Paladin's Prize (Age of Heroes, Book 1) (50 page)

“Why don’t you make me?” she countered coldly.

“Please. I don’t want to be rough with you or force you. I’m never giving up on you, Wrynne.”

“Oh, look at the king beg.”

“Please,” he whispered again, shamelessly. “I love you. Nothing’s going to change that, no matter what you do.”

Now it was her turn to flinch as though he had smote her with the flat of his famous sword. Only teaching her a lesson so far. But those sweet words stung her skin as though he had doused her in acid.

His stare glowed like a blue, celestial beam of light pouring out from Elysium. Pouring out from the sweetness of his breaking heart. For, oh yes, she knew his secret. The one the rest of the world had never guessed. The firechoke had showed it to her.

It was Thaydor’s love that made him mighty.

His love for his god, his family, his country. His love for the people and all the little children, like those who had flocked to him instinctively the day they had visited the plundered village. His willingness to lay down his life for them if necessary, without blinking an eye. His devotion to all that was beautiful and righteous and good.

And his love, most of all, for her.

She shrank from him, suddenly unsure if there was enough hate in Hell to overcome the likes of him. His Light shone so brightly it nigh blinded her.

“Come back to me, Wrynne,” he insisted with soft implacability. “Drink your medicine of your own free will, and show me you at least want to get well.”

“Stay away from me! I hate you!”

His face hardened. “Then you leave me no choice.”

He seemed to fill the room then with his sheer determination. She had rejected the lover, and so now she would have to deal with the large, angry knight.

He crossed the chamber in a few strides until she was driven back against the writing desk, with nowhere left to flee.

“Let go of me, you brute! Help! Jonty! Brother Piero!”

“Scream all you want, love. Your king ordered everyone to stay away, no matter what they heard.”

She looked at him in dread.

And indeed, nobody even peeked in. Of course, it was partly her own fault. She had already used the trick of crying wolf on her keepers in her endless attempts to escape before she had given up and laid her trap for him instead.

Looming over her, Thaydor captured her and held her fast against his chest, his left arm clamped around her waist. With his right hand, he caught hold of her face. “Open your mouth for me. Come on!”

She refused, sealing her jaw shut and glaring at him as she continued trying to push him away. She might as well have shoved a mountain.

“Wrynne, don’t be difficult. You’re acting like a child.” With calm, maddening patience, he bent her backward, partway over the desk, trying to pry her jaws apart.

“Stop fighting me!” he said through gritted teeth. “This is for your own good!”

“I
despise
you!” she wrenched out in seething, volcanic passion, but that was all the chance he needed.

He forced her mouth open wider the second she spoke and poured the medicine down her throat.

She choked a bit.

He quickly covered her lips with his hand to stop her from spitting it out. “Swallow it. Now.”

She glared at him in rage, holding the vile liquid in her mouth.

“Wrynne. Swallow the medicine. Do as I tell you, now. There’s a good girl.”

I hate, hate, hate you
,
she told him with her eyes, but he just smiled, as if he knew he had already won. Then he clamped his fingers gently over her nose, squeezing her nostrils shut.

Her eyes widened to think her own husband would actually cut off her air. Now she’d
have
to swallow the medicine to gasp for breath through her mouth.

“Sorry,” he said with a slight shrug.

You will be
, she thought. For while he was distracted, waiting for her to swallow and watching hopefully for any sign that the foul-tasting stuff was beginning to work, her searching hand found the handle of the top desk drawer.

Without a sound, she pulled the drawer open just a bit, reached into it, and sought the illicit weapon she had prepared and hidden there. A nasty little penknife she had fashioned by breaking off one of the metal sunrays in the religious sculpture hanging on her chamber wall.

Working under cover of darkness the past few nights, she had coated the metal file with the juice of the poisonous bloodbane berries she had carefully collected from the garden.

The idiot monks and nuns thought it was simply walking in the garden that had cheered her up and calmed her down, but this was not the case. The reason for her better state of mind in recent days was that she had hatched an excellent plan.

To rid the world of Thaydor.

And as her fingers closed around her little blade, the time had come to strike.

She did, plunging the makeshift dagger into his side, even as the need for air overcame her.

She swallowed the mouthful of medicine at last, while a small cry of pain escaped him. She let go of the blade, abandoning it in his side to let the poison do its work. Her husband released her from his viselike hold and looked down at the sunray of Ilios sticking out from between his ribs.

“Rather poetic, don’t you think?” she gasped out, panting for air.

“Oh, Wrynne,” he said mournfully, and moved away from her, a crimson stain spreading at his side.

What was that the oracle had said so long ago?

You will betray him.

He deserved it.

Her stare fixed on him, she wiped the taste of his hand and the residue of the medicine roughly off her lips. The potion he had forced down her throat tasted foul on her tongue, but she took satisfaction in knowing she had paid him back in full.

“You’re hard to kill, love, but that should do the trick,” she said.

He pulled the metal file out of his side and sent her a grim, defiant smile. “I’ve had worse.”

“Oh, I know, dear,” she said sweetly. “That’s why I tipped the blade with poison.”

He stopped, paling. “What?”

As Thaydor glanced down in alarm at the blood on his hand, a wave of nausea suddenly overcame her.

“But it seems you’ve poisoned me, too,” she rasped.

“Wrynne!” He reached for her as she dropped to her knees, clutching her stomach.

“What have you done to me, you bastard?” she ground out, spittle dripping from her mouth as she dry-heaved.

Everything inside her was burning. She started shaking. The room was spinning. She let out a scream of pain and convulsed.

“Wrynne! No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry… Sweet Ilios, I’ll kill that sorcerer…” Thaydor knelt beside her, covering his own wound with his hand, blood flowing out between his fingers, as he looked on in panic, asking her what was happening.

In a moment, she was barely aware of him. He dissolved out of focus. She curled into a ball, panting, her eyes squeezed shut, and when the next wave of blazing pain tore through her innards, she screamed. The agony was so intense it reminded her of the night she had relived his mortal injuries through the
Kiss of Life
spell.

And just like then, once more, she simply blacked out.

* * *

He gradually brought her back with a kiss. His lips lingered atop hers, silken and warm. She became aware of a large, trembling hand stroking her hair. His whispers wove into her addled mind.

“Please come back to me, demoiselle, so at least we can say goodbye.”

Goodbye?

When she opened her glazed eyes in confusion, blinking against the light, her temples were pounding. Her head rested on Thaydor’s thigh.

The room was waving with sickening slowness, and behind him, the ceiling seemed to stretch a hundred feet tall.

But she instantly noticed she felt different. Like a fever had broken. She felt cleaned out inside. As if she had vomited out some meal of putrid food that she had eaten by mistake. The residue of the medicine still tasted foul on her tongue, but the blessed emptiness within told her the stuff had killed the parasitic evil that had nested inside her.

Thaydor was stroking her head, watching every expression on her face. “There you are,” he breathed, a catch in his voice.

As her vision cleared, she noticed he didn’t look so well. His tanned, outdoorsy complexion had gone pale.

“Thaydor?”

“Wrynne.” He took her hand, twining his fingers through hers. “Are you back?”

She stared at him…with no idea what they were doing on the floor or how they had got there or what was going on. “Where are we?”

She looked around the room and recognized it as though she had only seen it in a dream.

Then her gaze happened upon the bloodstain on the side of his shirt, and instantly, it all came flooding back.

She sat up with a gasp of horror. “I did this to you!”

“Shh, it’s all right.” He cupped her cheek and shook his head, gazing tenderly at her. “It’s not your fault.”

“But I-I tipped the blade with bloodbane!”

“It doesn’t matter. Kiss me.”

She stared at him, her own complexion nearly as ashen with dread as his was, with the wicked work of the poison in his veins. He leaned closer and brushed her lips again with his own, but she refused to kiss him goodbye.

Instead, she reached for his shirt and lifted it with practiced hands, though they were shaking.

“Quickly—I can heal you.”

“Wrynne, I don’t think—”

“Let me try! Now that I’m better, maybe…” Disoriented as she was, she cupped her hand over the hole she had punctured in his smooth, muscled side, and drew on her power.

Nothing happened.

“No!” she cried. “I can’t. My gift— It didn’t come back.”

She tried again, squeezing her eyes shut, grimacing with the effort, to no avail. It was useless.

This was so much worse than her failure with the bard.

“Stay here.” She started to get to her feet. “I’ll get Brother Piero. We can send for one of the healers—”

“Wrynne, I don’t think there’s…time.” He clasped her wrist. “Don’t leave me. I don’t want to die alone.”

She looked at him in shock. His face was ashen; his breathing sounded strange. “No…”

“I’ve been close enough to death enough times to know when I’m actually dying,” he whispered wearily, and for the first time, she saw real fear in his eyes.

“No, no, no, Thaydor.” She jumped to her feet, ran to the door, and started screaming for help, but he needed her. She went racing back in a state of shock and dropped to her knees beside him. Shaking, she cradled him in her arms on the floor and covered his face with tears and with kisses. “No, no, no, you can’t leave me. Please—I love you. I need you.”

“I think I was always meant to die in your arms, as I should have done that first night,” he panted. “But you saved me with your kiss. And I got to learn what love means. The poems…don’t do it justice.” He shivered, the cold of death settling into him.

Aghast to find her otherwise-invincible warrior slipping away—by her own hand—she lowered her head and tearfully kissed him hard on the mouth, willing every ounce of love she had into him.

She couldn’t even remember now what all she had put into the poison. She wouldn’t have known how to begin making an antidote. But at his mention of the
Kiss of Life
spell, something tugged at the back of her mind.

She suddenly pulled back. “Thaydor!”

“Hmm?” he mumbled, already beginning to fade.

“The
Kiss of Life
spell! It transferred my ability to you—”

“No, I was never the healer you were.”

“I mean the power to heal
yourself
. Oh, why didn’t I think of it before? That was the sacrifice I had to make, the gift I transferred to you! Remember? Darling, stay with me now. You must try! Quickly!”

“What do I do?” he mumbled.

“It’s just the same as if you were healing someone else.” Heart pounding, she gripped his shoulders, pulling him upright, heavy as he was. “Hold your hand above the wound. Close your eyes. Make contact with the Light.”

He looked doubtful but he tried it. As a low-level healer, he knew the simple procedure. With his hand cupped above the place where she had pierced him in her madness, he closed his eyes and bowed his head a bit.

She leaned her forehead against his and sought the Light from which she had been so desolately cut off under the fire thistle’s curse. It was there for her now, even though she could not heal.

Please don’t take him from me. I beg You. We still have a destiny left to fulfill. The oracle also said we’d have a son.

Fresh tears rose behind her eyelids. But as she joined her silent, desperate prayers with his, love rose around them, the purest form of Light itself, enveloping the two of them in a sphere of warmth and tenderness.

She could feel Thaydor’s goodness flowing through him, pure and strong, like a wave of bright power pouring out of the unseen realms to a dark and hurting world.

The brilliance shone between the palm of his hand and his bleeding side—a blinding flash—then it vanished.

“Did it work?” she whispered.

It took a heartbeat for her dazzled eyes to adjust, and she looked down at his side.

The dried blood was still there, but the wound had closed and disappeared. There was not a scratch left on him, and when she looked up from his side to his face, his color was already improving.

“How do you feel? What of the poison?” she asked quickly, pressing her fingers to his brow.

He swallowed hard, looking disoriented. “Better,” he said tentatively. “I think…I’m all right. Wrynne—it worked.”

She threw her arms around him with a sob.

He pulled her closer. She hugged him harder. He held her for a long moment, but she couldn’t stop crying, clinging to him. Nearly losing him was even worse than nearly losing herself.

“Shh, I’m all right, love,” he assured her with a kiss on her cheek. At last, he took her face between his hands and stared into her eyes, drinking in the sight of her, his face full of stormy tenderness. “Do we really have each other back?”