“No pain. Not a single bit of pain. It felt like hot wa-ter on my cheek, where the eye had burst open. No blood. Only a spot or two of blood. I nearly dropped my knife. Or it fell and I snatched it up… I don’t remember which. Harvey slashed at me again, went for my other eye. He missed by…you can see for yourself. Opened up half my face like a butcher with a lamb’s carcass. Then I bled. Fireblast! But I surely bled then, lover.”
Half-blind, terrified and in dreadful pain from the gash across his face, Ryan Cawdor lashed out at the sm irking, triumphant face of his crippled brother. He dealt him a lucky punch in the middle of his hooked nose and felt it crumple under the blow like a crushed egg.
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“I ran. Down and up and along passages. I was near death from the loss of blood, blinded. Someone helped me. Kenny Morse? I don’t know. Suddenly I was out of the house and across the moat. There was snow on my face, melting and running with the seeping crimson all over my neck and shirt. A howling wind blew through the pines on the far side of the valley away from the ville. And I was gone. Fifteen years old and I never went back. Never thought about going back. Not until now.” He sat up and pulled on his shirt and coat. The evening chill was rising from the Hudson, and the sun had nearly gone down. “I can smell fish cooking.”
“Want to go back? Go ‘fore dark?”
“Yeah.”
“Help me up, lover. Thanks. What happened back at Front Royal after you’d fled the place? That double-crazy Bochco said your father married again. And what about Harvey?”
“Not much to tell. Haven’t heard much fresh until down in the swamps there.”
There had been a purge. Harvey had convinced the ail-ing Baron Cawdor that his youngest son was a murder-ous renegade and he was named wolfshead so that every man’s hand was against him. Several servants believed loyal to Ryan and to Morgan’s memory were executed on the old gibbets. Kenny Morse was the first to go, shriek-ing defiance as his feet were kicked off the stool and he danced in the air.
Pecker Bochco had told them about the cobbles of the courtyard flowing inches deep in sticky blood that clot-ted and blocked the drains of the entire ville. He had also told Ryan and Krysty about the new Lady Cawdor.
She was a sluttish whore who had been used by Harvey, but whose strength of will and capacity for evil out-
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stripped the halting young man. She seduced Baron Cawdor, persuading the old man of her love for him. Ryan’s father, by now, was slipping fast into dementia, finding it hard to tell fact from dream.
Lady Rachel Cawdor was plump and beautiful and just eighteen years old. She fed opiates to the old man so that he slept, then ran light-footed along the winding corri-dors to the bedroom of Harvey Cawdor.
They found that Ryan’s father was more tenacious than they’d expected. He didn’t die, despite being poorly fed and treated harshly by the girl-bride. Harvey drew back from butchering the frail old man, but his mistress did not.
One night, under the guise of playing a game of love, she cajoled the baron into letting her tie his hands and feet to the corners of their great four-poster, using cords of silk. She whispered, as she pulled the knots tighter, of the pleasures she would give him once he was her helpless slave. The silk was as thin as cotton, yet as strong as wire, and had been tied so tight that it bit into his wrinkled skin and drew blood from beneath his blackened nails.
Baron Cawdor tried to call out, realizing at that last awful moment that her intention was murder. But Rachel laughed at him, mocking him, even as she knotted a gag around his mouth, muffling his cries for aid.
She told him of her contempt for him as she climbed, naked, astride his chest, gripping him with her heels as though he were a horse. She told him of her lust for his son and of their vile and perverse pleasures together. As she leaned over him her breasts brushed his cheeks, her nipples swollen with her ruthless enjoyment of what she was doing to him. Rachel picked up a large satin pillow, holding it as she wriggled up his body.