Trial of Fire (33 page)

It was always satisfying creating a plan of his own, especially when it meant he didn’t have to directly cross Nash to get what he wanted. He would talk to Calenderi when he returned to court.

*

Nash walked into the gallery in Ransem Castle and almost immediately sneezed at the dust lying everywhere. It had been almost four months since he’d last been here; so much had changed in that time – rather,
he
had changed. Still, the dust would have to go.

‘Taymar!’

‘Yes, Master?’

Nash continued walking down the gallery towards the rooms he used to sleep in, where he did his most secret work. ‘Get this place cleaned out, and I want a bath and a meal in an hour. Have my bags brought up here and the long table cleaned off. I have work to do.’

‘Of course, Master.’ Taymar vanished; Nash could hear him calling out
orders to the servants who were supposed to keep Ransem clean and functioning when he wasn’t here. He’d returned without warning, but that was no excuse for sloppiness.

He sneezed again, and resisted the temptation to open one of the windows. Instead, he opened the door to his bedroom, to find this room at least somewhat free of dust, and fresh linens had been laid on the bed some time in the last week or so, which would do until he decided exactly where he was going to go next.

He did a quick scan to make sure he was alone, then moved behind the bed to the tiny hidden alcove in the wall. He flicked the invisible switch and reached inside to pull out the pouch he’d left there so long ago, then walked over to his desk and collected half a dozen books. By the time he returned to the gallery, the long table was cleaned of dust, tiny particles of which were dancing in the sunshine streaming through the windows. He waited only as long as it took for his bags to be brought up, then he sat down to work. He fished out the notes he’d taken down over the years, then spread out the maps he’d made from the stories on the cave wall. Slowly, he began to compare them, building up a composite picture.

He ate at his table and only stopped when his bath was ready. He left his notes then and returned to his bedroom where the tub sat before the fireplace, steaming and smelling of rose petals. In the past he had always preferred to bath alone, to hide the scars the Enemy had given him at Shan Moss, but those scars were gone now, and he undressed with relish. The water felt superb on his skin as he sank into it, revelling in the heat.

With a sigh, he slid down in the bath and doused his head under the water. He could hear nothing then but the steady thumping of his own heart. Blowing out bubbles, he surfaced and looked around at the room he’d lived in for so many years.

It was time to leave here and turn those caves into a fortress of his own. Time to return to court and prepare for the war to come – for he knew now there would be one, and soon, at that. So much that he had never understood before had become clear: no wonder he had failed in all his previous attempts to find the Key.

But now he understood: Robert Douglas was
not
simply the Enemy, and considering him as such had hindered Nash’s thinking. First and foremost, Douglas was a Lusaran, and a Salti. His duty to his country and his people would always come before any duty towards a Prophecy he couldn’t comprehend. By understanding the man who would destroy him, Nash could finally predict the future, and what they could expect to happen next. He could plan to meet the next blow head on, be ready to fight and this time, win.

That day inside those caves had been more than worth the time: the cool air, the darkness, breathing in the same air that had so recently swept around the Key and his Ally had felt almost surreal. Better still, now that he understood the Enemy, he knew exactly what he had to do with Kenrick. The boy would be feeling very suspicious – especially after Nash’s sudden disappearance from Marsay, leaving no word. And no doubt Kenrick would have heard about the attack on Maitland, and the possible death of his cousin. Nash could be fairly certain that Kenrick was honestly concerned about young Andrew – an emotion Nash could cure him of without too much trouble.

Though he thought he was on the final run now, it was certainly not time to alienate Kenrick; on the contrary, it would be best to once more become indispensable to him – at least until he could perfect the ritual of Bonding without consent.

He laughed out loud at the thought of Bonding Kenrick and, shaking water from his hands, stood up in the bath, taking the towel Taymar had laid over a nearby chair. He stepped out of the tub and onto the thick rug in front of the roaring fire, no longer plagued by the cold as he’d once been. This body was not only better than before his injuries, but better than any he’d had before. Not a day went by when he didn’t notice.

Drying himself thoroughly, he pulled on a robe and poured a cup of wine. He went to his door then and called out for Taymar. A moment later, the familiar face appeared at the opposite end of the gallery, and Nash told him, ‘I want Valena in here. Now.’

As he waited, he carefully folded up his notes, sipping his wine and enjoying the warmth the bath had left through his entire body. Then two of his Malachi appeared at the door, Valena between them, now washed and dressed after her long and trying journey. Her eyes looked through him, as though he were made of the same glass as the gallery windows.

Without a word, his men took her through to his bedroom and he followed, leaving the papers on his table by the fire. Then he took a seat, refilled his wine and dismissed his men.

Valena waited with something that might have been patience if she’d cared at all. Instead, she found some place to rest her eyes and left them there, the only movement in her body that of her chest as it rose and fell with her breathing. The small scar on her cheek did little to mar her beauty; in fact, for him it served only to highlight it. Her golden hair, shiny and clean, swept over one shoulder and down to her waist.

She was the first woman he’d known, the first who had called his attention away from his destiny long enough to learn about the pleasures of
the flesh. A supreme seductress, even his iron will had bent before her beauty and the promise of delight it held. And not once had he been disappointed there either.

‘You know,’ he said, taking a last sip of his wine, ‘you have almost outlived your usefulness.’

She didn’t react, but he had not expected her to. He rose from his seat and put his cup down, then, standing before her, he held her face with one hand and examined her features, looking for the obvious signs of aging. There were few, not enough to make him regret.

‘I have to say, I admire your courage. I honestly had not thought you would last this long, but then, you were always determined, weren’t you?’ Nash smiled. ‘But then, so was I.’

He took her arm then, and led her to the bed. With little enough force, he pushed her down until she lay beneath him. He took her bound hands and tied them to the end of the bed, just in case, then proceeded to remove her clothes until all her smooth, creamy flesh was revealed to him.

Her belly, despite having borne a child, was as flat as he remembered it, no scar anywhere to suggest she wasn’t a girl of twenty and he her first man. Her eyes were open, gazing unseeing at the canopy above.

‘Where are you? Are you hiding from me? From this?’

When she did not answer, he slapped her face until she tore her gaze away and met his. She said nothing, but that small attention was all he wanted.

Or not quite all. He let his desire rise, his anger along with it, thrusting between her legs and into her, enjoying his own new body as much as hers. The pleasure was sweet indeed, but more so was her humiliation. Even as his pleasure peaked, he watched her face, saw her gaze flicker a moment, and that was enough for him.

Spent, he lay full length on top of her, his arms stretching out along hers, feeling the bonds holding her to the bed, to him. His teeth found the tender flesh along her shoulder and he bit down hard, drawing blood, tasting it. Not once did she move a muscle.

‘Fear not, my dear,’ Nash said with a smile. ‘I neither expected you to fight me, nor wished it. Withdrawing from me means nothing.’

‘And your entering me did?’ she whispered suddenly, a laugh in her voice he’d never heard before. ‘You are pathetic.’

He looked into the face that had been so withdrawn a moment ago; the effect of the drugs was clear in her eyes, but her will was by no means broken. ‘You think me pathetic, yet you lie there and let me use you, as you allowed so many other men over the years.’

Again she laughed, and the sound made him feel ill. ‘You are pathetic.
No real man would ever take a woman without her consent, for to do so proves that he would never gain that consent, never be good enough for her. You were never good enough for me, Sam. Never. That’s why I was content to share Selar’s bed, why, in the end, I had to go back to Luc. Do you know how long I’ve been expecting you to rape me like this? Since you took your own daughter’s blood in a greater rape than any you could perpetuate on my tired body. You think you can hurt me like this? You think making me submit to your men would break me? If you think so, then you are less than even I realised.’ Her laugh continued, and now he could feel it rattling through his body, unsettling him, setting him on fire in a completely different way.

With a growl, he caught hold of her face in both hands, and let that anger go, feeling it course through his new body with all the vengeance of the old, shaking him with the vicious power of it. He pushed it out through his fingers, his palms and let it join with her, listening to her screams as the balm to his hurts, enjoying it more than he’d ever enjoyed her body. Only when she fainted from the pain did he finally stop.

He rolled off her, grabbed his robe and threw open the door. His two Malachi were waiting for him.

‘Get everyone in here, now, every Bonded Malachi I own. Now. Go!’ As they ran down the gallery, they called out, and he listened to their voices as he poured another cup of wine, swallowing it all in one go. He was on his second when they arrived back, filling the gallery.

He stood before them, surveying their youth, their strength, and the promise of their undying efforts. He hated his own weakness for needing to remind them of their vow, but still he did so, shouting, ‘You must not forget, ever, no matter what else happens. I have your vow: while I survive, regardless of all else that is going on around you, you carry out my orders to the letter, sacrificing whatever you have to in order to achieve them. Do you understand? Do you?’

‘Yes, Master!’ They answered as one, in a single shout, the echo rattling down the gallery, but doing little to ease him.

He gestured to the bed in his room. ‘Get rid of her. Keep her alive, but I no longer care about her comfort. Use her if you wish, just make sure she lives until I’m ready to kill her.’

As his men turned for the bedroom, he headed for the nearest garderobe and emptied his supper down the smelly hole.

It was no longer a comfort to know he could kill her whenever he liked. He would have to find a more fitting way to exact his revenge.

A knife. They’d promised him a knife next time, that they’d cut him, slicing his skin apart, so he could bleed. At least he could breathe then, his skin could breathe, and that would let the pressure out because it was building too high in here, getting too dark and too stuffy. Now, when he rolled, the pain didn’t change, didn’t get worse, it just stayed the same, making him long for them to come back, long for the knife, the blade they’d promised as they laughed at him as he’d laughed back.

They were going to break him, that’s what they said, like a twig, snap him in two until he said anything they wanted him to say. He wanted to tell them, oh yes he did, that it was too late, that he’d been broken decades ago, by something they would dearly love to have but never would. He really wanted to tell them that it was too late, that he’d already been broken by an expert.

His head lolled back and he laughed around the gag. They put it back on now, to shut him up. He wanted to talk to them; they didn’t want to listen. He kept egging them on, telling them where to kick him, where it would hurt the most, where it would make him bleed – but they shut him up, like they didn’t want his advice, didn’t want to be told how to torture, that it was a skill at its best when self-taught.

They’d promised him the knife but they hadn’t brought it yet and that made them late. Late, late, late. Much too late. Well, he would just find some other way to make the pain flare and then he would go to sleep and damn them.

He lifted his head and cracked it back against the floor, feeling the pain rattle through him, welcome. He hissed in pleasure, diving into it where it was warmer than usual, he breathed in deeply, finding the demon and wrapping himself in it, so warm, so perfect, like when he’d killed Selar, when he’d simply let the demon run free and he’d put his sword into a man he’d once called friend and felt the blood flow through his fingers and into the ground.

The demon.
His
Enemy, as though born of his own private prophecy. That dank, sweating, slithering core of his soul that hated everything and everybody, that dogged him with its stinking righteousness, driving him on
further, holding him together, making him whole and torn apart at the same time.

He couldn’t live without it.

He started to laugh again, at the irony, the sweet, vicious inevitability of it all. The demon drove him to madness, yet kept him sane. The Prophecy had never seen that, had it? If he was going to be damned, why not for this as well? Failure was a skill he knew inside out and could repeat it at will.

Such a hopeless failure.

He laughed again. Too hot now, choking him, screaming through him with voices that didn’t belong to him. And then light, but they weren’t bringing the blade, though they’d promised … lifting him, talking to him, using words he was now beyond understanding.

But when they got him to his feet, when the blood cleared from his eyes, when they carried him between them, up stairs he’d never seen, into the darkness, past the witch who had betrayed him, when they ran through the night, holding him between them, when the pain rose up like a living, fire-breathing demon, he gasped and cried out for the first time. The movement stopped, but it was too late, then, too late, as the other darkness, the soft, welcoming darkness inside opened its arms and enveloped him.