Captivity (28 page)

Dominic, assured of my safety, lifted me
easily in his arms, along with my sleeping son, and carried us out
of the stinking room that had been my prison for five days. My
husband’s arms held me close as he climbed the stairs and passed
through the great hall and entrance, and I never actually saw the
bodies that I had viewed through others’ eyes. As Jana had done
earlier, I buried my face in Dominic’s neck and did not open my
eyes until we were outside, when I promptly shut them again. It was
early afternoon, bright sun. I had spent five days and nights in
the dark. Like a newborn kitten, I would need time to adjust to
sunlight and fresh air. The cool mountain breeze felt like
rainwater on my face and hair, the light probing my deepest
secrets.

“You’ll feel better after the eclipse,”
Dominic said.

Out in the front clearing, the rest of the
Aranyi troops had assembled. Someone had retrieved the captured
Aranyi and Ormonde horses, including Jana’s little pony. All the
animals were looking starved and listless, like me, but they were
already snorting with pleasure at the familiar hands and smells of
their caretakers.

Jana ran to her own mount. “Topaz,” she
crooned his name to him, stroking the matted mane and the soft
muzzle as he bent to snuffle at her hair, “Topaz, did they tell you
I was dead?” The pony lifted and lowered his head a few times as
Jana petted him, seeming to answer her worried questions in the
affirmative. Jana patted his neck. “But you see it was just a lie,
to make you afraid. I’m all right, and we’re going home.”

Several of our men had been wounded, from the
arrows earlier, and during the conventional fighting. Only two were
seriously hurt — Wilmos, my housekeeper’s son, and an Ormonde
guard, a young dark-haired man with an open, handsome face that
looked familiar. I remembered him now, kneeling in the dusty trail
when we were captured, Reynaldo making a lewd remark. The front
line, the place of honor and redemption, had taken its toll. My
eyes filled with tears, thinking of all the lives I had put in
jeopardy with my careless act. Thankfully, neither man looked
mortally wounded. Both were conscious, if immobilized, their
comrades having laid them on pieces of the planking that had saved
them from the arrows, using the boards now as stretchers.

As Dominic approached carrying two of the
human trophies—me and Val—of this rescue mission, all the men who
could bowed low. Some called out encouragement to me and the
children, expressing their pleasure at our safe deliverance. I
tried to answer them, as Dominic would have, but my mouth was dry,
my throat swollen, and I choked. Dominic answered for me, squeezing
my arm gently as he spoke the proper words of thanks.
Beloved
, he thought to me,
let me be your body and your
voice, until you are strong again
. I had only to think my
acceptance and gratitude to him, my eyelashes brushing his neck, as
I blinked in the unaccustomed light.

Ranulf stood waiting with his bloody burden
slung across the back of the most stolid, imperturbable of the
horses. Groans and whimpers, punctuated by phlegmy gasps, broke the
awkward silence, but the wounded Aranyi men were stoically silent.
It was Reynaldo who made the sounds that sent shivers down my
spine, forcing me to lift my face involuntarily to seek their
source. I glimpsed the terrible bloody mask of his noseless face
before I had a chance to prepare myself, then shut my eyes and
cowered against Dominic’s shoulder as before.

Dominic sidled up to Ranulf, keeping my back
to the thing on the horse so that I would not have to see it again
even by accident. Ranulf handed something to Dominic. “I found this
on him, my lord.”

Even without Dominic’s startle, I knew what
it was—my prism-handled dagger, taken from me at the start of my
captivity.

Dominic thanked Ranulf and placed the
sheathed dagger in my hands. He said nothing to me. Dread and
disappointment ran through us both in our communion in a roiling
wave, soon displaced by Dominic’s cold rage. I felt the first
stirrings of my returning power, the faint hope that all might
someday be as it was before. Deeper emotions were impossible.

“I am taking ‘Gravina Aranyi and the children
to our camp,” Dominic said to Ranulf. “Put that piece of shit in
the rear of the convoy, and make sure it is always out of sight of
every member of my family.”

When Ranulf positioned himself like a screen
in front of the prisoner, Dominic thanked him again, propping me
against his hip and resting one hand on the man’s broad shoulder. I
could feel the affection and respect between my husband and his old
lieutenant, the warmth that radiated up from Dominic’s hand, along
his arm and into me, through his pumping heart.

Dominic carried me and Val a long way, to the
Aranyi encampment beyond the edge of the castle’s grounds, several
yards within the cover of the encircling forest. Niall, true to
Dominic’s promise, followed closely with Jana. It was cooler and
darker in the woods, more protected. There were a few canvas tents
pitched on grassy areas, but Dominic laid us down on a blanket that
Niall spread beneath the branches of a tall tree. My husband knew I
had had enough of darkness and close quarters. Jana sat beside me
and her brother, clutching my arm, looking constantly from me to
Dominic, as if to assure herself that we were really here,
together, alive.

In the light of day Dominic and I regarded
each other. His face grew dark and angry as he took in the full
extent of my degradation—the excrement and vomit and wet straw that
encrusted the dress, the louse bites and typhus rash that showed on
my face and the skin of my neck and chest. “You’re filthy, Amalie,”
he said, trying to make a joke of it, the quivering of his lips
betraying him.

“So are you,” I said, looking at his leather
coat stained with blood. Bits of flesh, and guts and brains,
mottled the buff background with brown, off-white and gray.
Spatters of the stuff mingled with the soot on his face in a muddy
stew. His usually springy hair lay flattened and ashy against his
scalp.

Dominic put both hands on the flimsy fabric
of the sorry rag of a dress and ripped it from top to bottom. My
exposed body, red spots standing out starkly against white skin,
ribs sharp and prominent, stomach unnaturally concave, made Dominic
catch his breath. The bruises from Reynaldo’s testing of the
reality of my death last night, the booted foot slamming into my
side, were beginning to show dark purple-black, a more vivid
version of the fading marks on my face where Reynaldo had hit me,
days ago. Dominic stared somewhere in the direction of my navel,
third eyelids lowered over eyes focused unseeing. Silver turned
slowly to clear glass starting with the area around the pupils,
forming circles like zeros in the household accounts which slowly
enlarged to the size of peas, continuing to grow until his eyes
were like two bottomless mountain lakes of icy water.

My love
, I thought to him,
I’m
cold
. The summer air wafted over my nakedness, raising goose
bumps. In the mountains, even at midday, the chill of the night
snow never completely dissipates.

Dominic blinked, crying in instinctive
communion, brought back to me out of his murderous rage. He
unbuckled his sword belt and his dagger strap and laid them on the
grass, unbuttoned the leather coat and the Aranyi wool tunic and
dropped them beside the weapons. Under his shirt, worn next to the
skin, was Dominic’s prism-handled dagger. He took it from its
sheath and held it up, just as the first bite of the eclipse began
to darken the sky.

For the first time in five days I lowered my
inner eyelids, not to privation and darkness, but to sustenance and
light. I worshipped the eclipse with my entire body instead of in
the usual way, with face and hands and voice. The shafts of
sunlight, bending around the corona in peculiar angles, dropped
into me like egg yolks and goats’ milk. And I kept my own prism
covered beside me while Dominic did the work of healing.

Jana watched in admiration as Dominic ran his
fingers over my skin, the dagger in his left hand, angling the
light of the eclipse into his eyes, soothing the sores and healing
the bruises. He untied the crude bandage on my wrist, traced a
fingertip along the line of the incision and saw that it was
closing cleanly. Dominic has had only battlefield training as a
healer, but his touch has always done me good. The warmth of his
love enveloped me while he worked. My shivering ceased as the fever
subsided and the sun emerged from shadow.

When Dominic had done what he could for me,
he removed his shirt, propped me up to pull the garment over my
head, guiding my arms into the sleeves the way Isobel or I dress
Val in the morning. The linen, damp with Dominic’s sweat, was soft
and light against my irritated skin, fresh and clean after the
putrid dress. Dominic rolled up the long sleeves until my hands
emerged and drew the shirttails down over my thighs to my knees,
trembling with his recent memories.

“I dare not bathe you yet, beloved,” Dominic
said. “The stream is ice water.” No one had had time to light a
fire, nor had anyone brought any utensils large or sturdy enough to
heat water. Bathing and cooking are for long campaigns, not for
forced-march emergencies.

Dominic lifted my head to give me sips of
that sweet ice water, waiting while I adjusted to the numbing feel
of it in my throat. He brought coarse brown bread and
strong-smelling hard cheese from the scrip at his waist. As with
the similar food the miner had offered me earlier, eating such
heavy fare loomed in my imagination as a huge, insurmountable
obstacle. My digestion was the last of my body’s systems to revive.
“No, Dominic,” I said. “I can’t.”

My husband stared, my refusal to eat proving
to him, beyond any other single factor, how desperate my condition
was. He saw in my memories the food I had rejected before, again
tried to joke. “I know you’re sick, beloved, when you won’t eat
spiced sausage or cheese.” He gave a double portion to Jana who
tore into the bread like a starving wolf and almost threw the
cheese down her throat. Val, still oblivious, dozed throughout.

Niall, unclear as to the extent of Dominic’s
new concern for female nudity, but suspecting that a naked ‘Gravina
Aranyi was not a suitable sight for him under any circumstances,
had kept his distance, searching the Aranyi camp, until I was
dressed again. He returned with more blankets he had found among
the baggage and watched as Dominic wrapped me up and swaddled Val.
“Very nice,” said, looking not at me or my son, but at Dominic’s
bare chest.

Dominic bent to put on his black tunic, but
stopped halfway. Seeing Niall’s unconcealed admiration, Dominic
lowered his eyelids in a sideways glance of communion and picked up
the sorry remnants of the girl’s dress instead. Laying them safely
on a patch of bare earth, Dominic incinerated them with one
pointing finger of his outstretched hand. Jana allowed a brief
close-mouthed smile to illuminate her stricken face as the wisps of
wool went up in smoke.

Jana had dogged her father’s every step, but
resumed her place by my side as soon as we were settled again. My
husband looked down at his daughter in her torn and soiled shirt
and breeches, her short hair hanging in jagged clumps around her
battered face. He smiled with difficulty, not wishing to frighten
her further with too much sympathy for wounds that were not,
strictly speaking, serious. Cradling a cheek, he used his gift to
relieve the worst effects from the black eye and Reynaldo’s
knock-out blow of last night. Remembering how often she had chafed
at the restrictions of long skirts and the burden of long hair, he
thought of a way to restore his daughter’s spirits. “You can wear
shirt and breeches a little longer, cherie,” he said. “You have
been both daughter and son to me today.”

Jana scowled, blinking back tears. “No,
Papa,” she said. “I’m a girl. I want to wear my dress.”

Dominic looked helplessly at me. He had
brought nothing with him but the clothes he wore and his weapons.
Jana’s travel dress was back in the ruined castle, on the straw
under my cloak, where it had performed its last role, as stand-in
for Jana while she mingled with the bandit children, brought me
food and discovered bows and arrows. “You’re my girl,” I said. “It
doesn’t matter what you wear, you’ll always be my little girl.”

Niall laughed at Jana’s pathetic voice and
words. “Yes, my betrothed,” he said, “you’re a real damsel in
distress!” He stood next to Dominic as he ticked off Jana’s
contributions on his fingers. “It was this
girl
who saved us
all.
She
learned about the arrows.
She
tried to warn
me.
She
crippled that bastard when he tried to escape—”

“
No!
” Jana interrupted Niall’s
well-intentioned recital. “
No!
Papa
killed them all!”
She glared at Niall as if he had accused her of something shameful.
“
You
fought them.
You
rescued me.” She clung to me,
crying and shaking her head, all her natural fierceness devoted to
denying her own accomplishments.

Dominic and Niall exchanged worried glances.
But I understood my daughter, felt closer to her emotions at that
moment than I ever have, before or since. She was tired of being a
hero, that was all. She had been brave and tough and daring. But
she was not yet six years old and she needed to be a child again. A
girl child, with competent parents she could rely on to perform the
adult duties of protection and rescue, who could face down
anything, even death. I hugged her to me, her warmth permeating the
layers of blankets and Dominic’s shirt, and calmed her enough to
let me speak.

“Jana’s right,” I said. That got Dominic’s
attention, and Niall’s. They both started to argue with me. I
raised a weary hand, pointed to the two men. “No,
you
won
this battle.” I spoke to Jana. “
I
told Papa about the
arrows, and Papa told Niall. That’s how Niall knew to make the
shields. You see?” Jana’s face regained some serenity as I began
the long process of apology and explanation. “I pretended to be
dead so I could warn Papa with
crypta
, and Reynaldo would
think we didn’t know about the arrows.”