By the Light of the Moon (29 page)

“What a little princess,” Brock teased, shaking his head at her dramatics. He picked up the knife again, leaving the mug discarded by their side and started to play with it absent-mindedly. He turned it this way and that, letting it glimmer in the firelight, balanced its blade on his finger. Moira couldn’t watch, in the end, she closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wall as she caught her breath and her heart rate began to return to normal.

When she tilted her head and uttered a little sleepy moan, Brock looked up with a grin.

“There we go, it usually comes in fast … ”

“What … what did you give me?” she asked, but instead of the protest she had tried to layer into her voice, she almost purred and smiled a little.

“Just a basic tonic, child, open your mind up to mine … dirty crossling as you are, you seem to possess a certain power; this makes it less painful.” Grinning, he touched her nose to make her smile again. Just a hint of his blood with the right ingredients and she was his little plaything, any mistrust vanishing.

“Why do you keep calling me that?” she asked pouting and pushing out her lips as she wrinkled her nose. “I’m clean, I promise!”

“Oh, you can bathe yourself, I’m sure,” Brock agreed. “But you are the offspring of Fae and Human. And those two should never mix. It’s against everything we believe in. Nowadays, it’s even against the law.”

Moira blinked, not quite understanding. What law? How did her wonderful Brock know all of this? She trusted him so much, and he had done so much for her … but how could he know? Had he seen her glow, too? Was this why he called her dirty? Because she disgusted him like she had disgusted Owain?

“I … I didn’t know,” she finally replied, almost tearfully. “I never … I’m sorry.”

“There, there … ” he whispered, cupping her cheek. “It’s not your fault. You are what you are. But you have to be honest with me, understand?”

Eagerly, Moira nodded. She’d do anything he asked without second thought but the very idea of lying to him was utterly insane.

“Good girl. Now, again … what do you know of your mother?”

“Father said, that she was a noblewoman who gave birth to me out of wedlock and brought me to him to raise and adopt as his alone.”

Brock eyed her for a long time and finally nodded.

“How about your sister?”

“I … I don’t have … I didn’t know I have a sister but … I would … I would love to meet them. Do you know them, Brock?” The hopeful and innocent tone in her voice made him chuckle quietly and he patted her cheek again.

“Your mother is a wanted criminal, my dear. And your sister … well, your sister tried to poison you.
Remember that
.”

Iris had walked for as long as she could, had walked against stones and tree trunks and she knew she was bleeding from her forehead. It had felt like a branch at the time, but she couldn’t be sure. For a while, she had felt it dribbling hot down the side of her nose, but now it was frozen like the rest of her.

Finally, she had given up. There was no honor in it and she didn’t have beautiful words in which to clothe it; she had given up. Her legs had stopped working and she had huddled against a tree trunk, curled herself into the smallest shape possible and wrapped herself tightly in her cloak. Names and faces flashed through her mind; Moira, Maeve, the Blaidyn. In the moments where she felt even more like punishing herself, she tried to work out the likelihood that each of them had of being alive the next day, the next week. She knew her likelihood and it wasn’t good. She was old and weak and she would sit there until the frost would take her; a death as ignominious as the life she’d led.

One thing she realized was that people were wrong. There was nothing gentle about dying of cold. The frost had wormed itself into every particle of her skin, it had infected her blood, painfully numbing one inch at a time. Her toes went first, prickling and hurting so much she howled into the wind. Where was shame in a dark night far away from anyone to see or hear?

Her eyes were closed against the cold. There was no difference in visibility one way or another and it hurt less. She could almost imagine she was far away, that she had never come into this cursed fief, had never met her mother, never known she had a sister, never signed her over to death or torture. Absentmindedly, she brushed over the scars of her own ritual again, the fine white line that ran from her wrist along her arms and branched out into every part of her body. Maybe death would be preferable. If it was swift.

This one wasn’t, she was beginning to understand. It wouldn’t have suited her life, she supposed, if it were.

She found it near impossible to say how long her ordeal had lasted already. If she hadn’t known with any certainty that the night could not be longer than eight or nine hours, she would have thought it might have been lasting for days, alone in the freezing dark. A nightmare from which she would not awake.

The wind was the worst, she decided. Not only did it keep blowing her scarf around, constantly finding ways to blow snowflakes against her ears and neck, but it was loud and strange in the trees. It could sound like the cry of an animal or a child’s plea for help. The next moment it was a flute or a harp, or the song she had sung herself to sleep to when she was a little girl, years and years ago.

It was cruelest, when it sounded like her mother. Iris’s relationship to Maeve had always been difficult; her unsteady Fae nature unable to give a hurt human girl everything she needed. It had never quite stopped. Maeve was never the same place, she was always hiding, sometimes with Iris for a few days but she had never been a steady presence in her life. She existed, she wasn’t bad, but she wasn’t the kind of mother other people had. Over the years, the pain of this had grown into a vague bitterness but sitting there in the snow at the brink of death, even just imagining her voice made her cry and the tears made her face hurt more.

“Iris, get up!” the voice said again, this time actually forming words. Confused, Iris opened her eyes. Snow had caked her lashes together but when she forced them apart, she could suddenly see. The snow was illuminated in a golden glow, swirling around a solitary figure and a shadow behind her.

“Get up,” the voice urged again, now reaching for her hand and pulling her to her feet. For a moment, her body found it almost impossible to get back up and out of its curled-up shape, but then Maeve pulled her into her arms, golden and warm.

“Shhhh, you’re all right. Everything is all right, I’ve got you,” she whispered, kissed her frozen cheek and simply held her skinny and shaking form. Iris, as old as she was, cried again. A mother’s embrace too powerful even then to leave her dry. Sniffing, she shook her head.

“I thought … I thought Brock … ”

“Not yet.” Maeve whispered, rubbing her daughter’s arms. “He’s going after Moira first; he knows I’ll come to him then. Come on, we have to get back to the castle.”

In any other condition, Iris might have refused but her mother was glowing like an angel sent from above to save her and she would have followed her anywhere, even back to the heavens if she so chose.

“I don’t know if I can walk very far,” she admitted sniffing but Maeve smiled at her, still the angel, and whistled once. The shadow appeared again and when it came closer it was a horse’s nose, nudging Maeve’s shoulder gently.

“I’ll help you up.”

There was no shame anymore in being lifted onto a horse by a woman so much younger and softer in appearance than herself. Iris knew the strength her mother possessed by the sheer grace of her kind. The horse was warm around her thighs but Maeve was more so and Iris slung her arms around her mother’s waist unashamedly, leaning her cold cheek against her shoulder.

“How did you know?” she asked when Maeve was guiding the horse back onto the path and up the hill.

“You’re my daughter. I know things,” Maeve replied a little louder, tension in her bearing. Even in her half-frozen state, Iris could tell. “I came as fast as I could. We have to hurry, too. He’s got Moira.”

Iris nodded, trying to breathe. Brock’s warning was deep within her and she shuddered.

“He has my blood,” she said as quietly as she dared and Maeve didn’t answer for a while until she nodded. “We can … work around that,” she managed and exhaled deeply. “Do you know a way into the castle? I’m sure he has it protected and he’ll know we’re there the moment I use magic.”

Iris’s head was still sluggish. Her mother’s touch worked but they both knew that a Fae was not as strong in dispensing magic when away from home for too long and Maeve had not been
Across
in many, many years.

“Not a secret one,” she offered still shivering. “But the guardsmen know who I am. I’m sure they’d let me back in if I said Sir Fairester sent me back with a message or to retrieve something of his.”

Maeve nodded. “Worth a try. I’ll have to stop the glow, any disguise that would help. I won’t be able to change it until we’re right upon him.”

“One of his soldiers?” Iris asked after a while. What else was there? It would make her own story more believable and it might help them move through the castle without much trouble.

Maeve nodded, gently directing the horse up the serpentines that led to the Keep. Iris realized with a note of dejection that she hadn’t even made it halfway to the village.

“Do you know the Blaidyn who protects her?” Maeve asked next, and Iris couldn’t help but feel a little hurt again. One daughter saved, and her mother’s mind was now completely on planning Moira’s rescue.

“The Blaidyn?” Iris asked, shaking her head. “Not really, I stayed away from him. He was the one who stopped Fairester using the draught. They took him into a cell, I think. But we left before … ”

Maeve cursed.

“Wha … why?” Iris asked. She sniffed again and her head hurt. She wanted a bed and a safe place to cook a draught to pick herself back up. Instead, she was still in the snow, riding a horse and planning a rescue.

“We need him,” Maeve explained with a shrug and Maeve whimpered a little when she suddenly turned down the glow and changed in front of her eyes into the towering figure of a soldier. “He’s strong, and he’s sworn to protect her. Plus … ” The Maeve-soldier had a deep voice and swayed his head. “It doesn’t matter, I think there’s more.”

Even Maeve could see the lit towers of the Bramble Keep now. Unexpectedly, it filled her with a sense of calm and safety. Her feelings couldn’t be more wrong, of course, but it was a building and it had fires and her mother was with her this time, strange as she looked.

• • •

With his eyes closed, Owain’s facial muscles twitched from time to time; his nose, his cheeks, his ears, even his mouth. Nothing about it looked human at all, but nobody was watching. Titling his head this way or that, he tried to listen, tried to catch a scent so hard, his ears were ringing with the myriad of other sounds that made up the nightly castle, so intense, he could hardly distinguish between sounds and sights and smells anymore. The scratching of a rat in the corner flashed through his head like bright lightning, the smell of year-old straw he had been able to block out so easily an hour ago was now providing a yellowish hue to everything else he heard or smelled.

He was just too far away. A long time ago, he’d heard her name called several times, but she never answered. At some point he thought she had, but it was so quiet and so low, he wondered if he had made it up in his fevered longing mind just to catch a sound of her. But for so long now, he hadn’t heard a single thing.

He knew better than to think she was sleeping; it hadn’t been the evening after which she could sleep. He should have heard her walking around, plucking her lyre, maybe crying. But there was nothing and as much as he told himself that he was just too far down in the bowels of the building, the bad feeling that had taken hold of his stomach a while ago just grew into a tense panic in his gut.

Finally, he opened his eyes with a grunt of frustration. They flashed wolfishly silver through the small cell and landed on the distracting vermin feasting on the specks of gruel left in the bowl he’d been given a while ago. From one second to the next, Owain’s face contorted in anger, and anger grew into something more, a muzzle and sharp teeth for the flash of a second in which his chest exploded in a dangerous growl.

The rat scurried out between the iron bars and Owain’s face turned back to normal, tired and frustrated, his hands balled to fists. He know that it was entirely possible he was obsessing about Moira’s safety because it distracted him from his own rather uncomfortable position, but he doubted it. He had spent nights captured before, had spent a whole month in a foreign dungeon once, tortured for information on his captain’s strategies. This was nothing and they were only humans; badly trained ones, at that. He doubted that Lord Rochmond would call for his head, but even if he did, Owain had little doubt he could tear through the guards’ ranks and to freedom.

He could have done it now, really. The metal rods were sturdy but he could see where their setting in the stone was old and cracking here and there. If he did that, however, he would never see Moira again. Never. He would never have the chance to tell her how sorry he was and she would remember him as the wolf who stole her maidenhood and humiliated her, repaid her love with spite and disgust.

His face flashed hot and red with shame at the mere thought of it now. He’d had reasons then, but whatever the reasons had been — he had never behaved as abominably to a woman, as he had that night. And he’d had to behave like it to the one woman, the one incredible girl, who made him feel like no one else, brand new as though his long life, his disappointments and failures had never happened, or happened to another Owain in the distant past. He ached for her now, ached for just a single sound, just a note of her scent, but either were denied him by distance and heavy stone.

Finally, he closed his eyes again and leaned his head against the rough wall. Morning would dawn and he would know his fate, morning would dawn and he would hear her again, somewhere. And not all was lost, he knew. He had heard her answer to Deagan Fairester’s proposal and it had made his chest swell warmly. He had also heard the nobleman’s guards march out of the entrance hall in rank and file and that, too, had made him smile. Both, however, now seemed like hours ago and as much as he tried, he couldn’t dispel the gut feeling that something was horribly wrong. His wolf knew it, too, howling in his chest, wanting to pace the cell like a caged lion in a Carnivalé. Owain spared him that indignity, but he felt the same need to rattle the cages and tell someone to just check on her, just make sure she was all right.