He blinked a few times, remembering how life with Sarah had gone much the same way-and how that had ended.
He lay quietly in the darkness listening to Margo’s steady, even breaths in the next room and tried to keep fear at bay by planning out the next phase of her training.
He wasn’t terribly successful at either.
* * *
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Kynan Rhys Gower was trapped in hell.
Everyone here who could actually talk to him said otherwise, of course, but Kynan knew it was hell nonetheless, even if it didn’t resemble anything the priests had ever described. The closest thing to a priest here, a man called “Buddy,” had told him he could never escape-not to his home or even back to the accursed battle against the witch woman fighting on the side of the upstart French.
It hurt him, gnawed at him, that he was cut off forever from everything and everyone he knew and loved. A king whose laws forbade it, Kynan might have understood. But he could not understand why, if this infernal land’s diabolical passageways that opened out of thin air could be made to open with the regularity of the rising and setting sun, why could the wizard or demon or hell-spawned sprite who controlled them not reopen the one passageway that would lead him home? Yet Buddy had told Kynan he would never again see the dark hills of Wales or the laughter in his son’s eyes ….
At least a hundred times every day, as he struggled to understand devilish things beyond his comprehension, Kynan was tempted to do violence to something. But they’d taken away his weapons. Without them, he was less than a man. Less, even, than the commonest Welsh farm girl, who at least carried a small knife for chores.