The Wolf's Captive (12 page)

The jailer had turned to study Cesare’s reaction as he entered. He grunted again, apparently unsatisfied, and spat into an empty cell.

“He’s down near the end,” the little man said, and walked forward, dragging his keys across the bars of each passing cell in a clanging chorus. Cesare was appalled to hear him humming.

The dungeon only got darker and damper, and the skittering sounds of fleeing vermin only louder and lazier, as they walked farther down the dirty passageway. There were cells off to either side, small stone boxes, only a few with small, grated openings to the outside world, high up near the ceiling. Once they passed an opening to another tunnel, one that led to someplace even darker and fouler than this one. That was where the permanent prisoners were kept, Cesare knew, though there weren’t many. His father favored executions.

The jailer stopped, and pointed into the gaping maw of darkness.

“That’s it,” he said. “He’s in there.”

Cesare could hardly see anything. The weak light from the ill-fed torch cut a dim triangle across the bars of the cell; a foot farther in, and it was pitch black. Something scurried in the dark. It was too big to be a rat.

“Leave us,” Cesare said. “I’d like to speak to him alone.”

“Is that right?” The jailer couldn’t hold back his contempt. The mixture of anger and fear was palpable.

“Please,” Cesare added.

The jailer grunted again, and averted his eyes downward. “I’ll be back at the front, then.”

Cesare watched the little man walk away, clanging the bars of the cells as he walked back to his post. Too late he considered who really paid the jailer—or who paid the jailer the most—and if it was someone who’d pay even more to have Lord Cesare Lupin locked up in the dungeon until he was unrecognizable, or dead. No one knew he’d come here, after all. The thought should have frightened him, but Cesare had the odd feeling that if he were kept away from Lucia Lyselle, there would come a point when the jailer’s door would not prove much of an obstacle. Of course, at that point, he might not even be recognizable to himself.

So he would take care of this obligation quickly. And then he would find a way to keep Lucia.

“Prisoner,” Cesare said, as gently as he could.

There was a dry cackle, ending in a cough. Something scrambled from one side of the cell to the other.

“Do you have a name?” Cesare asked.

A voice from the dark said, “‘Course I got a name. Not givin’ it to you.”

Cesare started. The voice had spoken with an accent he’d heard before, in the mountains. This was not a man from J’Amel.

“Why don’t you come forward into the light?” he asked. “I came to make sure you aren’t being mistreated.”

Again, that dry, hacking laughter. “‘Course I’m bein’ mistreated. It’s a dungeon. That’s the point.”

“I’d like to make sure it doesn’t get much worse.”

The silence was filled only by dripping water.

“You upset ‘im, did you?” the voice finally said.

“Not intentionally.”

“Well, t’wouldn’t be very hard.”

There was a sigh, and Cesare heard the sound of something being dragged across the rough stone floor of the cell. Slowly, the prisoner pulled himself into the light and then up to the bars. It was his leg he dragged behind him, limp at the end and useless. It would have made him easy to catch, although Cesare knew the mountain tribes wouldn’t want to have much to do with a cripple, either. More likely this man had been a forager, a scrounger, either living off scraps or some sort of skill that made him tolerable to the villages under J’Amel’s control and protection.

For the man was undoubtedly a Berkari barbarian.

The telltale tattoos on his face were incomplete, probably only half-finished before his injury. He must not have any family. Or one of the patrols had picked him out as an easy catch and brought him in for a bounty.

That is, if he’d been injured
before
he’d met the jailer.

Cesare cleared his throat. “Is that your only injury?”

But the Berkari prisoner was staring at him with narrowed eyes. “You’re the heir, ain’t you? I saw you once, riding out of J’Amel. The great scourge, Cesare Lupin. That’s what we called you.”

Cesare remained silent. He was the scourge of the Berkari. It wasn’t often one of them lived to call him that.

“And now the scourge wants to know if I’m injured! They tell children stories about you, to make ‘em act good, and now you want to know if I’m injured!”

The dry laughter shook his thin body until tears streamed down his dirty cheeks. Cesare’s jaw began to work back and forth, and he felt the rage begin to build within him, like a heated column of wrath rising inexorably from his belly to his mind. There was the new feeling, the beast, scraping away at his insides, howling for release, but not all of it was new. He had felt that wrath plenty of times before, hunting down Berkari raiding parties, and he’d made his reputation by unleashing it on any he found in his path.

That wasn’t the only place he’d felt it. It had a longer history than that.

The prisoner’s laughter stabbed at him, a furious series of pinpricks, all because here was the great, lumbering monster, trying to play at human decency. He had heard laughter like that a million times before. As a child, he couldn’t defend himself, but he was no longer a child.

Cesare lunged forward, his huge hands rattling the bars in their ancient settings.

“I am not a monster,” he shouted.

The Berkari didn’t move. Perhaps there was nothing left in the world that could scare him. The laughter stopped, only to be replaced by an alert curiosity. Instead of stepping back in fear, the prisoner leaned forward, putting his face as close to Cesare’s as he could.

Cesare himself was frozen, holding back the beast. It was getting harder and harder.

“
You’re
the heir?” the Berkari prisoner whispered. “You? But do they know what you are?”

Cesare gripped the bars until his knuckles drained white.

“Oh, high and mighty J’Amel!” The prisoner was laughing again, with wide-eyed wonder this time. He examined Cesare like one might look at an exotic exhibit. “It’s almost upon you now, ain’t it? Good thing there’s these bars here, hm? Still, can’t make you angry, can I? You just breathe real slow, my Lord Scourge. That’s right. Real slow.”

Cesare exhaled violently, spittle flying into the face of the unflinching prisoner. He was winning against…
it
. Slowly.

“Have you found her yet?” the prisoner asked. “You’ll know her if you do. You’ll know. If you’re lucky, she’ll love you back. Otherwise…”

“Otherwise what?” Cesare croaked.

The Berkari prisoner backed away from the bars, dragging his mangled foot back towards the dark, shaking his head the whole time.

“Poor bastard,” he muttered from the darkness. “Poor J’Amel.”

C
HAPTER 8

What are you?

The words had twisted themselves around Lucia’s mind like a poison weed. Lord Cesare’s final—and, she presumed, horrified—question had reverberated through out her whole being ever since he’d uttered it. Even as nameless servants had arrived to clothe her, even as she was led, blind, through ancient catacombs, even as she was bundled into the most luxurious coach she’d ever seen and taken to a giant townhouse in the heart of J’Amel, she thought:
What did he see? What am I?

Can I be so horrible?

And yet, she had been treated like a queen. Well, she assumed that she had; she had no real knowledge of what queens did. And she was not, if she were being honest, treated precisely like someone who was perfectly free to come and go as she chose. Avignon, Lord Cesare’s valet and the only one to introduce himself, made sure there was always someone close by. She hadn’t even had a chance to smuggle the bottle of the Duke’s Blend somewhere safe. She’d been sitting at the table, the tablecloth wrapped around her, trying to figure out how she would get it out of the locked room when Lord Cesare’s servants had come for her. She couldn’t risk anyone actually looking in the bag, so she’d left it where it was, buried in that crevice.

And now she was here, in a high-ceilinged library of ancient, dark wood, surrounded by endless walls of books. After being gently bathed by more silent, helpful servants, she’d been dressed in some sort of silken wrap that only increased her sense of unreality; she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe that there were people who wore things like this all the time. They’d even remembered to feed her a very pleasant, rich meal of duck flavored with oranges.

No one except Avignon had answered her questions, or even acknowledged that she’d asked them. It was the strangest thing, as though she were only a doll, afflicted with the delusion that she could speak.

And it had all been Lord Cesare’s doing—she was sure of it. Avignon had been in the background at the Dance of Seasons; he was undoubtedly a trusted confidant. So the man who’d run away from her after seeing her laid bare had provided for all this care and comfort.

It didn’t make sense.

Neither did it make sense that thoughts of Lord Cesare would make her wet between her legs again. She should be furious. She was furious. And crushed. And ashamed that she’d allowed herself to be so open, and that the result had been exactly what her grandmother had always said it would be. And yet, despite all that…

She shifted on the settee, her thighs brushing together. It reminded her of where Lord Cesare had touched her. She wasn’t nearly as sore as she thought she would be, and already her body was coming alive at the thought of him, just as it had every time she’d thought of him since the Dance of the Seasons, when he’d saved her from Paolo Ramora.

Paolo, who she couldn’t even bring herself to hate anymore, since he had been the reason she’d ended up bent over a table with Lord Cesare inside her.

Paolo…

With a start, Lucia realized she’d been set up.

Paolo had led her to Lord Cesare. Lord Cesare,
the
Lord Cesare, heir to the Ducal seat, had arranged for someone she knew to lure her to that cavern, where he’d then trapped her and had his way with her. With her eager encouragement, yes, but how could he have known? How could he know she would follow Paolo?

Why bother? Why arrange the abduction of a poor vintner’s daughter?

None of it made sense, but Lucia was quickly becoming accustomed to the hard reality that life was under even less obligation to be sensible than it was to be fair. And if Paolo Ramora were no longer a realistic prospect, she would need Lord Cesare’s help more than ever. She would have to make Lord Cesare love her, or at least want her, if she wanted to be sure of his aid, and her family’s future. She had to do whatever she could to get her poor father out of prison, at the very least. And that meant being whatever Lord Cesare wanted. It meant hiding whatever part of herself had caused him to run.

Her grandmother had been right.

Lucia quelled the familiar pain that came with that realization, and rose instead from the settee with a newfound determination. She did a quick inventory of the massive library. She would need to be well informed. A library of this size was bound to have several volumes on the Berkari, the perennial threat from the mountains that had occupied Cesare for the past several years. Perhaps not just occupied, Lucia thought, remembering the graffiti from the outside the amphitheater. The rumor was that Lord Cesare had gone native among the Berkari, picking up strange customs and mannerisms. After her own experience, she could well believe it. He had been barbaric, even beastly, in a way.

But you loved it,
she thought. True, but not helpful. She frowned, and focused on the task at hand.

She found what she was looking for in one dark corner, practically invisible to the casual eye. She had to get on her knees to read the title.
The Berkari Tribes, Legends and Lore.
It was actually the only one she could find that didn’t have to do with military tactics or history, which would have been gibberish to her, and when she dragged the heavy tome off the shelf, she discovered that the servants didn’t feel the need to dust the tops of the books that no one was likely to be much interested in.

After she finished coughing, Lucia hefted the book to the desk and set about reading. She had just gotten to a very interesting part when the shouting started.

It was the first thing to break the strange, dreamlike atmosphere of the entire experience. Someone was shouting in rage, and it was coming from somewhere out in the great hall. Lucia left her book and moved closer to the library door, kept open an inch so Avignon or whomever could politely monitor her.

When she heard the word ‘Lyselle,”’ clear as day, she flew back as if she’d been struck.

In a moment, the precariousness of her position came rushing back to her. Her father was under arrest for some unknown crime, some trouble with the Guild or the tax collectors, and she had fled from the Duke’s soldiers. And she had stolen a bottle of the Duke’s Blend. And now someone was shouting her family name in Lord Cesare’s house.

The voices were getting louder and more urgent. She could clearly hear Avignon’s among them, but his efforts did not keep the invaders at bay. Whoever it was that screamed for ‘Lyselle,’ they were coming to the library.

Lucia looked around, desperate and frightened. There were many places to sit, or stand fashionably, while reading a book, or pretending to, and an altogether frustrating surplus of lamps, all of which seemed to burn particularly bright at the moment. She was at a loss.

The desk.

Lucia ran for the huge desk where she’d laid out the book on Berkari legends, and crawled into the hollow meant for its owner’s legs. She curled into a ball, clasped her legs to her chest, and closed her eyes.

She was just in time. The doors to the library burst open and crashed against the stone walls.