Chapter Sixteen #3
“They are not here,” Colin panted, sinking onto one of the rowing-benches. Rubbing his injured thigh, he cast a dark look down the narrow gangway running between the bench rows, the defeat in his eyes squeezing Magnus’s heart.
His hope.
“They have to be here.” He dismissed Colin’s assessment with a wave of his hand. “I saw Janet. She . . . Christ on the Cross, what is that?”
He stared, starting forward only to have his feet slither on the slippery deck—a deck run wet with the pouring rain, sea spray, and an oddly luminescent green foam.
“That is your lady’s cloak, I vow!” Colin pushed to his feet again, pointing not at the strange rivers of greenish sea foam streaming over the deck planks, but at the crumpled and ripped mantle tangled up in the galley’s mast cordage.
Magnus charged forward, dread racking him when he recognized the ruined cloak as Amicia’s indeed. “Nooo!” he cried, his blood chilling, waves of nausea and denial churning inside him.
He sank to his knees beside the cloak, dragged its heavy folds up against his breast, dug his fingers into the wet fur lining and a mass of hard and soft somethings that felt anything but pleasant beneath his clutching fingers.
“What devilry is this?” He dropped the cloak at once, stared at it in horror.
“By the Mass, ne’er have I seen the like.” Colin’s voice came from behind him, the knave seemingly unwilling to come any nearer.
Not that Magnus could blame him for his own skin crawled with revulsion.
Revulsion, and fear for his lady, for the mantle’s hem had torn, and all manner of oddities spilled from within its folds. Strange objects without description that now littered the deck, washed to and fro by the swishing foam and rain, some tumbling over the side and into the sea.
The cloak also slid overboard, but the strange objects, some might call them charms, or spelling goods, remained. The objects and a single line of ominously taut rope that disappeared over the rail—its implication mocking every hope he’d clung to throughout the last hours.
Colin spotted the rope at the same time, and being closer, he reached it first. “’Tis old Dagda!” He pointed when Magnus joined him. “She is dead.”
Looking down, Magnus saw her, too.
Or rather what could be seen of her above the churning waves.
Horror constricting his chest, he stared down at her, disbelief crashing over him. “Jesu God, what a terrible end,” he breathed, crossing himself.
The old woman must have tripped on the rain-slick deck, tangling herself in a jumble of rope and—perhaps?—the voluminous folds of Amicia’s fur-lined cloak.
“And my wife? Poor Janet?” Wheeling away from the grisly sight, Magnus grabbed Colin’s arms. He held his friend crushingly tight, as if by sheer force of will and strength, he could undo what seemed the cruelest of ends.
“What of them? Where are they?” His shouts rose above the wind, reverberating off the heavens that would snatch away all that was so dear. “They cannot have met the same fate.” He dug his fingers into Colin’s mailed sleeves. “I will not allow it! They cannot be dead.”
“They are not here.” The flatness of his friend’s voice said why he believed them gone.
Colin believed the two women already at the bottom of the sea.
“You think they are dead!” Magnus shook him, fury and bottomless, white-hot pain blurring his vision. “Admit it . . . you have no hope of finding them. Not alive.”
Colin did not answer him.
But his silence did.
“Noooo!” Thrusting Colin from him, Magnus spun about, bent double in his pain. “Noooo!” he cried again, clutching his middle, mind-numbing grief eating his innards and spewing fire through him, each hot blast of agony setting another piece of his soul to flame.
“Merciful saints help me. It cannot be!” He sank to his knees, hot tears scalding his eyes, blinding him. Horrible pain welled and twisted inside him; then Colin’s hand settled on his shoulder and the commiserating squeeze he gave Magnus ripped away his last shred of hope.
He looked up at his friend, seeing only the tear-blurred outline of him but recognizing the sadness in the slow shaking of Colin’s head, the slumping of his shoulders.
“I cannot live without her, see you?” The words came out on a ragged gasp. “S-she is not just my wife, Colin. She is my life.”
Closing his eyes, his pressed the balls of his hands hard against his cheeks. “I love her, see you?” That, barely a whisper, so great was the quaver in his usually strong voice. “I have always loved her. So much. . . .”
Colin said nothing, his silence everything.
Amicia was gone.
Both women were gone, and his life had ended as surely as if he’d left it on the blood-drenched ground at Dupplin Moor.
And mayhap he’d already died and gone to join his fallen companions-in-arms because their dying moans and anguished, pain-filled cries had risen to join the roar of the surf and the keen of the whistling wind.
“Mmmmmmpphhhh!” moaned one of those unfortunates, the high-pitched voice a bit too panicky-sounding for a knight in mortal agony. Most warriors, even dying ones, kept their dignity through the bitter end.
But Dupplin had been that bad, that horrid and damning.
A defeat smashing enough to turn some men into women.
At once, comprehension washed over Magnus, hitting him as fiercely as the waves crashing against the sides of the lurching galley.
“Dear God in Heaven!” Magnus shot to his feet, almost toppling Colin to his. “Did you hear? Those thumping noises . . . that moan?” He threw back his head and whooped. “By the Rood! Colin! They are here. Somewhere. I hear them calling us!”
He glanced around, his heart soaring with hope . . . exultation.
New tears blurred his vision, but happy ones this time. That one wee moan had come from Amicia’s lips. He’d know the sound of her voice anywhere. Amongst a thousand women, across every sea, and through every light and darkness.
He grinned at Colin. “I heard them, I tell you.”
Colin looked at him as if he’d run mad. “I heard nothing,” he said, not smiling at all. But he did blink. And so furiously that the glimmer in his eyes revealed that it wasn’t just rain plaguing his vision. “I neither saw my Janet earlier, nor do I hear anything now.”
“Then you are blind and deaf!” Magnus clapped the other’s back, his own certainty making him jubilant. “Come, let us tear this galley apart plank by blessed plank until we find them!”
“Magnus?”
The cry, faint but too real to be any warrior knight’s ghost, came from the far end of the galley and split Magnus’s heart wide open.
This time, she’d called his name.
And Colin had heard, too.
Then at last he saw her, streaming wet and shivering, bruised and bound by rope to Janet. The two of them were wedged into a storage recess beneath a bench row, both women staring at him from wide, tear-filled eyes—the most beautiful sight he’d e’er seen in his life.
They lived and were hale.
The sun had returned to shine on him—and the Fiend could take him before he’d ever let it go out again.