Captivity (29 page)

Dominic, attuned now to his child’s
sensibilities, joined in the effort. “Your mama’s telling the
truth, sweetheart,” he said. “She saved herself, as much as anyone.
Your mama and I, and my tough-talking companion here.” He put an
arm around his lover’s waist, laughed lovingly at Niall’s outraged
expression.

Niall, lacking a parent’s intuition, opened
his mouth to object, but Dominic stopped him with a kiss, a long,
intense grind of mouth on mouth as Dominic thought to his lover,
explaining the need to rebuild Jana’s shaky sense of security.
I
know
, Dominic thought to Niall.
I know the facts very well.
And I’m most thankful, most thankful, to have so valiant a champion
at my side…
His thoughts lost some of their coherence as desire
overtook them both.

Niall struggled at first, feeling
misunderstood, then returned Dominic’s kiss as he accepted Jana’s
peculiar, female, outlook. He pulled Dominic closer, melting into
his lover’s fierce embrace, pressing hip to hip, chest to chest.
They were hot for each other—I could feel it, the desire scorching
the air around them, burning me like the fever. Ever since the
press of battle, the brief kiss and greeting after the worst of the
fighting, their blood had been up, aroused by the sight of the
other, hearts pounding with the nearness, unable to do anything but
think, their passion growing with anticipation.

Jana giggled, seeing in the deep kisses, the
roving hands and heavy breathing incontrovertible evidence, more
reassuring than any words, of a return to blessed normality. She
found a loose end of blanket and pulled it over herself, rolling in
against my back, surrendering to untroubled sleep. Dominic and
Niall stumbled blindly toward a secluded copse and sank to their
knees. All around me the sounds of peace lulled me to sleep again:
the birds in the trees, the deep murmuring voices of my husband and
his companion, the soft breathing of my children, the wind rustling
branches overhead. I basked in dreamless unconsciousness as Val and
I went through the last restorative stages of our return from
death.

I woke to the sounds of real life intruding. While my
children and I slept, while Dominic and Niall made love, the rest
of the Aranyi men had arrived in camp. They had waited at the
outskirts while Dominic saw to me, had made dutiful efforts to keep
quiet for the sake of ‘Gravina Aranyi and her children. But there
was work to do and the men, like Dominic and Niall, needed release
from the days of tension. Freed from the care of their arrival when
the outcome had been still in doubt, no longer required to observe
watchful silence, they broke twigs underfoot, startled birds and
animals with their voices. Men coughed and laughed, reliving the
tense moments of the arrow attacks, the brief siege and briefer
battle, as they tramped in and out of the center of the encampment,
gathering wood, building the campfire, filling skins with water
from the stream, munching stale rations or heading off into the
deeper forest to set snares for small game.

Dominic and Niall emerged from their love
nest, arms entwined, bits of leaves and grass clinging to their
clothes and hair. When they saw the purposeful activity in camp,
they peeled themselves off each other with difficulty, as though
glued together with their love.

Ranulf waited until the separation was
complete before reporting to Dominic in a low voice. Dominic shook
his head in self-reproach as he listened. Through my woozy
contentment, I caught a little of the situation. There was much to
do while the daylight lasted. All the bandits must be beheaded, the
heads stuck on poles placed around the perimeter of the castle’s
territory, a warning to some, a comfort to the majority—the
law-abiding farm tenants and graziers—who would see evidence that
their lord had retaken control. Tents that were still folded must
be pitched for the night, food prepared and distributed, the
wounded cared for, the horses fed and watered. Most of it was well
under way, but it always takes the commander’s guiding hand to
ensure that everything is managed in an orderly and efficient
fashion.

Dominic rolled his eyes at Niall as if to
say, “What were we thinking?” while he buttoned his tunic over his
bare skin and buckled on his sword and dagger.

Love
, Niall answered him in thought,
resentful at the implied rejection of what had so recently been
desired.
We were thinking of love
. He sat down next to me,
his knees drawn up, and laid his head on his folded arms.

It was unlike Dominic, I realized, my thought
processes more acute after my nap, to surrender to desire while his
men worked. Perhaps Niall was too young and too caught up in his
emotions to feel it, but I knew that Dominic would look back on
this episode with shame.

I took a hand in a long circuitous journey
through the layers of blankets that enfolded me and rested my palm
lightly on Niall’s shoulder. Despite my gentleness Niall startled
at my touch. His body was shaking with fatigue—fatigue and
something else, something I had once dreaded to find, had stopped
worrying about for years.

In my groggy condition I had forgotten that
Niall, unlike his predecessor, had come to us a man and expected me
to keep a woman’s respectful distance. Now, unintentionally, I had
discovered a secret. Niall shrugged, glad of an excuse to unburden
himself. Pointing to the opened neck of his tunic and shirt, the
marks where teeth and long thin fingers had bit and pressed,
leaving angry red welts that would darken to black and purple, he
searched my face before thinking his question, choosing his words
carefully.
Is he always this– intense
after a battle?
If Dominic’s rough treatment was simply the after-effect of the
violence of combat, a common occurrence among soldiers, Niall might
not read too much into this one incident.

The last battle of any consequence had been
six years ago, before my marriage. I had never accompanied my
husband on campaign; it was unthinkable. Only one person could
answer Niall’s question.
You’d have to ask Stefan
. I said,
remembering only how Dominic’s relationship with that young man had
proved to my husband that such violence was within his power to
control.

Niall’s face shut down, along with his
crypta
. Like me, he felt Dominic still held inappropriately
strong feelings for a former lover. “Compare notes, you mean?” he
said in a tight voice. “I’m not complaining. Merely curious.” He
was scared, and too young and too used to being able to handle
everything thrown at him, to know what to do.

As if I did, I thought, the first threads of
fear beginning to weave their pattern in my mind. There was a sound
in my head: crying, begging for mercy, sibilant whispers rising
suddenly to screams. It embodied all my own fears, but it was
external. Laughter was interspersed with the moaning sobs—cruel,
deranged laughter, with a feral note to it, like the cry of a
hunting hawk, yet resonant, almost musical.

Dominic
. The laughter was Dominic’s,
the pleading cries Reynaldo’s. Dominic was torturing his captive
already, had not waited until we were back in Aranyi. My husband
was playing with Reynaldo as any cat will with the mouse or bird it
has caught, cannot save such a fascinating toy for later, but must
pat it with the soft paw that conceals the sharp claws, must watch,
with the merciless, intent gaze of the luminous eyes in the
handsome face, its frantic attempts to save itself.

I stared up as a long shadow fell to see
Dominic standing over us. As I had suspected, he had come to regard
his interlude of love as dereliction of duty and was eager to make
his co-conspirator share some of the blame. “Niall,” he said,
“every other unwounded man is working.”

I gasped, hearing the unchanged background
noise. The pleading and cruel laughter had not subsided. They were
as strong as ever while Dominic, his face still and austere, chided
Niall like any other subordinate for shirking his duty. The game of
torture was taking place all within the world of
crypta
, in
the back of Dominic’s brain, while the front carried on with all
the minutiae of daily life: of being a ‘Graven lord, commanding
officer and the responsible head of a family. It was hard to say if
Dominic even knew what the back half of his mind was doing. But the
inner eyelids, almost completely glass again, gave it away.

The clear, soulless spheres turned to me at
my gasp. My blood, depleted from wounds and lack of nourishment,
threatened to turn to water. “Dominic.” I spoke loudly, to cut
through the moaning and the fiendish giggling that continued to
occupy the telepathic sensors of my mind. “Dominic, Niall and I are
tired.”

Amalie
. The telepathic voice was warm
and soft.
Amalie, beloved.
I felt the contrast as Dominic
turned some of his thoughts to me, experienced the wave of relief
that washed over Reynaldo as the torture slackened.

I knew I must keep Dominic’s attention
diverted toward me. The longer things went on in this way, the
harder it would become to break through to Dominic’s sane self.
“Dominic, I think I can eat now, once supper is ready. And Jana
must be famished. Aren’t you, love?” I nudged my daughter. Jana sat
up, rubbing her eyes. She nodded at my question, too tired to tell
whether she was hungry, but knowing from my tone of voice what the
answer was supposed to be.

Dominic struggled in silence, caught between
the two poles, love and hate, mercy and cruelty, healing and
torture, his face a mask concealing the battle within. The silver
of self-control gained a beachhead around the edges of his eyes,
grew to a strip of shoreline, but was pushed back by the waves of
the defending enemy of glass. Once again the claws were extended to
snag in the open wounds of the prey, the desperate pleading and the
gloating laughter resumed.

It was me, in a way. As much as I had the
power, by virtue of our strong love, to pull Dominic back from the
edge of madness, yet each time he saw me was a reminder of the
reason for revenge. My presence, physically or in his mind, would
bring Dominic to his senses, only to return him, reeling with fury,
to the slow torment of his victim, as he saw the bruises and the
thinness, felt the fever and the sores on the body of his wife, his
second self. He was doing his duty after all, and his honor was at
stake. If he enjoyed his work, in the way of a hunting cat, so much
the better.

There was another struggle, not within
Dominic, or me, but beside me. His mother’s movements and speech
woke Val to indignant awareness that he had gone much longer than
was proper without the usual comforts. “Let me out,” he said,
finding himself trapped in a scratchy woolly cocoon. As I uncovered
his head and freed his arms he saw Niall at eye level. “Greetings,
little man,” Val said in the accent of the miners.

Niall, exhaustion taking over, fear and
jealousy forgotten, rolled on the ground with laughter.
“Underground to Aranyi go you will?” he said. “Through tunnels dig
you will?” He did a fair imitation of the miners’ speech
himself.

Dominic, diverted by the humor, squatted down
to his son. Amazingly, the silver was returning to his eyes and the
sounds of torture had gone silent. He reached a hand to Val,
pathetically grateful that his son no longer wished to hide from
him or cried at his presence. “Greetings to you, little man,” he
said. “I was unaware the future Margrave Aranyi was a forge
man.”

Val’s face gathered itself into an impending
tantrum. “
I’m
the air,” he said. Dominic sat down beside
Niall, both of them howling with laughter.

Val turned away from the sorry spectacle of
two grown men behaving like infants. He felt at my chest, intent on
his own needs. His fingers plucked at the strange garment that did
not open over my breasts and he screamed with frustration when he
found himself separated from the sure source of nourishment and
comfort by a thin layer of linen that would not yield.

Dominic sat up at the angry noise. He
watched, fascinated, to see that for once I did not help Val in his
quest, did not lift the shirt or pull down the neck. I shook my
head at Dominic’s quizzical look, all silver now, his mind filled
only with benevolence for wife and children and lover.

“I can’t, Dominic,” I said. “I’ve dried
up.”

Dominic did not at first understand, but I
sent my exasperated thoughts to him, of my hard, sore breasts and
cracked nipples, the milk that would no longer flow. He let out a
loud bark of laughter before seeing the implications. “Forgive me,
Amalie. You said you were hungry, as if I needed telling.” His face
clouded over with remorse.

“Come on, beloved.” Dominic stood up, reached
down for Niall, pulled him to his feet and put an arm around his
shoulders. Through the touch of communion, he felt the residual
fear, the involuntary shrinking that anyone who has felt the sting
of the whip will betray when confronted with the object a second
time. His eyes fell on Niall’s bruised neck and he caught the
memories that Niall was too tired to conceal. Dominic’s mind
spiraled downward.

I thought back with difficulty to the last
time I had eaten. Eggs, I remembered, and warm thin milk that had
tasted like nectar. “Milk,” I said. “That’s what we need, the
children and I.” If Dominic could focus on something specific, he
might regain his equilibrium.

Dominic turned from Niall as I spoke, shouted
in a loud commanding voice that was, miraculously, sane and
composed. He ordered men to bring the ewes and nanny goats from the
pens in the bandits’ hall. There was an apologetic murmuring as he
was reminded that the miners had claimed them and all the bandits’
property for their spoils, a quick easy solution as Gwynn and the
others traveling to Aranyi with us offered milk from their own
animals.