Darkwitch Rising by Sara Douglass

Louis looked at his father a single moment longer, his eyes wild, then he turned and ran.

Behind him Silvius grinned, and raised the bow to his shoulder.

Then, the bow still held to his shoulder, he also began to run, although he moved with a curious high-stepping gait, his back straight, his arms held almost at shoulder height in order to keep the bow in position, his head high and unmoving, his eyes sighted down the length of the arrow.

It was as if Silvius did not so much run down that forest pathway, but dance.

Ahead of him, panting now, Louis ran as desperately as he could. What if the true test was escaping his father’s justice?

There is no escape for you, murderer.

Louis slid to a halt, staring wildly ahead. Just as that new voice had spoken inside his mind he’d run into the opening approaches to a wide and pleasantly shaded glade.

Standing in the centre of the glade was a man, hobbled and knobbled, crippled and distorted, a terrible mixture of Loth and Saeweald.

In his hand, dangling loosely at his side, this nightmarish creature held a knife, a long, wicked blade.

Louis looked over his shoulder, certain that Silvius was, at any moment, about to run into him.

But instead he heard his father call out from behind some intervening shrubbery.

Hark? Hark? Is that a stag I hear crashing about in that leafy gloom?

“No!” Louis screamed. He tried to duck, to turn aside, to run, but before his brain could send that message to his muscles, the shrub before him parted, as if by magic, and a single arrow sped through it.

No! Louis screamed in his mind, one of his hands instinctively raised to his face, and in the next instant the arrow thudded into him, punching straight through the palm of his hand and embedding itself in his left eye.

The force of the impact sent Louis sprawling to the ground. He writhed, in agony. The arrow had skewered his right hand to his left eye, and as he moved the hand, instinctively trying to pull it away, it tugged at the arrow, making its barbed point wriggle deeper and deeper into Louis’ orbit, scraping against bone and nerve endings.

He screamed, his back arching off the forest floor, his heels thudding frantically on the ground.

A man stepped up to him, and Louis knew it was his father. “For all the gods’ sakes,” he screamed, his voice now hoarse with pain and fear. “Do it! Do it!”

No, said Silvius.

“For gods’ sakes…” Louis moaned. “Please, push this arrow in, and kill me. Do it now! Now!” Oh gods, the agony, the agony…

No.

The Idyll, Idol Lane, London

NOAH SPEAKS

“Don’t fret,” Weyland said, with a charming grin to take away any sense of sarcasm. “This is no trap. If you want to leave, then I will show you the way. But it is, in its own way, a manner of test. A Mistress of the Labyrinth would know the way out. If you learn well, then eventually you won’t need to ask me for guidance every time you want to leave.” Then he nodded at a blue-tiled archway to my left. “In this Idyll, tonight, that is the way back into the house of Idol Lane.”

“Tonight?”

“Every time you enter the Idyll it is slightly different, slightly reconfigured. Not much, but enough to confuse.”

“You have built yourself a tricky haven.”

“And do you blame me? With all these gods and witches and Kingmen and Mistresses and the gods know what other faerie creatures out to trap me?”

I could not answer that, and I found his gaze too direct, too challenging. I looked away, hating that he’d forced me to that evasive action.

“Noah…” He moved very close now, our linked hands pressed warm and tight between our bodies. “Do you want to trap me?”

“Of course. Every time you set that imp to work within my body I cursed you, and wished you every foul fate I could devise. I will see you trapped once more within the heart of the labyrinth, Asterion, if it is the last thing I—”

He kissed me, stopping the flow of my words.

I pulled my mouth away.

“I am sorry for that imp,” he said, very softly.

“No,” I said, “you enjoyed it.”

He kissed my neck, my ear. “When I set him, yes, of course I did.”

I flushed, remembering that night he’d taken on the glamour of Silvius, and taken my virginity within the stone hall.

“And when, in this life, you were far distant from me, then yes, I am afraid I enjoyed it when I set the imp to work. I knew it caused you pain and sorrow, and that fed my hatred of you.”

“And this,” I said, meaning his closeness now, his kisses, “does this feed your hatred of me?” Sweet gods, he knew how best to use his mouth. Damn it, this man was my forefather! I battened down my thoughts. I couldn’t let myself think of this now, not with Weyland so close.

He stood back, watching me curiously. “I don’t hate you now, Noah. If I hated you, then I would never have brought you to my Idyll.”

“You want to manipulate me, to use me.”

“That is why I brought you to Idol Lane, yes. But that has changed. It is what I no longer want.”

My face set in hard, disbelieving lines.

“I loved Ariadne, and in return she had me murdered. For millennia, Noah, I hated the very thought of love. I distrusted it.” His voice became very soft. “But what if I had been mistaken? What if love provided, not a trap, but a shelter?”

I went cold. There, again, the use of the word shelter. All he had to do was to ask me for shelter and I would be lost. My goddess name meant shelter, it defined who I was. If he asked for shelter, then I would need to give it. Worse, Weyland was defining shelter in terms of love. I need shelter, Noah. I need love. All he had to add to that was, Give it to me, I ask it of you, and I would—both shelter and love, for Weyland had bound the two concepts together so tightly they could not be separated.

How did he know? How?

I tried to feel panic, fought for panic, but in the end all I could summon was a quiet calmness at the prospect. Perhaps that was resignation.

Perhaps.

Weyland stepped back, although he still held my hand loosely. “Come to bed, Noah, and talk with me a while.”

“We can talk here well enough.”

His mouth twitched. “When we lie side by side, naked, then there can be no secrets between us. That makes for good conversation.”

I stared at him, and he laughed at the expression on my face.

He led me to a chamber several archways and bridges and cloisters distant from the entry vestibule. The chamber was intimate, although not claustrophobic, with a domed ceiling painted a deep blue and patterned with pink and scarlet flowers rioting amid soft grey-green leaves. It was beautiful, and I think I might have embarrassed myself by staring at it a moment too long. I lowered my gaze eventually, and saw that directly under its apex stood a circular bed loosely draped with silken sheets and scattered with soft pillows.

“There is a washing chamber through there,” Weyland said, indicating a small arched doorway to one side, “and a closet stocked with robes and linens through there.” He nodded to another doorway. “There is nothing you can lack for. Except Brutus, of course.”

His voice became tighter at this last, and I glanced at him, surprised by this evidence of jealousy. He hadn’t been jealous when he’d lain with me as Silvius and all I’d thought about was Brutus.

But now he was. Why?

Weyland was disrobing, laying his shirt and breeches carefully atop a chest to one side of the bed.

I averted my eyes and turned my back, twisting my arms behind myself to undo the buttons of my bodice. I could have used the washroom, but that would have admitted defeat.

The next moment I heard him step up behind me, and then his hands brushed mine aside, and he deftly undid the buttons and laces of both bodice and skirt.

“They will need to be hung,” I said, thinking to take them from his hand and into the clothes room where I might escape his presence, even for a moment. But Weyland paid me no attention, draping the clothes over a chair which had mysteriously appeared just to our side.

I closed my eyes, gathered my courage, and stepped out of my chemise and petticoat, and then my underdrawers.

“Where is the bracelet, Noah?”

I held up my left arm, and, lo, there it twinkled. It came and went mostly to my summons.