busy turning one of Jimenin’s lackeys into a pile of separate body parts. Blood splattered in every direction, and another pair of eyes gleamed in the semi-darkness. Ballard. Or what was once the master of Ketach Tor.
This brutish thing bore no resemblance to the man she’d grown to love, just as the bat-wolf animal held no trace of Gavin. The terrible anguish in Ambrose’s gaze earlier had not been because they were dead, but because they were still alive.
Her waking nightmare took a worse turn. The real Cinnia appeared at the doorway and darted into the bailey. Louvaen screamed and lurched to her feet. Forgetting caution, she raced toward the door waving her arms. “Cinnia! For gods’ sakes, get back inside! Get inside!”
In that moment, the world slowed and the sounds of fighting faded. She saw Cinnia’s face, tear-streaked and pale, her gaze fastened solely on Gavin. She glimpsed movement from the corner of her eye. Jimenin turned, that hollow stare changing from terrified to malevolent. He sprinted toward them, the pistol in his hand raised and aimed at Cinnia. Louvaen lunged at her. The click of the flintlock’s trigger cracked in her ears, and she flinched in anticipation of the accompanying flash and muted boom of the lead ball flying out of the barrel to strike her sister.
Nothing. The world sped up again, and the gods answered desperate prayers. Jimenin shouted frustrated curses as the pistol misfired. He half-cocked it but never got the chance to full-cock the hammer. Just as he took aim at Cinnia a second time his eyes widened, and he staggered forward. His arm fell limply at his side, and he crashed to his knees before falling face first into the mud and snow. A warrior queen’s knife protruded from between his shoulder blades. Mercer stood behind him—breathing harder than a winded horse—sagging features dark with a grim triumph.
The shock of seeing her docile father dispatch their most hated enemy didn’t stop Louvaen. She limped to the fallen Jimenin and carefully pried the pistol from his still fingers. She reached for Mercer’s hand. “Come away, Papa. Hurry.” She tugged on him, holding him upright as he stumbled beside her in their bid to reach Cinnia.
The cursed pair of father and son savaged their last opponents, leaving only Louvaen, Cinnia, Mercer and Ambrose to their non-existent mercy. Unfortunately, neither she nor Mercer were fast enough. Before she could take two steps, Gavin loped across the bailey and crouched between her and Cinnia. The hackles on his hunched back bristled in warning, and he snarled through an impressive set of fangs.
She and Mercer froze. Louvaen full-cocked the pistol she’d plucked from Jimenin’s dead hand. If Gavin charged them or turned on Cinnia, she’d have no choice but to shoot. He did neither, but the fur along his back rose at every flinch and twitch they made. Louvaen watched him pace back and forth, and an idea took hold. He protected his mate. Somewhere in that bestial brain, the human Gavin remembered Cinnia, remembered the beloved wife and sought to guard her from those who might do her harm. Across from her, Cinnia’s gaze remained riveted on her cursed husband.
“Gavin,” she crooned. “My darling boy, come back to me.”
Louvaen blinked away tears at the longing in her sister’s entreaty and the befuddlement in Gavin’s beastly face as he struggled to understand its lure. What in the gods’ names were they supposed to do now?
She clutched her father’s arm and leaned to whisper in his ear “Back up slowly, Papa.” Maybe if they weren’t so close, Gavin would concentrate his attention less on them and more on Cinnia. She, of all people, had the greatest chance of reaching him.
They halted when every hair on Gavin’s fur-covered body stood on end. His yellow eyes blazed, and his lips curled back from his fangs as he stared at something behind them. In the moonlight, Cinnia’s face blenched white.
“Careful, Lou,” she warned in a low voice. “De Sauveterre is behind you.”
Forewarned, Louvaen pivoted slowly and almost bit through her lip trying not to scream.