Adrian Read online

If it was possible, Adrian’s heart beat even faster, causing black spots to dance before his eyes as the Spaniard continued to rail at his misfortune, although Adrian could not interpret exactly what he was saying; the man’s passion had caused his speech to resort to his native Spanish. But Adrian knew if he didn’t calm his own self, his body would shut down in order to preserve his pathetic mortality and he would become unconscious. He began breathing in and out slowly, counting each inhalation to two, then each exhalation. The spots began to fade when he reached a count of four.

  Roman was just outside of Damascus. He had survived that last horrible day, when Adrian had thought for certain that the huge Norseman’s arms had been ripped from his body before he was tossed beneath the churning hooves of the Arab horses.

  Roman had found his way to Damascus, with coin.

  “What think you, Adrian?” Constantine asked in a low voice, as if the Spaniard’s animated, foreign discourse on the shortened span of his future had rendered the two friends quite alone. “Will Roman Berg come for us?”

  Adrian forced his chin up, then down deliberately, the best nod he could muster. As the side of his skull ground against the gritty floor, he felt the lump that was his ear holding firm. He doubted he would keep it, if he lived.

  The mad barrage of Spanish suddenly ceased. “Surely he will no attempt entry into Damascus,” he said in disbelief, and Adrian was unsettled at the way this man had managed to rage loudly in a foreign language and at the same time listen keenly to Constantine’s quiet English question.

  Who was this Spaniard?

  The dark man continued, “No matter his size, he can no hope to penetrate such formidable armed defenses. And even if he possesses the madness to try—which, I must admit, is likely—he may no arrive before—” The Spaniard drew the flat of his palm across his throat while making a ripping sound through his teeth.

  “He is our only hope at this point,” Constantine said gravely, his eyes never leaving Adrian.

  “Yes,” the Spaniard mused agreeably. “Yes, I can see how that is true. Well then, I will hope, too.” He dragged his seated posture closer to Adrian, coming to rest between his legs and the wall, and made a great show of craning his neck to inspect the state of the man lying before him. “It is too bad, what has been done to you, my friend. I will help you.”

  From the very periphery of his vision, Adrian saw the Spaniard reach into his boot and withdraw a slender dagger. He had only a moment’s thought for how this man had managed to smuggle a blade into a Damascene dungeon before he made an instinctive, strangled sound in his throat as the Spaniard moved even closer to him.

  Constantine, too, called out in alarm, “What are you doing?”

  “Do no fear,” the Spaniard said mildly as the blade disappeared behind Adrian’s hip. In a moment, Adrian’s torso rocked back and forth, and he felt a heavy weight descend against his ribs. “I would no further harm this man. I was only freeing him from such cruel bonds. He is unable to use any force at all against our captors, even without them.”

  Adrian saw the Spaniard wipe the sticky black mass from his blade with the hem of his keffiyeh before replacing the dagger in his boot. Then Adrian realized the weight he’d felt against his ribs was his own arm. He tried to urge his shoulder forward but could not.

  The dark man leaned over Adrian slightly and flipped up one of the ragged pieces of cloth—once the fine shirt of a nobleman—from Adrian’s torso. The man winced. “Do you see?” he said over his shoulder toward Constantine. “I am sorry, my friend.”

  Adrian told himself that he would not look down. He would keep his gaze on Constantine only. There was no benefit to knowing what atrocity had developed of his own body. Once Roman had come, it would be addressed. But then Constantine blanched a horrible white and his throat convulsed.

  And Adrian looked down.

  The sliver of stomach the Spaniard had revealed showed black, putrid crevasses where he had been scourged and the meat of him where the road had stripped away the top layer of his skin. But the rotting wounds were not empty.

  They were alive with wriggling white worms.

  He lost consciousness in the dungeon as his eyes came open in the quiet wooden berth, his breath trapped in his chest so that he wheezed and creaked like a cart wheel. His lungs strained, his throat constricted, and he felt the tight bands once more around his arms.

  He looked down wildly, as if expecting to see the thin strips of leather once more gouging his flesh, but what he saw were pale, slender fingers encircling the shallow deformations of his arm over the bold, black patterns laid down by Brother Song.

  Adrian’s eyes traveled up the ivory sleeve to behold not Valentine Alesander’s swarthy visage but Maisie Lindsey’s pale, terrified face.

  Chapter 6

  Although she would have given all she could claim in the world to be free of the feel of him, Maisie could not seem to release Adrian Hailsworth’s arm; it was as if their flesh had melted together. She knew her mouth was hanging open, her eyes wide and glistening, for she could see them as clearly and objectively as she could see Adrian’s chest still lurching, seeking the breath he could not find.

  And yet his terror had somehow crawled inside her and was now trapped, like a mouse inside the long slender body of a snake, where it bulged and twisted grotesquely as she continued to stare at him. Her own breath was lost somewhere in a land where only sand and heat and violent revenge lived, and so unfamiliar with this foreign place was she that Maisie could not think of where to look for it.

  Adrian’s dried clothes hung limp in her right fist, the clothes that were not truly his but fashioned recently by some other man who had never known such horrors. Maisie mustered all her will in order to raise her right hand from her side as Adrian’s own fists clutched at the bedclothes, and his torso strained from the thin pallet as another strangled wheeze came from him. His garments entered her line of sight and Maisie wrenched her eyes from Adrian’s gaze and then released his arm with a gasp, her breath flooding her brain with swirling colors.

  She had to act quickly now. She knew that her touch had likely made things much worse for him—more vivid than any memories or nightmares he had likely been plagued with for so long. She dropped the clothes onto his heaving body and clapped her palms to either side of his face, staring once more into his wild eyes but no longer seeing death.

  “Adrian! Adrian!” she said, her nose nearly touching his. “Listen to me: breathe easy. There is nae preventing your breath—your throat is clear and open. Look, look!” Maisie drew a deep, loud inhalation through her nose, her nostrils flaring, and then blew it out her mouth into his reddened face, sweat breaking on his forehead like sea foam. “Like that. Shh, shh!” She repeated the inhalation, blew against his skin. “Doona struggle—let it come. It’s right there.” She inhaled again deeply.

  Maisie heard the reedy whistle of air as he tried to draw breath. His lips barely parted on his exhalation, the weak breath making a popping sound through his dried lips.

  “There it is. Easy, now,” she coaxed, surprised at how calm she sounded when her knees felt as though they would fail and spill her to the floor at any moment. “Breathe in—you ken how. One, two . . .” She nodded quickly as his next breath hissed into his body. “Out, three, four.” His exhalation caused his lips to tremble.

  Two more times he managed to inhale, and Maisie slowly peeled her hands from his damp face, fighting the wave of nausea that crashed over her as she swayed aright. The ruddiness of his complexion was fading, and behind it she saw a flash of some emotion she could not name. Perhaps it was shame at being caught in such a vulnerable moment by a woman who was nothing more than an irritating stranger to him—one who he was trapped with for the time being at that.

  She told herself that she would leave him to recover in private quickly, so as to preserve what dignity he had left, but she knew in her heart that it was she who could not bear to face him in that moment.

  “Here are your clo
thes,” she tried to say matter-of-factly, her gaze flitting away to the bundle of cloth atop his stomach. “There is a meal laid when you wish it.” She turned to leave.

  “I apologize,” he called out after her, making her pause.

  Against every shred of self-preservation within her screaming at her to keep walking, she glanced over her shoulder at him.

  His brown eyes were clear now, no longer flickering with ghostly torchlight. “For frightening you. I’m neither ill nor mad, if that’s at all reassuring.” He spoke bitterly, as if he had not only moments ago relived what must be the most horrifying moment of his life, with her to witness it. As if it meant nothing, the pain he had felt, the terror of seeing his own imminent death with his very eyes.

  As if what had happened to him—what was still happening to him—was nothing more than a petty annoyance.

  Her breath caught in her throat, the beginnings of a sob churning in her chest. She daren’t speak, and so she ducked out of his berth without a word.

  Maisie crossed the floor to the cauldron, the very ends of her red curls trembling with the overwhelming emotions she felt. She paused long enough to stomp her right foot firmly on the boards under her feet and then pat the cauldron twice. The flames leapt up by half their size again, instantly warming her face and causing the air in the cabin to expand as she crossed to her chair and retrieved her cloak where she’d left it the night before.

  It seemed like years ago, now.

  She began fastening the frog at her throat as she crossed to the ladder, whispering, “Fosgail,” as she went. The frog was not cooperating, and so she was forced to tuck her chin and look down, releasing a fat, fast tear as she did so. She swiped it away as she reached for the sides of the ladder and made her way through the open hatch to the deck of the crawler. She purposefully left the door open behind her; Adrian Hailsworth did not deserve to be trapped anywhere ever again.

  Still, she hoped they hadn’t stopped in the midst of another storm. Or pirates. She hated pirates.

  But neither storm nor pirates greeted her upon the abbreviated deck of the crawler—only a thick, gray fog and the quiet lapping of the water upon the hull of the ship. Maisie drew a deep, hitching breath of the cold, humid air. She turned in each direction, but she could see no farther than a quarter length of the vessel. She had no idea where they were, what lay beyond the fog in whatever direction she must go.

  It had all seemed so clear to her a month ago. Looking back now, she couldn’t help but be frightened by the suspicion that she had made the very worst possible decisions at every opportunity. If she had actually sought to make things as bad as they could be, it could not have placed her in a worse predicament than she now found herself in.

  Why, oh, why had the skinny old abbot sent this man?

  Maisie could not return to Wyldonna with Adrian Hailsworth.

  Neither could she return to Wyldonna without him.

  She saw once more in her mind the strange, black markings under her fingers where she’d gripped his forearm, like those of the ancient Picts. Maisie again found it difficult to catch her breath as the lines of verse danced in her mind like the swirling gray fog.

  Out of the mist she returned unseen,

  And none could ken where she had been.

  Beware the Painted Man, my child,

  Who trades the death of the Queen . . .

  Why couldn’t she have just tossed the clothes atop his dreaming form when she’d peeked behind the curtain and seen that he slept? Instead she’d been drawn by his hitching breaths, the odd way he’d held his arms, the fear etched upon his strained face. Perhaps it was because she’d been so foolish as to have touched his boots, but once more the urge to know had overcome her, especially when she’d spied the dark lines and swirls peeking out from the wide bell of his sleeve.

  Maisie could not afford to care one whit for this strange, brusque, damaged man. She had a duty to fulfill. But if her conscience had been twisted uncomfortably by the events of the past months, now it was being torturously crushed. Adrian Hailsworth had escaped death once, although how Maisie could not fathom. But the marks she’d glimpsed on his arm had confirmed her worst fear: he was the Painted Man. If she returned with him to Wyldonna, as she had promised to do, Adrian Hailsworth would die.

  And if he did not, the Queen of Wyldonna must.

  She heard Adrian’s footsteps coming up the ladder behind her and so she faced into the misty wind in an attempt to give a mundane reason for her splotchy face.

  He came to stand beside her, and she could see from the corner of her eye that he had once more donned the plain shirt and chausses he’d worn earlier, hiding his arms from her. It was a long moment before he spoke.

  “Why have we stopped?”

  “I needed to rest,” Maisie said.

  If he thought her answer strange, he made no mention of it.

  For the good of all living things, both in spirit and in flesh . . .

  “Do you wish to return to the abbey?” Maisie asked quickly, before she could lose her nerve. She didn’t dare look at him, though.

  “What’s this now?” he asked with mild surprise. “Wasn’t it only this morn you were going on and on about your terrible hurry to return to this island of your queen? How, once I’d arrived, I’d not be allowed to leave?”

  “That’s why I’m asking you now,” she said shortly. “Before we draw any closer.”

  “How close are we?”

  “Close enough.”

  He was quiet again for several moments and Maisie could almost hear the swift working of his mind. It made her nervous, as if he would somehow logically decipher the truth on his own, which was impossible. Anything he might learn, Maisie must tell him, for logic had no hand in any of it.

  So it was with great surprise that she received his words when he did at last speak.

  “You don’t think I’m competent to help you,” he said. “After . . . what you witnessed.” Maisie turned her head to look at him, her eyebrows raised. His mouth was pressed into a thin line. “What man who behaves in such a manner is possessed of the skills necessary to aid a queen with any effectiveness, is that not it?”

  “Nay,” she said slowly, her eyebrows drawing together. “I’m giving you opportunity to extricate yourself from a thoroughly dangerous, perhaps life-threatening situation.”

  “Because you have come to the conclusion that I lack the fortitude and skills to be of any use in a situation such as that.”

  Maisie gave a quick sigh of irritation. “Hear me now: I doona often avail myself of the characteristics of charity or compassion. But I am telling you that you have nae obligation to the problems that plague the people and rulers of Wyldonna. In fact, there is more than a better chance that you may have been . . . misled into accompanying me in the first place.”

  “I see. Now I am deserving of your charity and compassion,” he spat, completely missing the point that Maisie had been trying to make. “Kindly hear me, Lady Maisie: Glayer Felsteppe killed my best friend’s wife and son. He has caused me to be estranged from my own family, whom I’ve not seen in better than five years, and has quite possibly ruined them by now any matter. He is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of loyal men, and very nearly cost me my own.

  “If aiding your queen brings Glayer Felsteppe within my reach, then rest assured that I will see that he is brought to justice in one way or another. Regardless of what you might now think of me, I am not weak. I am not an invalid. And I will not be told that I am incompetent at any task I set myself to, especially by a recently appointed, glorified lady’s maid who never bothered to learn to press out the creases in a shirt properly when laundering it.”

  Maisie’s hands were clenched into fists by the time he was finished. And she found she no longer felt as much compassion as she had a moment before. Which was all for the good, she supposed.

  “This is your last chance,” she said. “Do we continue on from here, there shall be nae turning back.” F
or either of us, she said to herself.

  “Is there or is there not a vast fortune hidden in Wyldonna Castle?” he demanded.

  “That is the legend,” Maisie replied.

  “What shall I be paid for my services, besides the opportunity to capture Glayer Felsteppe should he return?”

  “The queen is prepared to grant you anything you wish.”

  “Ah-ah,” he cautioned, holding a finger toward her. “Careful. You should know, my expertise is renowned. Your queen should not promise a reward she may be unable to fulfill.”

  “Anything you wish,” Maisie repeated. “If you can find it.”

  “If it’s there, I shall find it.”

  “Perhaps. But let it be understood that, from this moment onward, it is your decision to continue. I gave you a choice.”

  “You really don’t think I’m capable, do you?” he asked, his eyes like molten pools. The wind picked up his hair and pulled it behind his head. Maisie saw the thick scar that twisted along his earlobe. The top edge of it was missing altogether.

  She knew he’d caught her looking at his disfigurement, and so she brought her gaze back to his eyes. “I doona know what I think at the moment.”

  His jaw tensed. “Where have you put the plans? I’ll need to study them again so that I might form a strategy of the most likely places to search once we land.”

  “They’re in a locked crate in my berth.”

  He nodded at her once and then turned back toward the hatch, calling to her over his shoulder, “Fetch them. And give the oarsmen orders to resume. I’d not delay any longer than necessary.” He turned on the top rung to retreat down the ladder and Maisie watched him with a raised eyebrow.

  Once his dark head had disappeared from sight, Maisie walked to the side of the crawler and peered over at the waves caressing the smooth, pale wood.

  “You heard the man,” she said sardonically, and twenty oars shot to attention from the hull. She tapped the toe of her slipper twice on the deck, and her ears were immediately filled with the shush and slosh of the long arms straining against the water. She wobbled a bit on her feet when the wind began to increase and put out her hands for balance as she turned toward the hatch and backed down the ladder.