Knight's Lady, page 6
part #1 of Tenebrae Series
Reubair gave her a good, long look, as if appraising her body for future reference, and a little smile turned up the corners of his mouth. “Once the marriage is consummated, I believe your heart will soften toward me.”
“Unlikely.”
“We shall see.” He handed back the torch to the dungeon guard, then retreated from the cell. The guard shut the door with a dull clank of iron lock and turned the key in it. Footsteps, another clank, and Lindsay was left in the darkness to turn over and over in her mind the horror of what she’d just been told.
For a time a sudden cold snap in the weather sent her huddling into a corner, clenched in a fetal curl with her arms wrapped tightly around her knees. She occupied herself in miserable shivering. For the first time she thought she might succeed in dying, and knew she would welcome it. She avoided thinking about Alex, for whenever she did her chest tightened with grief until she could barely breathe. The ache in her heart was too much to bear in this place, so she removed her thoughts from home and husband and focused on the situation at hand. Probably the time since her arrival had added up to a number of days. The exact number was unknowable, for meals seemed irregular and she slept often out of boredom. The cold was a constant. From time to time she stood to stretch and walked circles within her cell, her fingers lightly skipping over the stones in the wall so she wouldn’t bump into them. It was a short walk around, and so dark that at first she could only orient herself by feeling the door as she passed. After a few days, however, she realized she’d learned the topography of the rough-hewn stones at shoulder height. On the left wall was a spot where the mortar was very thin and the stones close together, and the back wall boasted one very large stone that bulged at the far end. The corner of the room was exactly one pace beyond it. Soon that stone became like a friendly face one might encounter every day at a bus stop year after year.
The food was plain, and though it was a bit stale she figured it was better fare than other prisoners might get. Reubair definitely wanted her whole and well.
So she stopped eating.
The peephole in the door was small, but the spaces between the bars were just wide enough for her to push through the bits of bread and meat brought to her. When her jailer began bringing stew and soup, difficult to funnel out the hole, she simply poured the food into the slop bucket into which she peed. Water was all she consumed. For how many days, she couldn’t tell. No sunrise, no sunset, and the hunger was constant. Eventually it became a hardness in her gut. She sat on the floor of her cell in a stupor, dozing lightly off and on. It crossed her mind they might let her die, and after a while she began to think that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
The loneliness invaded as relentlessly as the cold, and when food came she tried to talk to the guard who brought it. That was an exercise in futility, but any exercise was good. Every attempt to pry words from Reubair’s underlings failed, and she might as well have been talking to the walls. Which she did a bit of, in a murmur that was nearly prayer. Sometimes it segued into prayer, but in the end she remained cold, lonely, and hungry.
The darkness became eternal. Her mind became convinced it had always been there, and would ever remain. Seamless. Infinite. Lindsay accepted it, for there was no choice. Sometimes she hummed to herself to banish the silence, but she could do nothing about the darkness. When Reubair came again, his presence seemed nearly surreal, for her reality had become cold and loneliness, and did not include him.
The door clanked open, and she looked up to shade her eyes against the torch carried by the jailer. A dry comment about how good it was for him to drop by stuck in her throat. By the time the thought was formed, it seemed pointless.
Reubair said, “You must ask for a divorce.”
“Very well, I divorce you.” She giggled at that. Not terribly witty, but intensely entertaining relative to all else that had held her attention lately.
“I have a letter for you to sign, asking the pope for a judgment of annulment. Your marriage to Cruachan is invalid.”
“It’s not.”
“It is. The banns were not said three times, but only two.”
“Not true. And what would you know about it, in any case? You weren’t there. I didn’t even know you then.”
Then realization struck her, and her heart lifted in sweet relief. “Alex is still alive. You’ve had word, and he’s still alive.”
Silence. Reubair declined to reply, and that was as good as a “yes.”
Tears sprang to her eyes. Alex was still alive. She murmured a quick prayer of thanks.
Reubair said, “You will sign this paper.”
“I will not.”
“You will sign it, or you will rot here.”
“Very well.” A look of triumph slipped onto his face, but she added, “I’ll get on with my rotting, then. If you would be so kind as to shut the door when you leave, that’s a good fellow.”
Triumph turned to a scowl.
She asked, “Why do you want me to sign your silly paper? Most men in your position would simply forge my name and have done with it.”
“That would be against the law and invalidate the annulment.”
“No one would know.”
“God would know.”
Lindsay opened her mouth to ask why he thought God would be okay with a letter signed under duress but realized it would be pointless. Along with the obvious technology shortages of this time, she’d spent the past few years coping with the culture shock of a legal system that conflated canon and secular law to the point that the two were often indistinguishable. Reubair didn’t want the annulment so the pope would be happy with the forced marriage; he wanted it so God would be happy with it. Somewhere along the line, the legal technicalities of priest and ceremony became all that mattered, and apparently there was no law against forced marriage or forcing someone to sign a letter. The spiritual aspect of those things never occurred to anyone.
Instead, Lindsay said, “Get out. I’ll not sign your letter. I’ll die first.”
“You could very well.” There was no dire note of threat in his voice, but only reflection of regret. “But first there are other things I might do to convince you to obey. Are you certain you won’t reconsider?”
“If you want me attractive and healthy enough to bear children, you won’t want to let your torturer at me.”
“There is torture, and then torture. We Danann can be creative, and we know our humans.”
A shiver ran through her, and she hoped it was too dark for him to see it. “Bring it on.”
Reubair didn’t reply to that, but only gazed at her for a moment and then left. The cell door clanked shut behind him.
The darkness enveloped her once again.
But only a few minutes later the guard returned. “Get up,” he said. A shackle chain dangled from his hands.
She climbed to her feet. He knelt and attached the shackle to her ankle, locked it with a key, then handed her the other end of the chain. “Come with me.”
Curiosity made her forget to be afraid. What in the world was he up to? She followed him out of the cell, up several flights of stairs, and through more chambers and more stairs. Lindsay would have been quite unable to find her way back to the cell even if she’d wanted to. The warmth of these upper rooms where fires burned merrily in each hearth thawed the worst of her cold extremities. Then they arrived at what appeared to be the Great Hall. Almost too warm now, her fingers and toes burned as circulation returned.
It wasn’t mealtime, so there was only a scattering of extremely well-dressed people here and there in the huge room. When she and the guard entered, they all looked up, fell silent, and watched her make her progress across the floor. She became suddenly and acutely conscious of her state of undress, and a hot flush rose to her skin. All the more humiliating, everyone in the room could see her break out in dark, splotchy red all up and down her body. She crossed her arms in front of her, one forearm over her breasts and one angled across her crotch.
Aside from that, she struggled not to show her discomfort. It was difficult, but she managed to stare as openly as the onlookers and noted they were all faeries. Aside from her one brief meeting with Danu some years before, these were the first she’d ever seen who appeared to be nobility. But then she recognized one of them as a raider named Iain, one who’d helped Jenkins rape her. He was dressed more stylishly, in more distinct faerie fashion, than he’d been when he was her comrade making raids on English villages in the Borderlands the year before. Her eyes narrowed at sight of him, and his only reaction was to look away.
She was led from the Great Hall to the bailey outside, to an outcrop of rock that rose from the ground near a high garden wall. There the guard retrieved the end of the chain from her hands and knelt once again. He slipped a spike through the end link, set it against the rock, drew a hammer from his belt, and pounded the spike into the rock.
Lindsay looked around at where she was and realized what was happening. She was tethered to this rock, in the middle of the bailey where people were coming and going as on a busy street.
The guard finished his work, stood, and walked away.
“Wait! Why are you leaving me here? How long...”
He wasn’t responding, and she realized how long she’d be left here. Until she signed that blasted letter. She looked up at the high windows of the upper stories of the keep. Reubair thought he could embarrass her into surrender. Fool. She’d show him just how easily embarrassed she was not.
At least, she’d bluff it and hope he would give up soon. Once more acceptance was the key. She was naked and chained to a rock, and all the protests and yanking on her shackle wouldn’t change that. So she investigated the limits of her restraints. The rise of rock to which she was chained was only about knee-high, and the chain allowed her to climb just to the other side. There was a flat space between the rock and the garden wall, and if she stretched out her leg and an arm she could barely touch the rough, glittering stone. She looked around at where she was and sighed. “Rock and hard place, indeed.”
On the bailey side of the rock, the chain would almost reach the center between keep and stable. Except for the outcrop of granite, the area within her range was flat earth and a few patches of paving stones. She sat on her rock, huddled with her knees pressed to her chest, and watched people stare at her as they walked past.
She wanted to crawl into a hole, and had there been any sort of tool handy she would have dug one. She was expressionless as she stared back at passersby, who sometimes continued to gawk, but more often than not looked away and hurried on.
Food came as usual, but as soon as it was delivered she threw it as far as she could. Dogs ate it. If Reubair thought she would forget to not eat in her humiliation, he was mad. She drank the water but refused food.
After a while, she needed to pee. She didn’t want to do it here and put it off, though she knew she wasn’t likely to he brought a slop bucket. She was right. By sunset her bladder was so painfully full she thought she might have damaged it. She had to go, or urine would dribble down her leg and that would be infinitely worse. So she went to the farthest reach of the chain, between the rock and the garden wall, and squatted on her heels. The stream puddled and ran, and to her dismay touched her foot. It occurred to her to be glad there was no clothing for it to soil. Her foot would wipe more or less clean in the dirt. After a good, long drip dry, she stood, kicked dirt over the spot, and went to the opposite quarter of her area. There she huddled into herself again and shivered as the sun went down.
It went like that for days. The hunger strike continued, and she weakened. The weaker she became, the more she slept, the less she cared who gawked at her in the bailey. The corner she used for peeing began to stink like a garderobe, but she cared even less about that. Whenever the horror of her predicament crowded into her mind, she turned her thoughts to Alex. Her husband was still alive, and that was all that mattered.
When the guard came and threw some clothing onto her where she slept, she picked it up and stared dully at it. A heavy silken overdress with extraordinarily long sleeves, underclothes of equally silken but less weighty fabric, and slippers with points that curled back over her toes in the faerie fashion that was now coming in vogue among humans. The guard retreated immediately, before she could ask what was going on.
Lindsay rose, and a wave of dizziness sent her sideways. She staggered a couple of steps, then righted herself and held up the dress. She felt of the clothing. Something to wear, after so long without so much as a blanket to wrap around herself, seemed an unthinkable luxury. Never mind modesty, the warmth of it would be heaven. Quickly she sorted out the pieces and put them on as best she could without someone to help her with buttons and ties. No drawers, though. She couldn’t have pulled them on over the shackle anyway. Just as she was noting the sleeves that covered almost to the tips of her fingers, the guard returned and unlocked the shackle on her leg.
“That way," he said, and gestured toward the keep. Back through the Great Hall they went, the guard indicating at each juncture which way to go. She went up a circular stairwell, straightening her clothing and struggling to arrange her hair with her fingers. Beneath the fine silk she was as filthy as ever, and there were wee beasties crawling around on her scalp. A bath would certainly have been too much to ask for, but she would have given a lot for some private time at a fireside in order to pick herself clean of parasites. She scratched her head and wondered where the guard was taking her.
Through another door, into yet another chamber, then another, and finally Lindsay found herself in a chamber that had no further exit. A bedchamber, containing a large bed hung with heavy curtains and one much smaller closet bed with carved wooden doors. Opposite the hearth hung a rich, colorful tapestry depicting a swarm of winged fey hunting a dragon, and at one end of the room stood a heavy table large enough for an elaborate setting for four people. Just then it was set for only two, but groaned under many platters of food. Enough for a good company of men, it seemed. The smell of it wafted through the room, and Lindsay’s mouth watered terribly for it. Her gut turned and heart pounded, and it was all she could do to not leap upon the food and cram fistfuls of it into her mouth. Dizziness nearly sent her to her knees. Even the dinners at Eilean Aonarach were never this tempting, and hunger sharpened unbearably the sublime pleasure of the smell.
Sitting in a chair at one of the set places was An Reubair. He lounged against the back and leaned heavily on one arm, long, blond hair loose around his shoulders and head tilted a bit as he regarded her with an air of appraisal. She was suddenly so conscious of her unkempt state she could hardly look at him, but she forced herself to stare back. Also in appraisal. Her body gave a hard shiver, then was still, finally warm enough to stop shaking. Like Iain, Reubair was dressed in uberclean tunic and trews without spot, smudge, or unnecessary wrinkle. Rings graced his fingers and a heavy collar lay about his shoulders. The good-sized links in it were of gold, some of them enameled, crosses alternating with roses. She’d once been told he was extremely wealthy, but she’d not believed it at the time. In retrospect, she should have believed the ancient stories of faerie treasure might have been true.
“You smell,” he said in a flat, matter-of-fact tone.
“You’re an asshole. I can take a bath, but I’m afraid there’s no hope for you.”
He smiled at that, and the amusement showed in his eyes. God save her from men who thought she was cute and funny. “Have a seat. Help yourself to supper.” An insouciant hand waved toward the dishes on the table, of slabs of beef and poultry, of crockery filled to brimming with baked fruits stuffed with nuts and covered with sauces, of delicate confections made of spun sugar so perfect she knew there must have been magic of some sort involved in their construction. When she didn’t respond, but stared dully at the floor, he urged her, “Go ahead. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
She glanced sideways at him. If he said it, it couldn’t be so. She moved not a muscle, for if she did she would lose all control over herself.
“Oh, come now,” he said, his voice thick with impatience and frustration. “You’ve won. I’ve taken you off your chain. You should be happy now.”
“I want to go home. And I want my wedding ring back.”
“Be grateful for this.”
“This” — she glanced around the room — “is captivity.”
“Killing yourself will get you nowhere but dead.”
“Then I’ll be with Alex.” She cut her eyes toward him. “Or not.”
That silenced Reubair for a moment. After some deep thought he said, “Let us talk. If you would be reasonable, perhaps you could show me my error. Surely your mental faculties are impaired by this starvation tactic, so eat first.”
Just how impaired it had made her was clear, by the fact that she considered seriously his words. She glanced at the food on the table and had to swallow hard the saliva that filled her mouth, betraying her weakened resolve.
“Please. Eat. Then if you insist I will return you to your cell and you can continue your protest until you die.”
That did it. Instinct for survival overcame higher conviction, and her body moved without orders from her brain.
She sat in the chair to Reubair’s left and helped herself to a piece of beef. It was the most delicious thing she’d ever eaten. To say she wolfed it would have been a denigration of actual wolves, for the meat was tender and hot and it slipped down her throat without chewing to speak of. Grease ran down her chin and dripped from it, and since there was no napkin she wiped it with the tail of the tablecloth. As she ate, Reubair also picked up a large chunk of the meat, took a bite, and chewed slowly, gazing at her. She looked away from him. Then he took a stoneware pitcher and poured something that looked like spiced mead into the silver goblet set at her place. His goblet had already been filled, and he took a sip. It was ordinary grape wine, and she wondered why he’d not offered her that. But then, he knew she disliked English wine as much as she did mead, so it was no matter. She began to slow some in her eating, chewed, swallowed as quickly as possible, and took another bite. Then, with a wad of meat in her cheek, she said, “I won’t marry you.” She sucked some grease from her fingers and chewed some more.
