Chapter 1
What was the word for when a man was trapped in a dream?
When he knew with a terrible certainty that he was in bed asleep, yet trapped, reliving the same nightmare that he had endured every night for the better part of a year?
When he knew there was nothing he could possibly do to wake himself from it until it had run its awful course…
until he’d been forced to experience the worst moment of his life for what might be the hundredth time or even the thousandth?
When the most dreadful part of it all was that he was not even sure he wanted to wake up, knowing the hell that awaited him when he did?
There must have been a word for such a thing. Nothing so hideous could possibly exist unnamed.
But if there was a term for it, James McDougal did not know what it was.
All he knew was that this had been his fate for far too many months and that each time he stumbled and slumped off to bed, he fervently hoped he might drift off and never wake up again.
The sweet embrace of death seemed to hover just out of his reach night after night, and even if it did come for him in the end, how could he be truly sure that it would provide any respite?
How could he tell himself with any certainty that these same nocturnal horrors would not come to him again and again for the rest of eternity?
No, even his own demise might not give him any way out of the hell he currently inhabited. There was no apparent escape available to him. All he could do was live through it repeatedly and wait for it to drive him mad.
So he submitted, letting the ghastly nightmare take him where it would, as it always did.
The hoofbeats came first.
They approached like thunder, and with them came shouts and curses and the sound of blades being drawn—not only from the attackers but from the men who stood beside him as well.
The rain beat down upon them in relentlessly icy sheets, drumming on James’s head and shoulders and pounding the ground all around him.
It was thick enough to partially obscure his vision, making the marauders appear little more than wraiths and phantoms, dark shapes with murderous intentions.
The day had started off bleakly. The storms rolled in, accompanied by the tragic news that some of the outlying farms of the McDougal clan had been subjected to the depredations of merciless brigands. The fiends had pillaged and slaughtered and had even set fire to several fields of crops.
Why? Simply for evil’s sake, it seemed. To show that they could, and in doing so, demonstrate their utter defiance of the laws of the land.
As laird, Fergus’s life was not to be risked in such an endeavor as hunting these fiends.
It fell to James, then, to take the guardsmen out on patrol and put an end to these monsters once and for all.
They could not be allowed to get away with their crimes, else other packs of roving thieves might hear that they could swoop down upon the McDougal lands, pilfer to their hearts’ content, and escape unmolested.
James hadn’t minded bearing such a responsibility. He’d been to battle before and triumphed every time, and he hadn’t been afraid for his own life or limbs whenever such a need had arisen.
In retrospect, perhaps he should have been.
He’d gone to the stables with a sure step and a cold gleam in his eye, all too eager to dispense justice and punishment to these loathsome rogues who had victimized his lands and people.
He enjoyed his position as his clan’s defender, its champion.
His brother Fergus was a great leader. James had no need for power or glory.
Only the clash of steel against steel and the satisfaction of a job well done.
He and the guardsmen had searched the woods and fields in the areas where the brigands had attacked, even as the rain had assailed them and tongues of lightning greedily licked at the dark skies above.
They had beat at the bushes and tromped through the tall grasses, hoping to uncover the hiding scoundrels.
Then they had foolishly allowed themselves to be trapped in a narrow valley.
If they had been as vigilant as they were at the start of their search, no doubt they would have moved through the area more carefully, fearing an ambush.
But it had been many hours, they were all soaked through and chilled to the bone, and they had reached the point of nearly giving up.
Privately, all of them had become convinced that the bandits had long since moved on and that their search was a futile one.
They’d wanted to finish quickly so they could get back to the warmth of their hearths.
In short, they had grown impatient…and, as a result, careless.
In retrospect, James was sure the canny brigands had been counting on that. He’d long since convinced himself that the men had been hunkered down cleverly, watching the guardsmen and waiting for them to tire so that they could strike swiftly and lethally.
Which they had.
Roughly a dozen guardsmen had gone forth with James, but four were cut down immediately, bested by the element of surprise. They fell to the ground dead before any of them had a chance to even draw their weapons.
This was not the usual pack of dim-witted thieves armed with crude weaponry and blundering tactics. They were cunning and coordinated in their movements, and the blades they wielded were well-forged enough to hold their own against those brandished by James and the guardsmen.
Two more guards fell in the next several moments, mortally wounded.
The remaining ones fought valiantly enough to drive the cadre of brigands off again…
but not before one of them dug a knife into James’s calf and wrenched it.
The blade had snapped, and James had shrieked in a voice he himself barely recognized, shocked by the depth and intensity of the pain.
He’d never been stabbed before in all his years of fighting.
He’d led a bit of a charmed life that way, though he’d generally tried not to dwell on that too much, preferring to believe he had prevailed in this regard through skill rather than luck.
Not only that, but his armor had been well-built enough to withstand many attacks.
The brigand, unfortunately, had managed to find the vulnerable space where the armored plates met and had exploited it accordingly.
The bandits had departed and were not heard from again after that, thankfully.
However, James barely made it back to the keep.
He lost a tremendous amount of blood, and it took two of his men to help him back up onto his horse.
By the time he was under the care of the healers, he’d lost consciousness, and his skin had become white as a ghost.
It had taken a great deal of effort for the healers to extract the shards of the blade.
They’d had to cut and dig through a lot of the muscle there, ruining it forever.
Worse, there had been considerable rust and filth on the metal, which had infected the wound.
The sickness took hold, and for over a week, James had sweated and babbled and wept while his body had burned with fever. He barely survived the ordeal.
Now, looking back, he wished he had not.
If he’d simply had the good sense to succumb to his illness and perish on the healer’s table, he would not be trapped in the singular damnation that now gnawed at him every moment of the day and night.
He would not live his days in agony and his nights in terror.
But no. He had to cling to life. He had to pull through, believing—in the delirium of his fever—that if only he could persevere, he could return to his old existence.
As it turned out, he’d been a damned fool.
The healers gave him juice of the poppy to quell the anguish in his leg, which had helped…for a short while. But when he asked them when the pain would go away on its own, they’d had no answers for him. They had, indeed, strongly implied that some vestige of the pain would always be with him.
Then I will always have to rely on this opiate to function? he’d asked desperately.
Oh no, the chief healer, Ursa, had informed him.
No, he would need to be weaned from that stuff, else he would come to depend upon it too heavily.
To become too friendly with the substance would be bad for him in the longer term.
It would adversely affect his organs, and taken in high enough quantities, it could easily kill him.
The more he contemplated that eventuality, the less it bothered him. Indeed, it was fast becoming a welcome outcome for him. He could not fight anymore, not when standing for any lengthy period lent him crippling agony.
And if he was not the defender of his clan, what was left for him to be? Nothing but a burden. A waste. An insubstantial shadow of who he once was.
He could not lead men into battle. He’d thought he might marry one day, but who would wed him now that he was a useless shell?
Once the healers ceased providing him with the opiates, he had been forced to seek them out himself.
This had been exceedingly difficult. A hag and her twisted brood lived in a bog a day’s ride from McDougal Keep, and they harvested and bottled the juice of the poppy.
They were only too happy to sell their wares, but alas, a day was longer than James could ride given his injury.
Indeed, even an hour on horseback was enough to reduce him to a pale, sweating, grimacing mess.
So he had pressed one of his servants, a young man named Alvin, to go on such errands for him. He’d involved this lad in his subterfuge, his terrible secret—which, of course, only made it all the more likely that he would be caught at it.
Still, what other choice did he have?
He needed the poppy juice to live. Or perhaps he needed it to die.
Either way, he did not dare go without it.
Every moment he did not have the use of it was a moment when he would be subjected to the memory of his failure and agony again.
He issued purses loaded with coins to go with the servant (and more still to keep him quiet), and in return, he received bottles of laudanum—an opiate tincture distilled with alcohol.
It was such a bottle that greeted him at his bedside when he came out of his slumber with a pained moan.
His hands went to the sides of his skull reflexively as his all-too-familiar headache assaulted him sharply.
His eyes were too dry, and there was a foul taste on his tongue.
There was a ghastly ache in his bones, and his wound throbbed so deeply that it made him nauseous.
He was awake, yet the dream continued to hover before his eyes, a series of bloody phantoms savaging him endlessly. It was overlaid upon reality like some ghoulish tapestry, one he could not look away from, no matter which direction he turned his head.
James reached for the bottle and put a few drops of the stuff on his tongue.
The taste was bitter, but the effect was merciful and immediate.
Gray clouds obscured the skies of his mind, appearing as swiftly as they had that fateful morning he’d been hurt.
The pain in his leg dulled until it seemed that the leg belonged to someone else entirely.
Someone in a distant land, perhaps, who had written to James of his agony in colorful terms.
Or perhaps it was James himself who was floating to some other place. Perhaps all that was around him was a curtain draped in the illusion of reality, and beyond it all was some beautiful endless void that waited for him.
His eyelids lowered, and his jaw went slack, and as his consciousness came and went in transient and translucent sheets (like the rains that fell that terrible day), he was able to exist in a world outside of his damaged body.
A world of numbness, where nothing was real, not even himself.
A world he would gladly inhabit forever if given the opportunity.
Dinnertime came and went without his notice. The sun set outside the window of his chamber.
Then eventually, he drifted into a fitful sleep, and the entire process was repeated.