Slowly she lowered the blade.
As soon as the sword was pointed to the ground, the swordsman behind her dashed forward, the flat of his sword aimed horizontally at her neck as the others moved nearer.
She gave no sign she had heard him, no indication she was aware of him, until the last second before his impact.
Then spun around, going low, and sliced his knees out from under him with Anborn’s bastard sword.
A geyser of blood shot forth, spraying her clothing and face. The forest seemed to erupt with a blast of wind knocking her off her feet; she could feel the other six of Michael’s men fall on her, tearing her weapon from her hands, ripping the cloth of her shirt; she curled like a ball to protect her child as she fell, numbing her mind against the pain of the bruising, the jerking of her legs, the slamming of her back against the ground again and again.
Spare my baby, she prayed to the One-God over the howls of pain from the man whose leg she had severed and the blows her own body was sustaining. If I live, spare my child.
For all that it seemed an eternity of torment, it was over in a few blinks of the eye.
Rhapsody lay on the burning ground, her face bruised and blooded, breathing in the dirt of the forest floor, feeling the heat all around her rising with Michael’s madness.
He strode across to where she lay—she could hear his footsteps approach, and struggled to keep her fear from consuming her—seized the ropes that bound her hands, and hauled her to her feet before him.
He stared down into her face, his eyes a swimmingly cruel blue light before her own; in that moment Rhapsody felt she was staring directly into the Vault of the Underworld where the race of demons had been imprisoned.
Then his lips were on hers, lips that stung with acidic fire, pressed heavily against her mouth hard enough to bruise it.
All the horror of the past roared back in an instant. Rhapsody began to tremble violently, as agonizing memories flooded her mind, hideous moments from the past locked away deep with her nightmares. Against her will, she gasped aloud.
Michael pulled back from the kiss and stared at her, misreading her expression. He took her face in his hands and pressed his body, with its steel-like skeleton covered by a musculature that felt more dead than alive, against hers. “Bite, and it will be the last thing you ever use your teeth for,” he said quietly as he ran his hands over her golden hair, loosing the ribbon and letting it fall to the ground. “They are only a hindrance for how I plan to make use of your mouth, anyway.”
Then he thrust his tongue harshly between her lips, stealing her breath.
Rhapsody tried to separate her mind from her body, as once she was able to do, but the revulsion was so strong, the overwhelming stench of human flesh in fire reeking from his skin as his excitement grew, that she could not block out what was happening. Her stomach rushed into her mouth and she vomited, the force of it driving Michael back a few steps, reeling in disgust.
She was bent over in the throes of nausea when he recovered and strode angrily back to her, slapping her full across the face with a force so violent it threw her backward onto the ground.
“Whore!” he screamed, the sound of it harsh with the tone of the demon. “Miserable, rutting whore! You endure the rancid juice of your husband’s loins, no doubt, but you are repulsed by me!”
As he reached down to grasp her again, the reeve called out to him.
“M’lord! We risk notice! I strongly suggest we get to the promontory and back to the ship. There you can have her, undisturbed, in the privacy of your cabin, and she will be unable to escape. And Faron is waiting.”
The seneschal stared down at Rhapsody, curled on the ground, blood coming out of her nose, then reached down and seized her hair, pulling her to her feet.
“Bring my horse,” he ordered one of the remaining swordsmen who had been futilely attempting to bind the wounds of the man with the severed leg; he stood, looking helplessly at his writhing comrade, then ran up the road to retrieve the mounts.
From behind the seneschal Caius’s voice spoke up nervously, weakly.
“M’lord, we must go back to the first ambush point and retrieve Clomyn. He is grievously injured, dying; I can feel it.” He passed a sweating hand over his gray face.
The seneschal turned and stared at him angrily.
“Are you blind?” he snarled, gesturing into the conflagration that was spreading like a meadow wildfire through the green forest to where the coach had first come under attack. “He is ashes by now.”
Caius was staring into the blistering wall of light and heat. “No, no, Your Honor, he’s alive, though barely. He’s my heart twin, sir; I can feel what he is feeling, hear what he hears, just as he hears me. Please, I know he is alive. We have to retrieve him before we go.”
The demonic host that was once Michael glared at the crossbowman. When he spoke, his voice dripped venom.
“Very well, Caius. By all means. Go get him.” He wrapped Rhapsody’s hair around his hand several times and dragged her to where the lackey had brought his horse to a halt, lifted her by the collar of her shirt and her belt and threw her across the animal’s back.
“But—m’lord—will you open a—a wall in the fire, as you did before?” Caius stammered.
Michael turned, his shoulders visibly tense beneath his cloak, and regarded the shaking crossbowman.
“Of course, Caius,” he said solicitously. “Here.” He gestured casually toward the wall of fire.
A slim passageway in the flames opened, leaving a blue slice of air.
Caius’s face relaxed somewhat, his color returning with the light that flickered off it.
“Thank you, m’lord,” he mumbled quickly as he dashed into the passageway.
As soon as the crossbowman had entered the flames, the seneschal gestured again, and the passageway disappeared.
Caius, swallowed in flame, screamed noiselessly, drowned in the sound of the inferno and the cracking of the burning trees.
He turned and bolted from the fire into the area where the others stood, still clear from flame but about to be engulfed. Two of the swordsmen seized him and rolled him in the loam of the forest floor, snuffing him amid the spreading sparks.
“The next time you question my decision, Caius, I will wait until you are deeper in to close the passage,” the seneschal said smugly. “Then you and your heart twin can be forever mixed in the same ashes.”
He mounted the horse behind Rhapsody’s supine body and pulled her up so that her back was lying against his chest. Her eyes were glassy, her breathing shallow, but her heartbeat was strong, he noted, as he pulled her shirt the rest of the way from the waistband of her torn, bloody trousers and slid his hands up under her camisole, allowing himself to revel in the soft skin of the breasts he had dreamed about across endless time.
Rhapsody merely slumped forward, too spent to keep her head up and her back erect.
I have to protect my abdomen, bide my time, and wait for the right moment.
She battled to keep a tenuous hold on consciousness as the marauders rode off, westward, toward the sea.
And lost that battle.
29
Anborn came slowly to consciousness on the forest floor, where already the fire had charred the trees, reducing much of the wild bushes and scrub to hot ash, and had moved on.
All around him, before and behind, the world was burning.
The General groaned as he raised his head up to look around him, then laid it down again, too heavy to sustain. The heat on his back was searing, so hot that he could not imagine that he was not already burning alive.
For the smallest of moments, he thought of closing his eyes again, laying his head down to rest, and letting the fire sweep over him, through him, take him into its maw and swallow him, chew him into ashes and spit him out into the wind, where he could float across the sea, all around the wide world, ebbing and flowing in an endless current of air, like the Kinsman he had been.