Drink of Me

  Sánge.

  With a curse, Reule released himself and ran wet hands through his hair in furious frustration. He hadn’t thought about these things in so very long. Why now? Why were these memories invading his peace and the safety he had found in the stone walls of his valley fortress?

  Reule couldn’t say he was surprised when a sharp knock sounded on the door a short time later. With a long sigh, he relaxed back in the wide, sunken tub and spread his arms along the ceramic-tiled edges before bidding his visitor come in.

  Darcio entered, shutting the door quickly to keep the warmth in. Reule watched warily as his companion turned to face him. His hair was wet from his own bath and his clothing neat and fresh. Reule’s Shadow was even freshly shaved, which was more than he could say for himself. Then again, Darcio hadn’t been tending to…

  Reule shoved the thought aside. He’d probably been emanating far too much emotion as it was already. Darcio’s presence was proof of that. He didn’t need to rehash his conflicts while his friend was staring at him so intently.

  “What is it?” Reule asked, unable to keep the irritable bite from his voice.

  “Now, that’s strange,” Darcio mused. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  Darcio ignored the steam and the wetness coating everything in the room and moved to sit back casually on a bench as he regarded his Prime. The smaller private baths like this one were plumbed and tiled, rather than naturally replenishing like the Prime’s Bath. In comparison, the oval tub was rather small…if a tub big enough to hold four people could be called small. Still, it gave Reule little room to escape Darcio’s scrutiny.

  “Now, I know I’m not as easygoing as Rye, nor as powerful, for that matter, but I imagine I’m as good to talk to as anyone else,” Darcio speculated.

  “Of course you are,” Reule snapped, hating it when Darcio denigrated himself like that. It was as if Darcio, whom Reule couldn’t imagine living without, didn’t feel himself worthy of his role as advisor and protector. Reule believed it was his inhibition about his low-level telepathy that made him so, but Darcio had skill and ability that made him powerful in other ways. Reule just wished he’d acknowledge that to himself from time to time. “I just don’t want to talk,” Reule mumbled irritably.

  “Well, I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”

  “Why?” Reule barked, his darkened hazel eyes flashing furiously.

  Darcio shrugged, a slight lifting of a single shoulder that belied the intense focus of his carefully assessing gray eyes. “Because I know how fastidious you are, and how determined to shield others from your emotional emanations. You rarely lose control. However, every upper-level ’path in the castle has been getting a slideshow of their Prime’s moods ever since you crossed beneath the portcullis. My suggestion to you is to vent this emotional pollution you’re swimming in and gain your privacy back.”

  Reule had little to say in argument, so he didn’t bother. He turned his head aside for several minutes as he struggled to draw his tattered thoughts together.

  “I have to ask you something first,” he said carefully, knowing Darcio’s reaction could be potentially volatile. “It’s a favor to me, but one you won’t like.”

  “I rarely like doing favors for anyone but you, Reule,” he said, dropping all formality in light of the request. “Ask your favor.”

  “I need to know if she was raped,” Reule said quickly, meeting his friend’s eyes in time to see them widen.

  “Shit,” Darcio hissed, leaning forward to place elbows against knees and running thick fingers through dark blond hair. Reule wasn’t fooled. He saw the shudder that his Shadow tried to hide with the gesture. “Can’t the apothecary tell you that?”

  “She won’t let him near her, I promise you that. She regards even Para with nothing but suspicion and fear. Pariedes, who everyone makes fast friends with.”

  “You should wait for her to tell you in her own time.”

  “I would, but she can’t even remember her name, never mind how she got mapped with bruises and half the skin on her back scoured off. Friction burned off,” Reule added, menace creeping thickly into his tone.

  “Shit.” Darcio’s voice shook as he uttered the curse.

  “I wouldn’t ask you—”

  “I know,” Darcio cut him off hastily. “Why do you need to know so badly, Reule? If she can’t remember, shouldn’t you leave it at that? What will you say if you know the truth and she doesn’t? Don’t put yourself in that position.”

  “You don’t need to know my reasons,” Reule said carefully. “The task won’t be any less difficult for you if you do. Let me worry about my motivations and the results. But if it helps you, I’ll at least be able to tell the apothecary, and he’ll be able to act accordingly without putting her through the trauma of an examination.”

  Reule could tell by the weight of his sigh that Darcio would agree. He didn’t need to be a telepath, only a longtime friend, to know it. The method was simple, even if it was unique and potentially traumatic for Darcio. The Prime Shadow had been born with a gift as exclusive and powerful as Reule’s ability to emanate. But like that gift, it was hard to control and not always a pleasant thing to have at one’s disposal. Reule’s mother and his granddame had both had the gift of emanation, so it had come with a name and a measure of training. Darcio was the first of his kind to exhibit his particular power and so he’d named it himself, calling it “the Curse.”

  Darcio had the ability to sort through the physical trauma of the living and the deceased, the conscious and the comatose, in order to find out what had happened to them. Since it was a mapping of the body and not of the psyche, the victim could be brain-dead or just plain dead and Darcio could still gather history. It wasn’t a pleasant gift, and Reule didn’t blame his Shadow for his reluctance to use it. Especially when Darcio had once explained it to him as “traumatic empathy.” He didn’t merely read the memory, he was overcome by it, reliving the disturbance in his mind as if he were in the actual moment, suffering the abuse, or the death. It took him days, sometimes months to shake the experiences. There were even those that never let go. Perhaps if he’d practiced the power more, he’d learn how to release them. Understandably, he refused to use it unless necessary. To his mind, practice was utterly out of the question.

  Reule had only asked this favor twice before. Once to discover who’d murdered his parents. Darcio was seven years his senior, and at the time he had never once told a soul about his ability, which he considered horrifying. Upon learning of the terrible deaths of the Prime and Prima of their Sánge tribe, Shadow had had a knee-jerk thought impulse and the already powerful Reule had caught it like a brass ring. That time, he’d forced Darcio’s compliance, and it had taken three years for him to earn his forgiveness. The second time was the day they’d come upon a wagon train torn asunder by Jakals, where men had been tortured, women and children raped for the pleasure of their emotions. Reule had hardly needed to ask. Darcio had been black with fury, whipping his power out with a ready vengeance.

  Shadow didn’t do that now as he sat up straight and closed his eyes. He would tread more carefully, protecting himself and as much of the privacy of his target as could be preserved under the circumstances. Reule quietly watched him. It was a testament to how Darcio’s power had grown that he didn’t have to be in the same room as his subject in order to read her. Last Reule had known, Shadow needed physical contact with his target.

  Darcio sought for basics first, body memories of the most recent hours, which would orient him and then allow him to backtrack in a steady, chronological fashion, keeping him from getting confused once he lost familiar reference points. He would know enough of her past hours to catch the rhythm of her body cycle.

  The first memory was always forcefully intense. It flashed into Darcio’s consciousness like a percussive explosion, abruptly striking up a discordant symphony. Lights flashed, noise blared, sensations were magnified…and this time was no different. r />
  Oddly enough, it was a memory of Reule that came to Darcio. Shadow hadn’t considered that Reule’s recent upset might be rooted squarely in the outlander girl. She hadn’t even been conscious when Reule had brought her down. Darcio had thought this request to use his Curse had been Reule’s way of dodging his inquisition about his emotional well-being. In truth, Shadow realized, this was Reule’s way of answering without answering. Reule knew Darcio’s ability would allow the Prime Shadow to have a front-row seat to the memory of his disturbance.

  Five seconds later, Darcio became intimate with what had disturbed Reule so deeply. He recalled everything the nameless girl had experienced in that pool; every wave of heat and every touch of Reule’s ministrations. She hadn’t been awake, but her body remembered, and therefore Darcio remembered.

  Shadow knew that his Prime was sharing the experience, using his telepathy to observe as he read the outlander. Had it been any of the rest of the Pack, Darcio might have been embarrassed, witnessing acts that were by turns tender and seductive. However, Reule and he had walked as Prime and Prime’s Shadow together for eighty-five years now. They’d trained and warred, aged and whored, and seen many things, both good and evil, in the world. At ninety-one and ninety-eight years old, they were in the prime of a Sánge’s life cycle. Darcio anticipated that, though they were no longer wild with youth, he and Reule would experience much more of life together before all was done.

  While learning of Reule’s sexual interest didn’t make him blush, it did worry him. He’d withhold judgment until after he completed his scan, but even so, outlanders didn’t welcome Sánge, and Sánge didn’t welcome outlanders. Reule would be a fool to think otherwise, no matter how unusual her attachment to him was. It seemed to Darcio that she was merely clinging to her rescuer in the wake of a great trauma and…

  …and then the trauma itself began to burn into life, searing across his mind and body until he felt as though he were on fire. He threw back his head and gasped in a harsh breath as agony pummeled him from head to toe. He swallowed, gritting his teeth at the confusing and brutal abuse, tears pricking behind his lids as he tried to hold on. If she can endure this, so can I, he commanded himself.

  Within his mind, he was far from the bath and Reule, yet he knew his Prime was now physically by his side, watching him steadily, ready to end the pain he’d asked his friend to suffer if necessary.

  Mildew, must, and terrible cold. Every inch of his skin was throbbing and burning with open, fresh, and barely healed wounds. There was something strange about what he felt, even as sadness overwhelmed him again and again, a despair that tightened his lungs, forcing tears to fall even when he was too thirsty, too hungry, and too tired to weep. There was sleep in short, taunting snatches, but always the cold. Then that strange vibration again, humming the length and breadth of his—her—body. Weak, but growing stronger as time continued to reverse her condition.

  Jakals. He sensed them, was aware of them, but she could hide herself from the Jakals dancing gleefully right beneath her. Then he (she) felt her arms and legs exploding in horrible agony.

  Darcio leaped forward, roaring in pain as he fell before the bench onto his knees, Reule’s hands guiding him and now holding him as he yelled and shook. Alone, but not? Alone, but being tortured? No marks, only the pain of it. Driving, driving deep. And still they didn’t know of her, even though she wept and shuddered with the emotions the Jakals so desired to devour. Days rotated further into the past, hunger easing so it was sharp but not agonizing, as did thirst, the presence of the Jakals fading within forty-eight hours until she was alone in truth.

  Splinters rammed under skin disappeared, mildew and mold rashes faded, cold gave way to warmth as her body slid to the third floor, the second…the first. Slow, the trip taking most of a day to make because she’d crawled up while in ferocious agony. There was the burn, the raw scorching along her hips, spine, and shoulders. Hair tangled, scalp torn and bloodied. Every inch bruised, bones even broken. Some twice over.

  Since the scenario was running backward, Darcio was confused. Three days ago she’d had broken bones, today she didn’t. How was that possible? He wasn’t required to seek the answer. Reule had only wanted to know if the Jakals had raped her. They hadn’t. They hadn’t even realized she was there, though he knew not how. Still, what trauma had left her alone in such a state? A fight? Had she been attacked after all, only by a different assailant?

  Confusion swept through him as his body ached and throbbed in sympathy with the plight and pain of a small woman who turned out to have the stamina and fortitude of the most seasoned warrior. Experiencing the trauma she’d undergone secondhand, Darcio wasn’t so sure he would’ve been so persistent or resourceful. Then again, she wasn’t Sánge, and his natural defenses would’ve made this a much altered experience for him.

  “Darc, stay focused,” he heard Reule encourage him gently, his Prime’s voice concerned but firm.

  So it continued. Dampness and the stench of the swamps and bogs of the damplands. Earth. Grass. Beneath his hands and knees. Crawling inch by inch over changing terrain, every movement exquisite agony, yet the only thing keeping him warm in the pre-winter chill. A fall, brutal, snapped his arm in two. Then soreness between his legs, hard aches in his thighs.

  Shadow felt Reule tense next to him, but his Prime mistook the cause of the discomfort. Darcio had been an accomplished horseman for far too long not to recognize a saddle-sore backside. The fall had been from a horse. She’d broken her arm falling from a high-set saddle. She’d fallen from pure exhaustion.

  Then there was riding, the speed breakneck. He could tell by the windburn on his face, the whipping of hair that pulled at a scalp already beaten raw. How? How had it come to be, the battering that caused pain to worsen as time drew nearer to the origination? He was close to the cause. Darcio could feel it, and he dreaded it. He dreaded it because he knew it would be worse than all the other pain he felt through her body’s memory.

  He had braced for it, yet still was blindsided. There was screaming oblivion and then vicious nausea. Blood from his mouth, his nose…everywhere. Shadow lurched forward and vomited violently.

  “Enough! Darcio, it’s enough!”

  Reule’s command was followed by the feel of his Prime’s hands gripping his shoulders. Shadow was sick again, caught up in the cycle of body memory and suddenly unable to let go.

  But as always, Reule was there for him. He felt the instant his ruler unleashed his own power. Reule used it to seize control of Darcio’s thoughts and emotions, jerking him into the present, into the steam and heat of the private bath.

  Forgive me, old friend. I asked too much. Reule’s regret weighed heavily in the telepathic sentence, but Darcio waved it off as he focused on his Packleader. Reule had pulled on a robe after leaving the tub, he realized, and the small detail centered him, pulling him even further away from the horrifying memories of what a small female body had endured these past few days.

  “I didn’t find out how she was originally injured,” he said apologetically. “I fear that was only half the hell she’s been through.”

  “You did enough.” Reule frowned darkly, lines of disturbed emotion etching into his forehead. “I’m sorry I even asked. Now I’m left with still more questions.”

  Darcio nodded, his body aching with the ghosts of pain and brutalization.

  Reule had one answer that he’d not had at the start of this, however.

  He now knew why she felt such sorrow.

  Chapter 4

  After he’d bathed, dressed, and taken some supper, Reule entered Chayne’s quarters. To his surprise, the room was in a total uproar. Chayne was the center of a ruckus that looked like a mass wrestling competition, he realized a moment before an arc of blood spattered in droplets against him.

  “What in the name of all that is holy are you doing?”

  Reule’s bellow sounded like the hard crack of a whip, and everyone, including the heavily panting Chayne, froze
in mid-tableau. Delano, Saber, and the smaller man Reule recognized as the apothecary all turned their heads to look at their thunderous Prime’s visage. Rye, who was standing back as though supervising, was closest to Reule and also turned. Delano and Saber, it appeared, were attempting to secure Chayne to the bed by physical force so the apothecary could tend him. How Chayne was even moving after so much blood loss was beyond Reule.

  The Prime was infuriated and he made it very clear with an emanation that sent his Packmates staggering.

  “Damn!” Rye yelped, jumping back from his Packleader in shock.

  “Uh!” Delano concurred, bolting away from the bed. Saber staggered back as well, the Prime Defender swinging around hard to stare at his leader. The apothecary cringed and shook.

  “Back off!” Reule commanded even though they were backed away already. “Would someone care to tell me why you’re wrestling with an injured man?” But they all knew that Reule was really asking how they dared try to strong-arm Chayne when they knew—absolutely knew—it was the worst way to go about getting his compliance. Chayne loathed being held down. In light of his recent captivity, it would be even less tolerable to him.

  Chayne, the last one he’d demand an answer from, ground out in response, “That demented son of a bitch was going to clamp that contraption on me!” Chayne swung a shuddering arm toward the apothecary. An arm, Reule noted, that had been broken when it had been skewered by a steel spike.

  “By the Lord,” Reule swore as his Packmate’s agony beat at him. Yet he forced himself to move closer. Chayne’s other arm and his legs were no better off.

  The contraption in question made Reule’s blood curdle as he laid eyes on it. The steel vises were meant to hold realigned bones together, screwed tightly in place against the skin to form support. But this was often at the cost of utter agony and flesh that would break down over the weeks of healing. Most men opted for splints, taking their chances with lameness rather than facing a vise. Reule himself had done so once when a sword strike to his upper arm had broken the long bone. Bearing four splints on four broken or very likely shattered bones would be sheer hell, but vises as well? It was unthinkable, and he didn’t blame Chayne for finding the power despite his suffering to resist those who thought to force him.