Cobweb Empire (23 page)

Jack was still snorting outside, accompanied
by the whistling wind, so Beltain went back out and quickly led
Jack to the nearest barn building. There, he found a dry stall and
plenty of hay. As quickly as possible he had the stallion free of
saddle and harness, surrounded by clean hay, covered by a warm
blanket, and settled for the night.

And then Beltain took out his folded cloak
from the saddlebag, locked the barn and ran back to the main
house.

Percy lay on the bed, breathing faintly, and
her forehead and fingers were cold to the touch. The fire in the
hearth had barely begun to warm the room, and the air was still
permeated with chill.

Beltain took his long cloak, thick black
velvet, and covered Percy with it. Then he quickly started removing
his suit of armor, stacking the plates one by one on the floor next
to his sword and helmet. Next off came his chain mail hauberk.
Straining to raise his arms in the process, he winced at the dull
pain from some of his slow-healing bruises near the ribs, having
taken on additional new trauma from the battle effort less than an
hour earlier. His thick woolen gambeson undershirt came off last
and Beltain was naked to the waist, his powerful well-muscled upper
body warm and exuding energy despite the residual bruising.

“Percy . . .” He took the few
steps to the bed, then lowered himself before her, and placed one
arm under her waist to slide her closer to the wall, to make room.
Then he lay down on the outside, gingerly pausing for one instant
only, to consider what it was he was doing. And then he lifted the
cloak covering her and pulled her limp form against him, taking her
in a strange embrace, feeling her slightly chubby body through her
endless layers of stuffed outer coat, skirt, burlap and wool, and
probably cotton underneath.

No, this was not going to work.

He rose up on his elbow and started removing
her clothing. The shawl was simplest; he simply unwrapped her and
set it aside to be used as an additional blanket. The bulky coat
came off with moderate hassle—he pulled it off by the sleeves while
carefully raising her up and turning her to the side. Then he took
off her frozen wraparound shoes and socks and long stockings,
feeling her ice-cold shock of bare feet underneath. He wrapped his
palms around her feet and ankles, warming them for a few seconds.
She had a coarse burlap dress laced up on top around her neck, and
he untied the front and back laces at her throat, gently rolling
her to her side to reach around. Her neck was barely warm, and the
pulse at her throat fluttered.

As he was fiddling with her ties, Percy
inhaled a deep breath and suddenly came to.

She mumbled something, and her eyelids were
still closed, but a fierce joy came to him, together with a flood
of relief.

“You’re back, girl!”

In reply she mumbled again, and moved her
arms, weakly resisting him.

“Come, girl, fear not . . .”
he spoke softly, rolling her back closer toward him. “This is to
make you warm, for your own good!”

Her eyelids barely flickered, and he watched
her lashes tremble and rest against her plump cheeks, observed her
well-defined dark brows.

And suddenly a heat came to his cheeks.

Beltain quickly looked away from her face,
and put one muscular arm under her back to raise her, in order to
pull the outer dress off her shoulders. Slowly he shifted down the
fabric, leaving her cotton undershirt in place; freed one nearly
limp hand from the sleeve, then the other, and then let her lie
back while he pulled the burlap dress down to her waist. Here, her
wide hips were in the way, and he handled her plump sides while his
jaw and forehead and entire neck burned with something for which he
had no words. At last he found an additional tie around her waist,
loosened it, and then pulled the whole dress down past her hips,
holding her briefly underneath the buttocks, then letting go, in
order to catch breath. . . .

His head, brow, neck, everything was
scalding-hot, flaming under the skin, as the strange flush spread
throughout him. . . .

Gruffly he tugged the dress off her
completely, crumpled it and pushed the bundle aside. She lay in her
old cotton nightshirt, barefoot. Her ash-brown hair, fine and soft
like baby’s breath, came undone and scattered in waves upon the
quilt-blanket. With a trembling hand he tested the coolness of her
fingers and toes, and her extremities were still cold.

Beltain steeled himself and then lay down
alongside her once more, in a state of hyperawareness, sensing with
his bare flesh through her thin nightshirt how her skin was
lukewarm. His arms came around her, drawing her close and tight
against him—very tight, so that she came to again, and drew a deep
breath and parted her lips in an attempt to say something. Her eyes
flickered open and she saw the bronzed skin of his shoulder, felt
its scalding fire against her cheek, then squirmed against him.

Her nightshirt slid partway down her own
shoulders, revealing the tops of her rounded
arms . . . and his unshaven jaw was suddenly pressed
against plump softness, lying in the hollow of her neck and
shoulder.

He stilled completely, hardly breathing,
enveloping her. She too, after moving initially, seemed to grow
still, and he could feel her chest rising with each slow breath.
She was warming up by the second, and for some reason she was
trembling.

Warmth was rising between them, resonating.
It was an impossible fierce sense of one mutual skin between them,
for despite the barrier of her cotton shirt their skins had become
permeable, and his vigorous heat radiated at her and was returned
to him. Indeed, he no longer felt the slight chill of the room on
his bare skin because she had become his inner center, an extension
of him, and now it was
she
who warmed him, down to the
bones.

“Percy . . .” he whispered in
a thick strange voice.

“I am warm now . . .” she
replied unexpectedly. And then she shifted in his embrace. Her
hands lightly pushed back against his bare chest, and where her
fingers and palms touched him, tentative and fragile, he felt
searing awareness. “It is all right now, I thank
you . . . My Lord.”

But he could not let her go. He was molten
and stilled with intensity, fixed within the moment. The strange
debilitating warmth continued to course through him, turning his
limbs into lead and iron, and his breathing ragged.

The girl was a witch and she had taken his
mind.

Chapter
11

R
umanar Avalais,
Sovereign of the Domain, stood on the balcony of the Palace of the
Sun, watching the grand square below. The balcony of heavy
ornamental marble—warm cream in hue, with dark veins running in
exquisite hairline cracks along each squat curving slit-column that
fenced it—was the spot from which Sovereigns appeared before the
populace on parade. It faced directly east, hovering a hundred feet
above the façade of the Palace, before the square paved with mauve
stones.

The square that formally bore the name of
Trova, an ancient regal edifice that had once stood in place of the
present Palace, was now commonly called the Square of Sunrise. It
was at such times as the sun rose that the Sovereigns throughout
the ages made important proclamations.

This sunrise was no different.

Rumanar Avalais wore a dress the color of
deep ripe pomegranates. It was slim, long and flowing in the
old-fashioned style of the former century before the crinoline
skirt came to prominence in the royal courts. The fabric of the
dress fit her hourglass shape like skin, and it cascaded below her
thighs into fullness, ending in a flare at her feet. Her sleeves
were bells gathered at the wrists with lace and pearls. Her hair of
auburn flames was hidden entirely by a headdress of black and gold,
thickly garlanded with pearls from brow to her neckline.

It was the traditional costume of war, worn
by historical queens, taken out of treasury storage where it had
been on courtly display for generations.

The sun rose over the gilded rooftops of the
Sapphire Court, into a cloudless sky of crisp morning and its rays
were cast at a right angle directly upon the balcony, so that where
the Sovereign stood was only searing light.

Below, the entirety of Trova Square was
filled with army formations of every scope and rank, regiments and
battalions, cavalry and infantry, all of them clad in the colors of
dark red and burgundy, colors of the pomegranate. The military
forces that served the Sovereign and the Domain lined up always
first in this square, before marching on any campaign, and were
thus known as the Trovadii.

Overhead, the pale blue sky was boundless.
There was never snow at the Sapphire Court; winter was mild and
impotent here, with only a fresh cool edge to the wind and a sun
that took a season to turn remote and disinterested, casting no
true warmth, only incandescence.

With such indifferent sun in her eyes,
Rumanar Avalais stood watching the square below.

At her side, only a few steps back, were
three of her Field Marshals, all three decorated veteran generals.
They were going to lead the Trovadii on this new immense campaign.
Field Marshal Claude Maetra, an imposing stone-faced soldier in his
late middle years, hailing from the austere nobility of Tanathe,
was swarthy, with leathery olive skin, black hair and eyes, and the
posture and demeanor of a dragon leashed in human skin. He did not
take his eyes off the armies below, nor bothered to acknowledge the
two other men present.

Next to him stood a much shorter man, Field
Marshal Matteas Quara, of quasi-noble blood in Balmue, round and
red-faced, covered with wrinkles, with fair skin and thinning hair,
and a prominent gut. His expression however was satirical, with one
heavy-lidded eye set in a permanent aspect of mockery overlaying
sharp intelligence, and the other an eye-patch covering a hollow
socket. The third Field Marshal, Edmunde Vaccio, was the youngest,
energetic and brown-skinned—for he was of Moorish blood with family
roots in Solemnis and adjacent Spain—handsome, slender yet
muscular, and the tallest of the three.

“Your Brilliance, they are ready for your
words,” spoke Field Marshal Maetra in an abbreviated dry voice used
to command.

With her back to him, Rumanar Avalais said
softly: “Yes, they are. But are you? All three of you?”

“We are ready, with every fiber of our
being,” Maetra responded.

“Aye, we have sworn our all to Your
Brilliance,” one-eyed Quara echoed him.

“We are yours,” said Vaccio simply in a soft
bass.

A pause.

The Sovereign lifted her hands high. The
thousands gathered in the square below immediately heeded her
gesture and faded into absolute silence.

“Trovadii!” she exclaimed in a ringing voice
of power that carried all through the square. “Brave and loyal
Trovadii! You are unparalleled among warriors! Your valor and deeds
are legend. There is no enemy that can face you and remain
standing. You have protected our blessed Domain and served me thus
for as long as I remember! Will you serve me thus again, this
day?”

A roar answered her, as many thousand fists
clad in gauntlets pointed to the sky, swords bared, and pikes were
brandished.

“Trovadii!” The Sovereign continued holding
her hands above her head, stretching out to them like a bird in
flames, her shape blazing red in the sun, the color of ripe
pomegranates burning. “Will you serve me?”

“
Yes!”
They cried in a million
voices, and followed with another roar.

“Then serve me! I take you as mine, on this
day and always!”

The roar was deafening.

“And now,” she said, and her voice was a
sonorous wonder. “Now you will wait for me. Wait, and I will come
to you within the hour. Wait, and together we shall march!”

She lowered her hands and turned away, while
Trova Square rang with roaring voices, stomping feet, and clanging
metal armor brandished in salute, until the very ground around the
Palace shook.

“Come, My Lords,” she spoke to the Field
Marshals. “It begins.”

As the Sovereign and her generals exited the
balcony, flanked immediately by a company of guards, they were met
by a spry young man who bowed before her, delivering a message of
some import. Quentin Loirre had received urgent communication from
Letheburg.

“Well, what is it, Loirre?” she spoke,
continuing to walk swiftly, so that the messenger had to hurry
alongside her.

“Your Brilliance,” he reported, “Letheburg
is besieged as promised, and Hoarfrost waits for your arrival.
However, there is one unexpected complication—or possibly,
two—”

“What complication?”

“First, as of yesterday morning, Her Majesty
Queen Andrelise Osenni is deceased. I do not mean dead and still
present among us, but dead in the old way, so that her spirit has
fled the body and she is going to be interred tonight. It is
rumored that a young woman is responsible for putting her thus to
rest. This young woman or girl had been in attendance at Her
Majesty’s bedside by order of the Prince—who is now King of
Lethe.”

The Sovereign stopped walking. “I see.
However, a king or queen makes little difference at this
point.”

“Yes, Your Brilliance. Only, there is the
other incident—”

“What else?”

“If I understand correctly, Your Brilliance,
Hoarfrost claims that there was someone who broke through the siege
last night—someone from the city. And in the process, this
someone
killed several hundred of his dead men in passing.
And when I say killed, I am referring to the final real manner of
death, where the body collapses and the spirit is banished
permanently—”