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His face stiffened into a harsh mask. Not at all Brendan-like. This was a man she didn’t know. A stranger. “You’ll do as your told. Do you understand? This is bigger than me. Besides, my life was forfeit years ago. Whatever St. John uses to frighten you, don’t heed him. Just get the hell out of here when you have the chance.”
Daigh paused in front of the tapestry for only a moment before tearing the cloth from its nails. Shoving it into his coat pocket and retracing his steps.
Sister Anne remained where he’d left her. Slumped unconscious across her desk. By the time she woke with a knot and a headache, he’d be long departed.
So much for Ard-siúr’s resources.
In the outer courtyard, Sabrina’s would-be protector paused in tending his cook fire long enough to challenge him, but Daigh never slowed. Instead his steps turned toward the workshops and the traveling smithy’s abandoned forge. Plucking up a sharpened billhook, he shoved it into his belt.
“What’s yer business here this time of night?” The man filled the doorway, his eyes narrowed, his glowering features pricked with suspicion.
“My business is my own.”
“Not if yer skulking about where ya shouldn’t.”
Daigh felt Máelodor now like a second consciousness. Watching with voyeuristic glee. Filling his mind with hate and violence. “Let me pass.”
“Mayhap I’ll be hollering for me mates instead. Teach ya some manners. I seen the way you look at that young girl. Not decent. Not respectable. Pat! Jasper! We got that scoundrel cornered.”
His mates shoved their way into the closed space of the tool crib. The three of them together stoked high on gin and frustration. Daigh, a tidy outlet for their drunken rage.
He refused the black powers surging through his veins. The ruthless fury that sought blood and killing and death. Máelodor might claim him in the end, but Daigh would not make it easy.
Instead, he used the strength born of tilt-yard training and the cunning honed through countless border raids to level the first man with a quick fist to the jaw, his companions with a flurry of punches that left one doubled over in a retching heap, the other spitting blood and teeth.
Stepping over them, he slipped back into the night. Disappeared through the gate, the weight of Ard-siúr’s disappointed gaze boring into his back.
He turned back, shouting into the night. Knowing she would hear. “Your bones were wrong, old woman! There is no hope for the damned! And I have betrayed you all!”
Máelodor had always wished for the power of flight. To soar above the clouds. Look down upon the ants as they toiled and slaved in the fields and towns. To be one with the heavens. As powerful as the Fey themselves.
The nights he dreamt of climbing the skies, he always woke refreshed, without the grate of brittle bones or the ghost-pain in a leg that was no longer there. But these nights were few. His dreams now were taken up with darker forces and more sinister fantasies than the innocence of flying.
The traveling coach lurched, dropping heavily into a rut. Bouncing free. He grit his teeth against the constant jostling and swaying. Every pothole only served to remind him of his waning strength. Of the sacrifices he’d endured to summon a Domnuathi and bind him to the cause. Of the enormous drain on his powers to seek out his wayward creature.
He would need to expend more power to crush the Domnuathi’s stubborn will. How Lazarus had managed to break free of his bondage, Máelodor couldn’t guess. But it would not happen again. He would see to that.
Still and all, he could not be dissatisfied. Willingly or not, Lazarus had revealed the truth. Brendan Douglas was at Glenlorgan. The hunt was nearing its conclusion.
It would be mere miles until he could look upon the treacherous face of the man who’d betrayed the Nine, including his own father, to save his pathetic skin.
Skin, Máelodor planned on flaying inch by excruciating inch. He trembled in anticipation.
Rapping against the carriage roof, he urged his coachman to increase the pace.
To hell with his bones, he had a reunion to attend.
Sabrina had done what she could for Brendan’s hand, though the bones had been crushed almost beyond even her repairs. She’d cleaned his lip. The deep gash across his ribs. His torso carried the same mottled bruising as his face as if St. John had taken to him with a club.
“Fists only,” Brendan explained, wincing at every pass of her dampened cloth. “But there may have been a few pieces of furniture, and at one point a spur caught me. That’s the mess across my ribs there.”
As the hours dragged, Brendan’s face paled to a sickly gray, color high upon his cheeks. And his grip on lucidity loosened despite her attempts at reducing the rampaging fever. He drifted in and out, sometimes muttering incomprehensible gibberish, sometimes frighteningly quiet, barely a breath steaming the chilly air. She’d beaten upon the door, hollering for help to come. Bring a blank
et or even a candle to break the unceasing gloom.
The first time she’d received only a curse and a shout for silence in response.
The second time, the door cracked open to reveal a sinister bearded man who pushed a plate of food through the door at her along with a jug of sour ale.
