Riverrun (54 page)

But what if I’m wrong, she wondered as she ran. Suppose I’ve misjudged Geoffrey’s conceit?

Not bloody likely, a silent voice much like Eric’s told her, and she grinned and ran faster, arriving at the meeting point just a moment after her trio of stallers stumbled in from the other direction. There were several seconds of confusion until Tim explained quickly what they and the riders had done at the sheds, and Cass hugged him tightly.

Their position was not a strong one against a frontal attack, but Cass had good reason to expect assault from another angle. The trees on both sides of the narrow path swept in from the right and left in a wide V, and once Geoffrey realized that he had been tricked he would ride straight for the only clear way to the rear of the house—to any side of the house except for the lane. That much, she thought bitterly, she had counted on Simon telling him. The hands would be stationed, then, in those trees and they would fire one or two volleys—depending on the circumstance—before scattering to minimize their presence as targets. Once that had been accomplished, she was sure the riders would desert their mounts and it would be every man for himself, with her own people having the advantage of knowing where they were going.

Leaving Judah to be sure each man was in his proper place. She exchanged with Cable her rifle for his revolver and ran back toward the house. Amos had already been sent on, which meant, she realized dully, that she would be left with three women, the old man, and the boy, Abraham. Not, she thought sourly, the most terrifying fighting force in the world; but she hoped that when the men began to give ground—assuming that Hawkins managed to push things that far—there would be enough of them to protect the hidden crop. Fire was what she worried about more than anything, and the wavering, bloody glow in the sky over the sheds sent an involuntary shiver down her spine.

She broke out into the yard and had slowed almost to a walk when she heard a piercing scream shatter the relative quiet around the house. She froze and looked behind her, tightening her grip on the revolver. There was a muffled crash from inside the kitchen and another, softer scream. She ran, trying not to think, not to imagine what lay inside as she bounded onto the stoop and flung the door open.

The table had been turned over. Bandages were scattered all over the floor. The firelight was bright but uncertain, and it took her a moment to see the man standing in the corridor, pistols drawn, a woman lying at his feet unconscious. A moan in a nearby corner made her glance aside; it was Amos, crumpled into a ragged heap. To her left, in the small passageway between the kitchen and the dining room she could hear, faintly, the sounds of Rachel and Melody whimpering.

The figure in the hallway stepped forward over the prone Alice, and into the light, the bone-handled pistols were aimed directly at her stomach.

“Which one of us fires first, ma’am?” Vern Lambert said.

Behind her and outside she heard an explosion of firing that told her that Riverrun’s life-war had been joined in earnest. But it would be foolish to die now, when she didn’t have to. She had only the light of the fire to guide her, an uncertain protection, while Lambert only had to discharge both his weapons and he would be sure to strike her with at least one. She lowered her pistol.

Lambert nodded. “Wise move, ma’am. Wouldn’t want the captain t’be disappointed with me. ’Course, he wouldn’t listen t’me ’bout the house. I told him you was plannin somethin’, but he jes’ keep on with his own little dreams. In a lot of ways, he ain’t the most smartest man in the world.”

“Well, now that you’ve got me, what are you going to do?”

Rachel, for God’s sake! she thought wildly, as with her mind, she urged Amos to his feet, Abraham from whatever hiding place he’d ducked into.

The fighting had intensified outside, so much in one brief flurry that it seemed as though the battle were raging directly opposite the door.

“Somethin’ I should’ve done the first day we met, ma’am,” he said. He gestured toward the corridor with the pistols and she hesitated. “Move, or I’ll blow the old man’s head off,” he warned.

She moved, then, without question, into the corridor, looking down at Alice and seeing her chest moving, praying that it was only a blow that had felled her, not a thrust from the wickedly long knife that had been jammed into Lambert’s belt. She walked slowly, listening to the heavy pounding of his heels on the floor, knowing what it was he planned to do to her and feeling her skin begin to tighten, to crawl, feeling a hollow in her stomach rapidly fill up with bile. But there was no use trying to talk him out of it. The entire Union army could have been outside and attacking, and Lambert would have had only one thing on his mind. The only point she might have in her favor was the fact that he was obviously disobeying Geoffrey’s orders, that he should not have been here in the first place.

She stopped at the foot of the steps, looked up, and shuddered violently to keep herself from gasping. Lambert came up behind her, and stroked the cold barrel of a pistol over the back of her neck. “Very excitin’, don’t you think, ma’am?” he whispered. She could smell his fetid breath, the sweat, the odor of his horse permeating his clothes. She almost retched, but held herself steady. “I believe your room is somewhere up there. Why don’t you give me a tour, ’fore it’s too late?”

The shooting was sporadic now. Hawkins’s riders had apparently abandoned their mounts as she had hoped and were now fighting their way, tree by tree, through the woodland barrier toward the house. Geoffrey would know, now … There would be no other reason for the resistance to be so stiff here. She swallowed. Once again, she looked up to the large oval window at the top of the stairs. It glowed with the fires spreading to the forest, and in front of it was a shadow.

And when the shadow screamed “Down, Cass!” she threw herself to one side and screamed as two pistols roared simultaneously.

The shadow did not move.

Lambert stood open mouthed, his firing only an instinctive reaction. He looked up, tried to raise his pistols again, and again the shadow fired. Lambert was lifted off his feet as though a giant had grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and tossed him disdainfully into the center of the hall. His black hat skidded to rest against the door. A black stain spread from his chest to the floor.

“I told you, Cass,” David said triumphantly. “I told you I wasn’t going to lie this one out.”

She had no chance to reply, no chance to laugh, no chance to weep.

As David took his first step down, the double doors exploded open in fire and smoke, and she flattened herself against the wall when the shooting filled the hallway. Two men fell immediately, one of them over Lambert’s body, and another, who, wounded in the leg, began a pitiable moaning. But David had not escaped.

The invaders had fired blindly in and up, and standing in the middle of the staircase as he was, he had not been able to move out of the way. He staggered against the banister, his revolver dropping from his hand and thumping down the steps. Cass tried to get to her feet to help him, but another man came through the door and fired three times in succession so rapidly that it sounded as though the shots were one.

David whimpered, grabbed hard for the banister, then shook his head as though he knew it was no use, and collapsed.

Gerald Forrester laughed.

I am going to die, Cass thought in amazement, and thus could not believe her eyes when Forrester suddenly tipped his gray hat to her and backed out through the smoke and smoldering fire his men had made of the doors. A nightmare. He’ll come back and shoot, vanish again, come back and shoot again, vanish again …

She crawled up the steps, numb and oddly cold, and sat beside David. She did not touch him. She knew he was dead. In one way or another he had twice saved her life and had twice given his own; there was nothing she could say, nothing she could do even to begin a repayment. Slowly, she reached down two steps and picked up his weapon, snapping it automatically to the ready when footsteps pounded down the corridor below her. Through the banister railing she saw Judah running, and smiled at him weakly when he looked up and spotted her. One glance was all he needed to understand the situation, then he was gone again and back with Billy and Edward and buckets of water to douse the fire.

Meanwhile, she had risen to legs that barely held her and made her way down to the foot of the stairs where she grabbed onto the newel post and fought to keep from fainting. Though she realized that this was on a much smaller scale, she suddenly understood what it was that Geoffrey had gone through, what forces yanked at a man’s mind and made it scream, made it struggle, made it search desperately for a way to hide from this hell. She felt as though she were apart from it all, and she took refuge in that sensation while Judah and Cable dragged the bodies of the riders out of the hallway and into the dining room, and directed those men who were left—where is Marcus? she wanted to ask, and decided she didn’t want to know—to the windows on the northern and western sides of the house. Two thick tables were stacked in front of the now open door, and it wasn’t until that was done that Judah, without saying a word, grabbed her arm roughly and brought her back to the kitchen.

A man was lying by the hearth, and when Rachel placed pennies over his closed eyes Cass turned away abruptly. Melody was at the back window, a gun in her hands, tears pouring from her eyes. Alice she could not see, but when she realized that Amos was gone she imagined they had taken the old man out of the way, to a dark place where he could recover from Lambert’s attack and return in dignity.

It was silent. There was no firing.

A quiver of panic made her turn abruptly. She was nearly out of the room when she realized that Judah, or Alice, would have had the windows all shuttered by now, to keep the inevitable torches from finding their marks. She wondered if anyone had been stationed at the second-floor windows, smiling without mirth when she did a rapid count in her head of the men she had left.

A single shot sounded outdoors, and Melody collapsed on the floor, wailing until Rachel strode angrily over to her and slapped her twice, hard, across the back of her head. Judah looked at Cass quizzically.

“No,” she said, “he hasn’t quit. He’s doing the same thing we are—counting losses.”

“Mebbe I should try to get to … Mister McRae?”

Cass would not consider it. “If we were going to get help from our neighbors,” she said bitterly, “it would have come by now. Besides, you’d never make it past the house.”

“I could try.”

“And you could die, too, Judah. And what good would that do us?”

She sagged against the wall and let out a sigh, her arms leaden, her head dizzy from her efforts to keep insanity at bay. Everything was moving too rapidly for her to comprehend. She had hoped that events would take their time, moving as though in a shadow-play, one step at a time, with each step considered and each step tested. Yet, once the nightmare had spilled over the landscape she had not had two minutes to herself. She ran. Everywhere. And everywhere she ran were the dead and the wounded.

She felt herself beginning to breathe harder, her chest rising and falling as though she were running. With a deliberation that made her want to scream, she wiped a sleeve over her face and tucked David’s revolver into her belt. She pushed away from the wall and had taken two steps toward the center of the room when she heard a voice calling to her from outside. It was Hawkins.

“Means no good,” Judah whispered, as if the man could hear him. He looked around the room carefully. “You gets him in the light, Missus, I could—”

“No,” she said. “No. I have no intention of becoming like him, not even to save myself. You stay by me, just in case. But you do nothing unless I tell you to, you understand?”

Judah nodded with great reluctance and followed her to the back door. Melody, still on the floor, was shoved roughly away and Rachel grabbed her shoulders and dragged her into the passage.

“Cassandra!”

As the fire darted its gold-red light, the room seemed to move, to sway, to leap back and forth as the shadows sought for a way to remain still. The black iron kettle over the flames frothed and muttered to itself; whoever had been posted behind the tables at the front door shifted and kicked aside something small and metallic. From the scullery off to the right came a low, melodious humming: Amos, coming around and reaching for the only solace he knew when he was stalked by what he called the dark angel’s sword. A woman’s voice joined him and the humming became words, words that were lost in the musket-like crackle of the logs on the hearth. A simple harmony. An even simpler tune.

Hawkins called again, and Cassandra opened the door.

He was sitting on the dapple, wearing his captain’s dress uniform. Braid and spangles, and a harsh bright sword hanging in its sheath at his side. His hat was crowned with silver roping, and a long, white, dashing plume swept back and was caught by the rising night wind. He had his hands folded tightly over the pommel, not moving an inch when the horse backed off, and was stopped by the pressure of his cavalryman’s knees. The firelight spilled into the yard and framed him, flashing an unnerving red from the wide and excited eyes of his mount. He urged the horse a few steps nearer, a slight smile crossing his face when Cass reached for the door and pulled it to her, giving him only a profile of her figure, a shadow-mask of her face. “A considerate general,” Hawkins said, “always allows the opposition the opportunity to reconsider what even God knows is folly. You have that chance. Now.”

“You’ve given me quite a lot of opportunities … Captain,” she said.

“And you have taken none of them.”

“I wanted none of them.”

“You could have had a great deal, Cassandra. A great deal more than you’re going to have.”

“Such impatience,” she said, shaking her head mockingly, “The law would have given you Riverrun soon—”

“The law,” he sneered. “There are only two kinds of law, Cassandra—yours and mine. And it happens now that mine is the stronger.”