Chapter 8 #2
Tasgall waded through the guards until he stood before the MacBren. He had no weapons in his hands, which he held palm-up in a beseeching gesture. “I cannae oblige you, my lord. As I’ve said each time you’ve braced me on the matter, I shallnae wed your lady daughter.”
As the MacBren drew a dagger and held it against the laird’s throat, all the men around them looked prepared to lunge and kill the man. Darro strode toward him with his blade ready to skewer the enemy laird.
“Hold,” the laird said, making a quick staying gesture at the chieftain. To the other laird he said, “My answer, ’tis the same as ’twas each time you’ve asked such of me. However you threaten me, whatever you vow do to my clan, my answer, ’twill never change.”
“You stupit bastart,” the MacBren said, snarling the words through his gritted teeth. “Dinnae you see I’ve no choice? ’Tis her life or yours. I shallnae sacrifice my daughter on the altar of your dignity.”
The white mist suddenly descended and enveloped both men, making them stagger back in opposite directions.
The MacBren’s red tunic and trousers turned white, gold and then black as the outlines of his body blurred.
The men behind him vanished for a moment, and when they reappeared they were completely red and had no faces.
“With me, lads,” Darro said, stepping in front of Tasgall. “Alec?”
“Behind him,” the war master said, and then swore as the MacBren and his faceless entourage disappeared altogether. Distant shouts from the inner bailey suggested they had reappeared outside the castle. “Lads, stay with our lord, and if they return, keep him safe. Darro.”
The chieftain nodded and ran out of the chamber with Alec.
The white mist poured through the slit and curled around Esme like a long white snake. Instincts told her to hold still and not resist as a feeling of calm and shelter descended around her.
White lights began to drift down as well but, as they reached her, a flood of images came through her head.
At first they seemed like individual snapshots, and then they rushed together and made a movie about a beautiful woman with brown hair and green eyes.
She wandered through a forest with such huge, old trees it seemed primordial.
She walked in and out of trees through doors of red light that sparkled like the scarlet gems she wore around her neck and wrists.
Her life seemed to stretch on and on forever as mountains rose and then fell around her woods, and then primitive-looking humans began appearing.
The people who came first gathered nuts and berries, and then hunted the animals of the forest with their spears and bows.
The green-eyed woman watched the humans from inside her trees, and sometimes lured them inside the doors of light.
Whoever went into the trees with her never came out.
Then a huge, angry group of humans came and started chopping down the trees.
The green-eyed woman released a handful of odd-looking eggs that hatched into little stick dolls that started burrowing into and killing the humans.
Esme, can you hear me?
Someone was touching her, shaking her, but she couldn’t stop watching the movie.
The more the green-eyed woman killed, the darker the jewels around her throat grew, until they were almost black.
Some dreamy-eyed humans in embroidered robes came into the forest, but they didn’t try to harm the trees.
They gathered in a circle and prayed until the green-eyed woman came out with more of the odd-looking eggs.
One of the oldest robed humans bowed to the woman and spoke to her for a long time.
They seemed to agree on something, and she went back into her tree.
No more humans came into the forest, and the green-eyed woman’s blackened gems paled to scarlet, then pink, and then white.
A handsome man wearing fine clothes finally came into the forest, and knelt before the tree with his head bowed until the green-eyed woman came out.
He spoke to her and offered her a small chest filled with the most beautiful gems Esme had ever seen.
Slowly the woman removed her necklace as she spoke at length to the man, and then handed the necklace to him.
Yet when she reached for the chest he held, his face turned old and ugly, and he shoved her necklace into her mouth, holding his hand over her lips as she choked.
Esme, come back to us. We need you.
All the images in her head stopped just as the face of the green-eyed woman began being sucked into her own mouth, and then a fair-haired young woman in a golden gown drew her away from the horrific sight.
You neednae watch how the melia die, lass. ’Twill haunt you too deeply.
Someone picked up her limp body and held her against a wide chest. How Esme knew that was happening while she was still in her head, she couldn’t say. Whatever was happening, however, it seemed like vital information she had to remember. But why couldn’t she understand any of it?
Torra? When the girl nodded Esme grabbed her hands. Why did you show me those images? Who was that woman? What’s a melia?
’Twasnae my doing, lass. In time you shall understand what you saw. For now, go back to the man who shall go mad if you dinnae soon open your eyes. Find the armorer, too. Remember to save all, you must slay the first.
A big hand stroked Esme’s hair back from her eyes, which for a moment stared blindly at nothing at all.
She floated, disconnected from her body, as if her spirit had become white mist like the MacBren’s daughter.
Then she fell into herself, regaining at once control of her senses and her body.
She looked up to see a very pale, terrified Darro watching her come awake.
“My thanks for coming to me, my lady,” he said, and then hugged her so tightly Esme couldn’t breathe for a moment. When he looked all over her face, and then glanced at the people standing and watching behind him. “Send for Benedict, please.”
Ava, Olivia and Grace were all beaming at her while their husbands muttered to each other behind their backs. She looked for the big man who had been fighting with Darro—she needed to talk to him—but he wasn’t present.
“I’m fine, mi vida.” She held onto him as she pushed herself up, shocked to see she was in a huge bed in a room she didn’t recognize. Her throat seemed horribly dry, her hair hung in an oily tangle around her face, and she smelled like she needed a bath badly. “How long was I out?”
Ava came to the side of the bed. “We think it’s been about three days. Time has been slipping badly since you were enchanted.”
“I was enchanted?” She glanced at Darro, who nodded. “How?”
“We’re not sure what happened,” Grace told her. “I’ve tried to summon Torra’s spirit, but she hasn’t made an appearance since you fell unconscious.”
“Would you help me get up?” Esme asked Darro, who lifted her off the bed and carefully set her on her feet.
Even standing seemed overwhelming, as if she had been in the bed for months instead of days.
“I’m not sick, I was dreaming. I need to speak to that man I hit over the head. The one who hurt Darro.”
Bodach decided upon seeing the MacBren’s latest attack on the viewing scroll that it was the perfect time to send his little friend into the spell trap.
This one he had carefully crafted, making it not only stronger and more powerful than the first, but also giving it the means with which not to fail him: hundreds of spiderlings, attached to its back.
Finally he dosed them all with the vial that Mirry had given him, allowing them to fill their venom sacs with the enslavement potion.
At the barrier, he waited until he was sure the guards that had been posted there earlier would not be returning, and then used the chain mail glove to open a portal, and reached in to drop the spider inside.
“Don’t disappoint me,” he told the arachnid, which dipped down into an elegant bow before skittering away into the shadows.
Pleased by the initial success of his second attempt, he returned to the dungeons to view the result of the latest attack against the clan.
The attackers had all been burnt to charred pools on the ground, at least until thousands of white lights drifted down and covered the black patches, erasing them before disappearing.
Yet from the look of the sky the night had lasted only a few hours.
That speeding up of time was something Bodach had never seen occur in any melia pocket universe, and it gave him pause.
Why had the enchantment chosen to bring dawn earlier?
Had the death of the attackers and clansman triggered or damaged the magic?
It’s all the melia’s fault, Bodach thought, remembering the green-eyed Fae bitch who had sold him the spell.
Murdering the melia had seemed sensible at the time, for he needed the clan to remain permanently imprisoned, but he’d come to regret it ever since.
He also should never have alienated Aosda, the ancient being who knew the most about the forest Fae and their strange magic.
He could never return to the old mage’s territory to inquire as to what the alteration meant, and that left him with only one other Fae who might know.
“You never visit me twice in a moon,” Mirry said when she came down the foyer in a pink bathrobe the size of a car cover. “If I didn’t like your present so much I’d be annoyed. What do you want this time?”
“I need to show you first.” He followed her into a room that had been decorated completely in such a bright sunshine yellow he had to put on his sunglasses to find a table on which to spread the viewing scroll. “This allows me to monitor what’s happening in the spell trap.”
She watched as he pulled up the most recent events inside the pocket universe, and how swiftly the light had begun changing.